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I’d like to see the spots where the bodies were found,”

I told Flanders.

“Can do,”

he said, giving me an exaggerated salute.

As Haggerty started the engine, Flanders went outside to undo the moorings, and moments later, we were underway.

I left the cabin area and went to sit on one of the bench seats at the back of the boat.

Newt followed me and curled up at my feet.

After a brief chat with Haggerty, Flanders joined us, settling on the bench opposite mine.

“Don’t you have to return to the island?”

I asked as we motored out of Baileys Harbor.

“I have a full-time officer on staff who can cover for now.”

“Does one of you have to be on duty and patrolling all the time?”

Flanders shook his head.

“No, but one of us is on call all the time.

Fortunately, the crime rate on the island is low, even now with all the tourists.”

Once we left the harbor, Haggerty steered us around the Northport pier that served the ferry to Washington Island.

This put us squarely in Porte des Morts, or Death’s Door, where the waters of Green Bay and Lake Michigan mingled, sometimes with deadly results.

Off to the east, I could see the southern tip of Detroit Island extending out from behind Plum Island, and another tiny spot of land that I knew was Pilot Island.

At one time, Pilot Island had been covered with healthy, leafy trees and bushes, and the lighthouse had been manned by a keeper who lived in the decent-sized house.

But as has been the case with many lighthouses, it eventually became automated and no longer needed a keeper.

Once humans left the island, it was taken over by cormorants, large black fishing birds that arrived by the thousands.

Their guano proved to be so toxic, it killed off all the trees and other greenery on the island.

What is left now is a creepy and desolate bit of rock, sand, and scrub, with dead tree trunks, a lighthouse near the center of the island, and a crumbling foghorn building at one end.

The lighthouse is maintained at a minimum level to keep the light functioning and the walls from crumbling, but the workers who provide the maintenance need to wear respirators and other protective equipment. Even divers who have been in the waters surrounding the island have been known to get sick.

The closest island to Northport pier is Plum Island, once home to a Coast Guard station and still home to the Plum Island Range Lights, a pair of lighthouses 1,650 feet apart with a line of sight that directs ships through the narrow portion of Lake Michigan that leads into the Death’s Door passage.

There were hundreds of shipwrecks around Plum Island, and during this time of the year, ferries passed it on their way to Washington Island nearly every half hour.

Haggerty patrolled a parallel path along the northern coastline of the peninsula, keeping our speed at a reasonable pace, monitoring our progress, and watching for deadly shallows and shoals on his radar and sonar.

These hazards, combined with the highly unpredictable weather, were how Death’s Door had earned its name.

There are well over two hundred fifty shipwrecks in the area, so many that some of them are on top of others.

The combination of fresh water and cold temperatures preserves many of the wrecks in the pristine waters.

There are places where the wooden hulls and decks of sunken ships more than a hundred fifty years old can be seen so clearly that even the wooden pegs can be visualized.

Scattered about the mainland and Washington Island are historical markers that tell bits and pieces of the area’s tragic history, some of them displaying literal bits and pieces from the ships that created that history. Navigating these waters without knowledge of how treacherous they can be is a fool’s errand. Judging from the way Haggerty kept a keen eye on everything around him, I could tell he was no fool.

Another tale of how Death’s Door got its name has to do with a legendary battle rumored to have taken place between the Potawatomi and Winnebago tribes in the seventeenth century.

There are several iterations of this tale, making the truth elusive, but most people agree that a deadly battle of some type occurred.

Yet another claim states that the French named the passage merely to scare others away from the profitable fur trade that ran through it.

Regardless of how Porte des Morts came by its name, there is no denying the many wrecks and the number of men who have lost their lives there.

As we cleared the Death’s Door passage and rounded the western side of Washington Island, Flanders stared down into the water, which ranged from ninety to one hundred twenty feet deep in this area.

“Do you believe in Nessie?”

he asked me.

“I believe in the possibility of Nessie.”

He looked over at me with a doubtful expression.

“I’ll tell you why,”

I went on.

“There’s a fish called a coelacanth that was presumed extinct sixty-five million years ago.

We knew of it only through fossils until a live one was recovered off the coast of South Africa in 1938.

Since then, more have been discovered and we’ve learned that they tend to congregate in deep underwater caves several hundred feet down during the day, and come out and swim up into shallower waters at night to feed.

Could there be a Nessie-type creature that lives deep down in some waters and is rarely seen? A creature that, like the coelacanth, has remained largely hidden for millions of years? Sure.

But is it likely?”

I shrugged.

“There are reports of such creatures all around the world, all bearing a striking resemblance to one another.

In Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, the First Nations indigenous people have Ogopogo.

In Lake Champlain in upstate New York there’s Champ.

In the Chesapeake Bay area, the creature is called Chessie.

Many of these reports describe an animal that looks much like a plesiosaur, a creature that was known to exist eighty million years ago. Maybe, like the coelacanth, it never really went extinct, but went into hiding instead.”

Flanders considered that.

“Have there been rumors or sightings of these creatures in the Great Lakes?”

“Oh, yes.

There are stories going back more than a century about Bessie, the Lake Erie serpent with the head of a dog.

In Lake Huron, the Ojibwa talked of a great lynxlike creature.

The one in Lake Ontario is rumored to be able to fly and breathe fire.

And Lake Superior is probably the most prolific and varied of them all, with reports of everything from a dragon to a giant snake with a turtle head that possesses supernatural powers.

The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald has even been blamed on a lake monster by some.”

I paused as Flanders stared at me, wide-eyed.

“Interestingly,”

I went on, “Lake Michigan has had the least number of sightings of all the Great Lakes even though it’s had the most drownings.

But that’s because of longshore currents, not lake monsters.”

Flanders broke his stare and shook his head.

“Surely all these stories are merely figments of people’s vivid imaginations.

I’d have to see something like this to believe in it.”

“Why?”

He gave me a puzzled look.

“Because that would be proof.

Seeing is believing and seeing it with my own eyes is the only way I could be convinced.”

I nodded thoughtfully.

Then I asked him, “Do you believe in oxygen?”

“What?”

I felt certain he’d heard me and that his question was a reflexive one designed to give him a beat to figure out where I was going.

So I didn’t repeat myself.

I just waited.

“It’s not the same,”

Flanders muttered finally, confirming my suspicions.

“Isn’t it? We believe in all kinds of things that we can’t see .

.

.

some that we can’t prove or don’t understand.

Faith, not scientific proof, is the basis of all religions.

Faith is the thing that allows people who have no concept of aerodynamics to confidently climb inside a giant metallic bird and go up thousands of feet in the air.”

Flanders clearly didn’t like that logic.

He leaned forward in his seat and said, “Are you trying to tell me that you actually believe some kind of prehistoric monster somehow made it into Lake Michigan and decided to kill a couple of boaters?”

Newt sat up and alerted on Flanders at the change in his tone and body language.

Flanders sank back in his seat and scowled, forcing me to suppress a smile.

I had to confess, I enjoyed his discomfort a little, so I didn’t tell him that the injuries to Will and Oliver were inconsistent with the more popular theories of what these creatures most likely would have been if they did exist.

Will and Oliver both had marks that appeared to have been made from grinding teeth, like molars.

But the plesiosaurs had sharp teeth, rip-and-tear canines designed to catch and kill their food.

If plesiosaurs had somehow survived millions of years like the coelacanth, would their teeth have evolved into grinding molars? It didn’t make sense, given the fish that I assumed would have been their primary food source, but then, lots of things about the case didn’t make sense.

Oddly enough, that made it more appealing to me.