“Here!” I cried, realizing that I had it, and Tessa lurched at my suddenly raised voice. “Here it is! He lists some numbers and writes cryptically about a town in America on the water and how he’s been hiding out here for some time in an old house. It’s all pretty scattered, and he goes on and on about some of his delusions and how he thinks that some of his crew are poisoning him or something. But it’s in there.”
“It must’ve just taken them a long time to figure out which town he was talking about,” Tessa said as she peered over my shoulder. “I bet there are dozens that fit that description, at least.”
“More than that,” I remarked, thinking of just how many towns there were like that along the east coast and how many more there might have been back then.
“What are the numbers, though?” she asked me. “Coordinates?”
“They’re not coordinates,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not quite sure what they are, actually. He might have been trying to write coordinates, but it didn’t work out for him. He clearly wasn’t in the best mental state when he wrote this.”
“Do you think that he really was being poisoned?” Tessa asked, her brow furrowed again now. “Or were those just the delusions of a madman?”
“Hard to say,” I sighed. “On the one hand, he could be delusional because he was being poisoned. It would explain his declining mental state, at least. But on the other, since he does sound kind of insane, it does call into question pretty much anything he says. I’m kind of surprised that the Hollands took anything he wrote seriously, including about the Hawthorne house and Walldale.”
“Well, I’m glad they did,” Tessa remarked. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here now. You’ve always thought that there was something behind all that mad scrawling in the journal, though.”
“But I’m me,” I chuckled. “I’m practically insane myself when it comes to the Dragon’s Rogue. I get the sense that the Hollands have different motives behind their nautical exploits than I do, based on this and past events.”
“How so?” Tessa asked curiously. “What makes you think that?”
“Well, these, for starters,” I said, pawing at the post-it notes on the pages, covered in handwriting that I recognized as belonging to Ashley Holland from the couple’s file back at MBLIS. “I would never stick something like this on an old artifact. I care too much about them and their historical value. I wouldn’t be caught dead doing something like this.”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” Tessa chuckled, no doubt thinking of all the times she’d seen me carefully obsess over keeping my possessions in good condition, at the very least.
“Second, and this has been bothering me for a while, is Lafitte’s ship,” I said, scrunching up my face as I thought back to Holm and my mission in New Orleans. “They wouldn’t just give it away like that if they really cared about the artifacts, especially to a low life drug dealer.”
“Wasn’t the drug dealer going to give it to those people who were really into Lafitte and his history, though?” Tessa asked. “As some kind of bargaining chip or something? So the Hollands must’ve known that it would go to another collector. That counts for something, right?”
“Yeah, it does, in a way,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “But it still doesn’t make a lot of sense. If they were super into the collecting and the searching for its own sake, they would likely never let go of the ship in the first place. But if they were just in it for all the buried treasure… well, they wouldn’t have left Lafitte’s treasure in the ship for someone else to find now, would they?”
“Huh,” Tessa grunted. “I guess I hadn’t thought of it like that before. Why would they leave all that money and stuff in there?”
“Yeah, I think I’m going to need to have a talk with the FBI about that ship when I get back,” I muttered. “They kept everything from the New Orleans case because their agent was there before us, but now that the Hollands are involved, we have a good argument to make that it’s our domain after all. I’d also like to have a talk with those collectors in New Orleans. The last time I talked to them, they didn’t mention anything about the Hollands. I wonder if they know more than they let on after all.”
“Looks like you’ve got all kinds of leads to pursue,” Tessa said dryly. “So if they aren’t in it for the history of it, or for the money, what are they in it for?”
“That’s the question,” I said with a low, dark laugh. “I can’t even begin to say. Maybe they just like the hunt and don’t really care about the rest of it? I don’t know. It’s all very strange.”
“You could say that again,” Tessa laughed, shaking her head as she turned back to the table. “So if the numbers aren’t coordinates, then what are they?”
“I think they’re supposed to be coordinates,” I mumbled as I turned my attention back to the pages. “He just didn’t write them properly or something. Here, see this post-it note? Ashley Holland wrote real coordinates under them, and I think those are near here.”
“Are they the Hawthorne house?” she asked, peering over my shoulder again as I pointed out the post-it in question.
“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “These coordinates are too far out. They would be in the ocean, I think. Near here, though, just not on land.”
“Maybe that’s why that Joey guy said that they thought the Dragon’s Rogue was in the area,” Tessa suggested. “They thought that might be where the ship was. But when they looked for it there, they didn’t find it.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said excitedly, wanting nothing more than to
