But then, when I got back from Haiti, the journal was there waiting for me at the MBLIS office, addressed to me personally and with a return address stamped from the same town in Virginia where the museum was located. Or at least, that’s what I thought.
When I started to look through the journal, trying to find any indication of where the pirate Grendel had taken the Dragon’s Rogue after it left Finch-Hatton’s ownership, I couldn’t figure anything out. Much like the original pages I had had told me, Grendel wasn’t exactly sane. His writings started out plain enough in the beginning, but then turned to obsessive ramblings that had little rhyme or reason to them.
Even so, I had hoped that I would be able to decipher something of value from the journal’s pages. Instead, I found that someone had painstakingly gone through the book and blacked out anything that could resemble valuable information about the ship’s location. At one point, there were only a handful of words for about a hundred pages that weren’t blacked out, and none of them told me anything worthwhile.
This had been devastating enough until the old book repairman Percy told me that the journal was a fake. Then I was just confused. Why would someone go through the trouble of sending me a mutilated journal that didn’t tell me anything of value and wasn’t even the real journal in the first place? What did that serve to accomplish?
The only thing I could think was that this meant that someone wanted me to think that I had the real journal, so I would stop looking for it without getting any of the information I sought from it. That way, I might give up my search for the Dragon’s Rogue without any way to gain new leads.
Well, the joke was on them, if that was the case. I thumbed through the blacked-out pages of the journal as I waited for the phone to ring. Percy had said that most professionals wouldn’t even have detected that the book was a fake. Whoever did this did that good of a job. And they probably didn’t know that I knew. I had to keep it that way. I had the upper hand as long as they thought I didn’t know.
“Hello?” a familiar voice asked on the other line.
It was the museum manager, the one I had spoken to before. And Tessa had spoken to even more often. At first, I thought it was her who had sent me the journal. Then, when I spoke to her last, she seemed shocked and upset that someone had sent the book to me. I hadn’t been able to get her on the phone since.
“Yes, this is Agent Ethan Marston,” I said, clearing my throat before I spoke. “We’ve spoken several times before, I believe.”
There was a long moment of silence in which I could only hear the woman’s ragged, shallow breathing on the other line. I wondered not for the first time what was scaring her so much. Clearly, someone else was involved in all this since she hadn’t sent the fake journal. It remained to be seen who was in charge of this whole mess, if anyone, however.
“I thought I told you to leave us alone,” she hissed at long last, speaking in a loud whisper that I doubted would’ve prevented anyone from hearing her.
“Look, I just have a couple of questions…” I started to say, but she cut me off.
“What’s going on? What is your problem?” she asked without giving me any time to respond. “Look, if you don’t leave us alone, you’re going to regret it. Mark my words!”
Her voice trended upward until she was almost shrieking on her last sentence, and I was left more than a little dumbfounded. It wasn’t like I’d never been threatened before, but I wasn’t exactly used to being threatened by little old ladies from the nautical museum, of all places.
“I…” I started to respond, but she was gone by then, leaving me standing there completely flummoxed with my phone in my hand.
I shook my head to clear it as the pot dinged to tell me that my morning coffee was ready.
I poured myself a mug and tried to sip it down.
“That was… really weird,” I said to myself as I sat back down at my kitchen table and thumbed through Grendel’s journal some more.
I quickly texted Tessa to tell her what had happened and to be careful in Virginia. I didn’t want to be responsible for getting her in any more dangerous situations, especially after that messy business in New York. Add to that that her uncle was an associate of mine, and I really didn’t want to be getting her in any trouble.
Well, it was too late now. I’d already promised that she could come, and there was no chance she was going to back out now.
She quickly responded to my text, saying that now this really was getting interesting, and she couldn’t wait until she saw that woman’s face when we showed up at the museum unannounced.
I groaned. I tended to have a knack for getting Tessa shot at, and everyone else who hung around me for that matter. Oh, well. I’d just have to be on guard the whole time, even more than usual. This wasn’t shaping up to be much of a vacation after all.
I gave up on the journal, seeing as how it was just as full of blacked-out passages as it had been every other time I’d combed through it, and pulled out my tablet to go to the museum’s website. It was just a run-of-the-mill nautical museum in Newport News, VA, though I was
