by Matt Lincoln
Normally, this wouldn’t be that unpleasant a feeling, indicative of a long day lounging on the beach. But now, it was an irritating distraction from the task at hand and the little boy who needed their help.
There was no way that Tessa was going to let Ethan leave her out of the action at this most crucial juncture in his search for the Dragon’s Rogue. She was sure that she’d survived worse than this, either in her previous scuff-ups with Ethan or on one of her assignments for her own job, and she had no doubt that she would see worse again. In the meantime, there was a kid who needed saving, and this just might be the most exciting story she had come across yet.
At that point, Tessa was all but convinced that Grendel had once stayed in this house and that he was the subject of all these legends the locals had told them about. She was far more skeptical that his ghost was still hanging around, but it would be too much of a coincidence if the legends weren’t about him.
Ethan, she knew, didn’t dare hope for this much after he’d searched for so long and so hard, only to keep coming up short. The most he would hope for was the real copy of Grendel’s journal un-tampered with, or maybe just a clue to where it might be.
Tessa, on the other hand, didn’t believe in this many coincidences lining up in short succession. That would be far too convenient and far too weird.
It took them longer than they would’ve liked to reach the top of the staircase, bogged down by the fog and the sheer size of the cliff. They didn’t hear any more child’s screams as they went, but almost as disturbingly, they didn’t hear any more clanging sounds, either. It was like everything had just ceased after Miles had dared cry out for help.
Tessa came to a stop at the top of the staircase and reached back to grab Ethan’s hand as he came up behind her.
“I haven’t heard anything in a while,” she muttered, almost afraid to break the tentative silence that had cast itself over the area, bereft of sound but for the crash of the waves beneath them.
“Neither have I,” he muttered, shaking his head and glaring at the house as if he would like nothing more than to punch it in the face it did not have.
“Let’s go, then,” she said, prompting him to come with her gently. “The sooner we get in there, the sooner we figure out what’s going on and get that boy back to his parents.”
Ethan swiftly moved out in front of her and pulled out his gun. She felt a reassurance she didn’t know she needed then and was glad to have him there beside her and to be there with him herself.
The house was vast, at least the size of the Carltons, but it couldn’t look more different. It was dark and dreary, and the fog seemed to cling to it even up close. Tessa felt herself shiver unconsciously and wrapped her arms around herself to keep it from happening again.
She had expected to see construction tools all over the long yard, but there weren’t any to be found. Just overgrown grass jutting up against the sand that lined the edges of the cliff.
“Last chance to turn back,” Ethan said as they approached the front door, looking back at her with a very serious expression.
“Not a chance,” she said, shooting him a shaky half-grin.
“Alright, then,” he sighed, clearly thinking better than to try arguing with her again, and he left her a few steps behind him as he stepped onto the rocky front porch made of the same blackened wood material as the house itself and grasped the charcoal door knocker, letting it fall against the door three times in short succession.
The knocks rang out, echoing over the roar of the waves below. But not a sound came in response.
Ethan waited for several moments and then knocked again.
“Military police, open up!” he called alongside his knocks.
When those attempts, too, went unanswered, he shook his head and took several steps back until he was even with Tessa again.
“They can’t be serious,” he muttered under his breath. “Well, I’m coming in anyway.”
He rushed at the door and kicked it in. It didn’t take much, which honestly didn’t surprise Tessa. For a house that had supposedly been under construction for some time now, the place looked a little too bare-bones for her comfort levels.
The door fell in with a clang and broke in two, revealing rotted wood that splintered out in several directions.
His gun held out in front of him, Ethan crept forward into the house, stepping tentatively over the fallen door and into the dark house. Tessa followed close behind him.
There was almost no light coming into the house, except for what shone through where the door had been, and the sun was beginning to set, anyway. Pair that with all the fog, and Tessa had to blink several times to allow her eyes to adjust to the lower lighting, and even then, she could barely see anything.
“Do you have your phone?” Ethan whispered back at her.
“Yeah, but I still don’t have a signal,” she hissed back, not sure what he was getting at with this.
“Do you have a flashlight?” he asked, and Tessa could’ve hit herself for not thinking of this before.
She quickly scrambled for her phone and turned on its flashlight, illuminating the room in front of them.
There wasn’t much of an entryway by the door, just a small pocket to their right that was home to an empty umbrella stand. They were left staring at a vast living room area not unlike the one they had sat in at the Carltons in size and design, but completely different from it in appearance and aesthetic.
There was no furniture to be seen but for an old rickety wooden table to Ethan’s left that was covered in spray paint and other graffiti, no doubt from the house’s decades serving as a spot for high school kids to scare themselves.
Stacked on the table were all kinds of papers. They mostly looked old, frayed pieces of parchment with a yellow tinge to them that indicated their age. There were a few pages that looked newer, too, however, and Tessa stepped up to the table and shone her flashlight beam over them.
“Wait, what’s that?” Ethan asked before she had a chance to get a closer look at the papers, pointing to a place ahead of them that the flashlight beam had barely touched.
Tessa squinted to try to make out what he was pointing at, but she didn’t see anything yet. Just the thin outline of what looked like something large.
She reluctantly moved her flashlight beam from the papers resting on the old table to whatever Ethan was trying to get a glance at. As soon as she did, she nearly dropped her phone in shock.
Tessa wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find, but it wasn’t this. It was the hollowed-out carcass of a giant ship. Well, part of what looked like a giant ship. Tessa wasn’t exactly the expert on these things that Ethan was.
“What the…” Ethan started to say, his mouth hanging open as he stared at it.
Tools and other construction items rested all around the ship’s carcass. That must’ve been what the Carltons had been hearing for all this time, not work on the house itself.
“Is… is that…?” Tessa asked, not sure how to finish her sentence as she gestured at the strange ship. She didn’t dare breathe the words the Dragon’s Rogue, all of a sudden afraid of jinxing it much like Ethan had been this whole trip.
“No, no, it can’t be,” Ethan said, certainty in his voice as he stepped up to the ship and ran his hands along a smooth piece of wood that Tessa imagined was meant to be a part of its main deck. “This wood is too new. This isn’t an old ship. It’s not even a whole ship, yet. But someone definitely wanted it to look like one.”
“Huh?” Tessa asked, shaking her head in confusion. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“See this here?” Ethan asked, walking over to the other end of the ship and pointing to a darker area of wood there.
Tessa tentatively took a few steps forward to stand right behind him and shine the light where he pointed. Sure enough, a part of the ship looked darker and older than the others. And right at the foot of the ship sat several vats of some kind of weird paint Tessa had never
heard of before, and it definitely reeked, clearing out her sinuses in one sniff.
“What is it?” she asked, shaking her head at the darker area of the wood.
“It’s a paint to make it look older than it is, to make it age faster,” he explained. “Those stores that sell fake antiques use it, except this is a better quality one than I’ve seen before.”
“Wait, like the journal?” she asked, suddenly remembering something.
It was Ethan’s turn to be confused now.
“Huh?” he asked, looking up at her with a furrowed brow. “What are you talking about?”
“The journal,” she said excitedly, unable to keep her voice down. “Grendel’s journal. The fake one, I mean. You told me that that old book repairman in New Orleans had told you that someone went to a lot of pains to make it look convincingly old, even if it was new.”
“Yeah, he did say that,” Ethan said, nodding slowly as he caught on to her meaning. “And he said that not many people would’ve been able to tell, and I was lucky that I brought it to him first. But that was a book, and that was a whole ship. I don’t exactly see how they’re related…”
But Tessa could tell by the excited glint in his eye that no doubt mirrored her own that he did catch her meaning. He just wanted to talk it through some more. So she obliged him.
“So these same people who wanted you to think you found Grendel’s journal, maybe when they realized that you wouldn’t stop looking for it, they decided to try to make you think that you’d found what you’re really looking for, too,” she said, glancing at the whole of the fake ship now.
“Yeah,” Ethan said, returning to a standing position and taking stock of the whole of the ship’s carcass as well. “Yeah, maybe.”
Tessa suddenly remembered the papers and returned her flashlight beam to the table. The papers at the top showed two faces, a man and a woman, staring up at her in black and white, next to a bunch of information about the Hawthorne house: how much they’d bought it for, who they’d bought it from, that kind of stuff.
There was something about the faces that gave her pause. The man looked like he’d had a few too many spray tans, even in black and white. The woman looked like she’d had more than a few too many Botox treatments.
She then remembered Ethan’s description of Chester and Ashley Holland, the real estate mogul couple who were behind the whole mess MBLIS had cleaned up in the Florida Keys a few weeks ago.
“Hey, Ethan?” she asked, holding it out to him only to find that he was still wholly absorbed by the fake ship. “Can you take a look at this?”
“Hmm?” he asked, only barely listening to her, and she walked back over to him with the paper in hand, shoving it under his nose and beaming her phone’s flashlight right on top of it.
He didn’t need to say anything then. It was obvious that her intuition had been correct, judging by his reaction. He abandoned all thought of the ship then and gripped the paper tightly to him, staring down at the plastic faces on it in black and white.
“Well, well, you’re a bit more on top of things than we were led to believe,” a voice rang out across the vast room.
26
Ethan
I froze and dropped the paper as Tessa whirled her flashlight beam over to land on a man with a gun, holding a little boy who had to be Miles Carlton, wriggling and sobbing in his arms.
“Come for this?” the man asked with a sneer as I whipped my gun around to face his in the darkness. He lifted Miles up with one arm as the boy sobbed and hollered, his voice ringing out loud and piercing, and jostled him in the air a bit for emphasis.
“Put him down,” I growled, taking a step forward, so that Tessa was behind me again. “Put him down right now.”
“As you wish,” the guy grinned, holding his hands up and allowing Miles to drop all the way to the floor from where he was dangling in the air.
The sobbing boy took this in stride, doing an awkward somersault across the rotting hardwood floors and running straight into Tessa’s waiting arms.
“Take him,” I barked at her quickly. “Take him and run.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” another voice called out, and two more goons shuffled over to stand in the now empty doorway, blocking Tessa and Miles’s exit.
I cursed internally and whirled my gun around again, back and forth so that each of the goons was kept on their toes.
“Who are you?” I asked the guy who’d had the kid. He looked like the leader to me, with a tall stature, a shaved head, and beady blue eyes that shot right through me. The other two looked like they were half drunk, and they didn’t have the maniacal look about them that the other one did.
These men had been hired by Chester and Ashley. I knew that now, and I was angry with myself for not seeing it before. I hadn’t even thought of the possibility because it all seemed so convenient, the Hollands being the subject of our last case and all. It seemed like it had to be too much of a coincidence. It was too unlikely.
That was the thing, though, I realized. It wasn’t a coincidence. None of this was a coincidence. These people had been behind Lafitte’s ship showing up in New Orleans. And they had been behind all that nonsense in the Keys. And, it turned out, they had been tailing me for some time, watching my movements as I searched for the Dragon’s Rogue. The question wasn’t whether they had been doing this, but rather for how long.
“I’m not that important,” the man answered with a shrug. “I’m just the right-hand man for the biggest drug kingpins in the history of this country, is all.”
“You’re selling drugs here?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him. “Doesn’t seem like a big hot spot for that if you ask me.”
“Come on, Agent Marston, you know better than that,” the guy sneered. “We’re not here for any of that business. That’s peanuts compared to what we’re up to.”
“And what’s that?” I asked dryly.
“The same thing you are, I ‘spect,” the guy drawled, his muscles taut under his plain white tee shirt. By the look of him, I didn’t exactly love my chances in hand-to-hand combat with this one. The other two would be a breeze, but not him. He could’ve been a professional wrestler, as far as I could tell.
“Why don’t you tell me about this?” I asked, jerking my chin in the direction of the outline of the fake ship standing next to me.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this whole thing. The journal was one thing. It made sense to try to throw me off the trail that way, making me think that the real journal was mangled beyond repair, with any useful information redacted.
But an entire ship? Did they really think that I wouldn’t notice when the whole entire ship turned up, and it wasn’t the real deal?
Even as I thought this, I wasn’t so sure. I’d been fooled by the journal, after all. I liked to think that I wouldn’t be fooled by a whole ship, but if they did a good enough job, who knew? Paired with the elation and all the excitement that would come along with thinking I had found the Dragon’s Rogue at long last, it wasn’t actually unfathomable that I would be fooled.
“That?” the guy in the muscle tee repeated, an almost pained expression crossing his face for a brief moment. “That’s none of your concern.”
“None of my concern?” I asked, taking another step toward him with my gun held out, causing the two goons in the back to bristle and raise their own weapons a little higher. “How can you say that? It’s for me, isn’t it?
“Then you do know more than you let on,” the goon said, narrowing his eyes at me. “So what are you asking me for if you’ve already worked the whole thing out for yourself, smart guy?”
“I just want to confirm the theory I already have,” I shot back, a little snider than I’d intended, and he scowled at me.
I realized that despite his bravado, I’d ruined this guy’s whole plan. He had to be important for a couple of nautical enthusiasts like the Hollands to send him to run their whole operation in Newport News while they tried to fend me off in o
ur parallel searches for the Dragon’s Rogue. And here I was, squashing all his grand schemes and walking in on him trying to trick me. I wondered what else I might find stashed in this old house if I had a good look through it.
Something occurred to me, then. These noises had been going on for at least six months, or even the better part of a year, based on what the police, Paulina, and the Carltons had told me. The house had been bought even before that, clearly by the Hollands under one of their many aliases since this property hadn’t shown up on our map of their properties held under their own names.
That was long before I ever knew about the nautical museum—long, long before, which could only mean one thing. If the Hollands bought this house for the sole purpose of helping them find the Dragon’s Rogue, they were at least one or two steps ahead of me in my own search. Or they had been a year or so ago, at least.
Unless this was all just a coincidence, and they’d bought the property as one of their many mundane real estate ventures, and then just happened to have it when I found out that the museum had the journal. That struck me as more than unlikely, given recent events. There would be no more writing anything off as a coincidence where the Hollands were concerned for me.
“Wait, how long have you been here?” I asked the guy, and man, did he not like that question.
“Enough talk. You’re done, Marston,” he whined, waving his gun in the air and pressing down on the trigger before I knew what was happening.
I dove and pulled Tessa and Miles along with me, tucked close to the ground as I heard the bullet crash into the wall behind where my head had been mere seconds before.
“Stay down,” I murmured into Tessa’s ear before crawling back into a standing position. “Keep on top of him.”
She nodded weakly, and I moved on to the two goons standing over us in the doorway, quickly shooting at them each in turn before they had the time to react. They each fell to the ground in short order, blood pooling around them.
That left the main guy and me, with his muscles and all. And if he had been pissed before, he was practically fuming out of his ears now.
