Chapter 11
Seb and I barely made it out of the captain’s quarters before the tour group entered. We didn’t inspect what we’d found until
we rushed back to the Bronco.
“Hurry!” I said excitedly. “Open it!”
Seb cracked open the gold locket, and we huddled together to see what was inside.
A pair of black-and-white photos, man and woman, dressed in turn-of-the-century clothing and wearing serious faces.
“Wyrd Jack and Mabel,” I said as my heart raced. Mabel Malone was my ancestor’s devoted wife, a plain-faced woman who’d garnered
attention all over the Midwest as a famed spiritualist. She claimed to communicate with the dead, and local legends said she
used this esoteric information to lead Wyrd Jack to big cargo hauls. There were even several instances of recorded testimony
from the townsfolk claiming she was distraught the day before her husband was nabbed by police out on the lake because “the
spirits” had told her he was sailing into tragedy.
Pretty much everyone assumed she hid the Golden Venus herself, and that she worked with her husband while he was jailed to
hide all the clues leading to it.
Many believed that Mabel was the brains behind Wyrd Jack’s brawn.
“Are these their wedding photos?” Seb asked.
“No. She’s not wearing a veil.” The museum had an entire room dedicated to Mabel, but it was mostly interactive displays and
framed photographs, so we’d skipped it.
“There’s no Morse code,” Seb noted, turning the locket around in his fingers to inspect it closely. “Nothing engraved. Nothing
on the chain . . .”
“Back of photos?”
With the tip of my fingernail, I carefully pried them out while tourists strolled past the Bronco. Neither photo had writing
on the back.
No engraving beneath where they sat, either.
“Got the feeling this isn’t going to be easy,” Seb said, a little disappointment in his voice that I was also feeling as the
initial thrill of finding the locket faded. It was one thing to find a clue. A whole other thing to solve it.
The boardwalk was becoming crowded with people, and it wasn’t doing us any good to sit here in exasperation, trying to find
something on the locket that just wasn’t there. So we headed back to Heron Cottage, occasionally sharing ideas.
Like:
“Maybe there’s code somewhere on it, but we need a magnifying glass.”
And:
“Maybe we need to find an important location that matches up with the locket.”
And:
“Maybe we need to reread the Wyrd Jack biography and see if the locket’s mentioned.”
All ideas were valid, but they’d take time to run through, and Seb had only a few hours to work on my car. He had plans later in the afternoon that he couldn’t get out of.
“I committed to this a few days ago, before I knew we’d be trying to figure out treasure clues,” he told me.
“Hot date, huh?” I said.
He arched a brow and gave me a sly smile that caused panicky feelings. Was he actually dating someone in town? Why do you care? Stop being nosy. I looked away, frustrated that something so small would make me upset.
“Nah.”
“What?” I asked.
“Not dating anyone. Just family shit.”
“Oh?” My heart soared. I wished it hadn’t, but it did. Some part of me was happy he was single. “Hot date with your dad, then?”
“Something like that.”
He didn’t offer details, and I didn’t ask. Punkin greeted him enthusiastically, and afterward, Seb was eager to get started
on my car. So I left him in the garage after we agreed to keep the locket stashed away with the other clues, marriage license
and key, in a shoebox that we stashed behind the dryer. “Just in case,” he said. “You have had a break-in, after all.”
The afternoon flew by. He worked under my car with the garage door open, blasting the Stooges and MC5. When he took a break,
I made sandwiches, and we ate on the back porch, staring out at the shore and talking about various people around town. And,
of course, the locket.
We texted Benny and Jazmine photos of it, and ended up talking to them both on FaceTime to show them what we’d found and tell them the entire story.
No one mentioned Jazmine blowing up at all of us in the cave, and she appeared to be in good spirits—which was a relief.
We agreed to ponder the locket’s significance and meet up later in the week to compare theories.
Late in the afternoon, I heard the Corvair rumble to life and raced out to find Seb smeared with grease but grinning ear to
ear, leaning over the engine.
“Smoke-free,” he proudly proclaimed.
“You fixed it?” I looked the car over. “Oh my God, Seb. You’re brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I owe you big-time.”
He slammed the hood down. “I’ll start dreaming up ways you can pay me back.”
It didn’t take him long to gather all his tools and wash his hands. Then he gave the Corvair a quick test drive and gave it
a thumbs-up. He whistled for his dog, and when they were both inside the Bronco, he reconfirmed plans we’d discussed on the
porch during lunch.
“I’ll come over tomorrow night after work to brainstorm. If anyone figures anything out before then, they’ll let the group
know.”
“Sounds good. Hey, Seb? Seriously, thank you. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.”
His cheeks colored ever so slightly, and he looked pleased but brushed away my thanks. “It’s nothing. I mean, what are friends
for?”
I smiled at him. “I’m glad we are. Friends. Again.”
“Same.” The rest of his reply was so quiet, I almost didn’t catch it over the roar of the Bronco’s engine. “Haven’t been this
glad about anything in a long time.”
He drove away, leaving me with a jumble of emotions. But even if I couldn’t completely decide how I felt about Seb, I felt good about what we’d accomplished. We’d found the locket today, and I was no longer a prisoner in my own home. That was worth everything to me.
So I did a few things around the house before joyfully settling into the Corvair and taking it into town. It drove better
now, or maybe that was my imagination, and I wasn’t dogged by a trail of white smoke. What more could I want?
I drove through town, crossed the Little River bridge into Northside, and cruised along Shoreline Drive while the sun was
setting, coloring the lake’s horizon a pleasant ombré of magenta and orange. After a few miles, I turned around and headed
back across the river, turning away from the Harbor District, with the silhouette of the Devil’s Revenge looming against the
sky, and instead headed down Main Street into our downtown area.
Restaurant patios were filling up and music thumped from cruising cars. Downtown was nice in the summer, a less sanitized
area of town than the harbor. When I was a teen, I spent a lot of time walking the wide sidewalks that ran up and down the
three short blocks containing most of the downtown businesses. Shops. Bars. Cafés. And a two-story brick building on the corner
that was beloved by everyone in town.
Bean’s.
Short for Bean’s Trading Post.
Back when Michigan was just swampland, this was one of the first buildings in what would later become Haven Beach, where French Canadian fur traders and members of various Chippawa tribes stopped to do business.
They used canoes on the Little River to reach it, much like the Wags had used it to reach our cave.
At some point before I was born, the old store was bought by a man named Bean Dooley, who turned it into the greatest corner shop in western Michigan.
Everyone who lived in Haven Beach had walked its aisles.
As the sun was setting, I snagged a nearby parking space. A faded sign—trading post—had been painted on the side of the brick during Wyrd Jack’s time and remained to this day. I walked past it and headed inside,
into a long, cavernous shop that smelled of caramel corn and hot meat. Depending on how hungry you were, those scents could
be magical or disgusting. Right now, I was leaning toward magic.
Massive wooden beams stretched over wide oak floorboards lined with aisles of goods. Being a general store, Bean’s carried
just about anything you could want and a few things you didn’t. Needed milk and bread? They had it. Magazines from around
the world? Yep. Discount ammo and stinky fish bait? That was at the back counter, near the clothing section—which was basically
a lot of camo and weird novelty tees.
Dozens of patrons wandered the aisles while Prince played over loudspeakers. Navigating around all the chatting townspeople
who were clogging up the aisles wasn’t easy. I spotted faces I vaguely knew—faces that once knew Nana—and had a moment of
panic when one of them waved at me. I didn’t want to make polite conversation with everyone in town. Yes, I’ve been away at college. Yes, I’ve been managing all right since Nana died. No, I don’t need anything, but if you keep
poking my wounds, I’m going to have a breakdown in the middle of the potato chip aisle, and no one wants to see that.
Head down, I avoided the stares and made a beeline for the hot-meat scent, which was wafting from a countertop glass food
display case filled with three shelves of freshly baked goodness and a sign that read: hot dutch sausage rolls. Basically, puff pastry pies stuffed with sausage and half-melted cheese that would burn the roof of your mouth if you weren’t patient, the hallmark of any good food.
I stood in line, continuing to avoid people’s eyes, and purchased a kielbasa-and-cheddar sausage roll. It was wrapped in wax
paper and smelled like heaven—if heaven smelled of home and memories, anyway—but was way too hot to eat. I browsed a nearby
selection of imported candy and nearly dropped my sausage roll when a female voice squealed in my ear.
I swung around to find myself face-to-face with Benny’s girlfriend, Lulu.
“Hey, you!” she said cheerfully, pushing a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses up her nose and then running a finger along the
front edges of her blond pixie cut to smooth it in place. She clutched a Saint Laurent handbag worth thousands that was popular