Maritime Caper (Coastal Fury Book 12)

by Matt Lincoln

  “Only two?” I repeated. “Isn’t that kind of weird?”

  “It is,” she confirmed, a puzzled tone in her voice. “A couple of the guys ended up staying up there a little longer, but the magazine wanted me back to run the story. Hopefully, some more of the animals will turn up, eventually. Until then, it’s a real mystery.”

  “I guess we both make our living off of mysteries, then,” I chuckled, glancing back down at the file resting between my elbows on the kitchen table.

  I frowned at it and then shut it tight, obscuring Chester Holland’s annoying grin from view. The last thing I needed was to feel like he was watching me while I was trying to have a conversation with Tessa.

  “As I said, we would make a good team,” Tessa reiterated in a sing-song voice. “You supply the stories, and I figure out how to tell them. We could make a real killing.”

  “I don’t know how Diane would feel about that,” I chuckled, picturing the enraged expression on her face were she to find out that I put agency secrets into a tell-all book. “Or the United States government, for that matter.”

  “Oh, come on, there would be a way to keep the most sensitive details out while retaining the heart of the story,” Tessa pushed, though I could tell that she was just teasing me. “Anyway, people publish this kind of stuff all the time. We could even fictionalize it to give us plausible deniability.”

  “I think I’ll have to get back to you on that one,” I laughed. “Besides, if anyone’s going to give in to the temptation to tell a bunch of people about the goings-on at MBLIS, it’s Holm.”

  “That’s true enough,” Tessa said, her musical laugh ringing through the phone.

  “Well, I’d better go,” I said, glancing down at my watch. “It’s getting late for me. Let me know if you can get those tickets, and I’ll meet you in Virginia. We can rent a car and drive over to the museum if you like.”

  “That sounds like a good plan,” she said. “Sleep well, Ethan. I’m looking forward to seeing you again soon.”

  “Me too,” I told her, and then she clicked away, leaving me alone with the file and with Grendel’s fake journal, which was lying across from me on the kitchen table.

  I looked from the journal to the file and then back again, as if trying to decide which one I was going to look through now. At varying intervals, I’d been obsessed with both over the past few weeks.

  Ultimately, I decided to abandon both, leaving them both on the kitchen table as I gathered up my dishes and cleaned them out in the sink, looking out at the water surrounding my houseboat.

  I had another address officially on record with MBLIS, but the houseboat was really my home. I couldn’t imagine spending my downtime anywhere away from the water.

  Once my dishes were cleared up, I went straight to bed. I had a feeling eventful days were to follow, and I would need my sleep while I could get it.

  I couldn’t wait to see Tessa again. It felt like it had been a lifetime since we’d last met.

  3

  Ethan

  I woke up the next morning and tried to call the museum in Virginia. I figured that the least I could do was try to get a read on where things were at before Tessa and I just showed up on their doorstep asking questions.

  My relationship with the museum and its staff had been pretty dicey so far. I’d called a lot when I was originally trying to get my hands on the journal, and so had Tessa, emphasizing the fact that I was a descendent of Lord Jonathan Finch-Hatton’s, and that correspondingly it could be argued that the journal belonged to me in a way.

  I already had a few pages of the actual journal, too, found buried in the walls of a crime scene in Hawaii. None of this seemed to sway the museum, however, and before leaving for Haiti, I resolved to go up there myself and try to persuade the museum’s manager in person to let me at least look at the journal for a little while, if not take it off the site of the museum itself.

  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 respons
ible 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 sure I would be able to find a whole manner of things to be fascinated by once I got there.

  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 heard her saying something about the Hollands. I think she’s talking to someone from the FBI.”

  “Oh, damn,” I said, sinking down into my own desk chair several paces from Birn’s. “That’s bad timing.”

  “What do you mean?” Birn asked, arching an eyebrow at me.

  “I was just going to take some time off since you were coming back today,” I explained with a shrug. “I was going to head up to Virginia with Tessa and see if I can get to the bottom of this whole thing with Grendel’s journal. But I don’t want to miss out on a break in the Holland case. We’ve been waiting forever on that already, it feels like.”

  “You and your old pirate stuff,” Birn said, grinning and shaking his head at me. “You’ll never take a real vacation, will you, Marston?”

  “I guess not,” I chuckled.

  “Oh, well, better cases for the rest of us, then,” Birn smirked, and I shot him a look.

  “No way,” I protested. “I’m not letting you and Holm get the best case of the decade and work it without me. Not a chance.”

  “You’re one to talk about the best case of the deca
de!” Birn shot back. “You and Holm got to chase after literal zombies.”

  “They weren’t literal zombies,” I grumbled, rolling my eyes. “Not like out of the movies, anyway. Don’t believe everything that Holm tells you.”

  “Still,” Birn said with a hollow laugh. “You guys get to chase after some new drug while I get kidnapped by a bunch of boring old cocaine dealers in a tent. Never say Diane doesn’t play favorites again. I’m not even kidding…”

  “It’s not like Diane knew you were going to get kidnapped,” I laughed. “Or that the zombies were going to turn up, literal or not. Anyway, how are you feeling? Rested up? You weren’t gone for that long, considering.”

  “Ah, I’m fine,” Birn scoffed, waving a hand in the air dismissively. “I was just sedated for a few days in that tent, anyway. They barely left a scratch on me.”

  “If I remember correctly, you were allergic to the sedative, though,” I pointed out, thinking back to just how zonked out the poor guy had been when we found him alone in the woods. I’d thought he might actually be dead at first, but the guy who had been holding him there told us that he’d reacted poorly to the drug they gave him when they first took him.

  “Uh, we don’t talk about that,” Birn said, looking down at his desk, and I could’ve sworn that his cheeks turned a shade darker.

  “Ah, don’t be embarrassed,” I laughed. “You can’t help what you’re allergic to.”

  “Yeah, well, Muñoz won’t let me hear the end of it,” Birn said bitterly. “She keeps talking about how a big-time agent like me shouldn’t be allergic to a regular old sedative.”