“Haven’t you heard? I’m a waste of space who’ll amount to nothing.”
“If you’re angling for sympathy, it might do you good to remember that I gave youplentyof that when you started pulling away from the Wags, and what did it get me? You left your friends high and dry so that you could run around the beach like you were in some stupid gang.”
His brow lowered. “At least I was living. All you wanted to do was polish your golden transcript so that you could fit in with an Ivy League crowd and pretend like your family was still rich!”
In that moment, it felt like I’d traveled back in time to whenwe were both fifteen and having this exact same argument. I remembered fighting with him in the cottage’s front yard and Nana racing out to get between us and stop us from killing each other.
She wasn’t here now.
Anger rose, hot and fast. I shoved him with both my hands.
Hard.
Caught off guard, he stumbled sideways into the wall, straight into one of my grandmother’s landscape paintings—one that hadn’t been damaged by the robbery. I winced internally when it fell off its nail and hit the floor with a terriblebang. A corner of the wooden frame chipped off.
“Shit! Paige, I didn’t mean to do...” He cocked his head as he stared at the fallen painting, and my eyes followed his as he bent down.
A piece of paper had fallen on the floor. He picked it up while setting the painting against the wall. “I think this fell out of the painting... maybe from the back?”
Still angry, I snatched the paper out of his fingers and unfolded it to find a very old document.
Certificate of Marriage
This is to certify that Robert “Jack” T. Malone
and
Mabel Elizabeth Springsteen
Were united by me in holy matrimony
on June 2, 1918
in Haven Beach, Michigan
“Holy shit,” Seb said softly, reading over my shoulder. “Is that Captain Wyrd Jack’s wedding certificate?”
It looked authentic. “Why was this inside Nana’s painting?”
“Maybe she put it there. Can I... ?”
I begrudgingly handed him the certificate while shuffling around him to inspect the painting, see if there was anything else hidden on the backside. None that I could find.
“This looks real, Paige. It should probably be in the Wyrd Jack museum in the harbor. Wait, what’s this?”
Seb flipped over the certificate and made a small noise. I was so curious that I stepped beside him to see what he’d found.
Tiny dots circled the edges of the old paper. They’d been penciled in, like a doodled border you might draw if you were bored and daydreaming. But I quickly realized that the dots weren’t random.
Seb realized it, too. “Are you seeing this? Dots and dashes.”
“Morse code,” I whispered, and as my anger at Seb faded into the background, something I hadn’t felt in a long time stirred inside my chest. Something I’d buried deep down, along with so many childhood memories.
The thrill of the chase.
My heart sped as I stared at the shapes lining the paper’s edges. Seb and I both knew the old telecommunications language by heart. Nana taught us when we were kids. Even our matching Blackbeard decoder rings had dials that paired letters with Morse code dots and dashes. We used to write each other secret messages.
Seb and I moved toward the reading light near the sofa to see better.
