“Keyhole,” Seb said excitedly, getting out the skeleton key. “Look for a keyhole.”
“Maybe it’s under the rug, something in the floorboar—” I stopped talking as my eyes focused on a roselike emblem between the two dragon heads. Right under their noses.
The rose was about the size of a golf ball, and its petals were individually carved. I ran my finger around it as my pulse pounded in my temples. There was something off about it. Something different. At least Ithoughtthere was as I felt around the rose, hunting for anything at all.
Just when I was ready to give up, my fingertip moved one of the rose petals. Just barely. The play of movement was so slight, I thought for a moment I’d imagined it. But when I wiggled it with my finger and then used the tip of my nail, it definitely moved.
And something snicked open.
“Holy shit...” Seb said.
The rose freely rotated. I pushed it to the left, and it rotated enough to reveal a lock beneath it.
“Oh my God!” I whispered. “Is this for real? It can’t be...”
“Right under the dragon’s noses,” Seb said with wonder in his voice as he set the end of the skeleton key to the lock’s black hole.
It slipped right in.
Not too big, not too small.
Just right.
Seb turned the key in the lock. It clicked, and a small panel at the front of the desk popped open. And as noise from the approaching tour made my pulse spike, we peered into darkness together and spied something twinkling inside.
A lone gold locket.
Chapter 11
Seb and I barely made it out of the captain’s quarters before the tour group entered. We didn’t inspect what we’d found until we rushed back to the Bronco.
“Hurry!” I said excitedly. “Open it!”
Seb cracked open the gold locket, and we huddled together to see what was inside.
A pair of black-and-white photos, man and woman, dressed in turn-of-the-century clothing and wearing serious faces.
“Wyrd Jack and Mabel,” I said as my heart raced. Mabel Malone was my ancestor’s devoted wife, a plain-faced woman who’d garnered attention all over the Midwest as a famed spiritualist. She claimed to communicate with the dead, and local legends said she used this esoteric information to lead Wyrd Jack to big cargo hauls. There were even several instances of recorded testimony from the townsfolk claiming she was distraught the day before her husband was nabbed by police out on the lake because “the spirits” had told her he was sailing into tragedy.
Pretty much everyone assumed she hid the Golden Venus herself, and that she worked with her husband while he was jailed to hide all the clues leading to it.
Many believed that Mabel was the brains behind Wyrd Jack’s brawn.
“Are these their wedding photos?” Seb asked.
“No. She’s not wearing a veil.” The museum had an entire room dedicated to Mabel, but it was mostly interactive displays and framed photographs, so we’d skipped it.
“There’s no Morse code,” Seb noted, turning the locket around in his fingers to inspect it closely. “Nothing engraved. Nothing on the chain...”
“Back of photos?”
With the tip of my fingernail, I carefully pried them out while tourists strolled past the Bronco. Neither photo had writing on the back.
No engraving beneath where they sat, either.
“Got the feeling this isn’t going to be easy,” Seb said, a little disappointment in his voice that I was also feeling as the initial thrill of finding the locket faded. It was one thing to find a clue. A whole other thing to solve it.
The boardwalk was becoming crowded with people, and it wasn’t doing us any good to sit here in exasperation, trying to find something on the locket that just wasn’t there. So we headed back to Heron Cottage, occasionally sharing ideas.
