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Rita wasn’t known for flights of fancy or unjustified bouts of giddy enthusiasm, so her obvious excitement had my undivided attention.

“When you started talking about the SS Plymouth and Gull Island,”

she said, her eyes bright, “I remembered something.

My husband, George, bless his boring old soul, loved to collect old mariners’ diaries.

Many of them were written on paper and showed their age, making them barely legible.

But a few, like the ones in here, were collected by an enterprising independent publisher who found, bought, and begged for sailors’ notes, had them typeset, printed, bound, and published in book form.

Most of the stories are boring tales about life at sea and gossip that circulated among the sailors.

That kind of stuff fascinated George; he used to read excerpts to me all the time, assuming I’d be as entranced with them as he was. Some of them were interesting, but most were rather dry, paranoid, and misogynistic. A few of the writings were more fanciful and talked about legends and things like mermaids, but those were rarities. Still, I indulged George when he wanted to read them aloud to me because he clearly enjoyed them so much. It was something he and Marty bonded over. Marty liked those old sailing stories, too, and sometimes, when he’d come into our bookstore, George would share some of the passages with him.”

I had no idea where Rita was going with this and waited with barely contained impatience for her to get to the damned point.

Assuming she had one.

“Anyway, when you were talking about the SS Plymouth and how everyone thought it sank at Gull Island, it reminded me of this collection George had and one of the stories in it.

Because of George’s interest in her, I actually know quite a bit about the Plymouth.”

“Thanks to Devon, so do I,”

I told her.

“It’s a sad story, and an all-too-common one when it comes to these waters.

But I don’t see how it relates.”

“Read this,”

Rita said, pointing to a paragraph in the open book she’d set down in front of me.

“It’s a secondhand tale, a story told at a bar.

No way to know if it’s true or not.

But if it is . . .”

She gnawed at the side of her thumbnail, her eyes bright and eager.

I swear she looked ten years younger.

I took the book, noting its age and the small alarm tag on it, a necessary evil given its five-hundred-dollar price tag.

The cover was flimsy, the pages thin and yellowed.

Handling the book delicately, I read the selection Rita had pointed out, a recitation of a story told to the author in 1939:

The old man was a hundred if he was a day, and he ordered a shot of whiskey that he tossed back without hesitation, slamming the shot glass down on the bar and then ordering another.

His skin was terribly wrinkled and sallow, and tiny burst blood vessels marked his cheeks and nose, an indication of a life lived in the elements perhaps, or maybe a life lived with too much alcohol.

Later I realized it was probably both.

His hands were arthritic but also calloused, and when he saw me staring at them, he turned them over, palms up and said, “These are a sailor’s hands.”

That got us to talking about sailing and ships, and how many of them had sunk in Death’s Door.

I brought up the tragic story of the Plymouth because a distant relative of mine had died on that ship’s final voyage.

But when I summarized the story, the old fellow looked at me with a rheumy but sardonic eye and said I shouldn’t believe everything I heard.

I asked what he meant, and he said that if the Plymouth sank where the tug abandoned it, how come the wreck was never found there?

Then he proceeded to tell me a story about a young fellow back in 1913 who washed ashore on the northeastern corner of Washington Island on the heels of that bedeviled storm.

The lad was in rough shape—hypothermic, coughing with pneumonia, and waterlogged—and he died a few hours later, but not before sharing a fantastic tale.

According to the old man, this young fellow claimed that he was a crew member on the Plymouth and that the captain, a man named Alex Larson, had decided to move the ship mere hours after it had been abandoned by the tug.

It was getting battered hard where they were, and he figured they’d stand a better chance out on the open waters.

They pulled up anchor and let the waves take them, and at first, they drifted south around the eastern end of St.

Martin Island toward Rock Island.

But the storm worsened, and they got caught in a trough, a dangerous situation that can sink a ship in a mild storm, much less one with cyclonic waves coming at them from every direction.

The wind and waves started pushing the barge toward Rock Island with frightening speed, and as land drew closer, the crew tried desperately to drop anchor several times to keep from running aground.

But the anchor failed to catch until they were so close to Rock Island’s northern coast that they could make out individual trees.

Then, miraculously, the anchor caught.

Or so they thought.

Yet the boat continued to drift.

Thinking they had snagged on another shipwreck, the crew pulled up the anchor, surprised to find a wooden chest trailing a rope of thick, heavy chain snagged on the anchor.

The chest broke apart and thousands of gold pieces rained down into the water.

The chain soon followed, slipping off the anchor as the storm started tearing the ship apart.

This fellow and one other crew member tried to make for Rock Island in a lifeboat.

But their boat sank, and the second crew member disappeared, presumably drowned.

This young fellow managed to make it to shore on Washington Island, but after being battered and beaten by the storm waters, frozen, and nearly drowned, he died a short time after telling his wild tale.

It’s presumed that the others on the ship—the captain, four other crew members, and Deputy Marshal Keenan—went down with the Plymouth when it sank.

When I finished reading, I looked up at Rita.

“You think the gold is somewhere in the Rock Island Passage rather than up near Poverty Island?”

She shrugged, grinning.

Much of her hair had sprung loose of its bun and strands of it floated around her head, making her look a little crazy.

“It’s not beyond possibility, is it?”

she said, eyes wide.

“What if this fellow’s story was true? What if the gold is there in the Rock Island Passage and the Plymouth sank on top of it?”

“If it was, why didn’t someone follow up on it back when this book first came out?”

“For one thing, look at the date of publication,”

Rita said.

I flipped back and looked at the copyright page.

“?‘December 1, 1941,’?”

I read aloud.

“Six days before Pearl Harbor.”

Rita nodded.

“I suspect people’s minds were otherwise occupied then and stayed that way for several years.

Plus, this book was published by a small family-owned local press that went out of business months after the book came out because the three sons and the father who ran the business all went to fight in the war.

I have no idea how many copies might have been printed, but I doubt many of them sold.

Most likely they were returned and destroyed.

George found this copy at an estate sale, and it had been in the attic of the fellow who owned it for several decades. I doubt anyone else has read it. There’s also an issue of veracity. If you read on, you’ll see that the fellow relaying this story chalked it up to the hallucinations of a dying man.”

I thought about it all for a few seconds.

“The wreck of the Plymouth has never been found, right?”

Rita shook her head.

“Okay.

This is good stuff, Rita. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.

Just know, if you find the gold, I’m going to demand a finder’s fee.”

Before I could comment on that, Devon poked his head into my office.

“There’s a lady out here who wants to talk to you.

She said it’s about Oliver Sykes.”