Oh, Nana. I don’t think I can do this...
I swiped at my eyes before tears could fall and exhaled a shaky breath. Then I steadied myself and swung the front door open. When I did, shock hit me like a punch in the gut.
My family home was not in the state I’d left it last fall.
Furniture lay broken. Beer bottles were strewn everywhere. Books scattered. And a pane of glass in the back living room window had been smashed.
The beach cottage had been trashed. Utterly.
“What the... ?” Dazed, I parked my rolling luggage near Nana’s old rocking chair, the spines of which were busted, as if someone had kicked them. And when I took tentative steps across the old wood floor, my sneakers crunched broken glass.
Bookseverywhere.
Pizza boxes littered the kitchenette.
My nana’s painting easel lay on its side.
A warm breeze blew through the smashed window as I crossed the small living area to the narrow hallway that contained the bath and bedrooms. Nana’s mattress had been pushed off the bed. The drawers of her dresser were pulled out, as if someone had been searching for something. But last summer, before I left for Harvard, I’d packed up all her stuff and taken it down to the basement. So there was nothing in her room to find. Nothing but her paintings—all signed with her name,Kitty Malone—which had been taken off the wall and stood in a stack. One was slashed down the middle.
“What the hell... ?”
My mind snapped to the news story that my driver had mentioned, the one about the gold bar being found in a sewer last month. If that renewed the public’s interest in Wyrd Jack’s treasure, people might be coming out of the woodwork. Professional treasure hunters, and not-so-professional. Had one discovered that I was related to him? Broken into the cottage to look for more gold bars?
Distressed, I stepped out of Nana’s old bedroom and opened the bathroom door. All my toiletries and towels were dumped in a heap inside the bathtub.
But it wasn’t until I entered my old bedroom that my shock shifted to anger.
It was the only room in the house that wasn’t completely trashed. But that was the least of my worries.
My paddleboard was missing from the pegs on my wall. Paddleboard, paddle, leash—all my equipment, gone. And that wasn’t all ...
Someone has been sleeping in my bed.
Wrinkled sheets formed the shape of a stranger’s body. A small bedside pottery tray—one that normally held jewelry I’d remove at night—was being used as an ashtray for joints and empty disposable weed vapes. When I stepped farther into the room, I glanced at my old chest of drawers and found myself staring at two more surprises.
The first was a spotted sandpiper, lazily nesting inside my open underwear drawer.
The second was a silver key chain sitting behind the sandpiper.
Not my key chain, not my keys.
“Scram, beach chicken,” I shouted at the bird, shooing it out of my drawer.
It made a lot of noise, and for a moment, I thought it might even attack me. But when it finally left the room in a flurry of feathers and headed out the broken window, I was able to pick up the key chain.
That’s when I spotted the vintage brass decoder ring, dangling with the rest of the keys.
Shocked, my hand flew to the matching ring that hung on a chain around my neck.
A coldness spread through my core.
All at once, I knew who’d been squatting here and had trashed my nana’s cottage like the world was about to end.
Seb Jansen, erstwhile fourth Wag and the biggest deadbeat in town. My former childhood best friend.
Wayformer.
He’d just made himself my new enemy.
