Chapter 21
Denial is a funny thing when you’re desperate. Needing to believe that the Wags hadn’t just come to the end of our treasure
hunt, I told myself that we weren’t wrong about the time capsule or its leering penny. No other treasure hunters had emptied
it before us. Mabel was the last one inside it, and she wanted us to find the penny. We just hadn’t cracked what it meant.
Given time, we would.
I had to believe that. I wasn’t sure how or when it’d happened, but I’d come to hope that the hunt was a legitimate path to
keeping my place at Harvard and avoiding my father. And I wasn’t ready to give up on that.
So after the Wags disbanded with heavy hearts, and I was back inside Heron Cottage with nothing but my thoughts, I did my
best to keep hope alive. But as the afternoon wore on, it became more and more difficult to hold my chin up. Paranoid that
we’d be identified, I scanned socials, hunting for any mention of the festival and the time capsule, and even when I didn’t
see anything, I still worried that the shoe was going to drop eventually.
And even if it didn’t, I knew I’d have to face that the treasure hunt had just been a diversion. Fun, sure, but it was not
a practical way to earn the money I needed to keep my head above water.
The only way I was keeping my place at Harvard this fall was through the man whose biological matter just happened to bring me into this world. You’ve got to face him. Just bite the bullet and do it. No more excuses.
The only thing keeping me from spiraling into a deeper depression was the knowledge that Seb was still moving in the following
day. I clung to the thought as if it were a life raft.
After dark, I sat by the lake until midnight, watching the reflected moonlight and talking to Nana in my head. Was I foolish, believing in the Golden Venus? Why couldn’t you have just told me the truth about it, instead of stringing
me along with all this hope? Please, if the treasure exists and is possible to find, give me a sign . . .
I waited, watching the lake. The night sky. The dark beach. Repeating my question like a mantra that would provide illumination.
But the dead don’t answer, no matter how many times you ask.
The next day, I was still a little depressed when I woke, but my mood brightened when Seb texted to confirm move-in day. Vigor
temporarily revitalized, I spent the rest of the morning getting both the cottage and myself ready, eager to see him and discuss
what to do about the treasure hunt.
But after lunch, when I heard the Bronco rumbling up the cottage’s driveway, panic reared its head, and all of Jazmine’s concerns
about Seb and I moving in together went haywire in my mind.
My heart raced when a knock sounded on the front door. I jogged to open it, and Seb stood in the doorway with dark shades
on and a vertical army duffel bag slung over one shoulder. “Afternoon, miss. Heard you’ve got a room for rent.”
“Sorry, already gave it to another tenant who promised . . . what was it? Thirty orgasms?”
He grinned and made a fist at the sky. “Dammit! I knew I should have offered thirty instead of twenty.”
Punkin panted up at me, and when I tugged a thumb, signaling for her to come inside, she brushed by me without hesitation,
heading to the water bowl in the kitchen.
“I’ll help you bring your stuff in,” I told Seb.
“No need, this is it,” he said, plonking his giant duffel bag on the floor. “Other than an inflatable paddleboard and my old
surfboard, which are in the back of the Speed Buggy. When you’re a road scholar, you travel light.”
Wow, okay. I carried more with me to Harvard. But I reckoned half his stuff was over here already, all the clothes and various
things I found when I first cleaned up. My eyes fell on something sticking out of one of the outer pockets of his duffel.
“What the hell is that?”
His eyes dropped to the bag. “Oh, this? It’s a prop gun.” He pulled out what looked to me like a sawed-off shotgun. “I call
it Calico Jack because it’s nice and flashy.”
I frowned. “Come on, Seb. That’s no prop.”
“Have a little faith.”
“You’re the one with all the faith. No guns in this house. Period. The police might be after us for the time capsule—last
thing we need is them finding an illegal weapon in here.”
“Benny’s been monitoring the news. Only one post online about the time capsule, and it’s making fun of the festival security.
I’m thinking we got lucky.”
Thank God. This instantly reduced my stress levels.
“And secondly,” Seb continued, “this isn’t a gun.
It’s a replica. Doesn’t fire real ammo. Doesn’t fire at all.
” He showed me what he meant. “It came from the Wyrd Jack museum—back when they redid the gangster room about the Valentine’s Day Massacre and Bugs Moran.
They tossed this in the dumpster along with a couple of prop machine guns. ”
“Seriously?” I took a closer look. “Huh. Not historical, is it?”
“Nope. Pretty much valueless. Weighs nothing, which gives it away, but it looks real, and that’s the important part. Sometimes all you need is a little flash to convince people that they’d be wise not
to break into your house. That’s what this baby is for, flashy ol’ Calico Jack.”
I had my doubts that Calico Jack would convince a would-be burglar, but as long as it wasn’t real, it could stay, I supposed.
I wasn’t all that happy about it, though.
“How’s it going here?” he asked, tossing the prop gun aside. “Have you been wallowing like we have at Benny’s?”
It honestly made me feel better to know that he’d been depressed, too. “I’m trying to claw back some hope. If there’s any
to be had.”
“The time capsule was just a little road bump,” he said, sounding as if he were trying to convince himself, too. “We’re going
to find the Golden Venus this time. We aren’t kids. We’ll figure this out, okay?”
Foolish to even dream that was possible, I knew. But how could I not? I was just relieved that we both still cared about it
after all these years.
Seb glanced at the open door of the empty second bedroom.
Not totally empty: Nana’s bed and mattress were still there, as well as a chest of drawers and a lamp.
I’d walked through it several times today already, dusting, making sure I wasn’t going to freak out when Seb showed up.
It was hard, letting go of memories I had in that room .
. . and feeling guilty that I was somehow dishonoring Nana by not making a shrine out of it.
But I knew that wasn’t true. She was one of the most generous people in town and, more than likely, would be more upset with me if I just wasted the space and didn’t use it.
“Hey,” he said. “I was thinking, maybe it would be better if we rearrange the room. You know, move the bed to a different
spot. That way it will be . . . I don’t know. Fresh.”
I nodded enthusiastically. “It’s a good idea. Let’s do that.”
We headed into the sunny room and tackled the chest of drawers first. It wasn’t all that heavy, but it was old—from the 1950s—and
we tried to be gentle with it. Last year, when the Neelys came over to help me pack everything up, we emptied the drawers
and separated out clothes to give to Goodwill.
“It’s still a nice piece of furniture,” I told Seb. “Plenty of room for your stuff.”
“I haven’t put clothes in drawers since I was a kid,” he said. “This is four-star luxury.”
We argued about where the double bed should go. Only two choices, so Seb finally relented to my suggestion and we began pulling
the heavy wooden headboard away from the wall—something that had never been moved. Not in my lifetime, anyway.
“Holy shit, this is heavier than it looks,” Seb marveled. “What’s this carved out of?”
“It’s called wood. You might’ve heard of it. Humans made furniture out of it before the age of plastic. Ugh—Jesus! Maybe we
should just leave it.”
But we’d already pulled it out from the wall, so we figured we might as well finish.
Both of us wiggled into the space between the wall and the headboard as Punkin looked on from the doorway with a These folks are nuts expression.
But once we’d wedged ourselves back there and readied ourselves to push, my eyes lit on a yellowed piece of paper
affixed to the back of the headboard.
“What in the world . . . ? Are those nails holding it in?”
“Think they’re old tacks. Maybe it’s the warranty, or something?”
“On a bed?”
We looked at each other for all of two seconds, then Seb grunted and used his shoulder to shove the bed farther out from the
wall so he had space to remove the tacks. He couldn’t get them out without ripping the paper, so I got a butter knife from
the kitchen and we carefully pried them out.
The paper was folded like a letter, and when I opened it, the bottom third of the paper broke off along the fold line. “Oh
shit.”
Seb grabbed it out of the air and took the pieces around to the mattress and laid them out, unfolding the top piece carefully.
“Whoa, it’s a genuine handwritten letter,” Seb said with wonder in his voice.
A very old one, written in a beautiful cursive hand and addressed to “Elsie.” The name signed at the bottom was none other
than Mabel herself.
“Who’s Elsie?” Seb asked.
“That’s . . .”
“Oh shit, is that Nana Malone’s mother? That photo of her looking like Rosie the Riveter over the fireplace.”
Indeed, my great-grandmother. Elsie was Mabel’s daughter, the one with whom she was pregnant when Wyrd Jack went to prison.
I spotted Nana’s name in the text, too—Kitty—and that made my pulse race.
We perched on the bed and read it together:
June 7, 1949
My sweetest Elsie,
If you are reading this, our attorney has given it to you. That means I’ve passed through the veil and am no longer with you.
Please do not mourn me for too long, my dear. Do me that favor?
I’m leaving everything to you in my will, but this letter concerns things that I cannot declare in any legal paperwork: the