You’d find nothing. Nothing at all.”

But in the end, of course, they did go back, with a lookout on the foremast with the big Navy glasses. They served the sea, and the sea demanded it. And they found nothing but the empty and darkening prairies of the Gulf.

When there was no longer any light at all and they had given up and resumed their course, the captain counted the money in the presence of two of the ship’s officers and locked it in the safe. It came to eighty-three thousand dollars. Then he sat down alone in his office and opened the journal again.

He pulled the long strand of ash-blond hair through his fingers and held it up to the light. Freya, he thought musingly; Freya, the Viking goddess of love. He wished now he had boarded the sloop himself. The mate was a superb sailor, and intelligent, with a sharp eye for detail and clues in a thing like this, but he wasn’t a particularly sensitive man.

Maybe he could have felt it if he had stood there in the cabin where it had been. The span of time it took a pot of coffee to cool was not a very long one, and whatever was there must have been powerful, and magnificent, and perhaps even terrifying. Emotion was intangible, of course, and should leave no traces after the people who had felt it were gone, but—who knew? Perhaps even now, eddying in lifeless air in the corners of that deserted cabin—

He opened the journal at the first page and began to read.

Chapter One
23.50 North, 88.45 West

It was a hot, Gulf Coast morning in early June. The barge was moored out on the T-head of the old Parker Mill dock near the west end of the waterway. Carter had gone to New Orleans to bid on a salvage job and I was living on board alone. I was checking over some diving gear on the forward deck when a car rolled out of the end of the shed and stopped beside mine. It was a couple of tons of shining Cadillac, and there was a girl in it.

Or maybe a better way of putting it would be to say a girl came out of the shed, wearing a Cadillac. You’d see her first.

She got out and closed the door and walked over to the edge of the pier with the unhurried smoothness of poured honey. “Good morning,” she said. “You’re Mr. Manning, I hope? The watchman out at the gate—”

I straightened. “That’s right,” I said, wondering what she wanted. It might be possible to look more out of place on a water-front than she did, but it wouldn’t be easy.

She looked me over quite deliberately, and I had an odd impression she was trying to size me up for something. There wasn’t any basis for it really except that she took a little too long at it and didn’t look like a woman who normally went around staring at people. I was suddenly conscious of the beat-up old dungarees and my hairy and sunburned nakedness from the waist up, and was a little burned at the same time because I was conscious of it. What the hell? I was at work, wasn’t I? What was this, a State Department tea?

“What can I do for you?” I asked curtly.

“Oh.” She was a little flustered for a moment. “I—I’d like to talk to you. Could I come aboard?”

I glanced at the spike heels and then at the ladder leaning against the pier, and shook my head. “You’d break your neck. I’ll come up.”

I did, and the minute I was up there facing her I was struck by the size of her. She was a cathedral of a girl. In the high heels she must have been close to six feet.