“What is it?” she asked, shaking her head at the darker area of the wood.
“It’s a paint to make it look older than it is, to make it age faster,” he explained. “Those stores that sell fake antiques use it, except this is a better quality one than I’ve seen before.”
“Wait, like the journal?” she asked, suddenly remembering something.
It was Ethan’s turn to be confused now.
“Huh?” he asked, looking up at her with a furrowed brow. “What are you talking about?”
“The journal,” she said excitedly, unable to keep her voice down. “Grendel’s journal. The fake one, I mean. You told me that that old book repairman in New Orleans had told you that someone went to a lot of pains to make it look convincingly old, even if it was new.”
“Yeah, he did say that,” Ethan said, nodding slowly as he caught on to her meaning. “And he said that not many people would’ve been able to tell, and I was lucky that I brought it to him first. But that was a book, and that was a whole ship. I don’t exactly see how they’re related…”
But Tessa could tell by the excited glint in his eye that no doubt mirrored her own that he did catch her meaning. He just wanted to talk it through some more. So she obliged him.
“So these same people who wanted you to think you found Grendel’s journal, maybe when they realized that you wouldn’t stop looking for it, they decided to try to make you think that you’d found what you’re really looking for, too,” she said, glancing at the whole of the fake ship now.
“Yeah,” Ethan said, returning to a standing position and taking stock of the whole of the ship’s carcass as well. “Yeah, maybe.”
Tessa suddenly remembered the papers and returned her flashlight beam to the table. The papers at the top showed two faces, a man and a woman, staring up at her in black and white, next to a bunch of information about the Hawthorne house: how much they’d bought it for, who they’d bought it from, that kind of stuff.
There was something about the faces that gave her pause. The man looked like he’d had a few too many spray tans, even in black and white. The woman looked like she’d had more than a few too many Botox treatments.
She then remembered Ethan’s description of Chester and Ashley Holland, the real estate mogul couple who were behind the whole mess MBLIS had cleaned up in the Florida Keys a few weeks ago.
“Hey, Ethan?” she asked, holding it out to him only to find that he was still wholly absorbed by the fake ship. “Can you take a look at this?”
“Hmm?” he asked, only barely listening to her, and she walked back over to him with the paper in hand, shoving it under his nose and beaming her phone’s flashlight right on top of it.
He didn’t need to say anything then. It was obvious that her intuition had been correct, judging by his reaction. He abandoned all thought of the ship then and gripped the paper tightly to him, staring down at the plastic faces on it in black and white.
“Well, well, you’re a bit more on top of things than we were led to believe,” a voice rang out across the vast room.
26
Ethan
I froze and dropped the paper as Tessa whirled her flashlight beam over to land on a man with a gun, holding a little boy who had to be Miles Carlton, wriggling and sobbing in his arms.
“Come for this?” the man asked with a sneer as I whipped my gun around to face his in the darkness. He lifted Miles up with one arm as the boy sobbed and hollered, his voice ringing out loud and piercing, and jostled him in the air a bit for emphasis.
“Put him down,” I growled, taking a step forward, so that Tessa was behind me again. “Put him down right now.”
“As you wish,” the guy grinned, holding his hands up and allowing Miles to drop all the way to the floor from where he was dangling in the air.
The sobbing boy took this in stride, doing an awkward somersault across the rotting hardwood floors and running straight into Tessa’s waiting arms.
“Take him,” I barked at her quickly. “Take him and run.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” another voice called out, and two more goons shuffled over to stand in the now empty doorway, blocking Tessa and Miles’s exit.
I cursed internally and whirled my gun around again, back and forth so that each of the goons was kept on their toes.
“Who are you?” I asked the guy who’d had the kid. He looked like the leader to me, with a tall stature, a shaved head, and beady blue eyes that shot right through me. The other two looked like they were half drunk, and they didn’t have the maniacal look about them that the other one did.
These men had been hired by Chester and Ashley. I knew that now, and I was angry with myself for not seeing it before. I hadn’t even thought of the possibility because it all seemed so convenient, the Hollands being the subject of our last case and all. It seemed like it had to be too much of a coincidence. It was too unlikely.
That was the thing, though, I realized. It wasn’t a coincidence. None of this was a coincidence. These people had been behind Lafitte’s ship showing up in New Orleans. And they had been behind all that nonsense in the Keys. And, it turned out, they had been tailing me for some time, watching my movements as I searched for the Dragon’s Rogue. The question wasn’t whether they had been doing this, but rather for how long.
“I’m not
