Right. Can’t open a lock without a key. A little disappointment weighted my chest as the reality of this truth brought me back down to earth. As close as we kept getting to the treasure, it remained eternally out of reach.
Maybe that was just the nature of treasure. It was the pot ofgold at the end of the rainbow that you could never quite get to, even if you believed with your entire heart that it existed.
“Come on down,” I told Seb. But he continued peering at the eyes and muttering to himself. He fished around in his pocket and pulled out something that he fiddled with for several moments, cursing under his breath.
“What’s going on up there?” Benny asked.
I called up, “Hey! We’re talking to you! Yoo-hoo!”
“Um, guys?” Seb said as if he hadn’t heard us. “I think we were wrong about Mabel’s rings.”
What? “No!” I whined.
“You just said—” Jazmine started.
But Seb cut her off. “Paige! Tell me you’ve got your decoder ring.”
Decoder ring... ? My hand flew to my neck, where the old Blackbeard decoder ring hung on its chain. I couldn’t make sense of how our rings could unlock the heron. They were from the 1940s. Wyrd Jack was long dead.
But Mabel wasn’t. And as we’d learned this summer, Mabel was the one who hid her husband’s smuggled treasures.
“We had the real rings the whole time!” Seb gripped the sculpture with both arms and looked down at me “Throw yours up here! Fast as you can!”
I didn’t think about it. I just unhooked the clasp, slid the ring off, and... well. No way could I throw it to him and not miss, so I gave it to Jazmine. She underhanded it, aiming at Seb’s open hand.
He snagged it out of the air, nearly losing his grip in the process. But he shifted on the heron, foot straining for purchase on the carved wing of the bird. And we watched as he pushed the ring into the left iris.
No one breathed.
We just waited. Watched.
Seb pressed his fingers into the heron’s eyes, making a happy noise when he finally got them into place. A dull metallic click sounded from somewhere within the sculpture’s base.
“Get down!” Benny called.
Seb didn’t climb down gracefully. He stepped off the wing and dove for the sand, landing with a thud. His head snapped toward the heron just in time to see what we were all witnessing.
As if it were a king on a giant chessboard, Mr. Legs slowly moved backward to reveal a small trapdoor hidden under his base. It was a minor shock to me that the sculpture moved freely after being told all my life that it had been carved from a tree trunk that grew on the property.
If Mabel’s letter to her daughter was right, this was the smuggler’s hole.
“Open it!” Seb said, scrambling across the sand toward us.
Heart speeding like a moving train, I glanced around the beach again, utterly paranoid, and was relieved to see that we were still alone. We dropped to our knees in front of Mr. Legs, brushing sand away from stonework and a crude wooden door that had been sunk inside. A single iron ring was affixed to it, and when Benny pulled it, the door creaked and complained, but it finally swung open like the trunk of a car.
We all stared inside the hole.
Benny was the first to turn on his phone’s flashlight. And when he did, we could better see the size of it—maybe three or four feet in diameter, a straight shaft going down into the earth. And inside the shaft was the top of wooden crate.
“We gotta pull that out,” Seb said excitedly. “Get that side of it, Benny!”
The boys reached into the hole and grabbed the sides of the crate. But try as they did, all they managed to do was grunt in frustration.
“What the fuck is in this crate?” Seb complained. “Either it weighs a ton, or it’s wedged in there too tight.”
“Shovel?” Jazmine suggested.
My mind flew to the tools in the garage. “Crowbar?”
