Joey scowled again, but his expression told me that I was right.
“So,” I continued, giving him a small smile. “How about we talk about what’s going on here?”
Another scowl.
“Let’s start with the museum, shall we? Did you come here just to harass them?” I asked, continuing with specific questions when the goon offered up nothing of his own accord.
“No, that was way after,” Joey said with a shrug, prompting me to raise my eyebrows in genuine surprise.
“Oh? So you were here before you started caring about the journal?” I asked him.
“Oh yeah, way before that,” Joey said. “We bought the house, after all. Didn’t even know about that stupid journal until you came along.”
Another surprise. So it was all a coincidence, after all? That still struck me as unlikely.
“Okay, hold on,” I said, holding up my hands in the air for emphasis. “What do you mean ‘until I came along?’ I got the fake journal sent to me while I was in Haiti.”
“Uh, yeah,” Joey said, giving me a look as if he was concerned I was the stupid one. “What did you just say about that case a minute ago?”
I groaned as I realized his meaning and ran a hand across my forehead, slapping my notebook against my thigh in frustration.
“They caught on to me while I was down there, figured out what I was doing somehow, probably by tapping into my tablet and started tagging me after that,” I mused aloud. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
It’s not like I hadn’t considered this possibility before. I wasn’t exactly shocked. But it still hit hard, knowing that these people had been creeping on me for some time now. That being said, it wasn’t as long as I had originally suspected, a year or more. It was just a couple of months. I tried to tell myself that, anyway, but I didn’t feel any less violated somehow.
“The Hollands know how to get what they want,” Joey muttered.
“Are those their real names?” I asked him, latching onto this. “Chester and Ashley Holland?”
“Who the hell knows?” Joey spat, laughing for real this time. “They have so many of them. It’s impossible to keep track. Most of us call ‘em the Hollands, though. Which makes me think those aren’t their real names, honestly.”
I thought similarly. There was no way that the Hollands would use their real names like this. Not this widely. Their true identities were probably long since lost in a sea of paperwork, changed identities, and years of schemes on the wrong side of the law. Their real names probably wouldn’t even be a lot of use to us at that point, but it would still be nice to know. It would feel more like we were on the right track, as though we had the upper hand, or were at least closer to getting it.
“Alright, so let’s get back to how you ended up in Newport News in the first place,” I said, eyeing Joey carefully. “And don’t even try to pass it off like it was just another one of the Hollands’ investment properties, and it just so happened to be in the same location as Grendel’s journal. I already know your bosses are nautical enthusiasts and that they found Lafitte’s ship. Besides, if you’re their right-hand man, they wouldn’t waste you for so long on such an inconsequential property now, would they? You’ve been here from the beginning, yes? You already told me as much.”
The goon scowled yet again, seeing that I had covered every angle of a possible lie he could feed me. The only option left for him was the truth.
“Fine,” he muttered, almost pouting now. “They bought the Hawthorne house ‘cause they thought they’d find the Dragon’s Rogue here. They had a page out of the journal telling them as much.”
“There are more loose pages?” I asked, perking up at this. “Where did they find them?”
“I don’t know, somewhere in Hawaii,” Joey said, waving his hand in the air dismissively. “I wasn’t there back then. Anyway, the old guy was a nut, so they were only really able to figure out what he meant about a year ago. They thought the ship was here, realized that he wrote about staying here in this house for a while. Then they figured out that that lined up with local legends, so they sent me here.”
I had found my journal pages in Hawaii, I remembered. A few more must’ve been scattered on the island, just for the Hollands to find them years before I found the others. I had to admit that I felt a little swell of pride at having found something that the couple had failed to in the same location. Maybe I wasn’t so far behind them in the search for the Dragon’s Rogue after all.
“Do you have these pages?” I asked Joey, thinking back to that table covered in old documents that Tessa and I had found, just waiting for me to look through them and obsess over them as I had the fake journal and the pages that I did have from the real one.
“Yeah, they’re back over there,” Joey sighed with a dejected nod in the direction of the front room where the table lay in wait for me.
I glanced back over my shoulder longingly, wanting to abandon this conversation with this low life and go sift through the table’s contents now. But I realized I couldn’t yet as I shook my head to clear it and turned my attention back to Joey. Not yet. I still didn’t have the full story.
“So what did you find when you got here?” I asked the goon. “Is the Dragon’s Rogue here, or isn’t it?”
This last part came out a bit more intense than I’d intended, and Joey
