Chapter 13 #2
He glanced up at Jazmine, who was pacing through the kitchen on her phone, and from what I could hear, trying to convince
Patty that she hadn’t lost a pair of shoes.
“Back at boot camp,” Seb said, “when things were bad, it would sometimes feel like I was inside a nightmare—like, everything
was surreal, and I couldn’t figure out if it was really happening, or if I was just dreaming, or maybe even dead.” He tapped
his leg above the scar. “This told me I was alive. I would look at it and make myself remember everything that happened the
day I got it. Stealing the boat, our fight, getting stitches . . . Proof of life.”
Tender feelings softened my heart. I stared at the scar, and my hand lifted as if it had a will all its own. I hesitated,
steadying a tremble, then reached until my fingertips touched the raised patch of skin above his knee. The air seemed to still
around us, and I heard Seb’s breathing catch . . . and then hold while I traced the pale triangle. Goose bumps spread across
his thigh, and like magic, or maybe an infectious disease, they spread to my arms.
Seb shuddered softly.
“Sorry,” I said, and tried to retreat into neutral territory.
But Seb quickly trapped my hand against his knee, and whispered, “I’m not.”
My heart raced.
Everything was warm. His knee, his hand on mine. The air I raggedly breathed, making me feel dizzy and dumb. I felt trapped
in amber, unable to summon enough bravery to look him in the eyes, so I just stared at our hands and tried to slow my rapid
breathing while he watched me. His insistent grip on my hand relaxed, just barely, and his thumb stroked a slow pattern across
the bones in my wrist. Pleasurable chills raced up my arm, followed by more luscious warmth. It rolled through me like the
waves down the beach, and it felt like a drug.
Noise from the kitchen ripped me out of the moment. Seb and I jerked apart, and my heart pounded like I’d nearly been caught
breaking into a bank.
“Ugh! Patty is going to drive me to murder,” Jazmine complained loudly. “Should I let the dog back inside? She’s whining at
the back door.”
“Ye-a-a-ah,” he answered Jazmine, sounding dazed. “I mean, yes. Let her inside. If It’s okay with Paige . . . ?”
“Yep, fine,” I said, scooting an inch away from him, and then another, to put me out of the temptation zone. The way my heart
raced, you’d think I’d been caught robbing a bank. I needed to cool down, and fast.
Jazmine cracked open the last plastic tote as I made an effort not to glance at Seb. When she moved the lid to the side, her
face lit up. “Guys?”
“Did you find it?” Seb asked, craning his neck to peer around a stack of boxes.
Jazmine held up the old black photo album. “Boom! Let’s take a little look inside, shall we?”
The three of us huddled around the coffee table, hovering over the faded black pages inside the album. I carefully flipped
past black-and-white pictures that had been mounted with tiny cardboard corners. Photos of my great-great-great-uncle in Ireland.
Of some of the Malones who immigrated to Michigan, standing in front of a shack on the family’s former cherry farm. Standing
in front of a Ford Model T that was built down the road in Detroit.
“There!” Seb said, tapping the page.
Three photos of Wyrd Jack, long before he got arrested. One showed him standing on his boat in the fog, looking ominous. Another
was taken on the steps of some house. And the third photo was at a bar, him holding up a large mug of beer.
“No Mabel in any of these,” I noted.
Jazmine turned the page. More relatives, but no Wyrd Jack. She flipped back and tilted her head, holding the page horizontally.
“Huh. What’s this?” Before I could ask what she’d seen, she slipped one long nail behind the photo of Wyrd Jack with his beer
and picked carefully . . .
Until another photo came sliding out.
Two photos had been mounted together, one hidden behind the other.
We all leaned closer. The cottage fell silent.
The secret photo was upside down when she pulled it free. Familiar dots and dashes were scrawled across the backing. We stared
at it for a moment before Jazmine flipped the old photograph over.
Wyrd Jack and Mabel, standing in front of a building.
“Oh shit,” Jazmine whispered. “The faces in the locket . . . they came from this photo.”
“Go get it!” he told me, jumping up.
And while I raced to our treasure-clue hiding spot, grabbing the shoebox that contained the gold locket, Seb snatched the
framed copy of “Prison Poem” off the wall and quickly began deciphering the Morse code on the back of the secret photo Jazmine
had found.
“It’s numbers, just like before, sets of three to correspond with letters in the poem,” he said, biting his bottom lip as
he scrawled down his translations on the side of a catalog mailer. While he concentrated, I dug out the gold locket and opened
it to the two photos inside before setting it on the coffee table.
Same as the secret photo Jazmine had found.
“Exact match,” she said. “Must have had a duplicate copy printed. Someone cut out the faces and put them inside the locket.”
We stared at the locket, then Jazmine flipped over the secret photo, briefly arguing with Seb when she interrupted his deciphering.
“I’ll give it right back, just let me see it for a second . . . Look. The happy couple is standing in front of a building.
See that fancy stonework above the doorframe? I know that . . . don’t I?”
Of course!
“It’s Mabel’s parlor downtown!” I said, nearly dumping the entire photo book on the floor out of excitement.
The reason Wyrd Jack was called “Wyrd” originated with Mabel and her interest in spiritualism and fortune-telling. For several
years in the early 1920s, she held séances in the big Pink House, north of the river, until Wyrd Jack leased some space downtown
for Mabel inside a three-story apartment building, where she read tarot and performed spirit-medium services for the locals.
“Mabel’s old spirit parlor,” Jaz whispered. “Holy shit. Is that right?”
Bean’s Trading Post was quite literally a block away. I’d been so close today and hadn’t had a clue. Surely that was a sign
from the universe that we were on the right track.
“Okay, I think I’ve got it,” Seb said, furiously scribbling the final letter. “‘Hidden in deep corners.’ That’s what it says
on the back of the photo.”
“Shit,” Jazmine said, scratching her cheek. “Deep corners? Guys, what if another clue is hidden inside the spirit parlor?”
“Easier to hide something on your own property than on a confiscated ship,” I said, considering it. “But wouldn’t anything
hidden have been found already?”
After Wyrd Jack was arrested, Mabel’s spirit parlor was abandoned—the townsfolk turned against her and her unborn child, my
great-grandmother—and eventually the space was leased to another tenet. Over the years, it had been many things, but for the
past decade, it had been occupied by another business.
“Pretty sure High Spirits Brewing owns the entire building,” Seb said.
A local craft beer company. They ran a bustling taproom and restaurant on the first floor, and in the basement, brewed a popular
sour-cherry IPA and several cannabis-infused drinks.
“It’s one of the busiest places in town,” Jazmine said. “We could go check it out, but there’s no way we’re getting in if
they’re carding at the door.”
I asked, “Does anyone know anybody who works there? Dishwashers, hostesses . . . ? Maybe someone can let us take a tour?”
Jazmine and Seb both shook their heads.
“We don’t even know if we’re on the right track,” Jazmine said. “What if the spirit parlor behind them in the photo is a coincidence? Just a backdrop.”
“Everything has been personal so far,” I argued, pulling out other items from our box of clues. “The marriage license, the
key leading to Wyrd Jack’s ship, the locket. All of these things are centered around the two of them, so it makes sense that
Mabel would hide something in her own place of business.”
“Fair point,” Seb said.
“Hidden in deep corners,” Jaz contemplated. “Why ‘deep’? Why not ‘dark’?”
Great question. “Maybe in the basement? That would be deep . . .”
Seb tapped the secret photo. “I’m on board. We need to explore inside that building. Poke around in all the corners, try to
figure out what she meant by ‘deep.’”
“Right,” Jazmine said, thinking. “When does High Spirits’ taproom close? Midnight? Can’t really do that without looking sus
in front of tables of tourists chugging flights of pale ales.”
“Then we figure out a way to explore the brewery after-hours,” I said.
“I hear you, Paige, I really do,” Seb said, scrunching up one side of his face. “But what you’re suggesting is technically
known in the real world as breaking and entering. That’s pretty daring, even for the Wags.”
Point taken. “I didn’t say it would be easy. Maybe Benny can turn off the alarm system. You know . . . hack it?”
“Christ,” Seb mumbled, scrubbing the back of his head. “That’s a lot of pressure on a guy who just wants to dream up ways
to shake down parents for babysitting money.”
“He hacked the security system at school,” I pointed out.
We all looked at one another, hesitant to make a group decision.
“Come on, guys. We don’t even know for sure if these photos are pointing us to Mabel’s old spirit parlor,” Jazmine pointed
out. “Are we really willing to go to jail for a hunch?”
“To be fair,” Seb said, “I’ve gone to jail for a lot less. They really don’t like me at the sheriff’s station.”
Jazmine was right. This was only a hunch. But the fact remained that someone put that locket inside Wyrd Jack’s ship—the same
person who’d put the skeleton key in the flooded cavern. If it really was Mabel who’d done that, was it so inconceivable to
imagine she might hide another clue inside her own place of business?
We were on the brink of something—I could feel the shifting current in the air. The anticipation for something big. “Might
as well call Benny,” I said. “He can tell us if we’ve all gone off the deep end.”
“Yeah, and if hacking into a commercial security system is above his pay grade,” Seb said.
When he put it that way, it really did sound ridiculous. “Okay, fine. Maybe Benny’s got better ideas about exploring that
building.”
Jazmine put a hand on Seb’s shoulder. “Make that call, Jansen. I think we can all handle a little Lulu if it means we’re finally
on our way to finding that golden statue.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he murmured.
The way the two of them smiled at each other, like everything wrong in the past had been forgiven, and all that remained was
friendship and an unwavering trust . . . Nothing made me happier.
Pulling out his phone, Seb toggled on speakerphone and dialed. While we all waited for Benny to answer, blue eyes flipped up to meet mine, practically crackling with electricity.
They seemed to say, We’re not finished.
Or perhaps that was just my imagination. But my stomach fluttered wildly, regardless. It fluttered, flipped, and dropped like
it anticipated big thrills . . . and big danger. As if my entire being was warning me, Look up, you fool! Look up at the sky!
A malfunctioning jet could fall down at any moment.
Maybe even the sky itself.