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Haven

Monday

O n my first morning in Positano, I woke to the sound of sirens.

I turned over in bed, fumbling for my phone, which read 8:22 a.m. I could steal another hour, maybe two. Typically, I’d be up and going by now, but my internal clock was stuck at home—the Florida Keys, where I’d lived all my life.

The echo of distant emergency sirens went on, a series of high-pitched, nerve-grating wails. I threw back the covers with a sigh of annoyance and spun my dark hair into a messy bun.

Having arrived at this rented villa only yesterday, it took me a moment to mentally retrace the layout of what would be my home for the next year. Shuffling along the cool terra-cotta floors, I walked toward the small terrace, facing southeast. It had a panoramic view of the village of Positano and its many buildings, splashes of pink and orange and white stacked vertically up the hillside like the layers of a cake. At the bottom lay the main beach, Spiaggia Grande, with its hundreds of umbrellas lined up in perfect rows. And beyond this, the Tyrrhenian Sea, showing off her luster in every shade of blue.

This view was why I’d chosen the villa, and my team—four other women, all of us nautical archaeologists—had readily agreed. It had been well within our project’s budget, which surprised me until I realized that in exchange for the view, we were giving up space. There were only two bedrooms, which meant we’d be double-bunking, with one of us on the pullout couch.

Still, the view. There was a reason Positano was the gem of the Amalfi Coast. Even after a lifetime of diving wrecks throughout the Keys and the Atlantic, I’d never seen ocean like this. I’d never seen blue like this.

The distant wail of the sirens continued, and once outside, I turned my gaze to the ocean. A quarter mile off the beach, a pair of boats sped westward, red lights flashing and sirens squalling.

“Morning,” came a voice behind me.

I turned to find Mal stepping onto the terrace, her hands wrapped around a mug of black coffee. She and I had arrived together yesterday, earlier than our other three team members, who would join us next week. Mal and I, both thirty-five, had met in our PhD program years ago at Texas A&M. As the only two women in one of our conservation lab courses, we’d become instant friends.

“Morning,” I said back. “Sirens wake you up, too?”

She nodded. “I saw some paramedics up there, going west.” She pointed toward Amalfi Drive, the road we’d taken into town yesterday. The drive from Naples to Positano had lasted ninety minutes, but I could hardly complain. We’d stopped a few times to snag photos and then again at a sun-drenched roadside stand to buy a bag of apricots and prickly pears. It was easy to understand why Amalfi Drive, especially now in early summer, was one of the most famous roadways in the world. With the limestone cliffside plunging into the ocean just inches away from the road and a dazzling sea beyond, the views were incomparable.

“Harbor police, too,” I said, motioning toward the ocean. I bent over the railing, the stone already warmed by the morning sun. “Can’t see where they’re headed, though.”

Mal ran her hand through her short spiky blond hair. “Wonder what’s up.”

I eyed her coffee. “No idea, but I need a cup of that.”

“I found a Nespresso machine inside,” she said, smiling. “All stocked with pods.”

As I made my way toward the kitchen, I tripped on the handle of a suitcase and cursed under my breath. Only two of us had arrived, but already the inside of this rented villa was, in a word, chaotic : unpacked luggage pushed up against walls, scuba dive kits tossed onto furniture, underwater camera equipment crowding the countertops. Mal and I hadn’t worried about settling in yesterday. Instead, we’d made straight for the nearest ristorante in search of fresh seafood and cheap, local wine. We only had a few days of downtime before our project kicked off, and we planned to make the most of it. Today, we would take the villa’s two-person Vespa to a nearby beach.

Returning to the terrace with my coffee, I found Mal leaning over the railing, her eyebrows knit together. “You see that white boat out there?” She pointed to the watery horizon, and I spotted a different, faster vessel, this one also heading west.

“Shit,” I said, spotting the red band on the boat’s hull. The Italian coast guard. While harbor police handled all sorts of matters, even relatively trivial ones, the coast guard in any jurisdiction meant something serious. Search. Rescue. Recovery. That sort of thing.

“And they’re in a hurry, toward something thataway.” Mal pointed west, but our line of sight was blocked by the rocky cliff separating Positano from the villages farther along the coast. “If only that hillside wasn’t in our way…”

We glanced at each other then, eyes glimmering mischievously. I might have been the lead on this project, but Mal was dive marshal, the one ensuring my team’s safety underwater. If there was a local incident worthy of calling the coast guard, Mal’s curiosity would get the best of her.

And mine, too, if I were being honest.

I threw back my coffee, enlivened. “Let’s go,” I said.

***

Water had always been my playground. But as the daughter of an internationally esteemed nautical archaeologist, I suppose I didn’t have much choice. It was inevitable that my father would teach his only child to love the ocean as much as he did. He had me snorkeling at age three, scuba diving at age eight. I dove my first shipwreck soon after.

Not incidentally, we lived in the right place for it. The Florida Keys are riddled with more than a thousand wrecks, many of them in water so shallow that a wet suit isn’t necessary, and a single tank of air can last two hours. My father surveyed and published site plans for many of these wrecks, which was how he’d made his name in the world of nautical archaeology.

With the Gulf of Mexico as my backyard, I had an adventurous, unorthodox childhood. Without fail, Saturday mornings meant wreck-diving. The two of us would anchor offshore, raise our red-and-white dive flag, and explore our backyard underwater paradise. Early on, my father taught me basic dive skills—underwater navigation, buoyancy control—and in time, I began to master technical skills, too, like safely diving the cavelike environment of sunken wrecks.

Skills and technique were one thing, but my father also never let me forget the joy. Shipwrecks were full of mystery, and he taught me to explore them as a nautical archaeologist might. What brought the vessel down? What cargo did she hold? Where was she going, and why?

Don’t overlook the archives, either , he liked to say. Sailors’ logs, vessel blueprints, incident reports—they often revealed far more about a wreck than the rubble itself. Sometimes the answers aren’t in the water, but out of it.

Even so, there was more to my father’s interest in shipwrecks than just research and academia—he’d also been a self-declared treasure hunter. Framed in his study were several articles about the approximate value of the world’s sunken treasure: more than four billion dollars, experts estimated. And only a select number of people, those skilled and brave enough to slip into the depths of the ocean, had any chance of finding it.

Even then, it took luck. Luck my father never seemed to stumble on, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. Year after year, dive after dive, that Big Discovery always seemed to elude him.

His friend and old schoolmate, Conrad Cass, liked to give him a hard time about it. “Have you found anything but sea junk lately?” Conrad asked anytime the two got together. Easy for him to say: Conrad, a fellow diver, had supposedly stumbled on a few lucky wrecks over the years, though he never revealed where these wrecks were or what sort of loot he’d found.

It felt unfair to my father: he believed in following the rules, and he knew well the importance of reporting any finds to the proper jurisdictions, even if it meant he wouldn’t see a dime in the end. But guys like Conrad? My father wasn’t convinced he adhered to the same values.

Always a peacemaker, he just shook his head at Conrad’s teasing. “Not yet,” he always said with a laugh.

Still, I knew frustration lay beneath this facade. My father had come close so many times. Once, off the coast of South Africa, he recovered what he thought was a gold coin from a ship sunk in the early 1600s. It would have been worth more than a hundred thousand dollars.

Alas, it was pyrite. Fool’s gold.

Another time, he’d been slated to join a group of fellow archaeologists on a promising dive near the Azores. But the morning of, he woke with a severe head cold. Every diver knows it’s dangerous to dive with sinus congestion—it can rupture an eardrum—so my father stayed on the boat instead.

That wreck ended up yielding a quarter-million dollars in sunken Spanish doubloons.

It was his evergreen dream, making a big underwater discovery, yet time and time again, it slipped through his fingers.

Then finally, six months ago, he found something. Something big , he said, bigger than anything he’d ever seen. But without a means to excavate it, he’d been forced to return to the surface. Back on shore, breathless, he’d immediately begun planning his return dive to the wreck.

Only, bad luck wasn’t done with him yet, and he never got the chance to return. A few weeks after first laying eyes on that something big , my father was dead.

***

Mal drove the Vespa, leaving me to marvel at the smaller details comprising Positano’s charm: hot pink bougainvillea climbing up walls, swallows darting in and out of roof soffits, seagulls circling high above. It was a perfect June day with a few cottony clouds and a light breeze. If there had indeed been an incident on the water, no one could blame the weather.

At an intersection, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. I took a quick peek. It was a message from Conrad Cass.

Thinking of you today, kid , it read. If I could, I’d send him a whole case of plum wine.

A knot formed in my throat. Today, my father would have turned sixty years old. And plum wine was his favorite.

I tucked my phone back into my pocket, appreciative of Conrad’s kind gesture. He was a big deal these days, retired and living in a nine-bedroom estate in Naples, Florida, with a glut of financiers and politicians to call friends. I was touched he’d thought of me. Not even Mal had acknowledged my late father’s birthday yet.

On Amalfi Drive, we took a left, heading west. A few minutes later, we rounded the cliff. From this new perspective, we were able to make out miles and miles of glimmering Italian coastline, and even the Isle of Capri in the distance.

We could see Li Galli, too—the archipelago of three tiny islands where we would, over the next year, be doing our underwater fieldwork. As I looked out at the islands, a chill stole over me: dozens of shipwrecks riddled the seabed around Li Galli. A veritable graveyard, thirty meters beneath the ocean’s surface.

Who knew what secrets hid among those wrecks? An untold amount of information might be gleaned from surveying and inventorying them: historic trade routes, piracy incidents, crusades. And this wasn’t even accounting for what might be in the wrecks. Loot, gems, treasure.

We made a few hairpin turns, and I felt my palms growing sweaty—in part because Mal was taking the turns harder than I’d have liked, but also because we were approaching the first big project site of my career. After so many months of preparation, here we were at last.

Given its many wrecks, our chosen project site was an unexplored mess: archaeologists were at a loss for how to investigate it. Existing technology like echo sounders and side sonar were meant to find anomalies on the seafloor—a stretch of seabed interrupted by a single ship’s hull—but Li Galli was a quarter-mile-wide pileup of dense, sunken rubble. No technology existed to survey, much less excavate, such a chaotic site.

Which was precisely what my team of nautical archaeologists aimed to change.

***

Mal and I drove a few more minutes, the Li Galli islets coming clearly into view. Yet as the details of the islands grew sharper—now I could even make out the ancient stone watchtower on the easternmost islet—I felt my pulse quicken.

The islets were surrounded by rescue boats. Toward the middle of the archipelago, I spotted a yacht, but something was not right—

Suddenly, I drew in a sharp breath.

Mal must have spotted it at the exact same time, because she pulled the Vespa to the side of the road and turned the engine off. I rushed toward the metal guardrail, crocus and chicory weeds blooming at my feet. Below me, the craggy cliffside dropped sharply toward the ocean. I looked out at the sea and blinked, unable to believe what I was seeing: amid the islets of Li Galli, an enormous yacht—worth many millions, surely—listed severely to one side, its port side heaving toward the water.

“Mal,” I said, hardly able to form words. According to my research, the last wreck in Li Galli was almost a decade ago, and it had been blamed on a bad storm. And though we’d selected this project site due to its abundance of shipwrecks, those wrecks were… old . So old they felt detached from reality, even mythical. But this? This was a modern-day yacht, sinking right in front of our eyes.

My dive training kicked into gear as I considered the hazards, any possible explanation for what we were seeing.

Depth. I frowned, recalling the nautical charts I’d been studying for months. I knew the water around the sinking yacht measured twenty-five meters deep. They couldn’t have run aground.

Reefs. There were none in the area. Rocks. That was impossible, too, as the yacht was well away from the actual islets. I glanced again at the sky overhead, impossibly clear and calm. Weather couldn’t be blamed, either, then.

“Fire?” Mal asked. “Maybe an engine explosion?”

I peered through a pair of binoculars I’d thrown into my bag and shook my head. “There’s no smoke. Underwater currents, maybe?” I mused aloud. “Maelstroms? Everyone knows it’s a turbulent stretch of water.”

According to my prefieldwork research, Li Galli had been problematic for hundreds of years. A vortex of ocean currents converged here, amplified by the area’s irregular seabed topography. Surviving mariners often blamed their ill-fated journeys on unforeseen maelstroms near the islets.

Still, there was something strange in the data I’d reviewed: the early nineteenth century saw a spike in Li Galli shipwrecks, one after the other through the 1820s and 1830s. Nearby villagers couldn’t explain the uptick in incidents, though some speculated a sinkhole had altered the topography around the islets.

The phenomenon had been dubbed the Amalfi Curse and, for more than eighty years, mariners avoided Li Galli altogether.

Then, in the late 1920s, a few uninformed boaters traversed the area, experiencing no issues. It seemed that whatever oceanic vortex had plagued the area had all but disappeared. I suspected that seismological activity, or even climate change, had something to do with the shift. For me, the curse theory was ludicrous.

Mal gave me a skeptical look. “A superyacht like that, taken under by a whirlpool? Even a violent one. It doesn’t make sense.”

I couldn’t disagree with her. The sea that lay before us was serene, motionless. Not a whitecap to be seen. I let out a long exhale and handed her the binoculars. “Jesus. The women on deck, look.” I paused, short for words and feeling sick. “They’re panicking.”

On the sundeck, several women in swimsuits motioned frantically toward the coast guard. One woman fell to her knees sobbing, while another leaned over the edge of the boat, making a futile effort to reach one of the portholes. Brightly colored objects bobbed around the vessel, life jackets and flotsam that had either fallen, or been tossed, overboard.

And the vessel itself was taking on water. Quick. The cabins were most certainly flooded by now.

“This is terrible,” Mal whispered.

My eyes welled with tears. I was witnessing, in real time, an event that would most certainly result in casualties.

But it didn’t make sense, and this left the scientist in me further unsettled. By all appearances, this was a perfectly seaworthy yacht. There was no weather, no wind. The seas were easy and smooth. On the nearby islets, I spotted a few onlookers, people close to the water watching the scene unfold.

The yacht, rolling moments ago to one side, was now going down by its stern. Another two to three minutes, and she’d be completely underwater. I felt helpless from this vantage point, though reassured by the rescue boats within proximity.

Mal glanced at me, her expression hesitant. I knew exactly what she was about to say, much as I didn’t want to hear it.

“The Amalfi Curse,” she muttered.

I kept silent. The science-minded part of me wished badly I could counter with a better, more reasonable explanation.

But truth be told, I had none.