Chapter 20
We all stopped digging and swung around to see a small boy blinking at us. He couldn’t have been more than five or six and
wore a double-cherry temporary tattoo stuck to his cheek. Curious, he peered around the barrier with big eyes.
Just a kid, I told myself as my heart raced out of control and visions of prison filled my head. Calm down.
“Uh, hey, little buddy,” Seb said. “We’re doing dangerous work. Where are your parents?”
The kid shrugged a moment before a woman’s hand grabbed the back of his shirt. “I told you to hold your sister’s hand and
stay close, Carl! What’s wrong with you?”
Carl gave us a desperate look before disappearing in the crowd with his mother.
“Holy shit,” Benny said, clutching his chest. “For a hot moment, there, I was sure the FBI was coming to haul us away.”
“You and me both,” Seb said.
“Let’s refocus, okay?” Jazmine said. “Can’t be too much more to dig. How far down does this concrete go?”
Seb stuck his shovel into the channel we’d been digging and made a noise. “It goes to here, like another inch down. Let’s—”
Before he could finish, a stack of speakers on the stage crackled to life, and someone from the mayor’s office walked onstage to applause as the canned music was turned down.
From where we were, if we put our faces close to the black barrier, we could see through to the back of the stage, framed in bright lights, and the back of a woman with big hair and the same T-shirt we were all wearing.
“Good morning, Haven Beach!” she called into the microphone. “Welcome to the fifty-third annual Cherry Festival. We’ve got
a tremendous lineup of performers for you throughout the day. But right now, we wanted to kick off the festival with a local
favorite, former Atlantic recording artist and two-time Michigan Music Award winner for best doo-wop group . . . put your
hands together for the Haven Beach Smugglers!”
Seb pretended to cheer and scream in excitement while Jazmine mimed sticking something sharp in her ear.
“Hey, I like the Smugglers,” Lulu said, pouting.
I started to ask where she’d heard them before—I mean, they played county fairs and the Fourth of July fireworks display,
but other than that, they were retirees with bad hips who couldn’t do a lot of synchronized dancing anymore. But they could
get a crowd going with “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” which they tore into to start their morning set, cutting off any conversation
I considered having.
Bass and drums thumped beneath our feet as the crowd cheered on the Smugglers. It was hard to hear anything over the music,
so the Wags used hand signals to communicate. We’d dug far enough to give up the shovels and switch to the tool that would
pull the concrete shaft out of the ground.
Time for Big Red.
Seb and Benny seemed to know what they were doing.
They set up the tool on the edge of the hole we’d dug.
Benny stabilized it and wrapped a chain around the concrete shaft below the plaque.
Once the chain was secured, Seb began pumping Big Red’s handle while we all held our breath and stared at the concrete.
Each pump of the handle lifted the chain by a sliver, at best, and it took strength to use the tool.
It was slow work. Too slow.
As the Smugglers ended an original tune to sweeping applause, Benny switched with Seb to pump the handle. And it’s possible
that I was distracted when I peered through the black barrier screen for a hot minute because I could’ve sworn I spotted the
back of Pretty Paul’s buzz cut creeping around the backstage trailer. But while I was trying to tell if it was actually him
or just some army recruit enjoying the lake before being shipped overseas, I didn’t notice the security officer walk into
our little hiding spot. Why isn’t Lulu doing her job? She’s supposed to be lookout!
“Whoa, what’s happening here?” A ginger-haired man in his twenties frowned at the hole we’d dug around the time capsule. Dressed
in an unmarked black uniform and wearing a walkie-talkie, he was definitely a rent-a-cop that the festival hired for security.
Only problem was that I recognized his flaming orange hair and beady, suspicious eyes.
Off-duty cop!
Chaos erupted inside my head. I forgot everything we’d rehearsed. Visions of my life being ruined filled my head. Losing Harvard,
going to jail . . .
“Mornin’,” Seb said brightly, wiping sweat from his brow. “Just digging up the time capsule for Miss Betty.”
Miss Betty was how the town referred to our mayor.
The security guard cocked his head. “The mayor is digging up the town time capsule?”
“For the award ceremony this afternoon? They announced it yesterday. They’re going to open up the capsule onstage.”
Good God. Seb sounded utterly convincing. No one could lie like he could. The security guard wore a pinched face for a moment,
then he seemed to buy it.
Maybe . . .
“No one said anything about a time capsule in the morning meeting. Who told you to do this?”
“Mrs. Hawsley,” Benny said, referring to the mayor’s assistant who’d announced the Smugglers onstage. “We’ve got about half
an hour to get it out so that the capsule team can get it ready.”
Capsule team? Lord, the lies were flying fast and loose.
“I’m going to need to check with her,” the off-duty cop said. “No one gave me notice.”
Seb shrugged, chest heaving. His reply was cut off by the band onstage starting “Runaround Sue”—a crowd favorite—and once
the drums kicked in, no one could hear a thing. The security officer gestured toward the trailer, and Seb gave him a thumbs-up.
The officer slipped around the black barrier and disappeared.
All of us shouted, “Fuck!” to one another but we still couldn’t hear anything. All I knew was that if the security guard found
Mrs. Hawsley, we were toast. Was she in the backstage trailer? I didn’t know. But by the way Seb and Benny started pumping
the Hi-Lift jack, I was pretty sure they also were worried that we had mere minutes to get this thing out of the ground.
All at once, the concrete suddenly gave way and came loose. It must have been a couple feet deep and a foot or so in diameter.
On Seb’s signal, we all pitched in to pull it up—Why is concrete so heavy?—but when we hoisted, it slipped sideways and knocked against Big Red, punching a hole into the old concrete, which crumbled and fell apart to reveal a glimpse of silver inside.
The time capsule!
Seb had seen it, too. As the crowd sang in unison beyond the stage, he picked up his shovel and struck the concrete, again
and again, until the hole widened and a spherical tube about the size of a yarn skein fell out.
No markings. Old. Definitely the time capsule.
Joy raced through me. We got it!
But our triumph was short-lived. Lulu waved and flapped her arms, and when we looked up, she pointed toward the other side
of the black barriers, where the security officer was emerging from the backstage trailer with a serious-looking man and woman.
Shit!
We didn’t have time for anything, just up and left it all—Big Red, the shovels, and the wheelbarrow. I grabbed the time capsule,
and we took off like wild things, racing through the crowd and weaving around couples and kids with cherry-flavored slush
drinks. I could feel something dinging against the side of the time capsule with every step, and that freaked me out. I lost
the group for a minute when I ducked behind a frozen lemonade truck to see if the security guard was chasing us. Then someone
grabbed my shirt.
“Come on!” Seb shouted.
I kicked into gear and raced down the sidewalk with him until we spotted the others and followed Benny, who cut through a
narrow side passage between two buildings. We all ran through it, and when we came out the other side, we all stopped to catch
our breath.
“Are we safe?” Jazmine asked.
“Maybe for a second,” I said, peering down the side passage to make sure we weren’t followed.
“Fuck me,” Seb said, face red with exertion as he rested against the brick of a nearby building. “People saw us.”
“Of course they saw us,” Jazmine said. “We ran out of there like a nuclear bomb was headed this way. Did you not hear me shouting,
‘Don’t run, idiots’?”
I hadn’t, honestly. I just panicked.
“Hope they can’t trace Big Red back to where you got it,” Seb said.
Benny shook his head. “I ended up buying it at that little pawnshop near Paw Paw Lake. I doubt any detective in Haven Beach
has the time or interest to drive around to all the regional pawnshops to grill the owners.”
“So we just gotta hope no one recognized any of us back there,” I said, glancing in the direction of the festival.
“If we get taken down by that little kid with the cherry decal on his cheek, I swear to God . . .” Jazmine said.
“Seb’s right. Let’s not poison the well with negativity,” Benny said. “We might’ve barely scraped by back there, but come
on, Wags. We just had a win.”
Huh. I guess we did. Everyone stared at the time capsule, and I felt the same pull to get it open. Double-checking the side
passage one last time and finding it empty, I examined the lid of the time capsule. It wasn’t even sealed properly, not really.
It had a wire lightning-closure mechanism on the lid that was similar to Nana’s old canning jars, with a rubber ring around
the edge. Just pull up the rusty wire, and . . .
The seal popped. The lid swung open. We stared into the cylinder’s darkness.
“Empty?” Seb whispered in disbelief.
It couldn’t be! I’d felt something rattling around when I was running. I turned the time capsule upside down and something
small fell onto the sidewalk. Seb crouched and grabbed it before I could get a look.
“What is it?” Jazmine asked as we all stood in a circle to see what he’d picked up.
Seb held it out in the palm of his hand, a shocked look on his face. I soon realized why.
It was a single penny. Dated 1930, so probably had been put in there by the people who originally buried the capsule. But
that was it. There was nothing. No memorabilia. No newspaper to show current events. No photographs or artifacts.
Just the penny.
Distraught, we all investigated it, inspecting it from every angle in the sunlight, in case it contained another set of Morse
clues. We found nothing.
“A penny?” Benny finally said. “We just risked everything for . . . a penny?”
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to scream or sob. Had someone else dug it up before us and taken the clue out? Or had we got “deep
corners” completely wrong? If so, then why was there nothing left in the capsule?
The Wags fussed and fought about it, desperate to make sense of what we’d dug up. But the fact of the matter was that if there
was no clue in here, then we had no idea where to go next.
Had our hunt for the Golden Venus just hit a brick wall?