“Nat’s the one for that job,” said Eliot. “This whole cockeyed thing was his idea, so he can be the one who knocks at her door and tells her that her husband got killed salvaging a hunk of rotten, wormy, worthless wood. I’ll bet that’ll sit real well with her.”

Nathaniel’s expression turned murderous, and Will told Eliot to shut up.

“It’s all our faults, so we’re all going to knock at the door,” he said. “All right, Natters.”

“I told him to forget it. Just before he went down for the second dive, I said that maybe we ought to forget about it, but he went anyway.” Nathaniel realized that he sounded like a man accused of a crime, spouting alibis and excuses. “He wanted to for his own reasons. Said he wanted to break the spell of that bad-luck ship.”

“That isn’t what we need to know,” Will said.

He told them then, and the telling took several times as long as the event.

“Happened so fast, I never got a good look at the shark,” he added. He found that he could not hold Will’s gaze, and looked up at the same frigate bird that had been circling over the tender: the male with the scarlet throat. “I don’t know where it came from, because there wasn’t a sign of a shark on the first dive. Maybe it was this”—pointing at the wound in his calf. “I cut myself on a coral head, and I guess the blood, I guess that drew it in from somewhere, and it was down there, waiting.…”

No one said anything. He could not bear the silence, which somehow seemed like the silence of a jury listening to damning testimony. His throat tightened, and he pleaded.

“I didn’t do it on purpose, for Christ’s sake. And it wasn’t carelessness. I’d run out of air, and I was kicking up to the top, and I never saw the coral.…”

Will, squatting down in front of him, laid both hands on his shoulders.

“No one’s accusing you of anything. That’s not the point.”

“Damn right, it ain’t. What the point is …” Eliot broke off, went forward, and unshackled the chain. Bending low, he gave the escutcheon a heave, then another, and shoved it over the side. Scored with the holes and channels seaworms had bored into it, it floated for a while faceup: ANNISQUAM. “There’s the point right there!” Eliot shouted from the bow. He waited for his older brother to do something, to run at him and throw a punch, to dive in to retrieve his prize, but Nat did not move, and the board sank gradually back to where it had lain for twenty-one years.