The words that changed everything came after his wife had wandered off to photograph a collapsed building. Ric Gillespie continued to examine some of the flotsam washed up by the big storm that must have hit Gardner Island since their previous visit two years before.

“You might want to come over and look at this,” his wife, Pat Thrasher, suddenly called out.

Gillespie suspended his hunt for anything new the storm might have delivered, any possible clue that the great aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had ended up here when their plane disappeared in 1937. He went over to his wife, and she pointed to a piece of metal that lay atop some storm-tossed debris.