by Matt Lincoln
“No, I’m not threatening you,” the old woman said quickly, her tone bordering on panic now. “I’m warning you. There’s a difference.”
I narrowed my eyes at this.
“Warning me?” I repeated. “What do you mean you’re warning me? Warning me about what?”
There was only silence in response.
“Look, you’ve been dodging our calls for weeks, and we know that there’s more going on here than meets the eye,” I continued when I realized that she wasn’t going to respond. “It’ll be better for all of us if you just tell us what we need to know now. Get this done quicker and more painlessly.”
“Nothing about this is painless,” the manager snapped, and she sounded like she was speaking more to herself than to Tessa and me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, meeting Tessa’s eyes as we both eagerly awaited an answer. “Look, we’re going to figure it out eventually anyway, so you may as well help us and work with us. We can protect you this way.”
“I’m under no illusions about you being here on official agency business,” the manager scoffed, and she wasn’t exactly wrong about that. “I don’t care who you are. I’m calling the police. You can be their problem now.”
There was a note of finality in her tone, and there was a rustling sound as she picked up her landline to make the call.
“Hold on!” I called, rapping on the door with my knuckles violently in an attempt to get her to stop. “If you think the police are going to respond any differently to me than your security guards, you’re mistaken. And by involving them, you’ll just be drawing even more attention to whatever you’ve got going on here than you have already! And you don’t want that, do you?”
This was a gamble. I didn’t actually know that this was true about the police, considering that I wasn’t actually here on MBLIS business. Sure, I could maybe get Diane to go along with it in normal times. But who’s to say I could even get her on the phone at a time like this? Her focus was rightfully elsewhere.
Even so, Martha hesitated, or at least I didn’t hear her calling for the police.
“Look, I know you’re probably not the big gun behind this operation,” I continued. “No offense, but you don’t strike me as the type. I get it: you got caught up in something you don’t understand, and now you don’t know what to do. I can help you. You just have to let me.”
There was another period of silence, and then I felt the door beginning to swing open, and I took a step back. Martha Willis’s mousy little face poked through the sliver that was now between the door and the wall.
“What can you do to protect me?” she breathed as if she was afraid that someone would overhear.
Tessa glanced back at the other doors, but she didn’t seem to notice anyone there or any light under the doors of the other offices. I remembered that the museum didn’t have very many employees anyway, and the rest of the employees were probably downstairs dealing with visitors and giving tours of the museum. The only ones who probably stuck to their offices on a regular basis were Martha and Henry, but he wasn’t anywhere to be found, was he?
“That depends on what you can give us and what exactly is going on,” I pointed out. “But if there’s any real danger going on here, I promise that we’ll be able to shield you from it. As far as any possible charges against you, that depends on what you’ve done and who you’ve been cooperating with, as well as how much you’ve helped them.”
“I don’t know very much, I swear,” Martha said, shaking her head as her voice started to quiver. “I was just trying to stay out of trouble… and now it just keeps finding me some more.”
“If that’s truly the case, then we shouldn’t have much trouble,” I assured her with a nod. “But if it turns out that you’re still withholding any information from me down the line, that will come back to bite you. Do you understand? Either you’re fully honest with me now, or I can’t protect you to the extent that you may want or need, for practical reasons as much as anything else.”
“I… I understand,” the manager stammered, opening the door wide enough for Tessa and me to slip through. Her office was dark, and the window shades were drawn down as if she didn’t want anyone to know that she was there.
“Thank you,” I said, nodding to her again as she gestured for us to take a seat in the chairs that were sitting across from her desk.
We did so, and Martha sat back down behind the desk without turning on the lights. Papers and books were scattered across her desktop in front of an old MacBook, and the entire office gave me absent-minded professor vibes.
I wondered if this was the way things usually looked, or if the office was now a reflection of her frazzled and nervous state of mind given the funny business that had been going on lately at the museum, whatever that funny business was. Well, I thought that it was high time that I figured that out.
“So,” Martha said curtly, folding her hands in front of her on her desk. “You believe that you are a direct descendent of Lord Jonathan Finch-Hatton, is that correct?”
“Yes,” I said, a little taken off guard by this question. “I mean no, it’s not just a belief. It’s a fact. I believe I forwarded you the appropriate paperwork containing my blood work, crossed with the DNA extracted from Finch-Hatton’s remains.”
“Yes, I saw the paperwork,” Martha said curtly, the corner of her mouth quivering as if this distressed her in some way.
“And you don’t believe it,” I said flatly. This wasn’t a question. It was clear by her demeanor what her position was.
“It’s not necessarily that I don’t believe it, Agent Marston. It’s just that I don’t particularly care,” Martha said, shifting uncomfortably in her seat and avoiding my gaze. “That journal has been the property of this museum for decades now, and as far as I’m concerned, distant relatives have no claim on historical artifacts such as this. The public has an interest in places like this maintaining control over such items for educational purposes.”
Now, this was exactly the kind of argument that I had been anticipating originally from the museum. Why wouldn’t they want to keep their artifacts? Artifacts that people like Henry had no doubt spent an inordinate amount of time and care tracking down, researching, and educating others about. To just hand them over to some random guy who claimed to be a distant relative of the original owner would set a dangerous precedent about the ownership and preservation of such artifacts.
But I knew now that this wasn’t the real reason that the museum manager had given me the runaround. The journal’s miraculous appearance in a package addressed to me, later found to be a fake, paired with Martha’s over-the-top reaction to the knowledge that it had been sent to me, proved that well enough. Add to that her thinly-veiled threats against me, and we had something more than an intellectual debate about the rightful ownership of historical artifacts on our hands.
“Come on, Ms. Willis, let’s not kid ourselves here,” I said, shaking my head at her and leaning back in my seat. “That’s a decent argument, I guess, but it’s not why you’ve been giving us the runaround. I thought it was at first, sure, but then the journal showed up on my doorstep. Or rather, MBLIS’s doorstep. Clearly, whoever sent it to me didn’t have my home address. Or they wanted my colleagues to see it, for some reason. I’m still not sure which.”
The manager looked down at her hands, and though the lighting was dim from the drawn shade, I could still see that her knuckles were white, and her hands were clenched together. Her face was also white, and her features stricken.
“Look, you seemed more than a little surprised when you found out that Ethan found the journal,” Tessa added. “Or rather, that it was sent to him. Why don’t we talk about that a bit?”
“Yes, when I first opened the package, I’d assumed that you’d had a change of heart,” I told her. “But then, well, you made it more than clear that that wasn’t the case. Did you even know that it was missing?”
“It wasn’t missing,” M
artha spat. “It wasn’t missing at all. Your lie was a poorly considered one, Agent Marston.”
“My lie?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at her as I exchanged a bewildered look with Tessa. “Do you mean to tell me that the journal is still here, in the museum?”
“Of course it is,” Martha said curtly, sitting up a little straighter now and dawning a prideful expression on her face. “I would never let one of my artifacts slip away out from under my nose like that. Who do you think I am, exactly?”
“I’m sure you’re an excellent museum manager,” Tessa said quickly. “It’s just that it’s clear you’re in over your head with something here. Why don’t you tell us about that?”
“Not so fast, young lady,” the manager snapped. “You’re not getting out of this one that easy. I just trapped you in your own lie. The journal was never sent to you. Otherwise, you’d still be accusing me of lying about having it here.”
Well, she had us on that one, though not in the way she thought.
“You’re sort of right and sort of wrong on that one,” I said, crossing my leg over my knee and folding my hands in my lap. “The journal was sent to me—or rather, a journal was sent to me. It wasn’t the one we thought it was, however.”
It was Martha’s turn to be taken aback.
“What?” she asked, shaking her head uncomprehendingly. “What do you mean by that? How can there be more than one journal?”
“Well, here’s the one I was sent,” I said, reaching into my jacket pocket and pulling out the fake journal, which I had made sure to grab before we left the bed-and-breakfast in anticipation of just this kind of scenario. I didn’t hand it to the manager, however, and I made sure not to tell her that this one was a fake, merely planting the idea in her head that one of them had to be.
Martha’s eyes lingered on the journal, widening with recognition when she saw its cover. The old book repairman from New Orleans, Percy, had been right when he said that this was an excellent copy, then. It must closely resemble the original for the manager to look so alarmed at the sight of it.
“Where did you get that?” she breathed, not taking her eyes off the journal as it lingered in my hand, hovering between her desk and my chair.
“I told you,” I said simply. “It was sent to me.”
“I… I…” she stammered, shaking her head. “It isn’t possible. We have the journal here. I double-checked right after you called, right after you told me this story the first time…”
Her voice trailed off as she no doubt tried to sort out the different possibilities of what was happening here. As far as she knew, the journal I had could be a fake. Or the museum’s copy could be the fake one. Or they could both be fake, or some other scenario that none of us had thought of yet.
This last thought concerned me the second that it occurred to me. My body had been buzzing with the possibility of being so close to the real journal since the second that Martha had mentioned its continued presence there in the museum. However, the idea that I could get my hands on it at long last only to be told for the second time that I had been swindled was not a pleasant thought.
I made a promise to myself then and there that I wouldn’t get my hopes up about any more iterations of Grendel’s journal until I had Percy or someone like him check it out for me. I knew, though, that were I to get my hands on it, I probably wouldn’t be successful in keeping my expectations tempered after all this time searching for it.
“There’s more,” I said, taking the journal between my hands and flipping to a random page, finding that most of the words on it were blacked out. “Take a look for yourself.”
I held the journal up with its spine pointing in my direction so that the museum manager could see the state of the journal’s contents without my having to hand it over to her.
She squinted at it in the dark and leaned forward to be able to see the pages better. When she realized what I was talking about, she gasped and clutched both of her hands to her chest.
“No,” she said, her tone horror-stricken as she sunk back into her seat without taking her eyes off the journal’s pages. “How many? How many pages are like that?”
“Most all of them,” I said, flipping through them for her to illustrate. “There’s nothing of use here. Nothing your students or visitors or scholars could learn from studying it, and certainly nothing that will help me track down the Dragon’s Rogue.”
“Unbelievable,” Martha said, shaking her head in disbelief. “It’s criminal. Truly criminal to desecrate a historical artifact, especially of this nature.”
“Well, at least we’re on the same page on that, so to speak,” I said dryly, and Tessa snickered beside me.
“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Martha said feverishly, shaking her head to clear it and hovering somewhere between standing and taking a seated position behind her desk. “There are two journals… at least two journals that we know of. Perhaps this one isn’t the real one… But what if they both aren’t real? And what if this one is the real one? Then what will we do? Oh, to desecrate an artifact like this! Henry will have a heart attack when he finds out.”
I glanced over at Tessa and saw my own thoughts mirrored on her face. It was time to put the museum manager out of her misery, at least for now. I was satisfied enough that she didn’t have anything to do with creating the fake journal herself. She was just an unwitting pawn in this whole thing, whatever this was.
“This one is a fake, don’t worry,” I said quickly. “I had an expert in New Orleans take a look at it when I was on assignment down there…”
“Oh, was it Percy?” Martha asked before I could finish.
“Uh, yes,” I said, blinking at her. Did all of these people know each other?
“And he told you that it was a fake?” she asked, back in a sitting position and leaning forward eagerly on her desk. “You’re certain that he told you that.”
“Absolutely,” I assured her with a nod. “This journal is a fake. The question remains, however, whether the one that you have here in the museum is genuine.”
“Right, right,” Martha said, breathing a sigh of relief and leaning back in her chair. “That’s good… I just wish Henry was here so that he could perform the evaluation himself. There’s no one else here who could do it properly. Perhaps I’ll have to send it down to Percy, then, as he already helped you with this one. Or I could fly him up here and have him look at it on sight. Yes, I think that would be better. Then we wouldn’t have to send it anywhere. And it would be good to see him. It’s been quite some time…”
She seemed to be speaking more to herself now than to Tessa and me, trying to gather her thoughts after taking in so much new and jarring information in a short amount of time. There was a deer-in-the-headlights look in her eye that confirmed this theory, and she wasn’t looking at us anymore, her gaze fixated on the edge of her desk in front of her.
“About Henry,” Tessa jutted in, leaning her elbow on the arm of her chair. “My friend George has been trying to get in contact with him about this, but he hasn’t been responding. That’s why we tried to communicate directly with you in the first place. We heard from Paulina that Henry is sick and staying with his grandson in Charleston. Is that true? Or is something else going on?”
“Why wouldn’t Henry be where he says he is?” Martha asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes at us. “What are you talking about?”
I studied the old woman closely and determined that there was real concern in her eyes. There was something else, though, too. I realized that it was fear. She hadn’t considered the possibility that Henry wasn’t in Charleston, but now that it had been offered to her, she feared that it was true.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “It’s just suspicious timing, isn’t it? That he ran off to stay with his grandson right before I started looking for the journal. And before… well, we haven’t gotten to who’s been threatening you yet, but now’s as good a time as any, isn’t it?”
“I… I…�
�� Martha stammered, staring open-mouthed at me. Clearly, she didn’t want to answer.
“Why don’t we start a little smaller?” Tessa asked, not unkindly. “Did Henry show any signs of illness before he left? Anything at all?”
Martha scrunched her gray brows together as she thought about this.
“I… well, now that you mention it, no, it was very sudden,” she admitted with a shrug and a slight shake of her head. “I just didn’t think very much of it at the time. He’s very old, you see. It wasn’t a stretch to believe that he was ill.”
“And did he tell you that he was sick himself?” Tessa asked. “Did he ask for time off in person, or did he call?”
“No, his grandson came in, actually,” Martha said, raising her eyebrows as she remembered this. “I do remember thinking it was a little odd. Henry hadn’t mentioned that he was in town, though he had told me about a grandson in Charleston many times before. Apparently, he’d been staying with Henry for some time to help him out, and now things had taken a turn for the worse, and he wanted to take him back home with him. I didn’t think much of it, other than concern for Henry’s health.”
“You didn’t think to go check on him before he left town?” Tessa asked, no doubt thinking as I was that if Martha and Henry really were that close, she would’ve done so.
“Of course I did,” Martha snapped, clearly offended that we thought she was unconcerned for Henry’s wellbeing. “But the grandson said that they had an appointment for him in Charleston later that day, and they needed to get going immediately. Also, I guess Henry didn’t want us to see him not feeling so well. He’s a proud man. That much was easy to believe.”
The museum manager leaned back and scrunched her face up in thought some more, no doubt reevaluating the whole interaction with the grandson in a new light now.
“Did Henry ever show you pictures of his grandson or anything?” I asked her. “Did you have any reason not to believe that it was him?”
“No, none,” Martha said, shaking her head and looking up at me as if she was coming out of a daze, having been lost in thought. “I mean, he had pictures of all his grandkids in his office, but those were of them as children. I wouldn’t be able to tell if it were a different man at that age.”