Chapter 10
Hopefully whatever called Seb away wasn’t serious enough to get him another black eye. My worries about him bled into worries
for Jazmine, so I texted her a couple of times before she finally answered, later that night: I’m fine, just tired. Sorry I blew up. My arm’s bothering me. Going to take a pain pill and go to bed. Talk soon? Xoxo
Pain did make a person grumpy and irrational, I supposed, and maybe she truly did need some rest and space for the time being.
But now that Seb had confirmed my suspicions about Jaz’s feelings for Benny, I was hurt she hadn’t confided in me and made
mental plans to try to get her to open up.
The next day, I babied my hurt ankle and laid out on the beach behind the cottage with a book—one about women in modern art,
written by a Harvard professor who’d be teaching a class in the fall that I’d already registered for. It was a dry, academic
text, but that only made concentrating on it a challenge that I enjoyed. Mainly because it distracted me from the fact that
to actually attend this professor’s class, I’d have to eventually face my father.
I poked around online and found him. At least, I found his place of business.
Mr. Rufus Lee was “Grand Rapids’ leading commercial real estate broker.
” He sold office buildings. Entire floors of skyscrapers.
Stadiums. And Seb had been right: he’d won a bunch of sales awards.
If I had a working car, I could drive the hour to Grand Rapids and walk into his real estate offices.
Though, even thinking about doing that made my stomach cramp.
However, this was not an optional task if I wanted to get my degree from Harvard, and I knew it. So I took the coward’s way
out and filled out the contact form on his business’s website, R. Lee and Associates:
Dear Mr. Lee,
I have some legal paperwork that needs your signature and was hoping to find a time when we could meet in person. I’m at the
lake for the summer and can meet you in Grand Rapids. Let me know where and when is good for you.
Regards,
Paige Malone, your former daughter
I added my phone number and a postscript instructing him to feel free to text me for more information, then I sent it and
felt the biggest sense of relief, and right behind that, a prickling anxiety. Because now I had to wait for a reply. I refreshed
my email a gazillion times the first hour, then I gave up and tried not to think about it.
He’d respond eventually, I assumed. I knew businesses sometimes took a while to respond to inquiries, so I figured I’d just
wait. And for the time being, I had plenty of other things to occupy my time and thoughts.
By the time Wednesday morning rolled around, there was still no reply; however, I’d woken with an idea about our treasure hunt that I couldn’t get out of my head. So when Seb drove up in the Speed Buggy, I met him out front.
“Mornin’,” he said, blue eyes glittering in the sun. When he opened his door, Punkin jumped over him from the passenger seat
and leaped outside. “Dammit, Punkin! Mud on my shorts?”
Punkin wasn’t paying him any attention. She barked at me once and wagged her tail. Her teeth were snaggled, and her tongue
hung out goofily.
“Why is she just staring at me?”
“She’s wishing that you’ll succumb to her seductions and pet her,” Seb said, hauling an enormous bag of dog food out of the
back of his Bronco. There were a lot of tools back there now, too.
“You know what they say, Punkin. Wish in one hand . . .”
“Ignore the mean lady,” he told the dog, slinging the dog food bag over one shoulder. “She doesn’t want what I brought her
this morning on the dash.”
While Seb carried the dog food inside, whistling for Punkin to follow, I looked inside the front of the car and spotted a
pair of plastic coffee cups topped with pink straws, sitting in a paper holder from Grind-and-Shine. The orders were written
on the side of the cups: iced white chocolate mochas. One had added coconut milk.
He remembered?
I smiled to myself for a moment, feeling happier about that than I probably should have, then schooled my face to remain neutral
and carried the cups inside. Seb was in the kitchen, already filling up a bowl on the floor with kibble. I’d never seen a
tail wag so hard. Punkin stuck her entire big head inside Nana’s old bread-dough bowl and woofed it down.
“Slow down, girl. You’re embarrassing us, acting like I never feed you,” Seb said, looking up as I approached. “Ah, you found our morning fuel.”
I handed him one of the heavy plastic cups. “Can’t believe you remembered.”
“Mind like a bear trap.”
I chuckled and picked up my coffee, running a finger across the side to clear away beads of moisture that had sweated onto
the cup. The cottage grew quiet, and a strained awkwardness hung in the air. Did he not want to be here? Maybe he’d sobered
up after our cavern adventure. Maybe he regretted it.
It was getting weird. Say something.
“Hey,” I started. “So, um . . . I was thinking about the cipher—”
“‘Under their noses’?” He acted as relieved as I felt to have something safe to talk about.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding and stirring the ice inside my drink with the straw. “And I was thinking about how you first thought
about it being connected to the statue of Wyrd Jack.”
“But we already decided it can’t be the statue.”
I held up a finger. “I’m wondering if the museum itself might inspire a solution. I can’t stop thinking about how that phrase
means to do something bad right out in the open and no one suspects, right? The museum is inside the old jail where he was
held.”
“Treasure hunters have scoured the museum for decades, though.”
“But they didn’t have this,” I said, pulling the skeleton key out of my jeans pocket. “Is there something still there, something
they missed? Like . . .” I shook my head and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Seb filled another bowl with water. “Hmm.”
“Maybe I’m just spinning my wheels.”
“Maybe. But I’m getting that tingly feeling—you know the one.”
“You should really have that checked by a doctor.”
He leaned against the counter while Punkin plowed into her food. “Let me get the Corvair jacked up. Then we’ll take a trip
to the harbor, see what we can see. After, we’ll come back here and I’ll start tearing down your engine.”
A little thrill went through me. This was good. No more awkwardness. We were just two old friends, reconnecting.
Seb went out to the garage, while I let Punkin out back after Seb reminded me that she didn’t need babysitting and was perfectly
content to sleep on the back porch swing, which would explain the mud accumulating on the swing’s palm-tree printed cushion.
It didn’t take long for Seb to get the car jacked up on one side—enough that he could slide under and dismantle part of the
engine from below. Once he’d secured the wheels, he cleaned up and checked on the dog—and left her dozing on the back porch
swing—we piled into the Bronco and headed out.
The drive was less than ten minutes, and with his travelogue audiobook turned down low in the background, we talked about
things that had changed along the route. A new sub shop opened. An old laundromat closed. The city was rebuilding our former
middle school. After we crossed the river, heading into the nicer part of town, we turned away from Benny’s neighborhood and
drove into the heart of Haven Beach: the Harbor District.
We didn’t have a big harbor, but it stayed busy with tourists in the summer.
A wooden boardwalk curved around the water and was lined with quirky shops, street performers, and several hotels.
At the far tip of the harbor stood our cherry-red lighthouse—no longer working, just a tourist spot now.
Halfway between it and where we stood, a late-nineteenth-century wooden mail-delivery ship was moored along the boardwalk.
Devil’s Revenge.
Wyrd Jack’s “pirate” ship.
Tourists were already paying for tickets at a nearby booth to tour the ship. We found a lucky parking space right next to
the stone statue of Wyrd Jack—a fierce-looking man with a big beard and a corncob pipe dangling from this mouth, dressed in
a heavy coat and a fisherman’s hat.
“Still looks like you,” Seb joked when we hopped out of the Bronco.
“I’m trying to grow my beard back in. Hey, you don’t think we should call Jaz and Benny before we go in here, do you? I mean,
what if we actually find something?”
“Nah. Chances are low that we’d find the treasure inside there. Best we can hope for is another clue. Besides, you and me
are the primary Wags. Always have been. If we find anything, we’ll loop them back in.”
I supposed that was sensible. I shielded my eyes from the sun glinting off the water and looked around. It was really nice
here. Flowers bloomed in window boxes of an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, and pretty trees shaded a cobbled walk that had
been there a hundred years. Birds sang. Tourists smiled. And I sighed to myself in pleasure as nostalgic feelings surfaced
. . . until I saw the sign outside the museum.
“Holy shit, they doubled ticket prices,” I said. “Ten dollars a person? It used to be five!”
“No worries, I gotcha,” Seb said as we walked up to the museum’s ticket window. “Those of us who are gainfully employed, see, we have a paycheck—unlike you freeloading students. Two, please,” he said to the ticket seller.
“You’re fixing my car. I can’t let you pay,” I told him, digging out cash from my purse.
When I handed it to him, he pushed my hand down and looked around, feigning paranoia. “Not here. I don’t want to get picked
up for prostitution.” He winked at the attendant who handed him tickets. I waited until he entered the museum door then tucked
two fives in his back pocket, causing him to jump and make a yip noise, like I’d tickled him.
“Christ, you’re stubborn. That hasn’t changed,” he said good-naturedly.
I shoved his shoulder playfully, and he pushed me back, and for a moment, we were kids again, laughing and being silly. A