Medusa

front of the diorama as it was unrolled from panel to panel and fleshed out the details with his own story. The lighting would have been dramatic, and maybe there were even sound effects. You know, someone behind the diorama shouting ‘Thar she blows!’ ”

The next panel showed the Princess rounding a point of land that the caption identified as THE TIP OF AFRICA. In another panel, the ship was at anchor against the backdrop of a lush volcanic island. Dark figures that could have been natives were standing on the deck, which was bathed in a blue glow. The caption read:

TROUBLE ISLAND-LAST PACIFIC LANDFALL.

The panel that followed showed another volcanic island, apparently much bigger, with a dozen or so ships at anchor in its harbor. The caption identified the setting as Pohnpei.

Paul continued unrolling the diorama. The next panels depicted, in reverse, the crew cutting up a sperm whale and boiling its blubber down for oil. Particularly interesting was what appeared to be a white-haired man lying on the deck over the caption:

MODERN-DAY JONAH.

“It’s the Ghost,” Rachael said. “This is marvelous! This shows Caleb Nye as he must have looked after he’d been cut out of the whale’s stomach.”

The stiff canvas of the diorama was becoming hard to handle, but with Paul unrolling it and Gamay rolling it back on its spindle, the whaling saga continued to unfold in reverse.

The panel before them was the classic depiction of a whaleboat-harpooned sperm whale in the lace-topped waves. Two legs were sticking out of the whale’s mouth. The caption identified the scene:

CALEB NYE-SWALLOWED BY A WHALE.

Rachael Dobbs could hardly contain her excitement. She started talking about a fund-raiser to restore the diorama and finding wall space to hang it. Paul and Gamay Trout found the diorama fascinating but of little help. Yet they kept going until they came to the last panel, almost a mirror image of the ship in the first panel, only returning from its long voyage. In this panel, there was a crowd of people on the dock, and the ship’s rigging was unfurled. The caption read SETTING SAIL.

Paul stood up to stretch his legs, but Gamay’s sharp eye noticed that there were a few more feet of canvas. She asked him to keep unrolling, expecting to see a title panel of some sort. Instead, they were looking at a map of the South Pacific. Lines had been drawn in a crooked pattern across the ocean. There were whales’ tails scattered across it. Each tail had a longitude-latitude position inked next to it.

“It’s a map of the 1848 voyage of the Princess,” Rachael said. “Those position notations show where the whales were caught. Captains often illustrated their logbooks to record good whaling areas. The map would have given Caleb’s audience an idea of the extent of the voyage and shown where his adventures had occurred.”

Gamay got down on her hands and knees and followed a line with her index finger from Pohnpei to a speck called Trouble Island. The island’s position had been noted next to it.

The Trouts jotted down the coordinates, rolled the diorama back up, and carried it into the kitchen. Despite Rachael’s protest, they gave her a substantial contribution to start the ball rolling on a place for the mural.

While Rachael Dobbs went to close up the museum, the Trouts went out into the garden.

“What do you think?” Gamay asked.

“I’m not sure whether this will help them find the lab,” Paul said, “but it’s all linked somehow: the present and the past, the blue medusa, the miraculous cure of the men aboard the Princess.”

“Don’t forget that somebody thought the log was important enough to kill Brimmer over,” Gamay said. “We should let Kurt and Joe know what we found.”

Paul already had his cell phone in hand, scrolling down to a number on his contact list.

CHAPTER 39

LIKE ANY GOOD DETECTIVE, JOE ZAVALA BEGAN HIS SEARCH for Davy Jones’s Locker at the crime scene. Using a one-person submersible borrowed from the NUMA ship, he dove to the ocean bottom and made a couple of passes over the circular depressions left by the lab’s footings. Seeing nothing new, he broke away from the site and started to explore the surrounding area. The submersible’s searchlights suddenly reflected off a piece of metal.

Working the controls of the submersible’s mechanical arms, Zavala scooped a twisted piece of steel from the bottom and examined it under the lights before depositing it in a basket slung beneath the submersible.

“I just picked up a chunk of the Proud Mary,” he called up to the ship’s bridge.

“You’re sure it’s not a piece of the lab?” asked Captain Campbell, skipper of the NUMA ship.

“Reasonably sure. The metal is twisted and melted, the way it would be from a missile strike. It doesn’t look at all like the structures I saw in the diagrams. What I’ve seen fits with our theory that the lab was lifted off its site and towed away.”

“Have you checked out the canyon where the lab was prospecting for jellyfish?” asked Campbell.

“Yeah. It’s a few hundred yards from the site. I dove down into it a couple hundred feet. The canyon goes down forever. Saw a few blue medusae floating around, but that was it. I could dive deeper, but I’ve heard that the definition of insanity is repeating the same useless action over and over.”

“Come up for air, then,” said Campbell. “We’ll call the Concord and fill Captain Dixon in-Hold on, Joe. Call for you coming through the NUMA net. I’ll put it through.”

After a moment or two, a female voice came over Zavala’s earphones.

“How’s your search going, Joe?”

“Hi, Gamay, nice to hear from you. I’ve picked a piece of the support ship off the bottom, but that’s it. How about you?”

“We may have something,” she said. “We tried to contact Kurt but the call wouldn’t go through, so we tracked you down under the sea. Paul and I came across the coordinates for a place called Trouble Island. It’s about a hundred miles from the lab site. It may be where the crew of the Princess underwent their miraculous cure. Not sure how it relates to the missing lab, but maybe it will help.”

“Give the captain the info,” he said, “and I’ll come up and check things out.”

“We’re on our way back to Washington,” she said. “Call if you need anything at this end.”

Zavala thanked Gamay and Paul, then pointed the nose of the submersible toward the surface and powered the thrusters. A crane was waiting to hoist it from the water onto the deck of the NUMA ship.

Zavala popped the hatch, climbed out, and made his way to the bridge. Captain Campbell was poring over the chart table. He pointed to a speck on a chart of Micronesian waters.

“This is the atoll closest to the position your friends gave me,” Campbell said. “Doesn’t look like much, and, as you can see, it’s within a red rectangle, which means it was searched visually. What do you think?”

Zavala pondered the captain’s question, then said, “I think I need to talk to an expert.”

A few minutes later, he was on the line with the NUMA navigational unit that supplied the agency’s worldwide expeditions with up-to-date navigational information.

“Let me see if I understand,” said the map expert, a soft-voiced young woman named Beth. “You’re looking for a Pacific island that is no longer on the charts and you don’t know if it even existed in the first place.”

Zavala chuckled softly.

“Sorry,” he said. “This must be like looking for a nonexistent needle in a very big haystack.”

“Don’t be discouraged, Joe. I like a challenge.”

“Any chance the island might have been noted on a British Admiralty chart?”

“It depends,” she said. “The Admiralty charts were ahead of their time when it came to accuracy, although the