The Battle of Bayport (9 page)

Bolstered by my brother's confidence, I headed for Mr. Lakin's classroom. I walked in the door just before the bell and was greeted with yet another surprise—a classroom full of kids but no teacher. Mr. Lakin was known for his punctuality. He was always on time, and he demanded the same of his students. He locked the door the second the bell rang, and if you were a half second late, well, then you were out of luck. This time, though, the bell rang and the classroom door remained open. Mr. Lakin was a no-show.

A minute later Mr. Carr came in and told us the class was canceled. He wouldn't say why. Everybody started buzzing and speculating that it had something to do with the Don's murder. I chased after Mr. Carr to find out more, but he told me he wasn't at liberty to say. I thought about taking the opportunity to ask Mr. Carr some questions about his involvement in the reenactment, since his name had made our suspect list as well, but I figured tracking down Mr. Lakin was the higher priority.

I got my answer about Mr. Lakin's absence a minute later when I accidentally ran into Chief Olaf coming out of the principal's office. I tried heading in the opposite direction to avoid him, but . . .

“Hardy!” the Chief yelled.

I wasn't quick enough.

“Yes, sir.” I turned to face him with the same guilty look I usually get around the chief even when I haven't done anything wrong. It was habit, I guess.

“Don't worry, Frank, you're not in trouble,” he reassured me . . . sort of. “Yet.”

“Is this about Mr. Lakin not showing up for class?” I asked, hoping to take advantage of the chief's good (i.e., not awful) mood to gain some information.

“Unfortunately, yes,” he replied uneasily. “I know he's something of a mentor to you, and I was hoping he might have said something to you that will help us find him.”

“He's missing?” I asked in alarm.

“I'm afraid he is.” The chief looked disturbed. “He stood me up at the station for a follow-up interview during the break in his schedule at one and then didn't turn up for his classes. We have to assume he's fled.”

“You have evidence that he did it?” I asked, my stomach dropping.

“You know I can't comment on that, Frank. But innocent people don't usually go on the run from the police. It doesn't look good. I'm sorry.” Chief Olaf put a hand on my shoulder. “If you do hear from him, I want you to tell him to come in, and then you call me immediately. I've known Rollie for a long time, but if this thing turns into a manhunt, I won't be able to help him.”

The chief sighed deeply and walked off looking anguished. This case was taking a real toll on him. I knew how he felt. I also knew how much the museum meant to Mr. Lakin. If he'd taken off, then the situation must really be desperate. Especially with a sick wife in the hospital. Chief Olaf was right. It didn't look good.

I started back down the hall to find Joe and break the news. I was about to pass Mr. Lakin's classroom when I stopped. The door had been left open a crack. I looked back over my shoulder. Chief Olaf was gone, and there weren't any teachers in sight. The opportunity was too inviting to ignore.

I slid in the door and did a quick survey of Mr. Lakin's desk. I didn't expect to find much. Mr. Lakin's pretty neat. The drawers were locked, no surprise there, and there wasn't a lot on the desk itself, but sometimes a little can be plenty. A small white card poked out from between the pages of a compact notepad full of Mr. Lakin's indecipherable chicken-scratch scribbles.

I flipped the pad open to find a familiar business card with the name
DIRK BISHOP
and the words
ANTIQUES & ANTIQUITIES
embossed in gold. Mr. Lakin had scrawled four barely legible words on the piece of paper beneath the card. It took me a few seconds to decipher what it said: “Bay Breeze Inn—Noon.”

I studied the page. It looked like Mr. Lakin had planned to meet Bishop this afternoon just an hour before he failed
to show up at the police station. If he'd made it to the meeting at the Bay Breeze, then Dirk Bishop may have been the last person to see him before he disappeared.

What did Bishop want to see Mr. Lakin about? And what could have happened at that meeting to compel Mr. Lakin to vanish?

I stared at Bishop's business card, hoping it would provide the answer. Something about the card was bothering me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Sunlight from the window glinted off the embossed letters in a flash of gold.

I smiled. We were going to have a talk with our snooty English visitor.

I
WAS SITTING ON THE
wall in front of the school, still trying to make sense of all our new information, when Frank burst through the door yelling.

“Mr. Lakin's gone! The police think he fled. I don't know where he went, but I think I know who might.”

Before I knew it, Frank had made the dash all the way across the courtyard to the wall and was dragging me along after him, still talking.

“We've got to get to the Bay Breeze Inn. I'll explain on the way.”

Frank wasn't wasting any time, and for good reason.

“The business card you found on Mr. Lakin's desk makes Bishop a direct link between the victim and the prime suspect,” I agreed with Frank after he brought me up to speed.

Yup, the rude British antiques dealer we'd had the displeasure of meeting after the reenactment had just turned into a major player in our mystery. He had come to America to meet with Don Sterling, but Sterling was killed during the reenactment around the same time Bishop arrived, and the man we'd told him to talk to instead was Mr. Lakin. Judging from Frank's discovery, Bishop had taken our advice.

“If their meeting took place, it was one degree of separation from Mr. Lakin's vanishing act,” Frank said.

“Which means Bishop might know what happened to him,” I added.

“Whatever went down at that meeting may hold the key to the whole mystery,” Frank confirmed.

Frank had uncovered our biggest lead, and we followed it to the Bay Breeze Inn, a quaint little hotel a short walk from the harbor where the
Resolve
was docked. Sophie Drew, a Bayport High kid who'd graduated the year before, was working the front desk. She recognized us from school and greeted us with a big smile.

“Sure, the snobby English guy,” Sophie said perkily when I asked if Mr. Bishop was staying there. “He checked in last night. I haven't seen him around today, though.”

She tried ringing his room for us. No answer. We thanked her and stepped outside to try the international phone number on Bishop's business card. The voice that picked up had Bishop's distinctive proper British accent, but it was only a
recording. The message said he would be back in London on Tuesday night.

“Tuesday night! He isn't planning on staying long if he's supposed to be back in England tomorrow,” I said with concern.

Frank did some quick math. “London is five hours ahead of us, and it's a seven-hour flight. If he plans to be back in London tomorrow night, that means he's got to be flying out tomorrow morning.”

“That doesn't give us much time to find him before he wraps up whatever business he had with Don Sterling and Mr. Lakin and hightails it out of town,” I said, my concern growing.

“Whatever that business was, it must have been important enough for him to fly all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and then turn around and fly all the way back two days later,” Frank observed.

“Not much of a vacation, is it?” I asked, not that either of us really thought he was here on vacation. The question was, why was he here and how did it fit with Don Sterling's murder and Mr. Lakin's disappearance?

“So why would an antiques dealer go to all that trouble? None of the antiques on display in the museum are for sale,” Frank quizzed me.

“You think the Don was trying to sell artifacts from the
Resolve
behind the museum's back? We know from Calvin that he needed cash,” I said, picking up his line of thought.

“If Sterling was selling something, Bishop must have thought it was pretty darn valuable for him to go to all the trouble and expense of coming here,” Frank said, running his fingers over the fancy embossed gold lettering on Bishop's business card. “I've got a feeling I might know what he's after. I think it's time we find out more about our mysterious guest.”

There was a computer for guests in the lobby of the Bay Breeze Inn, and Sophie gave us the okay to use it. We sat down and typed in a search for “Dirk Bishop, Antiques and Antiquities, London.” There was nothing unusual at first, but a little bit of online detective work revealed that Dirk Bishop was more than just your typical antiques dealer. He specialized in a very specific kind of antique—sunken British treasure.

His name popped up in a London
Times
article about the attempted recovery of an eighteenth-century treasure from a British East India Company cargo ship that had been carrying more than a ton of gold and silver ingots when it sank near the British Isles. The article said the salvage team claimed to have come up empty, but just a few weeks later Bishop and one of the treasure divers were suspected of illegally dealing similar gold ingots on the international black market. He had also been investigated a lot closer to home on our side of the pond for violating the US Abandoned Shipwreck Act by salvaging artifacts from another sunken British cargo vessel off the coast of Rhode Island.

“So why would a treasure hunter from London travel all the way to America for a meeting with Don Sterling in tiny little Bayport?” Frank asked with a gleam in his eye.

“When we told Bishop that the Don was dead, he wanted to know who else he could talk to about items recovered when the
Resolve
was restored,” I recalled. “And he sounded all weasel-like when he said it too!”

“I don't think he wanted to talk about muskets and sabers,” Frank hinted.

“But he would have been very interested in the gold coin Calvin found in Don Sterling's coin tray,” I said. Frank nodded.

“He would if it was real. Calvin said Sterling decided not to sue the historical society to get back the stuff they found on the
Resolve
, but it doesn't make any sense that a broke guy with the Don's reputation would just give up on a fortune in valuable artifacts.”

“Not unless he had a line on an even bigger fortune in valuable artifacts the museum hadn't found,” I said, giving Frank the answer he wanted to hear. I liked the ring of it.

“Okay, let's say the Don did find a treasure that could be worth maybe even millions of dollars. Maybe somebody else found it too,” Frank theorized.

“Then Calvin might be wrong about someone killing his stepdad for the money, after all,” I jumped in to finish the thought.

We chewed on that for a minute before I reluctantly
brought the theory full circle. “Don Sterling wasn't the only one involved in the museum who desperately needed money.”

“Mrs. Lakin's hospital bills,” Frank said, sounding deflated.

It didn't feel great to be right about the documents we'd found in Mr. Lakin's old office aboard the
Resolve
maybe being important, but the debt gave him real incentive to get his hands on some quick cash by whatever means necessary.

“Both Don Sterling and Mr. Lakin needed money, right? And if Bishop really is in Bayport on a treasure hunt, the Don may have found a boatload of it before someone killed him. . . .”

“Or a shipload,” Frank corrected, but the interruption lacked his usual enthusiasm.

We were both on the same disturbing train of thought, and it wasn't a smooth ride: If the Don had found a shipload of treasure before he was murdered and a day later the prime murder suspect met with a black market treasure dealer, then skipped out on the police, well, it starts to make the prime suspect look pretty suspicious. We knew Mr. Lakin had the means (his experience firing a gun on horseback in the mounted police) and the opportunity (firing a pistol at the Don during the reenactment), and now, because of his money troubles, the gold would give him a solid motive as well. It made his disappearance right after meeting with Bishop seem even less like the action of an innocent man. Even worse, if Mr. Lakin had fled, it probably meant that
whatever business he had with Bishop was already finished. And if they had taken the money and run, then we might never find the killer or the treasure in Bayport.

I felt a charge of excitement along with my sadness at how Mr. Lakin's role in the mystery was shaping up. The existence of Bayport's legendary lost treasure suddenly seemed like more than just a fun little-kid fantasy, and the possibility that Don Sterling's murder may have had something to do with it was turning into a plausible theory.

“The Gold theory,” Frank said aloud.

So now we had a theory. What we didn't have was a way to investigate it further. Not until Mr. Lakin or Dirk Bishop turned up. Until then we were stalled.

Frank asked Sophie to call us as soon as Mr. Bishop came in, explaining that the museum staff wanted to surprise him with a thank-you gift for coming all the way from London. When you think about it, Frank's story stretched the truth only a little—my brother technically was part of the museum staff after all, and we really did want to surprise Bishop. If he was involved in the Don's murder and he knew we were onto him, he wouldn't wait around to greet us.

Time was running out, and so were our leads. Stumped, we decided to employ one of our most scientific investigative problem-solving strategies: one of Aunt Trudy's home-cooked meals.

Detectives have to eat too, and I've found that a full belly can do wonders for mental clarity. We'd made breakthroughs
on more than one mystery while hashing things out across the kitchen table and chowing down on our aunt's cooking.