Their family owned the small island off the coast and had for as far back as their grandfather could remember, and it was a place every generation of boys—for the Ronishes hadn’t produced a girl since 1862—spent adventurous summers exploring. Not only was it easy to pretend they were all Huck Finns marooned on the Mississippi or Tom Sawyers exploring the island’s intricate cave systems, but Pine Island had an inherent sense of intrigue because of the pit.

Mothers had been forbidding their boys from playing near the pit since Abe Ronish, great-uncle of the current Ronish brood, had fallen to his death in 1887. The directive was as inevitably ignored as it was given.

The real lure of the place was that local legend told that a certain Pierre Devereaux, one of the most successful privateers to ever harass the Spanish Main, had buried part of his treasure on this far northern island to lighten his ship during the dogged pursuit by a squadron of frigates that had chased him around Cape Horn and up the length of the Americas. The legend was bolstered by the discovery of a small pyramid of cannon balls in one of the island’s caves, and the fact that the top forty feet of the square pit was braced with rough-hewn log balks.

The cannonballs had long since been lost and were now considered a myth, but there was no denying the reality of the timberworks ringing the mysterious hole in the rocky earth.

“My shoes got wet,” Jimmy complained.

Nick swiftly rounded on his youngest brother and said, “Damn it, Jimmy, I told you already if I heard one complaint outta you I’d make you stay with the boat.”

“I wasn’t complaining,” the boy said, trying to keep from sniveling. “I was just saying is all.” He shook a few drops from his wet foot to show it wasn’t a problem. Nick shot him a stern look, his blue eyes glacial, and turned his attention back to the job at hand.

Pine Island was shaped like a Valentine’s Day heart that rose out of the cold Pacific. The only beach lay where the two upper lobes come together. The rest of the islet was ringed with cliffs as insurmountable as castle walls or was protected by submerged rocks strung like beads that could tear out the bottom of even the sturdiest craft. Only a handful of animals called the island home, squirrels and mice, mostly, who had been marooned there during storms, and seabirds that used the tall pines to rest and search for prey amid the waves.

A single road bisected the island, having been laboriously hacked twenty years before by another generation of Ronish men, who had made an assault on the island using gasoline-powered pumps to drain the pit, only to see their efforts fail. No matter how many pumps they ran or how much water they sucked from the depths, the pit would continuously refill. An exhaustive search for the subterranean passage connecting the pit to the sea turned up nothing. There was talk of building a coffer dam around the mouth of the bay closest to the pit, the thinking being that there was no other logical choice for the conduit, but the men decided the effort was too much and gave up.