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

I made a promise to myself then and there that I wouldn’t get my hopes up about any more iterations of Grendel’s journal until I had Percy or someone like him check it out for me. I knew, though, that were I to get my hands on it, I probably wouldn’t be successful in keeping my expectations tempered after all this time searching for it.

“There’s more,” I said, taking the journal between my hands and flipping to a random page, finding that most of the words on it were blacked out. “Take a look for yourself.”

I held the journal up with its spine pointing in my direction so that the museum manager could see the state of the journal’s contents without my having to hand it over to her.

She squinted at it in the dark and leaned forward to be able to see the pages better. When she realized what I was talking about, she gasped and clutched both of her hands to her chest.

“No,” she said, her tone horror-stricken as she sunk back into her seat without taking her eyes off the journal’s pages. “How many? How many pages are like that?”

“Most all of them,” I said, flipping through them for her to illustrate. “There’s nothing of use here. Nothing your students or visitors or scholars could learn from studying it, and certainly nothing that will help me track down the Dragon’s Rogue.”

“Unbelievable,” Martha said, shaking her head in disbelief. “It’s criminal. Truly criminal to desecrate a historical artifact, especially of this nature.”

“Well, at least we’re on the same page on that, so to speak,” I said dryly, and Tessa snickered beside me.

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Martha said feverishly, shaking her head to clear it and hovering somewhere between standing and taking a seated position behind her desk. “There are two journals… at least two journals that we know of. Perhaps this one isn’t the real one… But what if they both aren’t real? And what if this one is the real one? Then what will we do? Oh, to desecrate an artifact like this! Henry will have a heart attack when he finds out.”

I glanced over at Tessa and saw my own thoughts mirrored on her face. It was time to put the museum manager out of her misery, at least for now. I was satisfied enough that she didn’t have anything to do with creating the fake journal herself. She was just an unwitting pawn in this whole thing, whatever this was.

“This one is a fake, don’t worry,” I said quickly. “I had an expert in New Orleans take a look at it when I was on assignment down there…”

“Oh, was it Percy?” Martha asked before I could finish.

“Uh, yes,” I said, blinking at her. Did all of these people know each other?

“And he told you that it was a fake?” she asked, back in a sitting position and leaning forward eagerly on her desk. “You’re certain that he told you that.”

“Absolutely,” I assured her with a nod. “This journal is a fake. The question remains, however, whether the one that you have here in the museum is genuine.”

“Right, right,” Martha said, breathing a sigh of relief and leaning back in her chair. “That’s good… I just wish Henry was here so that he could perform the evaluation himself. There’s no one else here who could do it properly. Perhaps I’ll have to send it down to Percy, then, as he already helped you with this one. Or I could fly him up here and have him look at it on sight. Yes, I think that would be better. Then we wouldn’t have to send it anywhere. And it would be good to see him. It’s been quite some time…”

She seemed to be speaking more to herself now than to Tessa and me, trying to gather her thoughts after taking in so much new and jarring information in a short amount of time. There was a deer-in-the-headlights look in her eye that confirmed this theory, and she wasn’t looking at us anymore, her gaze fixated on the edge of her desk in front of her.

“About Henry,” Tessa jutted in, leaning her elbow on the arm of her chair. “My friend George has been trying to get in contact with him about this, but he hasn’t been responding. That’s why we tried to communicate directly with you in the first place. We heard from Paulina that Henry is sick and staying with his grandson in Charleston. Is that true? Or is something else going on?”

“Why wouldn’t Henry be where he says he is?” Martha asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes at us. “What are you talking about?”

I studied the old woman closely and determined that there was real concern in her eyes. There was something else, though, too. I realized that it was fear. She hadn’t considered the possibility that Henry wasn’t in Charleston, but now that it had been offered to her, she feared that it was true.

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “It’s just suspicious timing, isn’t it? That he ran off to stay with his grandson right before I started looking for the journal. And before… well, we haven’t gotten to who’s been threatening you yet, but now’s as good a time as any, isn’t it?”

“I… I…” Martha stammered, staring open-mouthed at me. Clearly, she didn’t want to answer.

“Why don’t we start a little smaller?” Tessa asked, not unkindly. “Did Henry show any signs of illness before he left? Anything at all?”

Martha scrunched her gray brows together as she thought about this.

“I… well, now that you mention it, no, it was very sudden,” she admitted with a shrug and a slight shake of her head. “I just didn’t think very much of it at the time. He’s very old, you see. It wasn’t a stretch to believe that he was ill.”

“And did he tell you that he was sick himself?” Tessa asked. “Did he ask for time off in person,