Chapter 30
Part of me wouldn’t have been surprised if our lives had ended there, two bloody splats by the side of the pool. When we hit
the surface of the water, I still wasn’t convinced we weren’t dead. The shock of entering the water blinded me, and for a
moment it felt like I was back down in Pinemoon’s flooded cavern. Only this time, I hit the bottom.
Nonsensically, as columns of bubbles clouded my vision, the only thing inside my head was the painted pair of double-vision
suns from my father’s Brazilian beach landscape, back upstairs in the room. Those painted suns reminded me of something I
couldn’t quite remember. But then, for the smallest sliver of time, Mabel’s wedding bands glittered inside my head—so real,
I could almost reach through the water and touch them.
The suns. The rings. And something that was on the tip of my tongue . . .
A holy vision caused by all the pool chemicals? Or just a meltdown from stress?
We pushed off the bottom of the pool and cut through the surface, my thoughts turned to more important things, like survival.
And air. And Seb, who bobbed next to me, blinking away pool water.
We swam to the side of the pool and pulled ourselves out.
I barely had time to suck in a breath before Seb was pushing me into the nearby bushes, getting us out of sight from the home’s windows.
We crouched together in the grass, breathing heavy while he pulled out his phone and shook water from it, making a happy noise when the screen turned on.
“Still works,” he said, quickly typing a text message and then glancing around nervously as he waited for a reply. “Come on, come on . . .”
At least he had a phone. Would I ever see mine again? That was another expense I hadn’t planned for.
“Finally!” He pocketed his phone. “Come on. Benny and Jaz are over this way. We’re going to have to sneak around the side
here where there aren’t any cameras. Follow me.”
We ducked past the bushes and bent low to make our way through the outskirts of a rose garden, sneaking past the windows.
We were both soaked to the bone, and chlorine stung my eyes as we pushed aside wisteria and headed around a screened-in patio—
Where we ran into Jaz and Benny, squatting near the patio door.
“Oh my God!” Jaz said. “Are you okay?”
“He fucking had her locked up,” Seb said.
“This is what you meant by ‘exited via pool route’?” Benny said, blinking at our wet clothes. “You absolute legends.”
“We’ll take our award later,” Seb said, pushing damp hair out of his eyes. “Let’s make a break for the side gate where we
came in. Paige, it’s over there, behind that little brick wall. See it?”
I nodded. Running there would take us in full view of the front of the house and the driveway. The Corvair was still parked
there, and the gate I’d driven through was cracked open.
I’ll leave the gate open for him.
I looked around wildly, trying to spot Paul Vanderburg, but the front yard was quiet and still. Even the road outside the gate was quiet.
“Ready?” Jazmine asked.
When we nodded, she signaled, and we all took off like we were running from the devil. Maybe we were. This entire hellish
estate was nearly as bad as the Vanderburg compound, just with a fancier wrapper. I raced across the lawn with the other Wags,
wet shoes squishing in the grass, heading straight for a waist-high brick wall, which partially hid a little curving path
from our view until we got right up on it. But there was the path, and there was the little side gate in the property fence
that Seb mentioned.
There was also Pretty Paul and Lulu, walking through the side gate.
We all skidded in the grass as Lulu closed the gate. Paul glanced up with a genuine look of surprise.
“Shit,” Benny mumbled.
“Front gate!” Seb said, and we all doubled back, scrambling to put some distance between us while Lulu shouted, “It’s them!”
Did Paul have his gun? I couldn’t tell. When I glanced over my shoulder, he was booking it toward us. But he wasn’t the only
one.
Black lightning streaked across the front lawn toward us. Thing One or Thing Two, I didn’t know. Didn’t care, either. We were
almost at the front gate, and there was just enough space for us to get out. Behind us, I vaguely heard my father shouting
along with his housekeeper. Heard Lulu’s Mickey Mouse voice. But we were there. We were going to make it!
One. Two. Three. Four. All Wags slipped through the crack in the gate.
And ran right into two Grand Rapids police officers.
“Whoa, whoa!” the first officer said, a middle-aged man with short gray hair, who put his hand on his holster while his partner, a young officer who didn’t look much older than us, held up both his hands to block us.
All I could think was how my father had bragged about bribing the Grand Rapids police. Had he called them? I didn’t get an
answer to that right away because the Doberman lurched against the gate, barking his head off. The officers moved back, wary,
but my father ran up and grabbed the dog by its studded collar.
“All right, now,” he shouted at the dog. “Stand down. Stand down!”
The dog obeyed, but you could tell it would rather eat our faces off. A reluctant Ester raced up behind with a chain leash,
which my father used to control the dog. “So sorry about that, Officers,” he said, breathless. “She’s normally better behaved.”
“Whoa!” the younger cop warned, looking behind my father. He quickly took out his gun but held it pointed down at his side.
“Who’s that, now?”
Paul and Lulu were trying to sneak out and leave the yard the same way they came out.
“Oh,” my father said. “They’re with me. It’s fine. They weren’t involved in this, so you can just let them go.”
“Excuse me?” the older cop said, and then called out to Paul and Lulu, “Grand Rapids PD. Get over here, now, before my partner
has to shoot a hole in your leg.”
The younger cop trained his gun on Paul, who looked like he was cussing us under his breath, but after a moment, both he and
Lulu slowly walked over to the gate. The younger cop herded them outside with us. We gave them dirty looks as they stood on
one side of the gate, Wags on the other.
“Everyone stay put,” the young officer said.
“Sir,” the older cop called out to my father, “I don’t know what in God’s green earth is going on here, but we got a call
from the Haven Beach sheriff that something might be amiss.”
Haven Beach . . . I glanced at the other Wags. Jazmine’s father was good friends with the sheriff. Was this his doing? Jaz
nodded once, and it made me feel a little better. Certainly wouldn’t stop them from siding with my father. But maybe there
was some hope.
“So what am I looking at here? Do we have a domestic in progress?” the older officer asked. “Or is this a break-in? Someone
start talking and enlighten me.”
Past the gate, my father’s eyes snapped to mine, and they weren’t filled with concern. They were furious. And that fury came
with a sharp warning: Keep your mouth shut.
If he wanted any hope of that, he shouldn’t have called my nana a bitch.
“That man with the dog is Mr. Lee. He’s the homeowner. I came here to ask him to sign some paperwork for my college—”
“She goes to Harvard,” Seb interjected, as if that gave my testimony more gravitas. Maybe it did. I’d take any advantage I
could against my father.
“Which he did, and then he locked me in a room for hours against my will and stole my phone so I couldn’t call for help,”
I told the officers, praying they weren’t in my father’s back pocket.
Praying they weren’t as incompetent as the cops in my town.
“O-kay, uh-huh . . .” the cop mumbled slowly, eyeing my wet clothes. When my father tried to speak up, he said. “Wait your turn,
sir. Go on, young lady . . .”
“My friends had to drive all the way from Haven Beach to come rescue me.” I gestured toward the Wags. “My boyfriend destroyed the door to the room I was locked inside in order to get me free.”
Seb looked like the cat who’d eaten the canary. “Boyfriend,” he murmured.
Well? What else was I going to call him? It was nearly impossible not to return his pleased-as-punch smile, but I forced myself
to shake it off and focus. “Oh, and Mr. Lee sicced his dogs on us, too.”
“Officer,” my father called out from the other side of the fence. “The only thing right about her statement is destruction
of property. That blond hoodlum destroyed one of my doors. And he threatened me with a gun. Look!” He held up Seb’s sawed-off shotgun, surprising all of us. I suppose he’d found it up
in the bedroom. “When someone points something like this at me, I’m well within my rights to stand my ground.”
The younger officer still had his gun out. “All right, sounds like we’ve got issues. Hands up, all of you.”
We all complied. Some of us more slowly than others, namely Paul.
The cop’s older partner kept one hand on his holster and gestured toward my father. “Let’s put that sawed-off on the ground,
sir. Yep, right there. Put it down and step away. Get that dog put up, too, while you’re at it.”
As Ester gripped the chain of the Doberman, urging it away from the front gate, my father tossed the sawed-off onto the driveway.
The officer moved it farther away with his foot, instructing my father to back up, and he started to radio something into the speaker that was strapped to the shoulder of his uniform until Seb spoke.
“That’s a prop gun, Officer.”
The man cocked a brow at him in disbelief. “Pardon?”
“That’s mine, but it’s a prop. Replica. Came from a museum. Doesn’t shoot.”
The officer picked up the sawed-off and immediately chuckled, weighing it in his hand. “Almost fooled me. Feels like a kids’
toy.” He checked the gun, making sure it didn’t have ammo, then squinted at Seb. “Any real weapons on you?”
“Just my good looks,” Seb said, smiling.
The officer shook his head. “Let’s pat them all down. Everyone sit your asses on the lawn, and we’re going to figure out what’s
happened here today.”
“What’s happened here today is that these kids broke into my house and destroyed my property,” my father said, looking aggrieved.
“I want to press charges against all of them. Those two are with me, my friend’s kid.” He pointed toward Paul and Lulu. “They’re
innocent. It’s these four you need to arrest.”
Jesus. That wasn’t going to work, was it? Part of me was terrified it would. His word against ours.
“Sir,” Benny said to the older police officer. “You might want to check his security footage. I didn’t get a chance to look
it over too well, but you can access it right here . . .”
Benny held up his phone slowly, and offered to show the officer.
“How’ve you got his cameras on your phone?” the man asked.
“His security system isn’t secure. Any phone using the Wi-Fi can access his home security system through the app, and his Wi-Fi doesn’t have a password,” Benny said casually, unlocking his screen.
“Here you go. See, he’s got cameras inside and out, a good dozen or more of them, so it shouldn’t be too hard to prove that he locked her in the room.
You can access the controls to that footage there and rewind it. ”
Was all of this true? Camera footage was a heck of a lot better than someone’s word. I could kiss Benny right now.
The officer kept his hand on his holster as he looked at the footage Benny offered up, making faces at the screen until he
lifted his eyes and stared at my father. “Well, now. This is getting interesting . . .”
My father shook his head. “Whatever you’re seeing, they’re twisting things. I didn’t lock her that room.”
“Sir, I’m going to need you to put your hands up where I can see them,” the older officer said, flicking open his holster.
“Don’t make me take this out.”
My father held up his hands, and hope rose inside me. If the Wags could just get out of this mess without being arrested,
I’d be relieved. But if I could take my father down and avenge my family in the process . . . ?
I’d be happier than a bird with a french fry.
Seb pointed at Paul. “While you’re at it, Officer, that guy is helping his father try to rob my girlfriend, here”—Seb’s eyes flicked toward mine—“but his father is on house arrest,
and he’s on probation himself, so he shouldn’t be in possession of a weapon. You might want to frisk him. Last time we saw
him he pulled a handgun on us—a real one, in case that wasn’t clear . . .”
“Fuck you, Jansen,” Paul said. “You’re dead.”
The officer’s brow lifted again. He glanced at Jazmine. “What about you? You got anything to say?”
She shrugged. “My daddy called the Haven Beach sheriff to ask y’all to come out here because we were all afraid Mr. Lee might do something bad to her.”
“Mr. Lee thinks we know where some priceless treasure is,” Benny added. “Maybe you’ve heard of Wyrd Jack, and the pirate museum
in Haven Beach? That treasure.”
“And do you know where this ‘treasure’ is?” the police officer asked, almost amused.
“Nope,” Seb said. “We do not. But Paul and Lulu there are working with Mr. Lee to try to find it. They’ve robbed us, threatened
us, and kidnapped one of us—”
“She’s my daughter,” my father called out. “Why would I kidnap my own daughter?”
“He robbed all the money out of my mother’s bank account when she died,” I said. “So he’s basically a piece of trash, and
I hope he spends the rest of his life in a jail cell.”
The older cop couldn’t look more discombobulated if he tried. He handed Benny’s phone back to him, looking dazedly at both
him and Jazmine, then at Paul and Lulu . . . then at me and Seb in our wet clothing. Finally, he squinted at my father and
sighed deeply. He mumbled something into his shoulder speaker that started with his badge number and ended with “requesting
backup.”
“Want me to cuff any of them, Sarge?” the younger cop asked.
The older officer glanced toward the house and said, “You might want to start with him.”
We all turned to see my father running as fast as he could across the lawn, until the sprinkler came on, and his bare feet
slipped in the grass. He landed flat on his back and didn’t move until the younger officer came to cuff him.
“Dreams really do come true,” Seb said, eyes twinkling. “All hail Calico Jack.”
“All hail Benny for hacking into the security system,” Jaz said under her breath.
“All hail Mr. Neely for listening when his daughter said this was a five-alarm emergency,” Benny added.
All hail the Wags, the best friends anyone could ever ask for.