The Battle of Bayport (5 page)

E
VIDENCE I'D NEARLY GOTTEN KILLED
trying to protect!

Bernie looked mortified as he fumbled to recover the tin canister and put the cap back on, but the damage had already been done. Oil had soaked the flintlocks and trigger guards of a lot of the remaining muskets. If there was trace evidence that might help us link the muskets back to the shooters, there was a good chance that's where it would be. Or would have been if Bernie hadn't poured oil all over it.

“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.

“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
.

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.