“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 different 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.
