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The underwater tunnel that Mason Devereaux had discovered was eventually found, and divers were able to follow it into the cave he’d been using as a base of operations for his gold-smuggling activities.

Inside the cave, which was surprisingly large, authorities not only found the altered submersible but also found bits and pieces from the Plymouth and six bars of gold, each one around an ounce in weight.

When questioned about the whereabouts of the rest of the gold, Devereaux admitted that those six bricks and a handful of coins that he had in a safe in his house were all they had recovered so far.

It turned out that retrieving the gold had been tedious and time-consuming, and the process was exacerbated by time limitations and interference from unsuspecting tourists, fishermen, boaters, and cryptozoologists.

The endeavor was made only slightly less arduous by the submersible’s power and dexterity, and finding any more gold that might be in the area wouldn’t be any easier, thanks to the water depth and the size of the debris field.

The gold bars were valued at around thirty grand, a far cry from the four hundred million Devereaux had hoped to find.

Though efforts were made to keep the discovery of the gold’s supposed location a secret, word got out and treasure hunters, thrill seekers, and lookie-loos showed up in short order.

The number of boats that could be seen in the Rock Island Passage on any given day increased tenfold.

The water surrounding the area was declared off limits to divers, but that didn’t stop the occasional industrious and creative treasure hunter from trying to get to the site.

So far, no more gold had been found—at least none that anyone admitted to.

Devereaux’s wife turned state’s evidence in exchange for a lighter sentence.

I was glad they didn’t offer her immunity, though the five years she did get seemed like too little to me.

I can’t shake the feeling that Devereaux found more gold than he admitted to and that he has it hidden away somewhere.

Or perhaps he already sold it and has the cash stored in an offshore account.

If so, he won’t be enjoying it anytime soon, thanks to a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

But if Ginger has access to her husband’s hidden treasures—if there are any—she might be able to live out the rest of her life quite comfortably.

Roger was caught the day after he kidnapped me, though the driver of the boat remained at large.

Roger denied killing anyone at first, claiming it was his uncle Mason who had done all the murdering.

But in the end he confessed to shooting Marty and to operating the arm that grabbed Will Stokstad and held him under the water until he drowned.

Those confessions were part of a plea deal that got him a sentence of life but with the possibility of parole after twenty-five years.

Roger told the authorities that Mason Devereaux weighted down Marty’s body and dumped it in the lake.

The area where that supposedly happened was in water over a hundred feet deep in Lake Michigan, and I know that means Marty’s body will most likely never be found.

Perhaps that should have saddened me, but it didn’t.

I felt Marty would have liked knowing that his final resting place was in the waters he spent his life on and knew so well.

When she was ready, I gave Sadie Hoffman the money she needed to escape from her husband and her marriage, and Jon and I helped her make the arrangements.

She was grateful to the point of crying tears of relief, and she promised to pay the money back.

I told her that instead, if she had the money in the future, she should pay it forward to some other woman who needed it.

Knowing that the restraining order she took out on her husband was about as useful as the paper it was printed on, I also gave her some contacts on the sly—folks I knew she could use to set up a new identity if she wanted to.

And so it was that on a sunny morning in late September, Sadie Hoffman went to the mainland to shop for some items that T.J.

wanted, and she never returned.

The final thing I did after things settled down was call Bess Thornberg and let her know that Oliver hadn’t been cheating on her.

“He was keeping a secret from you,”

I told her.

“But it wasn’t another woman.

In fact, the woman who was helping him said that he hoped to score a find that would allow him to buy you the kind of engagement ring you deserved so he could propose.”

That made Bess cry so hard that she had to hang up on me.

Jon Flanders and I had dinner a couple of weeks after Devereaux’s arrest, and I gave him back the money he’d paid me for my consulting fee.

“I don’t need it,”

he’d told me.

“Neither do I.”

“You earned it.”

I shook my head.

“It was never my intention to keep it.

Charging an up-front fee is merely my way of testing people’s commitment to what they want me to do.

Or what they think they want me to do.”

After a few seconds of thought, Jon took the envelope and stuffed it in a pocket.

“Okay, I give,”

he said.

“I’ll donate it to a worthy cause.”

Jon and I were taking things slow.

That was easy to do, given that we were separated by Death’s Door and limited by ferry schedules and our respective jobs.

Neither of us was eager to get super serious too fast, and all we’d done so far was share some meals together.

There was possibility there, for sure, but for now I was content with the way things were.

Our relationship was building up a slow heat on the romantic front, but Jon turned up the flame when it came to contract work for me as a cryptozoologist.

Thanks to him, I’ve just been consulted to help with some mysterious deaths up near the Apostle Islands that some believe might have been caused by a Sasquatch. I do love the hunt.

There are still many unanswered questions regarding Napoleon’s gold, but the discovery of the final resting place of the SS Plymouth and her crew was good news for the descendants of those who died and the historians who kept track of the Great Lakes’ dead.

Would we eventually find human remains down there? It was possible.

But it had been more than a century since the ship sank, and the frigid fresh waters of the Great Lakes are notorious for not giving up their dead.

Though the Plymouth sank in the Rock Island Passage and not in Porte des Morts proper, I can’t help but think that the curse of Death’s Door is still very much alive now that the souls of Oliver Sykes, Will Stokstad, and Martin Showalter have been added to the area’s watery graveyard.

As for whether large creatures resembling a plesiosaur call those haunted depths home, who knows? I haven’t found one yet, but I continue to hang my hopes on plausible existability.