“You’re fixing my car. I can’t let you pay,” I told him, digging out cash from my purse.
When I handed it to him, he pushed my hand down and looked around, feigning paranoia. “Not here. I don’t want to get picked up for prostitution.” He winked at the attendant who handed him tickets. I waited until he entered the museum door then tucked two fives in his back pocket, causing him to jump and make ayipnoise, like I’d tickled him.
“Christ, you’re stubborn. That hasn’t changed,” he said good-naturedly.
I shoved his shoulder playfully, and he pushed me back, and for a moment, we were kids again, laughing and being silly. A woman gave us a dirty look, so I cleared my throat and stopped as we got in line.
“Jeez, Malone. You’re almost as embarrassing as Punkin,” Seb whispered playfully. “What’re they teaching you out in Massachusetts?”
In good spirits, we waited for the attendant to take our tickets before moving past a red rope into the museum proper, into the town’s former police station lobby, where it was substantially darker. Polished wood and brick made up the bones of the space, where a jaunty sailing tune played on a loop over the museum’s speakers.
“Well, here we are again,” Seb said, glancing around. “Been a few years. Guess this isn’t the kind of museum you were planning on visiting in Europe this summer, huh?”
“Not quite,” I admitted.
The museum itself was once Haven Beach’s only police station, jail, and courthouse and had been built before the turn of the century. We strolled past interactive displays: “Pirates of the Great Lakes,” a map that tracked routes of various ne’er-do-wells who regularly stole lumber and booze from ships all across Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Erie. And: “Lawmen of Michigan,” which allowed patrons to match up old turn-of-the-century black-and-white photographs of police detectives and special agents in the coast guard who tracked down criminal vessels on the lake.
Seb stopped in front of the display and gazed at the photo in the middle. “There he is, Boatswain Nicholas Jansen. The man who caught Wyrd Jack Malone.”
This is why we were always the “primary Wags,” as Seb put it. My great-great-grandfather was Wyrd Jack, and Seb’s great-great-grandfather was the coast guard detective who took him down.
“Holy crap, Seb. You’re beginning to look a hell of a lot more like him than I do Wyrd Jack.”
It was the dimples.
“Maybe I should take up the mantle of my ancestors and become a cop. Think they drug test?”
“The Haven Beach cops are so crooked, you’d probably fit right in. We need to concentrate. We’re looking for something that fits this key or another clue. ‘Under their noses’...”
“There’s nothing old out here. Let’s go farther in and try the offices.”
We wandered through families with rambunctious kids and a lot of white-haired seniors who must’ve been on some kind of group tour, and entered an arched doorway that led into the detective offices.
This part of the old police station was set up as a living historymuseum. Historically costumed volunteers roamed the original offices, which were re-created to look as they did in the 1920s, when Wyrd Jack was incarcerated here. In the police chief’s office, a newspaper and a china teacup sat on the desk alongside a vintage black candlestick phone and old photos of the real police officers who worked here, back in the day. Visitors could walk through each office as long as they adhered to the gold-plated signs that read:historical display, do not touch.
“‘Under their noses’...” Seb mused as we stepped around the police chief’s desk. When the other visitors in the room with us exited, Seb ducked behind the desk to inspect the drawers. “Only one with a lock, but it takes a tiny desk key, not that big ol’ skeleton key.”
“The cameras are new,” I said, glancing at one in the corner. “Don’t want to get kicked out. Let’s not touch anything.”
Seb touched the desk with one finger. “They have to catch me first.”
I rolled my eyes and exited the chief’s office to head next door into Deputy Canter’s office. This one wasn’t as fancy—no china teacups—but it had a chalkboard with lists of crimes that were being investigated in 1929. Rum-running. Gangs. Stolen lumber. Chicken theft.
“Don’t think we’ll find any locks in Barney Fife’s office. None of his desk drawers require keys, and the only thing else in here that would are those metal lockers,” Seb said, gesturing toward the back corner. “And those give me the heebie-jeebies because they remind me of boot camp.” He shivered and made a cross with his fingers.
Much like the chief’s desk in the room next door, the lockers required a different kind of key. Still, I waited until a family of three left the office, then quickly tried to open the locker whilelooking around for cameras. The locker squealed open, but there was nothing in it—nor the one next to it.
“You know, we’ve never talked about it, really. What was it like?” I asked Seb. “Marquette Troubled Teens Boot Camp.”
He shrugged. “About what you’d imagine. There was a rule for everything, even blowing your fucking nose. You either obeyed or got kicked out.”
“The Seb I used to know would never obey.”
“Well, the man you see before you now has been screamed at, shoved into mud, slapped, and gone without dinner so many times that I finally decided obeying was the easiest way.”
That sounded awful. “We looked up stuff about the camp when you got sent away. Reviews were solidly in the one-star range. Lots of complaints about abuse.”
“I’m not sure if you’d call what I went through abuse, but some of the other kids had it worse. The people running the camp did a superior job at making all of us believe that if we didn’t adhere to their routine, we’d end up dying on the street. One kid killed himself.”
