The Summer of Lost Things

Chapter 1

The afternoon I flew back to Michigan after my freshman year at Harvard, no one was there to pick me up from the airport.

It’s not as though I expected a shower of confetti to welcome me home, but having a friendly face to greet me would’ve been

a comfort, which was something I hadn’t had much of lately. This past week alone, (a) I found out my financial aid was in

serious danger of being stripped away, and (b) I was forced to give up my spot on a once-in-a-lifetime field study trip to

Europe.

Not exactly how I expected my school year to end.

Or how I wanted my summer to start.

Jazmine Neely, I said to myself, staring at our recent texts as I slid into the back seat of a rideshare outside Ford International Airport

in Grand Rapids, Michigan. What’s the real reason you didn’t pick me up? I’d sweated in baggage claim for half an hour before she texted apologies for why she couldn’t make it, blaming a vague work

emergency. Jaz and I hadn’t seen each other since I flew east to Massachusetts for college last fall, and I was almost positive she was lying about the work emergency. But, even though I was supposed to be the big brain of our childhood friend

group, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.

“Hi there.” A cheerful, ginger-haired rideshare driver smiled at me from the front seat of his sedan, unaware that he was my second choice for the hour-plus drive from Grand Rapids to my small hometown on the shore of Lake Michigan. “It’s Paige, right?”

“That’s me,” I assured him from the back seat while zipping an outer pocket on my carry-on.

“And today we’re going all the way to Lake Michigan, huh? Haven Beach?”

“Yep.”

Eyes in the rearview mirror scanned me from top to bottom. My dark hair was wound into a messy bun, and I’d made a rash decision

the previous night to cut my own bangs in my dorm—I wanted a change before flying home. I followed an online tutorial, but

they were fringier than I wanted and a little too long, which made me briefly self-conscious under the driver’s gaze. But

it wasn’t just that. My academically challenged skin hadn’t seen much sun lately. Arm and leg muscles, once toned from swimming

and dock-jumping into the lake, had weakened. I felt like a hermit emerging from a cave after months of solitude.

I was not summer-ready.

The driver’s roving gaze finally stopped on my crimson Harvard T-shirt before he pulled away from the airport curb, merging

with other cars. “Harvard, huh? You an Ivy League girl?”

I nodded.

“Cool. That’s out in Massachusetts, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, Cambridge.”

“Is this your first time here, or . . . ?”

“No, I just go to college out east,” I told him. “Haven Beach is my hometown.”

The car curved around an exit ramp as we left the airport.

“Cool, okay. That’s one sweet strip of sand. At least, in the summer.”

“Definitely better than anything I saw out east.”

“Nice,” he confirmed. “You do a lot of boating in Haven?”

My family hadn’t owned a boat since my father ditched us. “Paddleboarding.”

He glanced at me in the mirror again as if he were trying to picture me on a board. “For real? That’s dope.”

It was the one thing I was looking forward to doing while I was home.

The driver’s phone buzzed, and he excused himself to take a personal phone call. I popped in earbuds, lazily slouching in

the back seat, and watched through my window as the glass-and-steel buildings of Grand Rapids changed to highway and flat

green land. The one-hour drive to the coast seemed to take longer than my flight from Boston, especially with late-afternoon

sun making me feel sleepy. I tried not to think about Jazmine avoiding me, or the daunting task that I needed to brave this

summer: facing my estranged father for the first time in several years.

Talk about annoyances. My father was Public Annoyance Number One.

If it weren’t for him, I’d be with the rest of my small academic department, who were all getting ready to fly to Italy for

a special summer “excursion seminar,” touring museums and studying art masterworks. Being the all-around overachiever that

I am—Jazmine’s words, not mine—I was pursuing a concentration in history of art and architecture. I’d always loved history,

and my nana was a painter, so I grew up surrounded by art. Getting into Harvard’s art history program was a dream come true

. . . until the person who both inspired the dream and raised me died unexpectedly last summer, just a few weeks before my

first semester in Cambridge was due to begin.

In fact, it was Nana Malone’s beach cottage where I was heading right now, where I’d lived since I was six, after my mother died. Nana raised me by herself—my father was already long gone by that time—and she left me the cottage in her will.

She didn’t leave me much else.

The Malones used to be prominent Haven residents, until my asshole father changed all of that. Just by existing, he’d taken away everything

I’d worked for over the past year and snatched away my trip overseas. And if I couldn’t get through to him this summer, I

couldn’t afford to return to Harvard in the fall.

Just thinking about it made my stomach hurt.

The scenery changed as we drove through rural towns, and as the sun began approaching its race to golden hour, I spotted a

sign that gave me butterflies.

welcome to haven beach

where the little river meets america’s third coast

Feeling excited and panicky all at once, I took out my earbuds and leaned my forehead against the glass of the window to greedily

soak in the sights. The road hugged the southern bank of the Little River as we drove through Haven’s downtown—where a kaleidoscope

of colorful shops and restaurants called to tourists and locals. After a few blocks of bustling sidewalks and shops hawking

T-shirts, the river flowed into Haven Harbor, and finally into Lake Michigan. We made the turn onto Shoreline Drive, and after

nine months away, I gazed at the slow-rolling waves that crashed on its beachy shore.

My ocean. That’s what I used to call it when I was a kid.

Everyone who visits here for the first time is amazed by the size of it.

How could all this blue water be a lake when you can’t see the opposite shore?

Milwaukee was two and half hours across the water from us by ferry.

Chicago was the same distance southwest. But you couldn’t see either one from Michigan.

Nothing but endless blue water.

“Captain Wyrd Jack’s pirate ship,” the driver said, squinting into the distance, where an old packet steamer was moored on

the harbor, outside a museum.

Wyrd Jack was one of the town’s big tourism draws, the only man to be officially arrested and charged with piracy on the Great

Lakes, back in 1929. He captained a ship that hauled mail to Chicago until he decided he could make a better living by hijacking

cargo on Lake Michigan, stealing lumber from the government and alcohol from gangsters . . . Any boat on the lake was fair

game for hijacking. When he finally got caught, he wrote a poem from jail that was said to contain all the information needed

to find his most valuable stolen treasure: the priceless lost antiquity known as the Golden Venus, a standing marble sculpture

covered in gold. It was found off the coast of Italy in the 1500s, claimed by Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, then it went

missing for hundreds of years . . . until Wyrd Jack stole it off another smuggling boat passing through the Great Lakes. He

conspired with his pregnant wife, Mabel, to hide the golden statue, leaving nothing but his prison poem to point at its location.

Thousands of treasure hunters had shown up here from around the world to find the Golden Venus. No one had gotten lucky yet.

At least, not when it came to the statue; it wasn’t the only thing Wyrd Jack had smuggled over the years.

“Did you hear someone in your town found a single bar of gold in a sewer drain a few weeks ago? Been speculation on the local news over whether it was a part of a bigger cache of gold buried by Wyrd Jack back in the day.”

Jazmine had texted me the news story last month.

“Believe it or not, I’m descended from him—Wyrd Jack,” I told the driver. “He was my great-great-grandfather.”

“No lie? That’s crazy. You know where the rest of the gold is? Or maybe where the mother lode is buried, that priceless Roman

statue that Wyrd Jack smuggled—some ancient goddess of love?”

“Afraid I don’t.” Not for lack of trying. The gold bar that had recently been found was a fluke. Golden Venus was the real

treasure. Everyone in my family had looked for it. When I was a kid, I spent most of my summers combing the beaches, chasing

down clues to its existence with a group of four friends. We called ourselves the Wags—short for Scallywags—and growing up,

we sometimes pretended to be pirates ourselves and hid our own “treasures.”

I was Wag number one. Jazmine, the person who should be giving me a ride home, she was a Wag, too. Another old friend, Benny, was Wag three. But it was the fourth Wag who truly

matched my own zeal for treasure hunting back in the day, my oldest friend in town, a towheaded kid named Seb Jansen.

When we were young, Seb and I were inseparable, daring to go places that the others wouldn’t, in search of the gold.

He had a big personality and tons of energy to explore and see new things.

My nana encouraged our adventures and even gave me and Seb a matching pair of Blackbeard decoder rings from a 1940s radio show about pirates.

I still wore it on a chain around my neck, along with a ring that belonged to my deceased mother.

And as I gazed out the window in the back of the rideshare, I couldn’t help but run my fingers over the decoder ring’s warm metal and wonder what Seb was doing with his life.

No telling. Seb left both me and the Wags behind years ago.

The driver turned onto the main drag that ran perpendicular to the public beach. I caught a glimpse of a Slushie-red lighthouse