He glanced up at Jazmine, who was pacing through the kitchen on her phone, and from what I could hear, trying to convince Patty that she hadn’t lost a pair of shoes.
“Back at boot camp,” Seb said, “when things were bad, it would sometimes feel like I was inside a nightmare—like, everything was surreal, and I couldn’t figure out if it was really happening, or if I was just dreaming, or maybe even dead.” He tapped his leg above the scar. “This told me I was alive. I would look at it and make myself remember everything that happened the day I got it. Stealing the boat, our fight, getting stitches... Proof of life.”
Tender feelings softened my heart. I stared at the scar, and my hand lifted as if it had a will all its own. I hesitated, steadying a tremble, then reached until my fingertips touched the raised patch of skin above his knee. The air seemed to still around us, and I heard Seb’s breathing catch... and then hold while I traced the pale triangle. Goose bumps spread across his thigh, and like magic, or maybe an infectious disease, they spread to my arms.
Seb shuddered softly.
“Sorry,” I said, and tried to retreat into neutral territory.
But Seb quickly trapped my hand against his knee, and whispered, “I’m not.”
My heart raced.
Everything was warm. His knee, his hand on mine. The air I raggedly breathed, making me feel dizzy and dumb. I felt trapped in amber, unable to summon enough bravery to look him in the eyes, so I just stared at our hands and tried to slow my rapid breathing while he watched me. His insistent grip on my hand relaxed, just barely, and his thumb stroked a slow pattern across the bones in my wrist. Pleasurable chills raced up my arm, followed by more luscious warmth. It rolled through me like the waves down the beach, and it felt like a drug.
Noise from the kitchen ripped me out of the moment. Seb and I jerked apart, and my heart pounded like I’d nearly been caught breaking into a bank.
“Ugh! Patty is going to drive me to murder,” Jazmine complained loudly. “Should I let the dog back inside? She’s whining at the back door.”
“Ye-a-a-ah,” he answered Jazmine, sounding dazed. “I mean, yes. Let her inside. If It’s okay with Paige... ?”
“Yep, fine,” I said, scooting an inch away from him, and then another, to put me out of the temptation zone. The way my heart raced, you’d think I’d been caught robbing a bank. I needed to cool down, and fast.
Jazmine cracked open the last plastic tote as I made an effort not to glance at Seb. When she moved the lid to the side, her face lit up. “Guys?”
“Did you find it?” Seb asked, craning his neck to peer around a stack of boxes.
Jazmine held up the old black photo album. “Boom! Let’s take a little look inside, shall we?”
The three of us huddled around the coffee table, hovering over the faded black pages inside the album. I carefully flipped past black-and-white pictures that had been mounted with tiny cardboard corners. Photos of my great-great-great-uncle in Ireland. Of some of the Malones who immigrated to Michigan, standing in front of a shack on the family’s former cherry farm. Standing in front of a Ford Model T that was built down the road in Detroit.
“There!” Seb said, tapping the page.
Three photos of Wyrd Jack, long before he got arrested. One showed him standing on his boat in the fog, looking ominous. Another was taken on the steps of some house. And the third photo was at a bar, him holding up a large mug of beer.
“No Mabel in any of these,” I noted.
Jazmine turned the page. More relatives, but no Wyrd Jack. She flipped back and tilted her head, holding the page horizontally. “Huh. What’s this?” Before I could ask what she’d seen, she slipped one long nail behind the photo of Wyrd Jack with his beer and picked carefully...
Until another photo came sliding out.
Two photos had been mounted together, one hidden behind the other.
We all leaned closer. The cottage fell silent.
The secret photo was upside down when she pulled it free. Familiar dots and dashes were scrawled across the backing. We stared at it for a moment before Jazmine flipped the old photograph over.
Wyrd Jack and Mabel, standing in front of a building.
“Oh shit,” Jazmine whispered. “The faces in the locket... they came from this photo.”
“Go get it!” he told me, jumping up.
And while I raced to our treasure-clue hiding spot, grabbing the shoebox that contained the gold locket, Seb snatched the framed copy of “Prison Poem” off the wall and quickly began deciphering the Morse code on the back of the secret photo Jazmine had found.
“It’s numbers, just like before, sets of three to correspond with letters in the poem,” he said, biting his bottom lip as he scrawled down his translations on the side of a catalog mailer. While he concentrated, I dug out the gold locket and opened it to the two photos inside before setting it on the coffee table.
Same as the secret photo Jazmine had found.
