by Matt Lincoln
Martha led them all the way to the back of the vast library, to a wall of drawers tucked away in the corner away from where any wandering tourists were likely to find it.
“What’s this?” Ethan asked when the three of them came to a halt in front of the drawers, raising his eyebrows at them.
Tess noticed that there were little keyholes in the centers of all the drawers.
“This is where Henry likes to keep our oldest and most sensitive documents,” Martha explained, shuffling around in her pockets and pulling out an enormous keyring peppered with what seemed like a hundred small keys.
Though all the keys looked identical to Tessa, the manager picked one of them out without too much trouble and opened a drawer near her in the lower left side of the wall.
Then she gasped and moved backward quickly, dropping the keys so that they clanged against the metal drawer and dangled there in the keyhole where she’d left them.
“It’s… it’s not possible,” she stammered, shaking her head and staring wide-eyed at the drawer. “I left it right here. I checked. I triple checked! I just don’t understand.”
Tessa moved quickly over to the drawer and peered inside. It was empty, which was no doubt what had alarmed the museum manager.
“There’s nothing here,” Tessa said quietly, looking back at Ethan, who looked almost frozen himself as he stared at it from a few paces away from Martha.
The MBLIS agent was ashen-faced, and Tessa knew then just how much he’d gotten his hopes up since Martha had told them that she still had the original journal tucked away in the museum. Tessa couldn’t blame him. He’d been looking for it for so long and had so many false starts in his search already that to be within such close proximity to the journal only to have it ripped away once more must have been awful.
“We’ll figure out what happened,” Tessa said soothingly, crossing over to him and placing a hand comfortingly on his elbow. “We’ll track it down, don’t worry.”
But Tessa was worried herself, regardless of what she told her companions. Martha had said that the journal had been there not that long ago, which meant that someone was watching the museum as well as her home.
“When did you say that you checked the drawer last?” Ethan asked. He shook his head to clear it and turned his attention to Martha, after practically having to rip his eyes off of the empty drawer.
“Right after you called, maybe three weeks ago?” Martha conjectured, unable to tear her own eyes off of the drawer. “I don’t know why I haven’t checked it since then. I thought about it, but if I’m honest, I think that a part of me was afraid of what I might find. Or not find, if you will.”
Her shoulders slumped as she leaned back against the wall opposite the drawers, slipping down into an awkward sitting position on the floor.
“It’s alright,” Tessa said, crouching down beside the old woman and thinking that Martha was in good shape for her age, to be able to sit like that. “No one blames you for this. You were scared. It’s not your fault. The important thing is that we’re here now, and you’re talking about it with us. Telling us everything, right?”
“Yes, yes, I’m telling you everything,” Martha assured her, her voice starting to quiver again. “But how do we know that they’re not watching us now?”
A chill ran up and down Tessa’s spine as she considered this possibility. She looked back at Ethan and saw the worry on his face instantly.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Ethan said quickly. “And the police know what’s going on now. All we do know is that these people somehow have access to your home and to this area of the museum. Can you think of any way that could be the case? They would need to have keys, wouldn’t they? Or to have taken yours at some point and possibly made copies?”
“I… I don’t know,” Martha stammered, shaking her head. “I just don’t know.”
She buried her face in her arms, and her shoulder began to shake again with her sobs, and Tessa sighed and looked back at Ethan again.
“Maybe we should just go back to the bed-and-breakfast now,” she suggested with a shrug.
“Not yet,” Ethan said, shaking his head as he looked at his phone again. “The police are there talking with Paulina now, and I don’t want to invite ourselves to set up shop there for a witness protection situation until she knows exactly what she’s getting herself into. Besides, I have a few more questions about this place.”
Ethan knelt down beside Martha along with Tessa and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Are you okay?” Tessa asked the old woman, giving Ethan a weary look. “Do you think you could answer a few more questions about the situation?”
“I… I can try…” Martha sniffled, raising her head slightly and wiping her nose on the sleeve of her purple sweater.
“Thank you, Martha,” Ethan said, giving her a warm and inviting smile that Tessa knew well by then. “We really do appreciate your cooperation. So, my first question would be, who all has access to these drawers?”
He gestured back at the wall of steel-cut drawers opposite them. Only the one remained open.
“Just Henry and me,” Martha said with another sniffle. “And I give the keys to Pierce sometimes so he can look through them.”
“Do you think Pierce could be working with these people at all?” Ethan asked. “How long has he been working for you?”
“Oh, no, that would be impossible,” Martha said, shaking her head and scoffing at the notion. “Pierce has been here for almost two years now. He’s a good kid, and he wouldn’t get wrapped up in anything like this. Besides, he keeps asking me why I’m giving you the run-around, and he’s been annoyed with the whole situation. I don’t think he would do that if he knew anything. Why draw more attention to it?”
“Understood,” Ethan said with a nod, seeming to be satisfied with this defense of the manager’s intern. “So then, only one option remains. Well, two, really. Either they took the keys from Henry, and he’s not with his grandson after all, or they’ve found some other way to infiltrate the museum.”
Martha gave another sob at this suggestion, though to Tessa’s relief, she didn’t bury her face in her arms again.
“Oh, Henry,” she cried, shaking her head in disbelief. “How did I not see it before?”
“It’s alright,” Ethan said, patting her shoulder awkwardly. “As you said before, he left before any of this happened. You had no reason to connect the two events.”
“What about the key card?” Tessa asked, suddenly remembering that Martha had to use one to get into the door leading to the library. “Have any of those gone missing? Who has cards that let you get into this room?”
“That’s right. Those aren’t as easily duplicable as regular old keys,” Ethan said thoughtfully. “Or at least, I imagine they wouldn’t be. I don’t pretend to know much about technology.”
“Oh, no, all our employees have them,” Martha said matter-of-factly. “And they're not duplicable, as you said. I would know if someone used anything other than the existing key cards to get in here. So would the security guards.”
“Alright, so they had to have taken the card of someone who works here,” Ethan mused. “Would you be able to tell who opened the door at any given time? What if they took Henry’s card?”
“Yes, there’s a log of who scans their card and when,” Martha confirmed, narrowing her eyes as she thought about this. “Though I honestly can’t remember the last time that anyone had to check.”
“So you don’t regularly look at those logs?” Tessa asked, exchanging an excited look with Ethan. Perhaps if they did look, Henry would show up as being on the premises when he clearly wasn’t.
“No, why would we?” Martha asked with a shrug. “We’re a small operation, and no one really cares much about us. I hadn’t even thought to check.”
“Would these people know that?” Ethan asked excitedly.
“I don’t know how I would be able to answer that question,” the manager scoffed. “I
’ve never even seen them. I just read the messages they leave for me at home.”
“Right, understood,” Ethan said with a curt nod. “Well, can we take a look at these logs? Where are they kept?”
“Right over here on this computer,” Martha sighed, heaving herself up and crossing over to an old desktop on a table that was tucked behind one of the bookshelves. Tessa and Ethan quickly followed her over there as she turned on the machine.
“What are we looking at?” Ethan asked as the manager maneuvered her mouse over an application at the bottom of the screen and opened it, revealing a long stream of white characters set over a black screen.
“This is the log,” she explained, scrolling down to the bottom and pointing at a long number on the last line. “These numbers here are our employee ID numbers. This one is mine, and here’s the timestamp. This shows that my ID card opened the door to the library not too long ago when I brought you in here to look for the journal.”
“Do you know Henry’s ID number?” Tessa asked.
“Not by heart, but I can look it up,” Martha said, maneuvering her mouse over to yet another application and opening it to reveal all the museum employees’ faces next to their corresponding names and numbers.
Tessa saw Martha herself, followed by Henry, Pierce, the security guards, and a smattering of other employees who she recognized from when she perused the museum website.
“Here,” Martha said, hovering her mouse over Henry’s number, scrutinizing it, and then flipping back to the log. “And there it is! It looks like it’s been used several times since Henry left.”
Martha’s voice shook as she said this, and it was clear that she was even more spooked now than she had been before. Tessa looked back at Ethan and felt that chill run up and down her spine again.
“What’s this?” Ethan asked sharply, pointing down at a new line that had just appeared at the bottom of the screen.
Martha froze, and her mouth dropped open.
“That’s… that’s Henry’s ID card,” she said, the words coming out stilted and shaky. “It was just used to open the library door.”
19
Ethan
I froze as I stared at the screen, Martha’s words echoing in my head.
She was right, I realized. That was Henry’s ID number and the number for the library door. And the time stamp was just a moment ago. Someone had used it to enter the library while we were talking.
Tessa opened her mouth as if to say something, and Martha made a terrified whimpering noise. I shook my head slightly at each of them and pressed a finger to my lips.
Then I listened hard. The library was large, but I hoped I could still manage to hear something—someone’s footsteps, perhaps, as they snuck up on us.
But I couldn’t hear anything.
I put my hand to my side, where I kept my gun, and I pulled it out before whirling around to come face-to-face with the barrel of someone else’s gun.
There stood three men in ski masks, dressed in black, all with weapons of their own. Each had his gun trained on one of us.
Martha let out another whimpering noise as she began to cry again. Tessa stiffened beside me.
“My name is Ethan Marston, and I’m a federal officer with MBLIS,” I said slowly, pointing my own gun straight back at the goon in front of me. “Shooting at me is a federal offense. I’d think twice if I were you.”
None of the men responded, and the two that were pointing their guns at Tessa and Martha stepped forward to stand closer to their respective targets.
“Watch it,” I growled, waving my own gun in either direction to indicate that I was watching the other goons, too, not just the one opposite me.
I was already kicking myself internally for getting Tessa into another one of these dangerous situations. Hadn’t she told me this would happen? That trouble and excitement had a knack for following me wherever I went, regardless of whether I wanted it or not?
Diane had told me as much during our brief conversation on the phone earlier when I’d stepped out of Martha’s office to see if we could make this an official case and get her some well-needed protection.
Of course, this happened, she had said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. I knew I shouldn’t have let you go. Now you’ll have to stick it out there and see this case through before coming home to help us on the Holland case. I guess we’ll just have to figure out how to manage.
She’d been happy to contact the local police for me, however, when I described to her just how dire the situation was turning out to be, with Henry mysteriously missing and Martha at her wit's end. Clearly, I’d spoken too soon. Now it was even worse.
I took a step toward the man in front of me.
“Drop your weapons,” I instructed. “Drop them now.”
“Or what?” the guy across from me sneered, and I could hear the expression in his voice even though I couldn’t see his face beneath the ski mask. “You’ll shoot me? Then my friends will shoot your friends, and we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?”
I bit my lip. I had to admit that he had a point there. I didn’t want Tessa or Martha or anyone else getting shot because I just had to track down an old pirate ship.
“Alright, so I guess we’re at a standstill,” I said airily, trying to sound like I wasn’t as concerned by this situation as I actually was. “How about we talk a little? Who hired you?”
“Like we’re going to tell you that,” the guy scoffed, rolling his eyes, and I could at least see that beneath the slits in the ski mask.
I closely studied each of the men. The one in front of me was slightly above average in height, with blue eyes. He had a lean build but didn’t appear skinny. The guy to his left was about an inch shorter, and he was skinny. His eyes were green, though a lighter shade than Tessa’s. Both of them were white. The third guy was shorter and stockier and looked to be Hispanic. He had brown eyes.
I committed all of this to memory. If these guys got away, I was going to have to relate their descriptions to the police later, and to Diane, and maybe even another agency. Who knew what was really going on here? Somehow I doubted that Walldale was much of a crime hotspot in normal times.
“Come on, guys, we’re going to need to figure something out, or we’re going to be standing here all day,” I pointed out with a lazy tone in my voice and a shrug, though I didn’t waver my gun from the man in front of me for fear that he would take the opportunity to take me out.
“Easy,” the guy said with a shrug of his own, his voice muffled by his ski mask. “There’s three of us and one of you. We win. It’s simple math.”
“I think you need to check your counting skills,” Tessa quipped back, and I groaned internally.
Wasn’t it bad enough that I’d dragged her into this mess without her putting herself in even more danger? Her smart mouth was part of what I liked so much about her, but it wasn’t exactly going to help in this situation.
“Oh, I’m sorry, do you have a gun, sweetheart?” the shorter guy asked in a low, gruff voice.
“I know enough about math not to count you,” the guy across from me added.
Anger gurgled inside me that they dared talk to her like that.
“Look, the police already know about you,” I said, taking a different tactic now. “For all we know, they could be on their way here now to interview the museum’s employees. And the place is open right now! Do you really want to open fire indoors in the middle of the day around a bunch of tourists?”
The taller man narrowed his eyes at me, the slits in his ski mask moving along with his facial features. He wasn’t sure whether to believe me, I realized. That was better than him dismissing what I had to say out of hand.
“They could be here any minute,” Tessa piped in, helpfully this time. “What would your bosses say if you get caught?”
The two shorter men exchanged a nervous look, and both of their hands wavered on their guns. I didn’t dare take advantage of this, however, for fear that the rema
ining goon would shoot Tessa or Martha in retribution for my own shot.
As if on cue, a shot rang out. My ears rang, and the world started swimming around me as I tried to figure out where it had come from.
I hadn’t shot my gun. I knew that much. But none of the three goons looked like they had shot either, and they all had shocked looks in their eyes that mirrored my own.
One of the goons, the Hispanic one, stumbled to the floor as blood pooled around him on the beige carpet. The other two whirled around, as curious as I was to see where the shot had come from.
To my surprise, the young, scrawny security guard, Jimmy, was standing there holding a gun. His knees were wobbling, and he looked like he wanted to be literally anywhere else in the world, but he had gotten the shot in, alright.
“We… we keep a gun in a safe downstairs…” Martha stammered, barely able to get the words out, much as I was barely able to hear her over the ringing in my ears. “They’re all trained to use it, but I never thought….”
Quickly, I leaped into action, not wanting to let this opportunity pass us by while the remaining men were distracted by Jimmy.
“Run,” I hissed to Tessa. “Take her and run. Then call the police.”
She hesitated but then seemed to remember her promise to me earlier that, should something like this happen, she would do as I told her so we could hopefully get out of the situation as quickly and painlessly as possible.
She grabbed Martha and hauled her up from the desk chair, and the two of them quickly disappeared in the sea of bookshelves.
The taller goon whirled around, then, seeing that Tessa and Martha were gone. Now that he was facing me again, gun in hand, I shot him.
He fell, the shot landing in his shoulder right above his heart, but as he fell down, he shot haphazardly back at me, only holding his gun with one hand now.
I dove under the desk to avoid the shot and heard the computer screen on the desktop crack as the bullet landed where my head had been just moments before.