We were all gathered in the galley, and Eva handed us each a folder. It was about an inch thick, and I opened the file along with the others to page one.

"In 1765, a galleon named the Maria Theresa set sail from Barcelona with a crew of twenty-nine." She checked on something but turned back to the first page.

"The ship had been sailing the seas for seven years, and it belonged to a wealthy merchant, Mateo Ramirez, for whom it brought in great wealth, along with three other ships he owned," Swan or Cap as most called him, since he also captained the boat, started off.

"Ramirez wanted to move himself and his family to the new world. He sailed over and bought some land on which he constructed a vast hacienda. Ramirez sent for his wife, and she came by boat. Then he sent for his daughter and his money." He showed us photos taken of portraits of the family.

"The daughter, Maria Theresa Garcia Ramirez, refused to follow her father to the America's. She had fallen in love with a man, not of her station, and they had secretly eloped." The portrait of her beau was rather underwhelming and mostly destroyed.

"The ship captain, Alejandro Diego Perez, was by then a wealthy man himself. He always had an eye on the daughter, and her father promised Alejandro her hand in marriage, but only if his cargo arrived safely in California. You will find the ships manifest in your folders," he indicated.

"Alejandro kidnapped Maria Theresa when she didn't cooperate and set sail. Once at sea, he forced her to marry him, under the guise that she was the only woman on board and that he simply wanted to protect her honor.'" He put air quotes around the word honor.

"Alejandro forced himself upon her that night, even though she told him she was already married and carrying her lover's child. He laughed at her and told her that no one would believe her, and we found this information in letters she managed to smuggle off the ship in some port." He shifted his folder, and I was fascinated by his strong, manly hands. I hated myself for my betraying weakness.

"Maria attempted to escape several times, even once managing to steal the lifeboat and almost making it to another ship, but the crew prevented her escape. There's documented evidence from several crew members of the cargo ship Evangeline Mason on this matter, but they didn't have the firepower to intervene and sailed off," Eva continued.

"That night, Maria was locked up in the brig. Later that evening, a sailor came storming from his sleeping mat to the top deck. He told Alejandro that he had a vision. A dream from God. he was instructed to tell Alejandro that if he did not turn the ship about immediately and restored Maria to her husband, the ship would sink. Alejandro laughed, had the sailor beaten and keelhauled, but the man survived and was locked down below." She made a note in the margin of her file.

"Back then, most sailors believed it was bad luck to have a woman on board, and they begged for Alejandro to return to port, but he refused." She checked something else, and I frowned. This seemed very well documented, and it must have taken years to find all the information.

"The Evangelina's crew noticed the galleon some weeks later. Some said that when the galleon first chased the lifeboat, it turned against the tide and listed slightly to one side. When they saw it again, it was lying lower in the water than before, and they assumed it had taken supplies aboard." Eva glanced at Cap as if asking if he wanted to tell the rest of the story, but he motioned for her to continue.

"That night, the Maria Theresa sank in calm seas in six hundred feet of water. The next morning the Evangelina found afloat only one piece of wood from the ship and Alfredo Alvarez, the sailor who had the vision." She handed Cap a document, which he read.

"Alfredo lived only long enough to tell them his story before perishing and was buried at sea. The captain of the Evangelin marked off the coordinates and sent a letter to the owner, Ramirez." Cap stole the pen from Eva and circled something.

"Mateo was bereaved at the loss of his daughter and his fortune. He left the table one evening and walked out to the balcony, where he shot himself in the head but didn't die." They didn't expect the grizzly portrait of a man that looked as if he starred in a horror movie.

"His head was half gone, and he was mostly a vegetable. He spent most nights calling out to Theresa, with his slurred voice and mumbling words no one could understand."

The binder even included a faded and almost illegible account from the physician that saved Ramirez's life.

"His wife asked the doctor for something for her nerves, but on the anniversary of Theresa's death, she took a whole bottle of Laudanum and passed in her sleep."

We listened to that sad tale as we paged along with the articles and evidence that accompanied the story.

Someone even tracked down old books and newspapers of the time that mentioned the tragedy. There was even a captain's log for Arturo Stevens, who was the captain of the Evangelina. He had been a meticulous man who wrote a detailed account of all he saw and heard.

"We believe that during Alejandro's headlong midnight flight from the Port of Spain, they hit a reef, and the ship had a slow leak all the way from Spain that needed constant tending because the how heavily the cargo was. The damage might have been worse than they thought, and two days before they sank, they ran into some inclement weather," Cap continued, still adding to his notes.

"We suspect they took on more water than they realized, and the storm widened the damage. By the time they figured out there was something wrong, it was too late." Eva used magnets to add some of the information against a whiteboard that was just a convenient part of the ship's inner hull.

"They were not just too heavily laden and lying too low in the water; they were way off course—further than their pursuit of the lifeboat could have taken them—and we think two things happened." She used a whiteboard marker to write on the paint.

"The boat sank at midnight, and there are strong currents in this area. The sailor was swept miles away from the wreck when considering the prevailing currents, which means his last known position was against the current." She wrote a series of nautical numbers, and I frowned at them.

"Adding that into the equation, we think they were trying to make an atoll island that is sometimes visible and sometimes not. It is visible this year." She drew a small dot on the wall with a larger area surrounding it.

"This ship may have sunk about twenty miles off its course and in less than three hundred feet of water," Cap added, and as we turned the page with him, I froze.

I stared at the painting, and it was the one from my dream—right down to the red sail on its third mast. A chill skittered down my spine. Was it just fancy or something more?

"Something wrong, Britney?" Eva asked unexpectedly, and I forced myself to smile and pretend I was okay.

My eye caught on the figurehead attached to the bow, and although it was a mermaid, the face seemed familiar, as if I had seen it before. Even before I turned the page to discover a portrait of Maria, I knew the artist used her as inspiration, and the stodgy formal artwork did her no justice.

"We'll be using a sonar fish to scan the ocean floor around the atoll for signs of the wreck. We'll explore it if it is there and lies in less than 200 feet of water." Eva added this information to her drawing.

"If not, we'll mark it and wait for the San Angelus to be ready in thirty days. It's equipped with one of the newest, best, and most expensive AUV's ever built, but while we wait, we'll map as much of this area as we can." She made a square around her map and drew grid lines. I knew an AUV was an autonomous underwater vehicle.

"This was once a bustling shipping lane in earlier years, and we may stumble upon something interesting. The ocean floor here varies from the atoll, at less than a meter above the surface, to around a thousand feet." She also added this to the information on her drawing.

"There are rumors of a rift in this part of the ocean that may be deeper than three thousand feet, but as yet, technology cannot accurately map it," Cap added as an aside, sounding intrigued.

"A little further away, we have three small islands surrounded by reefs, and we might have time to explore them," Eva suggested, capping the pen and staring at her stained fingers.

"Apparently, they developed in such isolation that there are unique creatures in the water and on the land, but getting past the reef is a challenge. Let's get busy," Cap ordered, "newbie, stick with Eva," he said, pinning me with his glare like a butterfly to a corkboard, and I nodded.

After getting the 'fish' in the water, the rest was kind of monotonous. The team worked together so seamlessly that there were no hiccups as the boat navigated along the grid. After two days of "running the lines," I was bored out of my mind, and I had studied all the available material about the wreck.

I used some initiative and utilized the ship's onboard computers to do some research of my own, finding a few more interesting details, but not much.

"Find anything?" Eva asked unexpectedly from the door as she and Cap entered the room to fetch something from her desk.

"Lucien Raul Perez, the man Mary loved, was found dead in an alley the morning after they left port. His throat was slit, but he had not been robbed," I said, returning the browser to the webpage I found.

"The only reason the newspaper reported his death was because he had a gold pocket watch engraved with the insignia of a wealthy family." I showed them a drawing of the watch.

"It once belonged to Maria's maternal grandfather, a nobleman," I told them, and they stilled.

"Her abductor murdered her lover; he was not taking any chances," Eva deduced.

"Good work, Britney," Cap unexpectedly said when Eva handed him the papers that she had been rifling through her desk to find.

They walked to the door, and she winked at me before leaving. I felt much more pleased that Cap praised me than I should or wanted to admit, but the warm spot in my chest would not listen to reason. Why would I feel this way about a man that couldn't stand the sight of me? Even if he was sinfully sexy. This was so out of character and concerned me, but my feelings didn't matter. He was a colleague, and I am way too smart to step on that bomb.