The Battle of Bayport Page 4

  “I’m sorry, sir, I’ll take care of it,” Bernie stammered, and hastily started trying to soak up the spilled solvent with a rag. He sounded so embarrassed I almost couldn’t help feeling a little bad for him.

  “Leave it, Bernie,” Chief Olaf ordered. “You’ve done enough already.”

  “But—” Bernie started to protest.

  “We’ll take it from here,” the chief cut him off. “This is police evidence now, what’s left of it at least.”

  “But if I don’t wipe up the excess solvent, it could stain the guns,” Bernie pleaded. “I could lose my job.”

  “I’m sorry, Bernie.” Chief Olaf sounded like he really was; police chiefs can be nice guys too. “We’ll do our best to take good care of the guns while we have them, and I’ll talk to Rollie and make sure he goes easy on you,” he continued. “Mistakes happen, and we’re all under a lot of pressure here with this Sterling situation.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bernie said.

  Chief Olaf looked over at us and said, “I thought I told you two to get!” For once, I was relieved to be chased off by the police.

  “Bernie Blank is kind of a scary guy,” Joe said to me once we were out of earshot.

  “You think?” I asked him. My voice came out all hushed. Bernie’s attack had only lasted a moment, but it had left me shaken.

  “I’m guessing that was one of those rhetorical questions the chief was talking about,” Joe said. I think he meant to lighten the mood, but I wasn’t really up for laughing.

  You play detective long enough and you’re going to get in a few fights. We never look for them—and we always try to defuse them with words before resorting to fists—but the Hardy boys won’t back down if it means defending ourselves or helping someone in trouble. I may not be that big, but I’m scrappy, and with Joe and I having each other’s backs, I usually like our chances. Back in the armory? I didn’t have a shot. Zilch. Zip. Zero. As in the Big Zero. Zero-days-left-on-this-planet-Zero. It’s not like I saw my life flash before my eyes or anything super dramatic like that, but it really is frightening being cornered with no control over what happens to you next.

  I didn’t know whether to be angry at Bernie, though. I had come up behind him in a roomful of expensive guns, after all. It’s possible any veteran soldier in that situation might have reacted the same way to a perceived threat. He was obviously also a little unstable. That didn’t necessary mean he had nefarious purposes.

  In a mystery like this, you have to question everyone’s motives, but there’s a thin line between healthy investigative suspicion and paranoia. But then again, as Joe likes to misquote, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t actually trying to eat your brains.”

  “It’s kind of hard for me to be objective about Bernie after the dude nearly ripped my head off,” I admitted.

  “I’m not too happy with the guy either, but just because he’s a terrifying super soldier with a screw loose doesn’t mean he’s guilty of anything.” Joe spoke the truth. Being scary isn’t a crime.

  “I guess,” I conceded. “He didn’t actually end up hurting me, and he sure could have if he’d wanted to.”

  We went back and forth about it, trying on ideas. It helps to have two people to bounce things around like that. You’re able to get a fresher perspective. It’s one of the many benefits of having a good partner in crime (or in our case, crime solving).

  “But why would he want to hurt you in the first place?” Joe continued to make his point. “It’s not like him cleaning the guns was suspicious. He was just doing his job.”

  That much was true, but . . .

  “Was he still just doing his job when he spilled solvent all over the guns he hadn’t cleaned yet? Sure, it was probably just an accident, but it was a pretty convenient accident for whoever does benefit from the evidence being compromised,” I said, reminding us just how difficult it was going to be to figure which gun was which with most of them wiped clean.

  “It looks funny, yeah, but what reason would he have for destroying the evidence, especially if he didn’t even know it was evidence? He would have been back at the ship with his headphones on before news ever reached the dock about the Don. He wouldn’t have heard until we told him.”

  “Unless he knew already,” I said, but it didn’t fit.

  As far as I knew, Bernie hadn’t even shot a gun at the reenactment, which made him a pretty unlikely assassin. He had been dressed as a Colonial officer and had been wearing a pistol and a saber like the rest of the officers, but he’d only been supervising.

  “Yeah, it’s a stretch. He certainly has the qualifications to be the shooter if he had a mind to, but it’s hard to shoot someone without firing a gun,” I said, frustrated at finding ourselves at an another dead-end line of inquiry.

  “He sure was slick handling those guns, though,” Joe said admiringly.

  “And handling me,” I added reluctantly.

  “The guy was like a ninja commando,” Joe continued. “He must have been pretty flustered to mess up like that with the solvent.”

  “I guess even terrifying super soldiers get a case of the nerves sometimes. Who wouldn’t be shaken up by accidentally almost killing a kid, getting yelled at by the chief of police, and maybe losing their job?” I said. It felt strange defending the guy who had just attacked me, but Bernie had always been nice to me before, and until a few minutes ago, he’d been one of my favorite members of the museum staff.

  Joe cut to the chase. “Even if he had a fired a gun, it wouldn’t make any sense without a motive anyway. Sure, the Don probably wasn’t the best boss, but he still signed the checks Bernie cashed every two weeks, right? You don’t take out the guy who pays your bills.”

  “Don Sterling’s death puts the whole museum in jeopardy. Bernie could end up out of a job, and you saw how worried he was about that already,” I said, thinking Bernie had a lot more reason to want the Don alive than dead.

  Joe was right: Everything Bernie had done had an innocent explanation. Even if he had acted suspiciously, he still wasn’t anything more than a person of interest. Without a means or a motive, he wasn’t our shooter. Which left us right back where we started.

  We’d been taking our time leaving, kind of just wandering while we talked out what had happened in the armory. I hadn’t realized how far into the ship we were. Part of the museum was still under construction, and we were in one of the last completed exhibits before everything was roped off.

  This room had one of my favorite displays. It was a small one—just one case with a plaque, some illustrations, and a single gold coin—but it was one of the coolest. It was about an old local legend of lost British gold that had supposedly been seized by the Continental Army around the same time as the Battle of Bayport. Every kid in Bayport had heard about the legend of the “King’s Pride Treasure.” When we were little, Joe and I used to run around the docks pretending we were treasure hunters on the run from pirates. Of course, we never found anything. That didn’t mean that no one else had, and it was fun to think it still might be out there somewhere. The gold coin in the display was just a replica of the kind of coin that would have been sent from England to help fund the war. It wasn’t even real gold. In a weird way, though, seeing it made me feel like a kid again.

  I let my imagination run wild for a minute before Joe’s voice snapped me back to reality. “Did you hear that?”

  I looked up and listened. We weren’t alone. I hadn’t heard it at first because my hearing was still a little wonky from the reenactment, but the sound of footsteps on the ship’s wood floor and muffled voices were getting louder.

  “We better skedaddle. The chief is going to blow his top if he catches us still on the ship.” I started leading the way back, hoping whoever it was would veer off into one of the corridors before reaching us. Yeah . . . no . . . so much for that one. A staticky voice blurted something over a police radio, and it sounded like the officer carrying it was headed right for us.
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br />   “What now, dude?” Joe asked.

  Good question. There was no other way I knew of to get out of the museum from that part of the ship, and there wasn’t anywhere to hide in the exhibit we were in. . . .

  There was, however, the roped-off corridor leading to the part of the museum that was still under construction. It was off-limits to most of the museum’s volunteers and employees because of the insurance risk, so I’d never been back there before. I was excited at the prospect of exploring a part of the ship I hadn’t seen, although I would have preferred to do it while not running from the police. I eyed the yellow caution tape crisscrossing the entrance.

  “This way,” I said, and darted past a big yellow sign that read DANGER—DO NOT ENTER.

  BEHIND THE SCENES

  8

  JOE

  I REALLY HOPED FRANK KNEW what he was doing. Next to the big DO NOT ENTER sign was another one that said CONSTRUCTION ZONE—HARD HAT REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT. I’d been accused of being hardheaded before, but I didn’t think that would do me much good when a beam fell on my noggin.

  We ducked under the ropes and out of sight a second before the officer stepped into the room. He hadn’t seen us! The relief I felt at our narrow escape didn’t last long—in the construction zone it got real dark, real quick. There weren’t any lights installed yet, and the portals were sealed off, blocking out the sunlight that filtered through most of the ship during the day. In the dark like that . . . Ack, there I go thinking about ghost stories again.

  “Ouch!” I exclaimed a little too loudly as I stumbled on a loose board.

  “Shhh,” Frank reminded me rather unnecessarily.

  “Sorry, bro, my X-ray vision is on the fritz,” I whispered back.

  A second later two small lights illuminated Frank and me. We’d both had the idea to use the flashlights on our phones at the same time.

  “Great minds think alike,” I said with a smile.

  “Come on, Edison,” Frank said with a smirk. “Let’s find another way out of here.”

  Frank started leading the way. I was counting on all the time my brother had spent aboard the Resolve and at home studying the huge ship’s design to get us out of there safely. Sometimes Frank’s nerd power comes in handy.

  “I hope you know where you’re going,” I told him.

  “So do I,” he replied. Well, that was reassuring.

  I followed Frank past dangerous-looking construction equipment, jagged nail-toothed boards, and precariously stacked piles of debris. Our flashlights weren’t especially strong, but they were a whole lot better than nothing. As creepy as it had been running through the empty ship in the daylight, this felt like some serious haunted-house stuff, with lots of dark corners and crooked shadows. I was more worried about the rickety state of the ship than ghosts, though. Light reflected off yellow caution tape where the floor had caved in, and the wood under our feet creaked constantly. The possibility of the floor collapsing didn’t make me feel good about our predicament.

  The space we were in came to an end at a gaping hole in the floor with a ladder poking out of it. Luckily, a narrow corridor branched off to the side of the hole, disappearing into darkness. I went to turn down the corridor and stopped short just in time to keep from bumping into Frank and knocking him into the hole. He’d paused at the edge and was deep in thought as he peered down into the pitch blackness below.

  “I think that goes down into the storerooms over the cargo hold,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to see where they found all the crates.”

  “No way, dude,” I said, and meant it. He actually looked disappointed. My brother can be an odd duck sometimes.

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. We could get lost down there in the dark before we found our way back out,” he said, pouting.

  I shone my little light down the corridor. “What about that way?”

  He thought about it for a second. “I think that may be the lower deck of the officers’ quarters, where the restoration crew had temporary offices when they first started working on the ship. If I’m right, there should be a way out up onto the deck.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” I said with a salute, and followed him down the corridor.

  Thankfully, the floor seemed a little safer here. Farther down, cabin doors started to appear on either side of the corridor. I held my light up to one of the cabin doors, where a handwritten sign said MUSEUM DIRECTOR. I stopped at that one. Bingo.

  “Hey, Frank, you said this is where they had the original offices?” I asked, holding the light up to the door for him to see. Frank stopped, looked at the sign, and smiled.

  “So this one would have been Mr. Lakin’s, huh?” I asked, happily already knowing the answer. We weren’t going to get a better chance to snoop around the office of the police’s prime suspect.

  Frank turned the knob on the creaky door and held it open for me. “After you, sir,” he said.

  To call it an office was being generous. The little cabin was so filled with barrels and boxes and all kinds of other nautical debris that the actual workspace amounted to little more than a cluttered cubicle. The desk was nothing but a wood plank thrown on top of two barrels, and from the dust covering everything, it didn’t look like anyone had been back here in a while. The only thing left on the desk was a small stack of papers and some paper clips.

  “Doesn’t look like there’s much here,” I said, feeling let down as I flipped through some random invoices and a museum display case catalog.

  “Oh well, it was worth a shot.” Frank turned to go, and I turned to follow when my light glinted off something white in the debris behind the desk.

  I moved a couple of small boxes where some loose papers had gotten wedged. They must have fallen there unnoticed when Mr. Lakin relocated offices. The first sheet was a past-due home electricity bill in Mr. Lakin’s name. I felt kind of guilty looking at Mr. Lakin’s personal stuff and flipped quickly to the next item. It was another past-due bill, and I was about to skip past that one too when I caught a glimpse of the dollar amount at the bottom of the invoice. I did a double take and blinked my eyes a couple of times, but the number didn’t change.

  “Frank, I think you should see this.” I called my brother over, and his mouth dropped open.

  $87,000. That was how much money the Lakins owed Bayport Memorial Hospital for ongoing medical treatment of Mae Lakin. I had a vague notion that Mr. Lakin was married, but I hadn’t known his wife was sick.

  “I don’t think I feel right looking at this, Joe,” Frank said.

  “I know, me either, but it could turn out to be relevant to the case if Mr. Lakin was having money trouble. We don’t know what information is going to be important yet. We might even find something that can help clear him,” I reasoned with Frank.

  He sighed his consent. “What’s next?”

  I flipped the page. Now, this was strange. It was a letter from the NYPD Pension Fund addressed to Rollie Lawrence Lakin. Frank and I exchanged a curious look. I read the letter aloud in a hushed voice.

  Dear Mr. Lakin,

  I regret to inform you that your appeal has been denied. Upon further review, it has been determined that your wife’s condition is not covered under the disability and pension health plan you received upon leaving the department.

  I am truly sorry and wish there was more we could do to help. I understand that you were wounded in the line of duty some years ago, and the New York Police Department and the City of New York are deeply grateful for your heroic service as a member of the mounted police unit.

  I stopped reading. You don’t ever really think much about your teacher’s personal lives. Or even that they have them. They’re supposed to be kind of like scholastic vampires, who just climb into big school lockers after the day ends and only come back out to teach when the bell rings the next morning. The idea that they could actually have relationships, life crises, and secret pasts just didn’t fit into the equation. It looked like I was going to have to come u
p with a new equation, though, because there was suddenly a lot about our history teacher that didn’t fit. Mr. Lakin’s wife was sick, he owed a ton of money for hospital bills that weren’t covered by his insurance, and, apparently, before he was a teacher, he had been a policeman. That was the real kicker. You could have told me he’d been an astronaut or a lion tamer or an astronaut lion tamer and I wouldn’t have been more shocked.

  “Did you know Mr. Lakin used to be a cop?” I asked Frank. From the stunned look on my brother’s face, I figured the answer was no.

  “I just assumed he’d always been a teacher,” he said quietly.

  Mr. Lakin was a Bayport High institution. He’d been there for at least thirty years. He’d even taught our dad. It was hard to imagine the old guy in the tacky suit as a young man in a policeman’s uniform.

  “He wasn’t just a police officer, Joe,” Frank said reluctantly.

  “I know,” I said before finishing Frank’s thought. “He was a police officer who also rode a horse.”

  “That would have been where he learned how to ride.” Frank started to say more, but stopped.

  “He also would have learned how to shoot.” I added the part Frank didn’t want to. “The reenactment wouldn’t have been the first time he fired a gun from horseback.”

  And just like that, the idea that Mr. Lakin could have hit Don Sterling from a galloping horse with a pistol seemed a lot less crazy.

  SCHOOL DAZE

  9

  FRANK

  I WAS PRETTY TIRED BY the time Joe and I dragged ourselves into school the next morning. We’d made it off the Resolve unnoticed, but we weren’t any closer to solving the mystery, and I don’t think either of us got a lot of sleep that night. Not with everything that went down after the reenactment. We’d witnessed one of the town’s most prominent people murdered in front of us during a make-believe Revolutionary War battle, one of our favorite teachers had a shocking secret past and might be the prime suspect, and, oh yeah, I’d almost been pulverized by a gun-wielding commando. You try getting a good night’s sleep after that!