There was, as before, nothing on the website to indicate anything suspicious about the place.
My phone buzzed again as Tessa sent me another message, this time informing me that her friend George’s contact at the museum hadn’t been responding to him since the whole thing with the journal came up with me.
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.
I maneuvered over to the ‘about’ section of the website and looked for George’s friend. I didn’t see any older men there, however. Just the older woman whose name I recognized to be the manager’s, a younger male staffer, and several twenty-something interns.
I sent Tessa a message to this effect, and she messaged me back that she was going to have George call me as soon as he had the chance.
“Good,” I muttered to myself. “I was beginning to wonder whether he was leading us on a wild goose chase from the beginning.”
But then again, I remembered, he had led me to Percy. So he probably wasn’t involved in whatever this was and was genuinely trying to help.
As if on cue, my phone began to ring. The old man must be bored, I thought. I answered.
“This is Marston,” I said quickly.
“Hello, Agent Marston, this is George,” a friendly old man’s voice came booming through my receiver. “I’m a friend of Tessa’s. I believe we met back in New York a while ago.”
“Yes, of course, I remember,” I said, forcing a smile. This whole thing was beginning to get to me, I realized. Between the journal and the Hollands, I really needed a win.
“Yes, so I hear my friend Henry hasn’t been in touch at all,” George said, his voice ladled with concern. “I was sorry to hear that.”
“Is that his name?” I asked. “I’ve never spoken to a ‘Henry’ at the museum, just the old woman who runs things and her intern.”
“Watch who you call old, son,” George warned, though his tone was jovial.
“Right, sorry,” I chuckled. “I forgot who I was talking to.”
“I’m afraid I can’t be much help,” George sighed. “I haven’t been able to get in touch with Henry either. Which is unusual, I’ll say. When I first told him about you, he was very excited.”
“Really?” I asked, suddenly interested. “What did he say?”
“Well, no one’s more interested in finding old ships like this one than Henry and me,” George explained. “Except maybe yourself, of course. He wanted to do anything he could to help you out. He promised me he’d convince Martha to send you the journal. Thought she had, too, from what Tessa last told me.”
“Martha, that’s the museum owner’s name,” I said, maneuvering back to the about section on the website on my tablet. Sure enough, there she was, smiling up at me in an ugly old sweater and thick glasses. Not really the threatening type, by the look of her. “She hasn’t exactly been cooperative.”
“So I’ve heard,” George said, the worry back in his voice now. “And Tessa said something about my friend Percy being of help to you?”
“In a manner of speaking, yeah,” I said, thinking back to the strange old book repairman I’d met in New Orleans. “He told me the journal was a fake. The one that someone from Virginia sent to me after the museum refused to talk to me about it.”
“My, that is strange,” George mused. “I’m not sure what to tell you about that, my friend. I’m sorry. I’ll just say that I’ll keep trying Henry for you.”
“Do you have his address?” I asked. “That could be helpful. Then we could look him up if he isn’t at the museum.”
“Sure, sure, I’ll send that to you,” George said breezily. “Though I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t be there. He works there, after all!”
“Has he said anything about retiring?” I asked, thinking that if this Henry character was anything like George and Percy, he was probably getting up there in his years. Percy had barely been able to carry on a conversation as he was so hard of hearing.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” George said dismissively. “He’s not really the type for that, to be honest. None of us are! We could never give up our love of the sea. You could understand that yourself, I imagine, given your line of work.”
“Yeah, you could say that,” I chuckled, thinking about how people were always bugging me for refusing to even consider retirement, and I wasn’t even close to as old as George and all his buddies.
“Alright, then, I’ll do some discreet digging on my end and good luck to you!” George said cheerily.
“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I said genuinely.
“Keep me updated,” the old man said before hanging up on me.
4
Ethan
Soon after I finished my conversation with George, I headed in to work to check in one last time on the Hollands’ case and tell Diane that I was going to take some of that time off after all.
When I got there, I found Diane tucked behind her office door, arguing audibly on the phone with someone, and Birn at his desk, looking a bit like a wilted flower, afraid of making a wrong move for fear of awakening the beast in Diane’s office.
“Uh oh,” I said, glancing over at the other MBLIS agent. “I’ve heard that before. That can’t be good. I thought all our funding problems were cleared up by now?”
Diane had been spending a lot of time arguing on the phone lately, mostly with a particularly annoying bureaucrat named Sheldon, who spent his days stuck behind a desk and making our lives miserable because he had nothing better to do with his time, apparently. Since Holm and I stopped the Haitian zombie drug from making its rounds through the United States, however, our bureaucratic problems had magically gotten a lot fewer and further between.
“I don’t think that’s what this is,” Birn said, shaking his head and eyeing Diane’s door with distaste. “I
