“You have to swear not to tell anybody,” she said, her voice stern. “You can’t tell anyone. Not your mom or Joe or any of your friends. I mean it. My life depends on it, Isabelle. Maya’s too.”

The girl’s eyes grew wide. She crossed her heart. “Holy shit! I won’t. I swear it, Letty. I won’t tell a soul. I can’t believe it. Is Tanya really dead? Are you guys really in trouble? From who?”

“Yes,” Letty said. “It’s a long story, but it’s true. Tanya’s ex-boyfriend killed her. He’d been fighting her in court, trying to get custody of Maya, but she was determined not to let that happen. She told me, about a month before … she said if anything bad ever happened to her, it would be Evan. Tanya begged me—she made me promise, if anything happened, that I would take Maya and get as far away from Evan as possible. So that’s what I did.”

She told Isabelle a condensed version of the story. About how she’d worked for Evan, and how Tanya became involved with him, and the details of their bitter breakup.

Letty recounted the day her sister showed her the canvas tote bag she’d hidden in a boot in her closet, her “getaway stash” with the enormous diamond ring push present and the magazine article about the Murmuring Surf.

She left out only one detail—the amount of cash in Tanya’s go-bag.

Letty had been thinking about the money, nineteen thousand dollars, ever since she’d learned about Tanya’s involvement in Rooney’s gold-and-silver-buying scam. Knowing her sister, she’d been naïve to believe her story about “saving” money.

“So that’s why you came here? Because of that magazine article?” Isabelle said. “She never told you about living here at the Surf, or about what happened here?”

“Oh, Isabelle,” Letty said, with a long sigh. “I’m not sure I can explain my sister, because I’m just now realizing how little I really knew about her. Tanya was … complicated. All her life, she had secrets. Big ones and little ones. And I know this sounds terrible, talking about my dead sister like this, but she wasn’t always truthful. For instance, five years ago, she called me out of the blue. She said she’d been living in Atlanta and that her ‘boyfriend’—Rooney—had stolen all her clothes and money and abandoned her. She was crying and so pathetic. She asked if she could come stay with me in New York, to get a fresh start.”

“But that part was a lie,” Isabelle said. “She was right here. On Treasure Island. At the Murmuring Surf.”

“So it seems.”

“And they weren’t really married after all?”