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The postmark on that envelope was from Saturday and I had gone out on the boat with Marty on Monday before any mail delivery would have arrived.

He presumably had gone back out in his boat after the storm, but he might have waited it out by sitting in his truck.

The ink in the word “Plymouth”

had run slightly, and it hadn’t rained on Saturday or Sunday, leading me to believe that Marty had jotted it down with wet hands after our excursion and while waiting out the storm.

Could it have something to do with whatever it was Marty had seen on his sonar screen?

When I got back home, I showered and then climbed into bed with my laptop, searching for any references I could find for the word “Plymouth.”

There were a lot of them; I got twenty-eight pages of results.

The top ones that weren’t business names were entries for the car models made by Chrysler, a city named Plymouth in Wisconsin, another in Michigan, a third in Minnesota, and, of course, the more famous Plymouth in Massachusetts.

There wasn’t much I could do with the car.

If Marty had written down the word because he saw a Plymouth that was somehow relevant, all I could do was keep my eyes open for one in the area.

There were other cities named Plymouth in the country, but I figured it made sense to start with the ones that were geographically close.

Given that, I began my online research with Plymouth, Wisconsin, and learned that the city touted itself as the Cheese Capital of the World, so much so that the phrase had been trademarked.

Given that the city was home to four large processing facilities that provided ten to fifteen percent of the nation’s cheese, I supposed they were entitled to the title.

I also learned that Plymouth, Wisconsin, was once called Hub City because it was a major center for wooden wheelwrighting—the making or repairing of wooden wheels—a trade not much in demand these days.

What’s more, Plymouth, Wisconsin, was named after its more famous Massachusetts namesake because the folks who settled the area were from New England and wanted a touch of home.

It was all fascinating stuff, and while I made a mental note to plan a trip there sometime in the future, I couldn’t find anything that seemed relevant to the situation at hand.

I moved on to the other two nearby Plymouths—Michigan and Minnesota—and came up equally disappointed.

Then I allowed myself to get lost for nearly two hours reading about Plymouth Rock, the Mayflower Pilgrims, and the Plymouth colony, including a delightful assortment of ghostly tales involving both the settlers and the Native Americans.

I even succumbed to the lure of a link that led me to someone selling what they claimed was the skull of an original settler with a lead ball embedded in it.

There was a picture that got me excited at first, but upon closer inspection, it looked like something that had been epoxied together.

Some of the other links I followed led me to gruesome yet oddly fascinating stories born out of the many deaths that had occurred among the early settlers.

One detailed how the survivors, knowing they were vastly outnumbered and fearful the natives might attack if they realized that, attempted to hide the truth by smoothing down the mounds of graves and planting seeds on top of them.

The stories didn’t say if the settlers ate the produce that grew out of these body gardens, and I decided I didn’t really want to know.

There was also a story about a storm in 1735 that led to flooding, erosion, and a river of human remains washing down one of the streets, and another about a house that the courts ruled legally haunted in the eighteenth century.

I could have spent the entire night going down delightfully creepy Google rabbit holes and it was a struggle to break free.

Before I did, I ran across someone who was selling a young girl’s shoe that they claimed had been found inside the wall of one of the haunted houses in Plymouth.

The price was reasonable, and the item clearly looked like an old-style shoe, though I realized it might have been artificially aged.

I did a quick bit of research and learned that the practice of hiding things inside the walls of houses built during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was common.

They were called spiritual middens and the Brits and other Europeans had been doing it since the fourteenth century. The shoe would make a nice addition to my store’s inventory, so I bought it, knowing that if it turned out to be fake, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been taken in. It would sell regardless. It had a creepy look and an intriguing story to go with it (one that I would, of course, embellish a bit) and that’s what most of my customers wanted.

When I finally closed the laptop and turned out the lights, it was just after two in the morning.

My mind kept playing a clip in which corpses in various stages of decay flowed down a hill overrun with water, spreading out into the main street of a seventeenth-century town.

The images should have been disturbing, but instead I imagined myself walking beside the bodies as they floated by, mentally picking out the best pieces for my store.

It was my version of counting sheep and it’s what I fell asleep to.

* * *

? ? ?

When I awoke a little after six, I decided over my morning coffee that I needed more heads to help me sort through the Plymouth enigmas I’d researched.

When Rita and Devon came into work, I told them about my visit to Marty’s house, shed, and truck, and then described some of the things I’d found online regarding the word “Plymouth.”

Knowing their tastes for the macabre mostly matched mine, I shared some of the ghastly and ghostly tales I’d read about Plymouth, Massachusetts.

When I was done, I said, “Be honest with me.

Am I making too much of this piece of envelope with the word ‘Plymouth’ on it?”

“Hard to say,”

Devon answered, scrunching his face up in thought.

Rita, however, gave me hope.

“You know, I remember that Marty used to write stuff down on scraps of paper all the time.

He’d come into the store and pull random notes from his pockets until he found the one he wanted.

If he wrote it down, it had some meaning to him; of that, I have no doubt.

But whether or not that meaning might be related to what you’re doing . . .”

She shrugged and gave me an apologetic look.

“Right,”

I said with a sigh.

I looked back at Devon.

“Can you do me a favor and take one more run through the social media sites for the two victims and see if you can find any mention of Plymouth anywhere?”

“The car or a city?”

My turn to shrug. “Both.”

He looked doubtful but took out his tablet and got to work.

I went back into my office and thought about calling Will Stokstad’s wife, Janelle, again to ask her if the term “Plymouth”

had any meaning to her, but I didn’t feel up to her acerbic bitterness.

I decided to call Oliver Sykes’s live-in girlfriend, Bess, instead.

Maybe things would be better with her, though I still didn’t relish the task.

I took the slip of paper with Bess’s phone number on it out of my drawer and dialed it into my office desk phone.

She answered after only one ring.

“Hello?”

“Is this Bess Thornberg?”

“Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested.”

“I’m not selling anything,”

I said quickly before she could disconnect.

“My name is Morgan Carter and I’m working with the local police on the investigation into Oliver’s death.”

“Investigation?”

she said, her voice rife with skepticism.

“Why? He drowned.

What’s there to investigate?”

I remembered that she didn’t know about the injuries to Oliver’s body.

In fact, as a live-in girlfriend, she wasn’t Oliver’s legal next of kin and might not have been directly notified of his death.

“There were some .

.

.

irregularities that the police are checking into.

It may be nothing, but they want to be thorough.”

“What kind of irregularities?”

she asked, her voice rising.

“No one mentioned any irregularities.”

Keenly aware of walking a thin line here and not wanting to do anything that might further alienate Jon, I opted not to answer her question, going for a diversion instead.

“I talked with several of Oliver’s friends who went on the trip with him, and they said that he seemed preoccupied this time out, like he was focused on other things.

Did he talk to you at all before he left about anything that he planned to do while he was there?”

“I wish,”

she said, hurt and anger apparent in her voice.

“Trust me, Oliver was distracted long before he went on that trip.”

She paused for a few seconds, sucked in a shuddering breath, and then blurted out, “I think he might have been having an affair.”

Oh, geez.

This was going to be more awkward than I’d imagined.

“I’m sorry,”

I said.

“That really sucks.

What makes you think that?”

She didn’t answer me right away, so I quickly added, “I ask only because I’ve had similar concerns myself with the guy I’m living with.”

That was a lie since I wasn’t seeing, much less living, with anyone, but I figured a shared sense of misery wouldn’t hurt.

Newt was curled on the floor at my feet, and I saw him raise his head, his ears pricked forward.

I shook my head to let him know I wasn’t referring to him and he settled his head back onto his paws.

“Oh, the usual things,”

Bess said wearily.

“It’s so easy to see it all in hindsight.

Oliver lost his job a few months ago and he got depressed.

Then he began spending more time away from home, claiming he was job hunting or going out with the guys for a drink.

When he was home, he was on his computer constantly, again supposedly for the purposes of job hunting.

But if I came into a room, he’d close his laptop so I couldn’t see what he was doing. I overheard him on the phone talking to one of the guys on the trip before he left, and he was telling him how he was going to need some space while they were there and not to be offended if he tried to go off on his own some of the time.”

She paused and sighed.

“I don’t know if it was someone who lives in Door County or if he arranged for her to be there at the same time so they could hook up.”

She sounded so sad and dejected, I felt heartsick for her, though that was tempered by the excitement I felt over the fact that her revelations were providing me with another clue.

If Oliver had had a secret girlfriend, had she somehow played a role in what had happened to him?

“Bess, do you have any idea who this woman was?” I asked.

There was such a long pause I thought our call had been disconnected.

“Bess? Are you still there?”

“I’m here.

Sorry.

It’s just that when you asked me that, I realized why you asked it.

Clearly there was something about Oliver’s death that was unusual.

Do you think this girl he was seeing did something to him? Is she one of those black-widow women or something like that?”

“No, no, no, Bess,”

I said, frantic to get her off that train of thought before it ran completely off the rails.

“That’s not why I was asking at all.

I just thought that if he was meeting someone up here, she might be able to shed some light on what he was doing and where he went.

Maybe she witnessed something or knows something about his death that might help the police with their investigation.”

Another pause followed, but this time I heard her breathing and knew she was still on the line.

I figured she was putting all the pieces together the best she could and feared what she might come up with in the end.

“Why is it again that the police are investigating Ollie’s death?”

she asked.

There was a notable softening in her tone that, along with her use of Oliver’s nickname, suggested she’d already forgiven him for his suspected transgression.

“It’s just that where they found him didn’t make a lot of sense because of where he put in and what he’d told his friends he was doing.

He probably just changed his mind.”

“Or he lied because he was going to meet with her and didn’t want his friends to know,”

Bess grumbled, though the earlier anger I’d heard was gone from her voice.

All that remained was sad resignation.

And grief.

“Any idea who this ‘her’ might be?”

I asked again.

“No, but I think she might live in Plymouth.”

That got my attention.

“Why is that?”

“Because I found it written on a scrap of paper that he’d torn up and tossed out.

One piece of it slipped out of his hand and went under the table and he didn’t see it.

I picked it up later when I was sweeping and saw that it said ‘Plymouth.’?”

“That’s all that was on the paper, just the word ‘Plymouth’?”

“That’s the only full word that was on it.

There was a letter W after the word and the letter S before it.

I figured the W was for ‘Wisconsin.’ I know a lot about Plymouth, Wisconsin, because my uncle works at one of the cheese-processing plants up there.

I figured the S was part of an address, or maybe the last letter in her name.”

“Bess, do you have Oliver’s laptop?”

“No.

I asked his mother if I could have it and she said it was collected by the police and never given back.

I couldn’t get into it anyway.

He had it password protected, and I have no idea what his password was.

I’m not proud of admitting this, but I did try several times to guess it before he left on the trip.

That’s another reason why I thought he might be having an affair. He’d never password protected his computer before.”

“I’m really sorry you’ve had to go through all this,”

I told her.

“I know how hard it must be for you.

Thanks for talking to me, and if there’s anything I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to call.”

After I gave her my cell number, she said, “I miss him so much.”

I understood her grief. “I know.”

“I hope whatever you discover makes you happy.”

For a second, I thought she was referring to my hunt for the lake monster and I said, “I’m not sure which answer will make me happy.”

“You’re not married to your guy, are you?”

For a second, old anxieties and fear made my heart pound and little lights pulse in my peripheral vision.

Then I remembered that all of that was in the past.

Except for the fact that David had never been caught.

“No, not married, thank goodness,”

I said, once again grateful for the narrow escape I’d had.

“Good.

I hope it works out for you.”

Too late.

“Thanks for listening to me.

It felt good to vent.”

“Happy to oblige,”

I said.

“We women have to stick together.”

“Ain’t that the truth!”

She let out a pained laugh.

I laughed, too, but mine sounded forced.

There was nothing about any of this that was remotely funny.