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More and more, it was looking as if the wreck was circa World War II, not the detritus of some unlucky modern collector whose plane, or boat, had gone down.

I straightened and braced a hand on the stainless table, testing and discarding explanations.

Was it possible that local stories about a sunken U-boat were based on fact? It’d been several years since I’d researched the subject, but I remembered reading that there were three, maybe four German subs unaccounted for after the war. A theory was that one of the missing subs had been used by high ranking Nazis to escape before the Reich fell. The others had been scuttled, or stolen by the Soviets.

A U-boat off Sanibel? No…the scenario was implausible. Islanders would have known if a vessel that size had been attacked so close to shore. In forty feet of water? For a submarine, that was rendezvous depth, not battle depth. Even a small submarine needed one hundred feet of water to submerge.

There were dozens of people living on Sanibel and Captiva who had lived on the islands during the Second World War. Details of a sunken U-boat would have been anchored in oral history. Fact, not legend.

I t was nearly 7 P.M. I went out a screen door, exiting my lab, and crossed a breezeway to another screen door, which is the entrance to my home.

An unusual structure, for an unusual lifestyle.

I live in a house built on stilts over water, connected to land by fifty feet of boardwalk. Dinkin’s Bay Marina, with its ship’s store, take-out restaurant, and docks, is just along the shore, a quick walk through the mangroves. Tomlinson, nonconformist that he is, lives on the other side of the channel, aboard No Mas, the sailboat that has been his home for years.

I’d had to rebuild the boardwalk after the hurricane. Felt lucky that any of it survived. Same with my house. It had been built in the early 1900s by a thriving fish company that constructed similar piling houses all along the coast. They’d built them to house fishermen and also as storage depots where fish could be iced.

The design of the buildings varied but not much: there’s a lower platform for mooring boats and an upper platform with two small cottages under a single tin roof. One cottage served as a bunkhouse large enough to sleep a dozen men. The other was used for storing ice, so the walls are triple thick.

These structures—fish houses, they’re called—had to be as well built as any seagoing vessel, so the company had used cypress, or Miami yellow pine, which, when cured, is so rock hard you can’t drive a nail in it.

So, yes, I felt lucky my house and lab had survived. There was a lot of damage—I’d had to gut the place because a tornado took the roof off. On a laboratory wall, I’ve tacked photos of the way it had looked the day after the storm, even though the details were vivid in my memory: the tin roof shredded, lower decking gone, pilings and lamp poles all leaning at the same precise angle, still pointing toward the hurricane’s exit path—northeast. There was something accusatory in their uniformity; the impression that my home had been violated.

It had been violated. I’m not a sentimental person, but it was painful to look at the mess. Stare at my damaged property too long, and the image became penetrating, like staring at a strobe light.

As Tomlinson said when he came to check on me after the storm, “Looks like she collided with an iceberg. Which is kinda far-out, if you think about it. Your place has always seemed more like a ship than a house, anyway.”

I replied, “Iceberg. Interesting metaphor, this close to the equator.”

“She almost sunk but didn’t. That’s what I’m telling you. You’ll get her fixed up fast, though. People say things’ll never be the same? Dude, I am glad. It’s exciting. Your place will be better than ever.”

Hard to believe at the time, but it was turning out to be true. No, I wasn’t surprised that my ship of a house was standing.

M y kitchen, appropriately, is the size of a ship’s galley. There’s a two-burner propane stove, and copper-bottomed pots and stainless pans hanging from the ceiling. My office desk is across the room near the reading chair, and the wooden RCA shortwave radio I sometimes use. I went to the desk now and rummaged through it until I found an unused notebook. In pencil, I labeled the notebook, NAZI ARTIFACTS, and returned to my lab.

Through the north window, storm clouds leaned westward toward a harsh and angular light. The sunlight fired distant mangroves, transforming gray trees to silver, dark limbs to copper. I could see a pod of bottlenose dolphins cruising along the oyster bar that edges the channel. Their skin was luminous as sealskin.

I watched them for a while—fluke tails slapping; herding mullet into the shallows—before returning to work. I placed the new notebook beside the tray of sodium hydroxide, and snapped on fresh rubber gloves.

Beside the tray was a smaller basin that contained a ten percent solution of nitric acid. I’d already dipped the artifacts in the acid bath, and rinsed with freshwater. All but the cigarette lighter were cleaning up nicely.

I was wearing rubber gloves because the artifacts, I decided, were too delicate to risk tongs. So I was using my hands—taking all the precautions, because archaeological restoration is not my field.

I’m a biologist. That’s my business: collecting, and selling, marine specimens. Vertebrates, invertebrates, sharks, rays, sea urchins, mollusks, and plants. I sell them live, mounted, or preserved to schools and labs around the country. Sanibel Biological Supply, Inc. I also do consulting work, which pays most of the bills, as well as my own research—a passion.

These artifacts were becoming another passion.

The silver death’s-head now lay on the bottom of the tray, diamond eyes focused upward through the lens of sodium hydroxide. I couldn’t keep my own eyes off it. Each time I came near the thing, I paused to stare. Couldn’t quite define why.

The cigarette lighter drew my interest, too. It had been engraved with a person’s initials, which added a sense of intimacy. Some long-gone man or woman had carried it, held it, leaned their face to it in darkness. I wouldn’t know what the initials were until the barnacle scars were removed, but the etching was unmistakable. A portion of an N showing? Or an M. Possibly a V, or a K.

The lighter was personal.

I paused to look at the lighter now. Tried to project what the initials might be. Stopped, though, when I heard the engine of Tomlinson’s dinghy start in the distance. Checked my watch: an hour or so before sunset. That’s when he usually came ashore.

I returned to the window and there he was: yellow shirt adorned with bright hibiscus flowers, his hair stuffed under a Boston Red Sox cap. On the bow of the red dinghy was a ditty bag—he always carried it when he planned to shower at my place. A long, warm-water shower instead of a sponge bath aboard No Mas. Ladies, he told me, appreciated the extra effort.

Which meant that he was stopping by the lab for a beer, a shower, and then to stroll the docks until after dark. After that, he’d vanish. Him on his bicycle, sometimes for hours. Occasionally, most of the night. Presumably, he was with his new love interest. Washed and fresh for the woman he seldom mentioned and we’d yet to meet. Tomlinson’s “mystery woman,” the guides called her.

I’d never met her, but I knew where his mystery woman lived.

A week or so after the hurricane, I’d gone for a late jog. The moon was full, it was impossible to sleep, so I’d run toward the Gulf along Tarpon Bay Road to the beach. Continued running on a ridge of firm sand when I happened to notice Tomlinson’s bike in the moonlight. It was chained to a boardwalk that led into bare trees.

Unmistakable, Tomlinson’s bike: a fat tire cruiser, peace signs painted on the fenders, and a plastic basket on the handlebars that reads: FAUSTO’S KEY WEST.

On my way back, the bike was still there, and I heard music coming through the trees. A piano played elegantly. I recognized the melody but couldn’t name it. Something from the 1930s or ’40s, not big band. Torchy, with smoky subtleties.

I stopped to enjoy the music, my shadow huge on the white sand. Among the trees was a two-story house I hadn’t known existed, the foliage had once been so dense along that stretch of beach. The storm had taken most of the trees, though, so the house was now exposed, a Cape Cod–sized place with gables and an upstairs balcony. It appeared solitary on its own grounds, a moneyed estate that had once been hidden—an indignity to be endured.

I felt like a voyeur. Which is what I was, in fact. The music stopped a couple of minutes after I did, yet I stood looking at the house, oddly pleased that I’d never suspected the house was there.