Maritime Caper (Coastal Fury Book 12), Matt Lincoln [good books to read for beginners TXT] 📗

She responded almost immediately, saying that she would be in touch soon, but until then, she would have to keep things under wraps.

“Anything from Holm?” Tessa asked, looking up from the guest book to see me absorbed by my phone.

“No, nothing,” I said, shaking my head as I double-checked to make sure that there was nothing from my partner. “Must’ve been a quiet day after I left. I do have something from that FBI agent we worked with in New Orleans, but she’s cagey about the whole thing.”

“Cagey?” Tessa repeated, arching an eyebrow at this. “Do you think she’s working the same case as you guys?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said, frowning down at my phone as I sent Nina a quick text saying that I understood her situation and thanking her for staying in touch with me. “She didn’t say that outright, but I don’t know… it’s kind of like the way she didn’t say it confirmed it if that makes any sense.”

“I know what you mean,” Tessa said, walking over to me and wrapping an arm around my waist. “This has been a long day, hasn’t it?”

She sighed and rested her head around my shoulder as I pocketed my phone and wrapped an arm around her in turn.

“You could say that again,” I murmured into her hair.

We stood there for a few moments, just enjoying each other’s presence there after such a long time apart, and such a stressful time for both of us.

“I really thought that someone was watching us back there,” she said, raising her head from the crook of my neck at long last and beginning to unpack her bag and pile her few belongings into the dresser.

I realized that she had packed real light for someone spending a long time in the Yukon, with just one suitcase and her carry-on. She was low maintenance, something I admired a lot about her. She was less concerned with the material things in life and more concerned with chasing the next big story.

“Yeah, so did I,” I said, bending down and beginning to unpack my own sparse possessions, or that is to say one pair of jeans, a couple of shirts, and the fake version of Grendel’s journal.

I pulled the book back from where I’d left it when I tossed it into the bag carelessly back at my houseboat. I was almost a little disappointed that it hadn’t gotten jostled around a bit more during my flight, given how annoyed I’d become with the object in the past few weeks.

I thumbed through the yellowed pages, acting out what had basically become a nervous tick at that point, peering inside at the blackened words as the pages flipped by me.

“Is that what I think it is?” Tessa asked, freezing in her tracks as she was on her way back to the dresser and pointing at the journal, her eyes wide with excitement.

“Don’t get too excited,” I said, handing it over to her and watching almost longingly as she began to look through it.

I wasn’t sure why, but even then, I felt attached to the journal. Annoyed enough with it to want it jostled around, but attached nonetheless. I supposed that I’d had it with me for so long at that point, and it had occupied my mind for even longer, that handing it over to someone else induced a kind of separation anxiety.

It was all irrational, anyway. I wasn’t going to learn anything from that journal. If I was, I would’ve figured it out by now.

“This is so weird,” Tessa breathed as she sunk down on the foot of the bed, her eyes glued to the journal’s pages. “The writing… it gets borderline incoherent at one point. And then everything starts getting blacked out, not that a lot of it wasn’t already.”

“I know,” I said, running a hand wearily through my hair. “I’ve spent hours looking at that thing. Days, even. We’re not going to learn anything from it. It’s just a bad copy with anything resembling something useful redacted from it.”

“Hey, now, a fresh set of eyes couldn’t hurt,” Tessa pointed out, glancing up at me with a grin on her face before quickly turning her attention back to the journal.

“I guess not,” I said, sinking down onto the bed next to her in turn.

We sat there like that for some time, with Tessa going through the journal, trying to find something interesting in there.

Finally, she gave up and handed it back to me.

“Sorry, you were right,” she said apologetically, shaking her head. “I can’t make heads or tails of anything in there.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” I mumbled, reluctantly taking the journal back and placing it back in my suitcase, which I then sealed.

As much as I hadn’t liked handing the book over to her in the first place, I felt like a weight was back on my shoulders as I accepted it back from her. I hoped to find the real journal soon, un-redacted, if only so that I could put the continuous stress of this one behind me.

“We do know one thing, though,” Tessa said, laughing a little under her breath as she said this.

“What?” I asked, raising my eyebrows at her.

“This pirate guy was a real piece of work,” she said. “I mean, he really went off his rocker about halfway through there. It’s kind of crazy.”

“Literally crazy,” I agreed with a grim nod. “The question is, why? What happened during the earlier pages that made him go out of it so much? And what’s blacked out? At first, it seems like everything pertaining to the Dragon’s Rogue’s location is redacted, but then it’s every other sentence, and then almost every single sentence. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Tessa agreed. “And most important, someone else knows the answer to these questions. Whoever sent you the journal, and whoever went through this one and removed all this stuff, they know. And we