Free Lethal Legend by Kathy Lynn Emerson Page A

Something shaped like the hull of a ship would be nice.” He grinned, and a gold tooth glinted in the sun.
    “I wouldn’t call the water off this coast particularly warm,” Ben remarked. “Or all that shallow, either.”
    Carstairs shrugged. “It’s mid-June. The water temperature is no longer frigid. And soundings indicate it’s no deeper than about forty feet out there where the ledge drops off.”
    Carstairs’s confidence and the care she’d witnessed him take to outfit Ennis convinced Diana she should not worry overmuch about Mr. Ennis’s safety. Carstairs seemed to know what he was doing, and she was frankly fascinated by the idea that they might find something underwater after all this time.
    When the men were in the boat and on their way out to the spot where Mr. Ennis would go overboard, she turned to Miss Dunbar. “I am surprised you aren’t in the tender with the others.”
    The archaeologist responded with an unfriendly glare, but Graham Somener seemed to have recovered from his fit of temper and become mellow once more. “There isn’t room enough,” he told her, “and since it is a two-man pump, it only made sense to leave the physical labor to Amity and Carstairs.”
    Diana didn’t bother to ask about the underwater work. Just imagining it caused a delicate shudder to pass through her. How closed in it must feel in that suit. In Mr. Ennis’s place, she knew it would be all she could do not to scream at the sound of the bolts fastening the helmet in place. No, she did not believe she would care to spend any time deep under water. She enjoyed new experiences but there was a line between adventurous and foolhardy.
    “How does Mr. Ennis get back to the boat?” she asked Mr. Somener.
    “He wears weights to take him down to the bottom and keep him there. When he’s ready to surface, he removes them and floats up. The weights are secured by a separate line so they can be pulled up afterward.”
    “And he is looking for an unusual formation or shape on the bottom?”
    “An anomaly of some sort, yes,” Miss Dunbar interrupted, the desire to lecture on her area of expertise evidently overcoming her aversion to talking to a journalist. “Assuming anything did survive the shipwreck, that is the most likely place to find it. You see the way that bit juts out?” She indicated the curve of land that contained Ben’s cave. “If the ship sank—during a storm perhaps—while anchored in that spot ... “
    Her voice trailed off. Frowning, she shaded her eyes, trying to get a better look at what her men were doing.
    Ennis went over the side with a barely audible splash.
    “Four hundred and eighty-seven years is a long time for anything to survive,” Diana said.
    Miss Dunbar shot an accusing glance in Mr. Somener’s direction. “You told her?”
    “If I hadn’t, Ben would have.”
    “Was it a fishing vessel, Miss Dunbar? I suppose shipwrecked fishermen would have had to settle where they were wrecked, but would they have stayed on Keep Island long? Surely they’d have been able to build some sort of water craft, a raft at least, and reach the mainland.”
    “They were not fishermen. They came to these shores intending to stay. To colonize.”
    “So early?” If Diana remembered her lessons, the first settlers in America had been at Jamestown, and then at Plymouth in Massachusetts. She was fairly certain those settlements dated from the seventeenth century, not the fifteenth.
    “If Europeans sailed this far in medieval times, they discovered not only rich fishing grounds but also unlimited forests. In the Old World, supplies of timber had been badly depleted by the fifteenth century. It only makes sense that some early entrepreneur would think of establishing a colony to harvest and export wood.”
    “You’re saying they meant to found a trading center?”
    “I believe so, yes. And I believe that the colonists who came here to Keep Island originally set out from Scotland. They wanted timber