But Jess could only shrug. “I never really paid attention when Ty was talking about fishing,” she said. “He only took me out on the water with him a couple of times, and that was…”

She stopped. She’d caught vestiges of a memory, her and Ty, not long after they’d started going together. The sun sparkling like diamonds on the surface of calm water, Ty’s little boat chugging along, Ty at the wheel, Jess on the back deck, sitting on the fish hatch, sunning herself in a halter top. Ty playing the radio loud enough to hear over the sound of the diesel.

“Jess?” Burke asked, breaking the spell. “Where did he take you?”

Even Shelby looked interested.

“This place is my secret,” he’d told her, throttling down, aiming the boat toward rocky cliffs and verdant green forest. “I take you in here, you got to promise you’ll never tell anyone it exists.”

And she’d been in love with Ty Winslow back then, and he was tanned and grinning and sexy at the wheel of that boat, and she’d promised right away, of course she had, and he’d pulled her close and kissed her hard, and kept aiming that boat for those rocks.

He’d stayed on that course and kept kissing her, one mischievous hand creeping down to her ass, copping a feel without being shy about it, and she’d giggled and let him, until she heard the surf crashing and pulled back and pointed out the wheelhouse. “You’re going to wreck us.”

This only made Ty smile bigger, and he gestured out over the bow at those rocks on the shore and the forest behind, that crashing surf. “Look again.”

She did. She looked harder, and then she saw what he saw: there was a gap in the cliff, barely twice the width of Ty’s boat. It curled out of sight quickly, but it was there, and it was where Ty was aiming.

“It’s called Dixie,” he said, both hands on the wheel now, focused. “You can only get through on slack tide. And even then, that’s only if you’re as good as I am.”

Jess could see the letter now. She could see what Ty had written. “He told me the fishing was great,” she told Burke and Shelby. “Better than ever before. He told me by the time I got home, we’d be whistlin’ Dixie.”

Burke and Shelby exchanged a look. They didn’t get it.

“It was a place he took me once,” she explained. “A secret little cove on a little island out there in the strait. He said hardly anyone knew it existed.”

“Whistlin’ Dixie?” Burke said. “And you think that’s where he hid the package.”

“Dixie,” she said. “Dixie Lagoon. That’s the only place I can think of. It was his secret spot; he only took me the once, years ago. I’d completely forgotten.”