"First and last."

'Yeah. Anyway, according to Gault, Skinner and Nordhoff the skiff made it into shore, and then it started snowing. The crew on the boat lost sight of the island and the skiff. It socked in overnight. The next morning there were two inches of snow on the ground and no sight of skiff or crew."

"Did they go ashore to check?"

Jack shook his head. "No."

" What?

"No, they didn't. They said they had no way to get there. The skiff was already ashore."

Still disbelieving, Kate demanded, "I presume they had a life raft?"

"Two of them." Jack grinned at her. "Gault says he didn't want to use them, in case he ran into trouble later on."

Kate stared at him. "And this is the good ship Lollipop you signed me onto? Thanks a whole bunch, Jack. So what happened next?"

"Gault called the Coast Guard."

Something in his voice made Kate say sharply, "How soon?"

"From the Coast Guard logs it was noon the day of the disappearance before Gault got around to calling them."

He looked up with a bland expression. "He ran the Avilda up and down and around the island, looking for signs of life through the binoculars. When he couldn't find any, he pulled the hook and set course for Dutch."

Kate was speechless. Jack's smile was bland. "It gets better. When the Coast Guard fired up a chopper and took a run out there, it seems that Gault had given them the wrong coordinates, so they searched the wrong part of the island."

When Kate found her voice it was only for a very weak, "You're kidding me."

"Nope. The Coasties didn't discover this until a couple of weeks later, when the operator who took the call compared notes with the pilot. So they went out again.

Didn't find anything that time, either."

"Nothing at all?"

"Nope."

"Not even a jerry can? An oar? A hat or a glove?

Nothing?"

"Nothing." Jack refiled the list of boat names in the folder, just missing losing the entire mass on the floor.