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Curious, I went out to the main store area, surprised to see Sadie Hoffman standing there.

“Hello again,” I said.

She glanced over her shoulder, her hands wringing nervously.

“Is there somewhere private we can talk?”

“Sure.

Let’s go into my office.”

I turned and led the way, not bothering to look back to see if she was following.

Or packing.

Or if her husband might have been trailing along.

I had Newt at my side, as usual.

When I stepped into my office, Newt followed and sat beside me as I stood behind my desk.

Sadie walked in and looked warily at Newt.

“Does he go everywhere with you?”

“Pretty much.

Please, have a seat.”

She walked over to the other chair and perched herself on the front edge of it, clutching the purse slung over her shoulder as if she thought I might try to steal it.

I reached over and shut the door, then settled into my own chair.

I leaned forward, arms on top of my desk, and looked at the woman, waiting.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” she said.

“I get it.

Your husband is an abuser.”

If she was shocked by my bluntness or by the fact that I’d figured out her deep, dark secret already, she didn’t show it.

She hung her head, whether in shame or to think, I couldn’t tell.

“Were you having an affair with Oliver Sykes?”

Her head snapped up.

“No.

We never . . .”

She let out an exasperated sigh and let her head fall back, looking at the ceiling.

“Oliver was a kind, decent man who loved his girlfriend and made it clear to me that he wasn’t interested in any kind of romantic relationship.”

“Did he have any reason to think you were?”

She looked back down at the floor.

“I kissed him.

Just once.

I’d arranged to meet him at a coffee shop by the Piggly Wiggly, supposedly to show him some things on a map.

After the kiss, he kindly explained he wasn’t interested in anything like that.

To be honest, neither was I, at least not for romantic purposes. I was stupidly looking for my knight in shining armor, someone who could rescue me from T.J. and the life I seem to be stuck in with him.”

“Why don’t you just walk away?”

“It’s not that simple.

T.J.

has control of all the money.

I have nothing.

The car, the shop, the inventory, all of it is in his name only, passed down from his father.

The shop is a family-owned business and T.J. inherited it before we met and got married, so there are no guarantees I’d even get half of anything. I need money if I’m going to run, and I need to go far away, establish a new identity, find a place to live. . . .”

She paused to catch her breath.

“None of that stuff comes cheap.

That’s one of the reasons I wanted to believe in Oliver’s theories about the gold.”

“You were hoping to strike it rich so you could get away,”

I said with dawning understanding.

She nodded.

“I really thought Oliver was onto something.

He said he’d found a book here in your store that was a collection of old mariners’ tales.

It was an antique and expensive, so he couldn’t afford to buy it, but he flipped through it and found this story about some fellow who claimed to have seen the gold close to Rock Island after his ship, the Plymouth, had been blown there in the storm of 1913.”

I gaped at her, realizing that Oliver must have read the same excerpt from the book Rita had just shown me.

“Oliver thought the gold was in a spot that no one knew about.

If he did find it, he was afraid someone else would try to claim it and it would get tied up in the courts or in disputes between countries claiming ownership, so he wanted to bring it up slowly and only a little at a time.

He was certified as a diver, but he needed diving equipment, someone to watch while he dived, and someone to help him hide the stuff if he found it.”

“Speaking of which, how did you find me tonight? I never told you who I was when I came to your place earlier.”

“I’ve been in your store before.

I love mystery novels and I’ve come in a few times to pick up something to read for myself.

And I admit I find some of your other inventory rather fascinating.”

She gave me a wan smile.

“Anyway, you waited on me once and I’ve seen you in the store on other occasions, so I knew who you were when you showed up today.”

“How did you and Oliver meet initially?”

I asked.

“At your store?”

She shook her head.

“We met in an online chat room for people who hunt for hidden and lost treasures.

I talked about it more than I did it, but that kind of stuff has always intrigued me.

Any kind of mystery, right?”

She shrugged and chuckled.

“One night, Oliver and I got to chatting online and I was telling him how I’d been researching wrecks in Death’s Door, and he said he was doing the same thing.

We went into a private room then so we could compare notes.

When he found out my husband owned a boat-rental and dive shop, he said we needed to meet in person.

I knew T.J.

wouldn’t approve, so we arranged to meet at a coffee shop in Sister Bay on a day when I typically go to the mainland anyway for supplies.

We spent an hour talking, looking at maps, comparing notes. . . . It was exhilarating, so full of promise.”

She smiled briefly but then her sadness returned.

“We met maybe a half dozen times over the past year, and during those visits, we came up with a plan to look for that gold.

I offered to provide a small motorboat and the necessary diving equipment, and Oliver was going to do the actual diving while I served as his lookout.

He wanted me to be his dive buddy, but I’m not certified.

I went through the PADI training and tried a dive once because T.J.

was insistent on the matter, but it didn’t go well.

I panicked and I have no desire to try again.”

She shuddered at the thought.

“I’m claustrophobic and superstitious.

Too many people have died in the water around here.

If I ran across an underwater skeleton or something like that, I’d probably have a heart attack.”

I smiled, even as I was thinking what a great find an underwater skeleton would have been for the store.

“So did you and Oliver ever go out?”

She nodded slowly, folding her arms over her chest in a way that made her appear to be shrinking.

Her upper teeth raked over her lower lip, which was raw from being chewed.

When I saw terror flit across her face, I knew we were finally getting to the meat of things.

“Tell me what happened,”

I prompted gently.

She didn’t speak right away, and I waited.

There was a faraway look in her eyes that told me she was remembering something that had happened in the past, something that, judging from her expression and body language, had terrified her.

“We went out three different times,”

she said finally, her voice soft, distant, and oddly childlike.

“T.J.

does dives with customer groups on Mondays during the summer, and we employ college students who work the store during their summer breaks in exchange for free equipment.

Oliver and I went out on three consecutive Mondays in June.

The first two times were a bust, but on the third try, Oliver came up all excited because he’d found a gold coin.”

My heart skipped a beat and I wondered if I’d heard her right.

“He found a gold coin?”

She nodded.

“It was a gold ten-franc French coin with Napoleon’s image on it.

Oliver was beyond excited.

He said it was proof that Napoleon’s gold was down there.”

“Do you still have it?”

She shook her head.

“Oliver tried to flip it into the boat, but it hit the edge and fell back into the water.

He said it was no big deal because there would likely be more where that came from and then he went back down.”

She shot me a heart-wrenching look—a mixture of fear, regret, and sadness—before turning her focus to her hands, where she was busy destroying a cuticle.

“He never came back up again,”

she said, her voice barely audible.

“What did you do?”

I asked, trying to imagine the fear and helplessness she must have felt.

“I waited a long time without moving the boat.

That was the one thing Oliver always insisted upon, that I not move the boat.

But after hours passed and I knew something bad must have happened, this speedboat came in fast toward me.

I had fishing lines in the water— that was my cover in case anyone wondered what I was doing just sitting out there in a boat—and I started reeling them in.

Something about that boat gave me a bad feeling.

There was a man driving it and he got up really close to my boat and just stared at me. I waved and smiled at him, and just as I was securing the last fishing line, I hollered over to him that something must have scared all the fish away.”

She paused, swallowing hard.

“I said it in a joking way, you know? But after I said it, he smiled at me in a way that gave me chills.

I started up the engine and left.”

“How awful.”

She nodded slowly, waging war against her cuticle again.

“Two days later, Oliver turned up dead over by Boyer Bluff.”

“Oliver was found in a wet suit, barefoot, with no diving equipment of any type on or around him,”

I told her.

“No tanks, no buoyancy device, no mask or flippers, nothing.

Did you ever get any of the equipment back?”

She shook her head.

“Fortunately, I handle the inventory for the store, so I was able to hide the loss from T.J.

Typically I’d charge the cost of lost equipment to the person’s credit card, but I hadn’t charged Oliver anything because I didn’t want T.J.

to know what we were doing.

As it was, I panicked when I realized Oliver’s kayak was sitting on our beach.

I debated just leaving it there, but it had identifying information on it and I didn’t want any investigations that might crop up to lead back to us. So, I tied it up to one of our speedboats one afternoon when T.J. was out and hauled it over to the area around Boyer Bluff. Then I just set it adrift.”

She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, her brow furrowing.

“At first, I was just so sad that Oliver had died, but then I started thinking about that gold coin and wondering if there was some other way to go after it.

My hopes had been so high that I was finally getting my ticket out, you know?”

She lowered her head and looked at me, her body rigid and tense as if she thought I might reach across my desk and strike her at any moment.

After a few seconds, her body sagged and she said, “You must think I’m a terrible person.”

“Not at all.

I think you’re a woman who is trapped in a horrible situation that you’re desperate to escape.

Seeing that escape so close and then losing it must have been awful.”

She smiled at me gratefully, tears welling in her eyes.

“It was awful,”

she said, a hitch in her voice.

“But that wasn’t the last of it.”

“What do you mean?”

She took in a deep, shuddering breath before continuing.

“Well, I was considering logging back in to that chat room where I’d initially met Oliver, to see if I could hook up with someone else there and maybe make another similar arrangement, when the guy from the speedboat walked into our store.”

“Yikes! That must have been scary.”

“It was.

I tried to tell myself that he was just a random customer, but when he looked at me, I knew he remembered me from that day on the water.

He gave me that same creepy smile.

I was afraid he was going to say something in front of T.J.

and then I’d have to explain myself, but then he started asking a bunch of questions about who we’d rented diving equipment to recently.

T.J. told him we didn’t give out customer names, not that Oliver’s name would have been on any list, and that pissed the guy off. In the end he left, but I’ve been afraid ever since that he or someone else would come back and hurt or kill us.”

“I take it that hasn’t happened,”

I said with a wry smile.

“Not yet,”

Sadie said with dead seriousness.

“I know I can’t prove anything, but I can’t shake the feeling that the guy in the boat had something to do with Oliver’s death.

It’s made me even more paranoid than usual.

Coming here, I made a bunch of unnecessary turns just to make sure no one was following me.”

She glanced at her watch and shifted nervously.

“I need to go so I can catch the last ferry back to the island.”

I eyed her for a moment and then said, “Sadie, is it safe to assume that if you had the money to escape from T.J.

and start over somewhere, you would go?”

“Of course.”

I smiled at her and said, “Well, then, we have some planning to do.”