by Matt Lincoln
She was right, though I liked the look of the clear night sky above the ocean waves, the stars all shining down on us without a lot of light pollution this far out of the way from the rest of civilization.
“I think we were a little preoccupied when we got here,” I pointed out with a low chuckle.
“Well, you’re right about that,” she admitted. “God, I’m glad we found that kid in one piece, Ethan.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said honestly. “That would’ve been a real disaster. But you were great with him, and you really held your own against that last guy.”
“Told you I could take care of myself,” she teased, elbowing me playfully in the ribs. “You should take me on all of your missions.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said, though I thought that I might like that very much. Her uncle might have something to say about it, though, and I wouldn’t want to put her in harm’s way that often, or at all for that matter.
“So what were you going to tell me about before?” she asked after a few more moments had passed of us just enjoying the view and each other.
“Oh, right,” I said, clearing my throat and then launching into a recount of everything that I had learned from Joey about the Hollands, the museum, and the Dragon’s Rogue.
“Wow,” she breathed when I was finished, echoing what she had said about the view. “Well, that really is something, isn’t it?”
“Which part?” I asked with a laugh, thinking that it was all pretty damn crazy.
“Well, all of it,” she said. “But what really gets me is how big this organization these people have built is, and how strange it is that they’re looking for the same thing you are.”
“Yes, that is something,” I agreed, furrowing my brow as all the bad stuff came back to me. I’d almost forgotten about it, seeing Tessa and being there with her at that moment.
“Do you think your boss and the FBI will be able to track them down?” she asked. “I’d hate for this whole thing to drag out any longer for you guys.”
“Oh, I have a feeling it will, though I wish it wouldn’t, too,” I said with a low, humorless laugh. “I have a feeling that we’re going to be dealing with the Hollands and their ilk for a long while yet.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Tessa said, pursing her lips. “It would be too much to ask to take down a whole criminal syndicate on one vacation, I guess.”
I laughed for real at this, deep in my belly, and so hard that it shook. Part of it was the fatigue, I think, but it was also that the absurdity of the whole situation was really hitting me then. Something about the way Tessa had referred to this whole thing as a vacation, in that droll tone of hers, had really done me in.
Tessa laughed, too, nervously at first, as if she wasn’t sure why I was laughing so hard. But then she just went with it, and we were both there laughing so loud that the forensics team looked back over at us with a combination of confusion and interest.
“So, what do you think?” I asked when I’d recovered, glancing over at her as she finished off her own laughing fit.
“About what?” she asked, wiping the shadow of a tear out of her eyes, and I couldn’t help but notice just how pretty she was when she laughed. I mean, she was pretty all the time, of course, but she was even prettier then, somehow. Maybe it was the ocean accentuating her sea-green eyes.
“About all of this,” I remarked, waving a hand lazily in the air to indicate that I was talking about the whole package of this crazy week, and perhaps even our crazy relationship as a whole. “Have I scared you away yet?”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s possible,” she assured me, laughing again and clutching her stomach muscles with a small wince. A little too much laughing, apparently.
“Really?” I asked, serious now as I met her eyes.
“Really,” she said, just as serious. “Honestly, Ethan, if I wasn’t scared away before, what makes you think that I would be now? You got me shot at in a restaurant, for God’s sake.”
“Ah, yes, that again,” I sighed, wincing myself at the memory.
“Oh stop, it wasn’t really your fault,” she said, pushing at me playfully by elbowing me in my side. “Besides, I live for this stuff. Speaking of which, let’s get a look at what’s on that table, shall we?”
29
Ethan
By the time we walked back into the house and made our way over to the table past another forensics team working in the doorway where we’d killed the two goons, my hands were shaking.
I just wanted so badly to know what I was working with here. I’d sought after Grendel’s journal for so long that now that I might finally be getting my hands on it, I was almost overwhelmed with nerves.
I was excited, but at the same time, I was almost reluctant, which wasn’t a reaction I’d anticipated. Somehow, now that the moment was finally here, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to find the journal. I mean, I did, of course, but then what? What if it was all messed up like the fake one? Or worse, what if it wasn’t, but it still didn’t make any sense or didn’t give me any substantial leads?
“What’s wrong?” Tessa asked me, her brow furrowed as she noticed that I had stopped walking just short of the table.
I could see it faintly in the starlight coming through the empty front doorway and the flashlight beams buzzing all around us as people worked. The papers rustled atop it from all the surrounding movements, some of them normal and white and crisp, others old and yellow and frayed. Those were the ones that concerned me the most, though I knew that Diane would want to get her hands on the current stuff, as well.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, shaking my head as I stared at the stacks of papers. “I just… I’m not sure how I feel.”
Tessa’s face softened, and she strode back over to me to interlink her arm with mine, as she had when we walked down on the beach to the Carltons earlier that evening, though it already felt like days ago, at least.
“It’s alright,” she said, gently urging me forward with her. “This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. It’s only natural to not know how to react. But come on, aren’t you just dying to know if it’s here?”
“Yes, of course,” I said with a nod. “I just… I just…”
I wasn’t sure how to finish my sentence. There was a lot that I wasn’t sure of at that moment, though Tessa seemed to understand where I was coming from.
“You know, sometimes, when I’m working on a really big piece, and I’ve been tracking down all the different parts of the story for a long while—years even, sometimes—when it gets to the end, I don’t really want to finish,” she said kindly. “Because I’m kind of afraid of what might come next. What will my next assignment be? Will it be as interesting? Will I be able to live up to what I did with this piece? There’s a lot of questions or unknowns involved with finishing something like that, even if it’s just the first leg of a journey.”
“Yeah, yeah, I think that might be it,” I said, giving her a weak but genuine smile. Somehow, she had perfectly managed to encapsulate what I was feeling at that moment. She had a knack for understanding me even better than I understood myself sometimes.
“Do you want me to look for you?” she asked when I still didn’t move, giving my arm another squeeze.
“Yeah, sure,” I said, nodding to her in thanks. “I think that would be good.”
“Should I take a look at the current day papers or the old ones first?” she asked.
I hesitated, not sure how to respond to this either.
“Why don’t we start with the newer ones?” she asked when I didn’t answer, deciding for me. “Maybe that will help us ease into it.”
“Sure,” I agreed with a nod, taking a step up beside her by the nearest side of the table, the one holding the papers that Tessa had found before, including the one with the pictures of the Hollands on it.
“It looks like a lot of real estate records,” she said after she had read through them for some time. “All under differe
nt names. Do you recognize any of them? I wonder if MBLIS knows about these already.”
“Well, they definitely didn’t know about this one,” I pointed out, gesturing around us to indicate the Hawthorne house. “And those aliases don’t look familiar to me. Let me take a look.”
I sifted through the pages, trying to remember if any of the listed properties had been on the map that MBLIS created with the known Holland properties. Some of them had been, but others, like the Hawthorne house, hadn’t.
“There are some I know about, but a ton that I don’t,” I remarked when I turned my attention back to Tessa. “That freaks me out, to be honest. There are a lot of properties here, and we thought that we were working with a lot before. This is a whole other level.”
Worry lines creased across her forehead as she thumbed through some other pages.
“And there’s more here than just that,” she murmured, shaking her head in disbelief. “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“That seems to be a trend with these people,” I said, remembering how Holm had made a similar comment about trying to find the Hollands in all the security footage from the Atlanta airport.
“Do you know what to do?” she asked, furrowing her brows at me. “You said that they were never actually here in Walldale?”
“No, they weren’t,” I confirmed. “At least not lately. And I’m fairly certain that Joey guy was telling the truth. He was terrified of those people.”
“And his friend who attacked Robbie and your boss is on the run from them now, too,” Tessa remembered.
“Yes,” I murmured in agreement. “Yes, he is.”
I wished not for the first time that I could get some cell service and call Holm or Diane. But I knew that they had a handle on things there, and I would be able to update them when we got back to the bed-and-breakfast. I just wished that I could tell them what I knew about the Hollands, as hopefully, that would send them down the right track in their search for the nefarious couple.
Tessa and I sorted through several more blocks of pages together. It was a wealth of information, and I wasn’t sure that even our whole MBLIS office would be able to go through it in a reasonable amount of time. Hopefully, this would lead us to the Hollands, though I still had some concerns.
“It’s almost too much information,” Tessa remarked, practically reading my mind. “Right now, you have a smaller list, and you know that the Hollands were at that airport. Now, it’s almost like there are too many possibilities, each of which could lead you down a rabbit hole that gets you nowhere fast.”
“My thoughts exactly,” I said, my tone and expression grim. “I mean, it’s great that we found all this stuff and everything, but I’m starting to get kind of concerned that there are too many options. We’ll have to bring other offices in on this, more FBI agents, maybe even the CIA. And getting three agencies in on one case is a real nightmare, to say the least.”
“I can imagine, though I don’t really want to,” Tessa said, her eyes widening at the thought. “And yeah, it’s kind of like the paradox of choice. People are happier when they get to choose from a smaller number of similar items, but not when they have so many choices that they’re overwhelmed. This has real-world consequences, though, not just picking what you want for dinner.”
“Right, which means it’s both better and somehow worse to have so many options,” I sighed, running a hand through my hair wearily. “Better because there’s a higher chance that one of the options is the right one, worse because we’re less likely to pursue it with limited resources.”
“Well, you’ll just have to put all your resources on it, then,” Tessa said, shooting me a small smile. “I guess this means that you’re going to be busy for a long time. No more vacations for a while.”
“Yeah, I suppose it does,” I said, returning the gesture. “We’ll be working this for a long while, along with whatever other normal cases come our way in the next few weeks. Or months.”
“Well, I’m glad we’ve had this time, then,” she said, reaching out and squeezing my hand gently where it rested atop the stack of papers.
“Yes, so am I,” I agreed, interlinking my fingers with hers and squeezing her hand back. “And I’ll be here for a few days wrapping things up here, so if you really want to stay, we’ll have some more time together.”
“Oh, I’ll be staying,” she assured me. “There’s no question about that.”
I couldn’t help but smile.
Eventually, I felt ready to move on to the older papers, the ones that may or may not be related to the Dragon’s Rogue.
“Do you want me to look for you again?” Tessa asked as we shifted down to the other side of the long, old wooden table.
I nodded. I wasn’t as nervous anymore, but I was afraid that I would be suddenly if I looked first.
“Alright, here goes nothing,” Tessa quipped as she sorted through some old papers as gently as she could.
I waited with bated breath as she carefully sifted through the pages.
“Here, these look like blueprints,” she said at long last, passing me a long, tall, framed sheet of old paper that was about the size of a standard world map. “Or really old blueprints, at least.”
I took it from her and studied it carefully, my eyes widening as I realized what it was.
“I think this is a rough sketch of what the Dragon’s Rogue is supposed to look like,” I said excitedly. “They must’ve been using it as a roadmap for the fake ship!”
“Will that help you find it, do you think?” Tessa asked eagerly.
“I doubt it,” I said as I studied the paper. “There’s nothing here that would indicate where it might be now. But man, it is cool.”
Tessa smiled over at me wanly, like she enjoyed seeing me so excited about something.
“Wait, what’s this?” she asked, grabbing hold of something off to her right on the table. “I think it might be those loose journal papers that that guy told you the Hollands had.”
Sure enough, when she handed the pages over to me, I recognized the handwriting immediately as belonging to Grendel.
“Yeah,” I breathed, squinting down at it. “This is them, alright. The same scrawl that he has later in the journal, based on the fake one. When he was starting to lose it, I guess.”
“Didn’t that guy say that it took them years to figure out what he was trying to say?” she asked, her brow furrowed together now. “Do you think you’ll be able to figure it out faster?”
“I certainly hope so,” I said. “I mean, I know what they figured out, that Grendel spent time here in Walldale, so I should be able to work backward.”
I turned around and leaned back against the table in a half-sitting position, squinting down at the pages as I attempted to decipher what the Hollands had uncovered in the midst of Grendel’s words.
Fortunately for me, the couple had left some of their work behind for me in the form of small post-it notes against the pages. I would never treat my artifacts with such carelessness myself, but I was grateful that they were there to lead me in the right direction.
“Here!” I cried, realizing that I had it, and Tessa lurched at my suddenly raised voice. “Here it is! He lists some numbers and writes cryptically about a town in America on the water and how he’s been hiding out here for some time in an old house. It’s all pretty scattered, and he goes on and on about some of his delusions and how he thinks that some of his crew are poisoning him or something. But it’s in there.”
“It must’ve just taken them a long time to figure out which town he was talking about,” Tessa said as she peered over my shoulder. “I bet there are dozens that fit that description, at least.”
“More than that,” I remarked, thinking of just how many towns there were like that along the east coast and how many more there might have been back then.
“What are the numbers, though?” she asked me. “Coordinates?”
“They’re not coordinates,” I said, shaking
my head. “I’m not quite sure what they are, actually. He might have been trying to write coordinates, but it didn’t work out for him. He clearly wasn’t in the best mental state when he wrote this.”
“Do you think that he really was being poisoned?” Tessa asked, her brow furrowed again now. “Or were those just the delusions of a madman?”
“Hard to say,” I sighed. “On the one hand, he could be delusional because he was being poisoned. It would explain his declining mental state, at least. But on the other, since he does sound kind of insane, it does call into question pretty much anything he says. I’m kind of surprised that the Hollands took anything he wrote seriously, including about the Hawthorne house and Walldale.”
“Well, I’m glad they did,” Tessa remarked. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here now. You’ve always thought that there was something behind all that mad scrawling in the journal, though.”
“But I’m me,” I chuckled. “I’m practically insane myself when it comes to the Dragon’s Rogue. I get the sense that the Hollands have different motives behind their nautical exploits than I do, based on this and past events.”
“How so?” Tessa asked curiously. “What makes you think that?”
“Well, these, for starters,” I said, pawing at the post-it notes on the pages, covered in handwriting that I recognized as belonging to Ashley Holland from the couple’s file back at MBLIS. “I would never stick something like this on an old artifact. I care too much about them and their historical value. I wouldn’t be caught dead doing something like this.”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” Tessa chuckled, no doubt thinking of all the times she’d seen me carefully obsess over keeping my possessions in good condition, at the very least.
“Second, and this has been bothering me for a while, is Lafitte’s ship,” I said, scrunching up my face as I thought back to Holm and my mission in New Orleans. “They wouldn’t just give it away like that if they really cared about the artifacts, especially to a low life drug dealer.”
“Wasn’t the drug dealer going to give it to those people who were really into Lafitte and his history, though?” Tessa asked. “As some kind of bargaining chip or something? So the Hollands must’ve known that it would go to another collector. That counts for something, right?”