“And where is that, exactly?” I asked, jumping at the opportunity to hear about what Tessa had been up to since Holm and I had gotten back from Haiti.
“Oh, I’m in Whitehorse,” she said, as if this should’ve been obvious to me. “It’s the closest thing there is to civilization in the Yukon. Well, sort of. Anyway, there’s an airport here. Not all that many flights, though. I’ll see what I can find.”
“So, what were you doing up there?” I asked. “I don’t think you had time to say before.”
“Oh, it’s been so interesting, Ethan,” she gushed, and I could practically see her eyes widening with excitement on the other line as she spoke. “I was looking for this rare species of moose that scientists thought was extinct, but some backpackers caught sight of a while back up here.”
“Oh?” I asked, leaning forward on my seat even though she wasn’t actually in the room with me. “And did you find what you were looking for?”
I thought about how it was the hair from a rare kind of deer native to the Keys found where it shouldn’t be that helped lead Holm, Muñoz, and me to the campsite where Birn was being held on a remote island down there. I’d developed a healthy appreciation for rare wildlife ever since. Not to mention that I loved to hear Tessa talk about her work or to talk about anything at all, to be honest.
“We did,” she said, and I could hear the grin in her voice. “It took forever, though. That’s why it took so long for me to get back to you. My team from the National Geographic and I were camped out up there for ages, trying to find it. Just when some of us were about ready to give up, I saw one. Then we spent another week chasing it and trying to find some more of its kind. There were only two of them in the end, though, that we could find.”
“Only two?” I repeated. “Isn’t that kind of weird?”
“It is,” she confirmed, a puzzled tone in her voice. “A couple of the guys ended up staying up there a little longer, but the magazine wanted me back to run the story. Hopefully, some more of the animals will turn up, eventually. Until then, it’s a real mystery.”
“I guess we both make our living off of mysteries, then,” I chuckled, glancing back down at the file resting between my elbows on the kitchen table.
I frowned at it and then shut it tight, obscuring Chester Holland’s annoying grin from view. The last thing I needed was to feel like he was watching me while I was trying to have a conversation with Tessa.
“As I said, we would make a good team,” Tessa reiterated in a sing-song voice. “You supply the stories, and I figure out how to tell them. We could make a real killing.”
“I don’t know how Diane would feel about that,” I chuckled, picturing the enraged expression on her face were she to find out that I put agency secrets into a tell-all book. “Or the United States government, for that matter.”
“Oh, come on, there would be a way to keep the most sensitive details out while retaining the heart of the story,” Tessa pushed, though I could tell that she was just teasing me. “Anyway, people publish this kind of stuff all the time. We could even fictionalize it to give us plausible deniability.”
“I think I’ll have to get back to you on that one,” I laughed. “Besides, if anyone’s going to give in to the temptation to tell a bunch of people about the goings-on at MBLIS, it’s Holm.”
“That’s true enough,” Tessa said, her musical laugh ringing through the phone.
“Well, I’d better go,” I said, glancing down at my watch. “It’s getting late for me. Let me know if you can get those tickets, and I’ll meet you in Virginia. We can rent a car and drive over to the museum if you like.”
“That sounds like a good plan,” she said. “Sleep well, Ethan. I’m looking forward to seeing you again soon.”
“Me too,” I told her, and then she clicked away, leaving me alone with the file and with Grendel’s fake journal, which was lying across from me on the kitchen table.
I looked from the journal to the file and then back again, as if trying to decide which one I was going to look through now. At varying intervals, I’d been obsessed with both over the past few weeks.
Ultimately, I decided to abandon both, leaving them both on the kitchen table as I gathered up my dishes and cleaned them out in the sink, looking out at the water surrounding my houseboat.
I had another address officially on record with MBLIS, but the houseboat was really my home. I couldn’t imagine spending my downtime anywhere away from the water.
Once my dishes were cleared up, I went straight to bed. I had a feeling eventful days were to follow, and I would need my sleep while I could get it.
I couldn’t wait to see Tessa again. It felt like it had been a lifetime since we’d last met.
3
Ethan
I woke up the next morning and tried to call the museum in Virginia. I figured that the least I could do was try to get a read on where things were at before Tessa and I just showed up on their doorstep asking questions.
My relationship with the museum and its staff had been pretty dicey so far. I’d called a lot when I was originally trying to get my hands on the journal, and so had Tessa, emphasizing the fact that I was a descendent of Lord Jonathan Finch-Hatton’s, and that correspondingly it could be argued that the journal belonged to me in a way.
I already had a few pages of the actual journal, too, found buried in the walls of a crime scene in Hawaii. None of
