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Avery replied.
    They landed in Nassau shortly before six. McAllister was still in the office. He was a portly Irishman with curly black hair, a cigar, and the affable charm of a successful politician. Ingram unrolled the chart on his desk and explained the situation.
    “You’re sure that’s the position?” McAllister asked. “The chart doesn’t show a sand bar there.”
    “I know,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything. A lot of the Bank’s pretty sketchy in the survey department, and those shoals and bars change with every storm. We checked the course on the way in, and wouldn’t have any trouble finding it again.”
    “Any rocks or coral heads close to the surface?”
    Avery shook his head. “No. There’s plenty of water to the westward of the sand spit. Early in the morning, before the breeze gets up, we could bring her in well off the shoal and taxi up in the lee of it while they go aboard.”
    “Okay,” McAllister replied. “If it looks safe to you. What time do you want to take off?”
    “The earlier the better. As soon as it’s light.”
    “All right. We’ll put one of those surplus life rafts aboard and have her ready.”
    Ingram retrieved their suitcases and they went around in front of the terminal and took a taxi downtown. As they pulled away from the loading zone, she asked, “What do you think happened? What became of them?”
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    “You don’t think there’s a chance anyone is still aboard?”
    “No. They’d have made some attempt to get her off. There would have been a kedge anchor out astern, or some roily water downstream if they’d been turning the engine. She was apparently abandoned even before she drifted in there.”
    “But how? And why?”
    He shook his head. “I wouldn’t even try to guess. There’s been no bad weather, and I didn’t see any sign of damage. Hollister couldn’t have taken her down there alone. There had to be others. And as far as we know, they didn’t even have another dinghy to get off with even if they’d wanted to. It makes no sense at all.”
    “But what about Hollister?”
    “There’s a good chance he’s dead.”
    It was a moment before she answered. “Why?”
    “He took off his clothes and that watch to go in the water after something. He didn’t come back into the dinghy. And if he’s not aboard the Dragoon, that doesn’t leave much.”
    “I see,” she said. He turned and glanced at her, but she was staring out the window on the opposite side. She was silent during the rest of the ride into town; when he suggested the Pilot House Club as a good place to stay, she merely nodded. When they came into the central business district she asked the driver to stop, and got out.
    “I want to do some shopping,” she said to Ingram. “Take my suitcase and the binoculars, and reserve a room for me. I’ll be along later.”
    After he’d shaved and showered he ate a solitary dinner in the patio near the pool. He didn’t see her anywhere. He crossed the road to the Yacht Haven; none of the skippers he knew were around, so he walked downtown, driven by restlessness, and had several bottles of beer in the Carlton House bar. You’re getting old, he told himself; you’ve been too many places for too many forgotten reasons, and now you’re going around again. Remembering the same place offset in different layers of time makes it too easy to count the years in between and wonder where they went. You wake up in the morning and they’re speaking Spanish outside your window, so it could be Mexico again, and you remember lightering bananas down the Grijalva River in a wheezy gasoline-powered tug with a string of cranky barges and the goofy invincibility of youth, and the salvage job off the Panuco River bar below Tampico when the tanker piled up on the south jetty because the skipper wouldn’t wait for a pilot and didn’t know about the bad southerly set across the entrance during a norther, and then you realize the