The Island of Dragons (Rockpools Book 4)

by Gregg Dunnett

  I guess he can tell I don’t know what he means.

  “OK, the money. Maybe seventy percent of the attraction is the value. They’re called priceless, but each painting has a value, and it goes up all the time, because of the scarcity, there’s a limited number, and since all the artists are dead you can’t make any more.”

  He smiles. “Then the mystery. There are many more paintings rumored to exist, than are actually accounted for. But if you – if you have certain connections – you become aware that some of these paintings aren’t lost, but hidden. Here in this house, for example, there’s a Renoir, that isn’t known about by any of the museums. By anyone.”

  “Is there?” says Jennifer. She sounds surprised. “I haven’t seen it.” Then I notice Lily is staring at James, she looks just a bit annoyed.

  “It’s in the master suite.” Lily says, then gives a funny frown. “It’s a bit risqué. It’s called Nude in the River.”

  “No way!” Jennifer says, and James’ explanation breaks down while Lily describes the painting, and promises she’ll show it to Jennifer later on.

  “So what are you into,” James comes back to me, a while later. “If it’s not dead French painters?”

  Again I don’t feel pressured by the question. In fact the opposite. There’s a real warmth to James now. It’s a little weird, given how cold he was earlier, but I’ve sort of forgiven it.

  “Well I’ve always been really interested in Marine Biology,” I say. “I mean really interested.”

  “That’s why you were in Australia, measuring the sharks?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never been to Australia,” he ponders. “But that’s good. You’re lucky to have a passion in life, something of interest.”

  There’s a silence, but Eric breaks it.

  “These gnocchi are delicious Lily,” he says, holding two up he’s speared with his fork. “Beautiful balls of pleasure.”

  The talk goes on, and though it’s mostly not about me, they each take care to include me in what they’re saying, explaining throughout the dinner what it is they’re studying, and some details about how they got to know each other. I learn they’re all at Harvard, and they’re all in their third year. Most of them are studying some variation of business, as in one subject with business as a second topic. All except Oscar, who’s doing computer science, though that’s about the only thing he says the whole dinner.

  I get the idea that all of them come from families who run some sort of businesses, though they don’t say which ones. They ask about me, and so I explain how Dad also runs his own Whale Watching business, and how I helped set it up. They all agree that’s something they’d love to do sometime. Then I get invited to do what they’re into, play tennis at a country club, and even to go sailing on Lily’s father’s yacht, although they don’t actually set any firm dates. And all the while I’m trying to file away the information, and make sense of it.

  After the pasta we have a main course (I didn’t actually realize the pasta balls weren’t the main course, until James and Jennifer took them away, and come back with chicken breasts, cooked in white wine). Then there’s a dessert, which is something called a Pavlova – I’d heard of it, but never had one before – it’s a kind of white crunchy stuff, with raspberries and cream – OK, but nothing special. But while we’re eating this Eric reminds me that I talked about catching murderers, as well as drug dealers, and I tell them about my old high school headteacher, who helped to murder her father and her brother, and how I caught her. After that I help carry the plates through to the kitchen where Lily loads them into the dishwasher, actually into one of them. There’s two dishwashers in this kitchen, which I think is a really good idea, just as long as you have enough dishes. But as I’m saying that to Lily I notice how her dress rides up her legs as she leans over, showing the bare skin. And I guess I fall silent. And then I look away when I realize Eric is watching me.

  After dinner Oscar challenges me to a game of snooker. I don’t actually know the rules, but he explains it to me. I’m not too bad either, because I’ve played a lot of pool in my time, they used to have a table in the Surf Lifesaving Club in Silverlea. You have to clear all the balls, just like in pool, only in the correct order, and you score different points for the different colors. However, Oscar is quite a lot better than me, and after about ten minutes he has sixty points and I’ve still not got any balls in. So everyone else suddenly starts supporting me. Oscar pots ball after ball, but then he finally misses, and I get a turn again, and the others start banging the table and cheering me on. I feel nervous as I lean over the table to take the shot, but when I strike the ball I can see it’s going to go in, and when it does everyone cheers. Well everyone except Oscar.

  He kind of smiles at me.

  “Lucky shot Billy. I still win though.”

  After that James grabs me, along with Lily, and says he wants to show me some of the paintings he was talking about before. A couple of them are on the walls, or copies of them, but mostly we look through some huge books in the library, and I can tell he’s genuinely interested, though I can’t really see the attraction.

  At about midnight though, when we’re all in the sitting room that Eric showed me earlier, Lily gives a big yawn, and the others take it as a sign that the evening is over. We all say thank you to Lily, and I get another hug and a kiss, from her and Jennifer, and then we all leave together. Oscar and Jennifer turn right on the street, telling me they don’t live too far away, but Eric has already called an Uber, which he says I can share. Inside I want to ask more questions about everything I’ve seen, and just who they all are, but I remember his strange rules, and I guess they apply to letting Uber drivers overhear. So I don’t ask. And instead he drops me off, not letting me pay him anything again, and then the car drives away.

  I’m still confused by everything as I walk back into my apartment. Confused and sort of on a high, not really believing or understanding where I’ve just been. There’s a light on in our lounge, and I go in to see that Jimbo and Guy are both up, rolling joints and watching something about dirt-bikes on TV. Our own kitchen/living room looks tiny, even though it’s quite a big room, with space for six people to sit down. And even though it’s still mostly clean, it looks dirty and just bare compared to where I’ve just been. The Lily-palace.

  “Billy, my main man.” Jimbo puts on a terrible Rastafarian accent. “You want a toke my brother?” He offers me a puff on the joint, but I say no, and instead I go off to bed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  But I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m still buzzing and I want to do some research. Even though Eric told me I mustn’t talk about the Lily-Palace, he didn’t say I couldn’t Google it. So that’s what I’m going to do.

  I’ve got quite a good set up here, computer-wise. I have my laptop, and I bought a separate monitor after I arrived, quite a big one too, because I’m going to have to do work here at some point and I like to work on two screens. And I thought it would make me feel more at home.

  So anyway, I minimize everything else I’m working on and open up a couple of new web-browsers – Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and Mozilla Firefox – you get different results on different platforms, so it’s worth trying lots. Then I start typing in some of the terms I picked up earlier, hoping to get Lily’s surname, so I can find out more about her. But it’s harder than I expected. Either they were careful not to actually say anything that would let me find her online, or I was just a bit too excited about everything that was happening. Actually the latter is the most likely.

  So then I remember that Lily texted me, which means I’ve got her cell phone number. I’ve tracked people this way plenty of times. Sometimes people put their phone number online, like in a Facebook post or something, so you can get them that way – which is pretty dumb, so I’m almost pleased when I see she hasn’t. And anyway it’s not a problem, it’s fairly easy to access the database listings from the various phone companies.
It is a little bit illegal though, so I hop onto the dark web to do it where I won’t be tracked by bots. And it takes a little time too, because it’s not like there’s one centralized database of everyone’s phone records. It’s more that lots of different hackers have cracked the records from each of the major companies at different times. So you have to search through all of them one by one. Plus they’re not always up to date, meaning if her number is newly assigned, then it won’t be on there. Anyway – long story short, after a bit of digging around (if you really want to know I wrote a short program that creates a lookup table and ran that to automate the job), I discover it’s not there. Her phone number isn’t on any of the major networks used in the States. This is odd, and I don’t know what it means, but I move on.

  I try with the address now. I know where it is, obviously, but I don’t know who owns it, other than it’s Lily’s Grandfather, or she says it is. But it’s such an amazing place, there’s got to be something about it online. One of the easiest ways to find out who owns a property is to see who’s paying taxes on it, which you can find out through the local tax assessor’s office. They usually have a website, and all you need is the address, and a bit of patience, because they’re not the best websites. Annoyingly however, in the case of this tax office they also want you to pay a fee of a hundred dollars, and – get this – go down in person to pay it because they haven’t even set up an online payment portal. And even if I was going to pay them (which I’m not) they’re not open at – what time is it now? Three in the morning. Never mind. I’ll check the County Records instead.

  In most States the deeds and title documents of all buildings are publicly available. I have to hold my breath a bit when I check if that’s true here, but I’m pleased to see it is, and there’s no fee either. So then I enter the address and see what’s listed, only to find a new problem. The records are only digitized back to the 1960’s, and clearly Lily’s Grandfather’s house was built before then. So it’s not listed on the indexed part of the site. It’ll still be there, but I’ll have to look through images of scanned in handwritten records. I am actually getting frustrated now.

  It takes me another hour to figure out that they’ve organized it on a map basis. You have to find which grid square the street you’re looking for is on their map, and then you can look through all the records for that square. Because it’s a city, there’s quite a lot of records, and you can’t search them because it’s just an image of a handwritten ledger. But eventually I find the correct square, and the correct street and there it is – Lily’s address. Only there isn’t anything listed against it. For some reason, while every other address has a neat handwritten block of text giving the deed-holder, for Lily’s address there’s nothing given. This is really odd. So I hop back onto the dark web and run a couple of searches for what this might mean, but I can’t find anything, so in the end I leave the question on a message board and log off. These message boards, they’re full of mega geeks who are totally into all this stuff. There should be an answer in the morning.

  So that done, I log off and this time I actually go to sleep.

  Chapter Sixteen

  There’s an answer waiting for me when I wake up, quite early as I have a nine o’clock lecture. I have to read it twice because I’m a bit bleary eyed from all my research, and it obviously isn’t the name I need, it’s just an explanation of why I can’t see any records listed against Lily’s address.

  It comes from someone called Blackhorse. I haven’t met him before. He tells me – actually I say he, but I don’t know if it’s a man or a woman, but I’m guessing man – but anyway, he tells me there are several reasons why a private residence might be ‘access restricted’. It could be something really dodgy, like the owner being part of the Witness Protection Program, or because the owners work for military intelligence. In that case I’d need to proceed really carefully because there’s all sorts of higher level securities that trigger red flags, and when they’re secret they’re super hard to wipe. Alternatively it could be something a lot less exciting, such as the owner of the property simply requesting that their records aren’t made publicly available. As well as telling me all this, Blackhorse has asked if I want him to look into it further, and he says he won’t even charge me. I think about the offer for a while, while I’m brewing up some coffee in the kitchen, but then I reply to say no thanks. It’s probably the wrong thing to do, to run all these searches about Lily behind her back. And also, with these computer nerd people, you never quite know how stable they are.

  It’s a beautiful day outside, and it puts me in a good mood as I go into college for my morning lecture. The first one is the same as ever, going over topics I studied years ago, but I still go through the motions of writing notes, but it’s so boring that in my head I start going over everything that happened last night. As I do so, I keep getting these visions of Lily. Lily laughing at the dinner table. Lily leaning in to kiss me when I arrived. Lily leaning over the dishwasher, her skirt rising up and showing her smooth legs. I’m actually so distracted I don’t notice that a woman, sitting a couple of empty seats away from me, is leaning over to talk to me. Eventually she taps me on the arm.

  “Hey! Are you OK?” She smiles, looking a bit concerned. I’ve actually noticed her before but we’ve never spoken. She’s quite a bit older than me, and obviously really keen, as it’s often just me and her at the start of the classes, before everyone else arrives. “You seem really distracted today.”

  “What?” I release my vision of Lily, though I’m disappointed as she drifts out of my mind. I shake my head clear and focus on the woman. “No. I’m… Fine.”

  She smiles reassuringly at me, and goes back to her notes. Then at the end, when the lecturer has finished, she moves a seat closer before I get up to leave.

  “That was a tough one, wasn’t it? I do struggle with all the Latin names.” She rolls her eyes.

  “Oh I wasn’t…” I get what she means, but stop myself. I can’t really say I wasn’t paying attention.

  “I’m Linda.” The woman says, though I don’t ask. “Linda Reynolds. I’m in a lot of your classes.”

  “I know.”

  “Right.” She bobs her head to one side then the other, like she’s thinking this over. “Well… I just wanted to say hi. And that you can borrow my notes. If you ever need.” She gives me another smile. “Like if you’ve been up all night partying. And feel like your head’s not on straight.”

  “I wasn’t up all night partying.”

  “No?” She gives me a look and a grin, but then shrugs. “Well you know. In case you ever are.”

  Annoyingly, at that moment I feel a yawn coming on, and I can’t stop it. Then I feel I ought to explain.

  “I was sort of working. Last night.”

  “Ahhh,” Linda looks suddenly pleased. “So you do put in all-nighters.” She grins again. “We were wondering how you managed to know the answer to every question in the tutorials.”

  “It wasn’t that sort of…” I start to say, but then I stop. “Who’s we?”

  Linda waves a hand. She’s filled her bag now. “There’s a bunch of us. Mature students mostly. We’re helping each other out with the work.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. So I don’t say anything.

  “I was wondering, maybe you’d like to join us? I mean, you’re kind of mature yourself. In a young way.”

  I’m not sure what to say to this either. I definitely don’t need any help with my work, but I don’t want to say that, because it would make me sound really arrogant.

  She smiles again, as the rest of the class files out around us.

  “Actually we’re meeting up today, just for a coffee. After Chemical Processes, maybe you want to join us?”

  I’m sort of doubtful, I’m already younger than all the other students here. I’m not sure hanging out with the mature students makes much sense. But I don’t want to be rude.

  “Erm. OK. Sure.”

  �
��Great! I’ll look out for you in class.” She leaves, and gives me a wave.

  I have a break next, so I go to the library. I try to read but I find I can’t concentrate. I’m in a funny mood suddenly. I had all these ideas about college, before I got here. How it would be all research and experiments and fun. But actually it’s mostly just reading about other people doing research. And it’s all reading I’ve already done. I feel like something’s missing, but I don’t know what it is. So I don’t read much, instead I just secretly watch the other students around me, with their headphones and their laptops and their giant Starbucks cups of coffee, and the looks of concentration on their faces, like they’re finding it hard. I wonder what I’m doing wrong.

  But I cheer up pretty quickly because then I get a call from Lily. And she sounds fresh and full of life.

  “Billy. What are you doing today?”

  My schedule flashes up in my brain. It’s my busy day, I have three other lectures after this break staggered, through the day and finishing at six this evening. But I don’t get a chance to tell her this because she carries straight on.

  “We’re going to the beach. Do you want to come?”

  “What?”

  “The beach Billy. Like a big bath. With sand…”

  “I know what… but I can’t. I’ve got lectures.”

  “So?”

  “So I can’t.” I think quickly. Or try to. “I could come at the weekend.” I say it a little hopefully. “Too late. We’re going now. James has decided he’s a surfer.” In the background I can hear a snort of laughter, it sounds like Eric. “It’s his new hobby. His new passion.” She says that really sarcastically, and I can almost see her smiling at me, in her very-slightly goofy way. “And he says there won’t be any waves at the weekend. So it has to be now.”

  I think – or maybe I wish – I could somehow move my lectures. But that’s a ridiculous thought, and Lily interrupts it anyway.