The Battle of Bayport Read online

  “Do you think there’s anything to what Mikey told us?” I asked Frank.

  “Hmm?” Frank looked up. He’d been staring at his plate, lost in his own thoughts too.

  “Do you think Mikey really could have somehow shot the Don without knowing what he was doing?” I asked again. He thought about it for a minute.

  “Pretty unlikely,” he said through a mouthful of red snapper. “I mean, a musket ball didn’t accidentally fall down his barrel, and real episodes of temporary amnesia are about as rare as gold coins. And even if he did black out for a moment during the reenactment, he still would’ve had to bring a musket ball with him, right? It’s hard to imagine someone doing that without it being premeditated. I guess he could be lying to us, but it would be hard to prove without more evidence or an actual confession. We’ll talk to him tomorrow and see if his story changes.”

  We were at another dead end. I stabbed at Aunt Trudy’s Revolutionary War–themed red, white, and blue fries with my fork and thought about Aunt Trudy under her red, white, and blue sun umbrella at the reenactment. Ha! Actually, it was a double “Ha!” I laughed at the image of Aunt Trudy and then had an “aha!” moment—she’d been shooting video of the reenactment! I’d had a hunch Aunt Trudy’s meal would lead to some sort of revelation.

  In all the excitement of the past day, we’d forgotten all about it. It wasn’t likely to break the mystery open or anything—whatever Aunt Trudy caught in the video would have happened in plain sight of a few hundred people, and the police probably already knew about it—but it was still worth watching to see if it shook anything loose. I ran the idea past Frank.

  “Beats sitting around and feeling useless!” Frank agreed cheerily.

  “True. And maybe it’ll at least help us rule out Mikey’s crazy theories.”

  We got the video from Aunt Trudy and watched it full screen on the computer. The angle was pretty wide, so we got an overview of the field without a lot of close-up detail. Even when she zoomed in, the image still captured a big chunk of the action, but there was also a lot you couldn’t see, and the people we wanted to watch weren’t always in the frame. We tried to focus on Mr. Lakin and Mikey along with Amir, Mr. Carr, Pete Carson, Rob Hernandez, and the other suspects on our list. I took notes as we watched, breaking down the reenactment into moments of action we could refer back to.

  Mr. Lakin looked on proudly in his general’s uniform, his saber and pistol swinging from his belt as Bernie handed out muskets to the Colonial militia. Mr. Carr gave a dramatic salute to Mr. Lakin when he got his weapon. Mikey was the next suspect to get his musket. Mr. Carr went over to say something to Mikey after he got his gun, but there was no way to tell what. It looked like they were going over some detail of how to load the musket. Then the camera panned away from Bernie and Mr. Lakin handing out the muskets and went over to the British side.

  A few minutes later, Mikey and Amir were back in the picture, palling around before the battle. Mikey was laughing and gesturing wildly with both hands as he told a joke or something. As the reenactment got ready to start, the infantrymen formed a drill line, and Mr. Lakin made a show of doing inspections. He straightened Amir’s lapel and took Mikey’s musket to examine it before handing it back and moving on to the next soldier.

  Then the chaos started. The first cannon went off, and the whole field got real smoky real fast from all the shooting. With so much going on, it was hard to follow all the action. Knowing what happened next, I almost turned away when Mr. Lakin charged forward on his horse and Don Sterling collapsed. There were so many guns going off at the same time, there was no way to tell from watching the video who’d fired the real shot, and it was too hazy and far away to see if Mikey had done anything unusual when he loaded his musket. The shot could have come from Mr. Lakin’s gun or Mikey’s. It also could have come from Amir’s, Mr. Carr’s, Pete’s, or a lot of the other militiamen as well.

  Frank had that pale look about him again, and I knew he had the same queasy feeling I did. What we’d just watched wasn’t for show. A man had really been shot.

  So far, watching the video hadn’t answered any questions. All it had done for the investigation was make the investigators feel ill.

  “I’m going to catch a quick nap and then we can reconvene to come up with a strategy for the evening.” Frank took a deep breath, collapsed on the couch, and started snoring pretty much instantly. As beat as I was, I was way too amped to sleep. I pressed play one more time instead.

  A couple of minutes later, I paused and hit rewind. Mikey stood on the baseball field, palling around with Amir before the reenactment, gesturing with both hands open. It wasn’t what I saw that caught my eye, it was what I couldn’t see.

  Mikey’s gun.

  Amir was still holding a musket, but Mikey wasn’t. He must have put it down somewhere off screen, because the gun wasn’t anywhere in sight. That’s when it hit me. Maybe Mikey had been right.

  SWEET DREAMS

  15

  FRANK

  I WAS WEARING MY REENACTMENT costume in my dream, but that wasn’t the cool part. The cool part was the cutlass clamped between my teeth and the rope in my hands as I swung across the bow of the Resolve to rescue Daphne from Mr. Lakin, who was dressed like a plaid-clad pirate captain. The Plaid Pirate Lakin propped his peg leg on top of a treasure chest and threatened Daphne with a metal-hooked hand. Daphne yelled out my name, and that’s when the dream really got weird. Daphne sounded exactly like Joe!

  “Frank!” she yelled in Joe’s voice. “Wake up, dude!”

  When I opened my eyes, the twist in my dream suddenly made a lot more sense. Joe really was yelling my name. Bummer.

  “Can it wait, dude? I was having a really awesome dream,” I muttered, still half-asleep.

  “What if Mikey shooting the Don was premeditated,” Joe asked excitedly, “just not by Mikey?”

  That opened my eyes all the way. My Daphne-in-distress fantasy was going to have to stay a cliffhanger.

  “What have you got?” I asked him.

  “It’s really been bugging me how sure Mikey seemed about somehow being the one who shot the Don. I mean, he sounded so sincere, but it didn’t make any sense. How can you shoot somebody and just not remember it?”

  “It would be a neat trick,” I agreed.

  “Even neater if Mikey wasn’t the magician,” Joe said. “I think there is a way Mikey could have been onto something with his crazy ideas about his musket being loaded, just not the way he thought.”

  “I’m listening,” I said, now all the way awake.

  “I went back and watched the video again, and there are a few times when Mikey’s gun is either out of his sight or someone else has it. If Mikey wasn’t the only one who had access to his musket before he fired it during the reenactment . . .”

  “You think someone could have tampered with it?” I asked reluctantly. Joe was opening up a disturbing new door.

  “I think it’s possible, at least. There’s nothing obvious in the video, but the opportunity would have been there. Everyone just assumed the shooter was working alone, but what if there was a second person involved? The shooter could have had an accomplice, or he could even have been set up.”

  Setting someone up would be a huge gamble. It was almost too risky and callous to consider.

  “What if they missed and hit the wrong person, or the killer miscalculated and the shooter decided to aim at someone else instead?” I said, hoping Joe was wrong. “Talk about cold-blooded.”

  “We already know the killer has to be one cold, bold hombre to try to assassinate someone in public like that in the first place,” Joe pointed out.

  “The Second Man theory,” I said, giving Joe’s theory a name. We’ve found that classifying our theories sometimes helps us wrap our minds around a mystery and organize our thoughts, especially on a complex case like this one.

  “If someone really was that devious and wanted to pick a shooter to take out Don Sterling for them, then Mikey Gr
iffin would be a good bet,” I affirmed.

  Joe nodded. “He said he was a good shot, and with his family’s history with the Don, it wouldn’t be hard to guess who Mikey was aiming at.”

  “Mikey’s not the only one,” I said. “A lot of people probably aimed at the Don. Mr. Lakin basically told them to.”

  Not that people needed any encouragement. Even if they thought they were only shooting blanks, it would be hard to resist pretending to take a shot at the guy who’d messed up your life.

  Our job had just gotten a lot harder. It was tough enough already just trying to figure out which gun had fired the shot; now, even if we did, it might not be the real bad guy’s. We didn’t just have to look at who had motive, we also had to look at who had access to the guns of the people with motive. Joe was right about Mikey, though: If there was a fall guy, he was a good candidate.

  Joe had flagged the spots in the video where Mikey put down his gun or when someone else had it. He skipped ahead from Mikey receiving his musket to Mr. Carr helping Mikey with his gun to musketless Mikey goofing around with Amir. Joe was right: Someone totally would have had the opportunity to tamper with Mikey’s gun. Both Mr. Carr and Amir knew Mikey well enough to have his confidence, and both of them had the opportunity.

  It was common knowledge that Mr. Carr hated the Don, and he had the acting skills to pull off a deception. He also had a flair for the dramatic and a love of old English plays with intricate revenge plots and leading men with guilty consciences. The pieces fit, but could our own drama teacher really have used one of his students to exact his revenge for him? He would have had the chance.

  So would Amir, Mikey’s buddy from their time together in detention. When Aunt Trudy moved the camera away from Amir and Mikey goofing around, you could still see Mikey in the background, but Amir had stepped out of frame. When he reappeared, he was carrying Mikey’s musket along with his own.

  I liked Amir. We used to study together before Don Sterling shut down the factory. After his parents lost their jobs, everything changed, though, and he stopped caring about class. You knew things must have gotten pretty bad at home, because he’d gone from one of Bayport High’s brightest students to one of its biggest troublemakers in no time flat. It was like he was a different guy. But murder? I didn’t like the idea of an old friend turning into a devious killer.

  Not that I liked the next possible Second Man suspect any better. Joe fast-forwarded to Mikey having his musket inspected in the drill line. By Mr. Lakin. The angle was on Mr. Lakin’s back, so we couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but he held the gun long enough to leave the possibility open. Thinking about our history teacher using a student to pull the trigger for him was even more disturbing than suspecting him of pulling the trigger himself.

  I took some comfort in the fact that Joe’s Second Man theory was still purely hypothetical. The second person could have been someone we suspected or someone we hadn’t thought of yet, or the killer could have acted alone and there might not be any “Second Man” at all. We didn’t have any proof, and for all we knew it was just another wild-goose chase.

  Even so, just the idea of it was enough to turn my stomach. And until we had some proof one way or another, we couldn’t eliminate the possibility that it was a valid hypothesis.

  “There could be a lot more to this case than we figured,” Joe said.

  “You mean one mystery shooter using a fake Revolutionary War battle as cover to secretly load a 250-year-old firearm with real ammunition and publicly assassinate Bayport’s most notorious businessman with the whole town watching isn’t enough?” I shot back. I should have known better than to even ask. There’s always more.

  But for now, we’d reached another standstill. We now had two theories to explore—my Gold theory and Joe’s Second Man theory. We just didn’t have any way to explore them, not from our den. Our forty-eight-hour clock was ticking, and the trails on Mr. Lakin and Dirk Bishop were growing colder by the second. By tomorrow afternoon it would be two full days since the Don’s murder, and the statistical chances of ever catching his killer would plummet. We had an even shorter window to find Bishop. By tomorrow morning he’d be sitting pretty somewhere over the Atlantic, and whatever role he’d played in this mystery would probably stay a mystery.

  I was contemplating hitting the streets of Bayport and wandering until we stumbled onto a new lead when my phone buzzed. I looked down, saw Bay Breeze Inn pop up on the caller ID, and hit speaker. “Frank Hardy.”

  “Hey, Frank, it’s Sophie over at Bay Breeze. Just wanted to let you know that Mr. Bishop just got back and went to his room,” Sophie’s bubbly voice chirped into the room over the speaker.

  I looked up at Joe, who was already pulling his jacket on, ready to roll for the Bay Breeze.

  “That’s great, Sophie, thanks!”

  “Sure thing,” she said. “Mr. Bishop sure is a popular guy for such a sourpuss. Someone else came by from the museum looking for him too.”

  My antennae shot up.

  “Was it Mr. Lakin? You know, the history teacher from Bayport High?” I blurted. If it was our fugitive teacher, Sophie could have just broken the whole case open for us.

  “You mean the old guy with tacky thrift-store suits?” Sophie asked.

  “Yeah, him!” I almost shouted in anticipation.

  “Nah,” she said, popping her gum and bursting our balloon.

  “It was some other guy. Real big guy too. He had some kind of military tattoo on his arm.”

  SHANGHAIED

  16

  JOE

  REAL BIG GUY WITH A military tattoo on his arm? Ding. The phone call from the Bay Breeze just got a lot more interesting—the guy Sophie had described sounded like somebody else we knew.

  “Was his name Bernie, Bernie Blank?” Frank asked Sophie.

  “He didn’t say, just said he was from the museum and told me to tell Mr. Bishop he’d be waiting at Barnacle Bill’s. Said Mr. Bishop’d know what it was about,” she replied. Barnacle Bill’s was the local dive on the pier across from the arcade.

  “You want me to ring up Mr. Bishop’s room for you?” Sophie asked.

  “Nah, I think we’d rather surprise him. Thanks, Sophie, we owe you one.” Frank clicked off.

  We might have just gotten a huge break in the case, but Frank looked apprehensive. Our last attempt to talk to Bernie hadn’t exactly gone smoothly.

  “Sophie was right about Bishop being a popular guy,” I said. “It seems like everybody on the museum side of this case wanted to meet him.”

  Frank frowned. “Yeah, and it hasn’t turned out too well for them either. One’s dead and another’s missing. I wonder what’s in store for Bernie.”

  “Well, at least we know he can defend himself,” I joked, but Frank didn’t seem to appreciate my attempt at humor.

  “If it is Bernie, what do you think he wants with Bishop?” I asked, trying to piece together how the intimidating ex-soldier fit into our puzzle.

  “Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Frank replied.

  “Well, we’ve got two hot leads at two different locations. Only way to follow them both is to split up. I’ll take Bernie, you go after Bishop,” I offered. I knew my brother wasn’t excited about the possibility of accidentally surprising Bernie after what happened the last time one of us snuck up on him.

  “I don’t like it, Joe,” Frank said. “I think we should stick together.”

  “I don’t like it either, but we’re running out of time, and this is the only chance we have to stay on top of both leads,” I reminded him.

  Frank thought about it for a second before conceding.

  “Fine, but don’t get too close and don’t stick your neck out with Bernie or anyone else. Just keep an eye on him and see what he does,” he cautioned. I didn’t like seeing him stressing over me, but it’s good knowing your brother is looking out for you.

  “That’s the plan, bro. I like my neck even more than I like your
s,” I joked, hoping to lighten the mood. “Besides, if he’s at Barnacle Bill’s, the arcade is the perfect place to pull surveillance. There will be plenty of other people around, and even if he spots me, there’s nothing suspicious about me wasting quarters in the arcade.”

  “Stay safe,” he said, nodding reluctantly. “The Bay Breeze is just a few blocks from the pier. Any sign of trouble, holler and I’m there.”

  “You too and likewise,” I told him.

  Frank fixed me with a serious stare. “Now let’s crack this thing wide open.”

  I smiled. That’s what I wanted to hear. “Let’s do it.”

  Frank headed left toward the Bay Breeze, and I headed right toward the pier where Barnacle Bill’s was. Unfortunately, Bernie wasn’t there. I posted myself by the pinball machines and wasted a few quarters like I’d told Frank I would, but there was no sign of Bernie. We were running out of time and I was running out of patience, so I ducked my head inside the Barnacle for a closer look and then went right ahead and asked a couple of the locals when it was clear Bernie wasn’t there. They said Bernie had gotten a call and taken off before I got there. I sure would have liked to know who was on the other end of the line and what it was they said. Out of ideas, I headed for the Bay Breeze to meet up with Frank and see if he’d had better luck finding Bishop.