Maritime Caper (Coastal Fury Book 12) - Matt Lincoln (have you read this book TXT) 📗

necessarily that I don’t believe it, Agent Marston. It’s just that I don’t particularly care,” Martha said, shifting uncomfortably in her seat and avoiding my gaze. “That journal has been the property of this museum for decades now, and as far as I’m concerned, distant relatives have no claim on historical artifacts such as this. The public has an interest in places like this maintaining control over such items for educational purposes.”

Now, this was exactly the kind of argument that I had been anticipating originally from the museum. Why wouldn’t they want to keep their artifacts? Artifacts that people like Henry had no doubt spent an inordinate amount of time and care tracking down, researching, and educating others about. To just hand them over to some random guy who claimed to be a distant relative of the original owner would set a dangerous precedent about the ownership and preservation of such artifacts.

But I knew now that this wasn’t the real reason that the museum manager had given me the runaround. The journal’s miraculous appearance in a package addressed to me, later found to be a fake, paired with Martha’s over-the-top reaction to the knowledge that it had been sent to me, proved that well enough. Add to that her thinly-veiled threats against me, and we had something more than an intellectual debate about the rightful ownership of historical artifacts on our hands.

“Come on, Ms. Willis, let’s not kid ourselves here,” I said, shaking my head at her and leaning back in my seat. “That’s a decent argument, I guess, but it’s not why you’ve been giving us the runaround. I thought it was at first, sure, but then the journal showed up on my doorstep. Or rather, MBLIS’s doorstep. Clearly, whoever sent it to me didn’t have my home address. Or they wanted my colleagues to see it, for some reason. I’m still not sure which.”

The manager looked down at her hands, and though the lighting was dim from the drawn shade, I could still see that her knuckles were white, and her hands were clenched together. Her face was also white, and her features stricken.

“Look, you seemed more than a little surprised when you found out that Ethan found the journal,” Tessa added. “Or rather, that it was sent to him. Why don’t we talk about that a bit?”

“Yes, when I first opened the package, I’d assumed that you’d had a change of heart,” I told her. “But then, well, you made it more than clear that that wasn’t the case. Did you even know that it was missing?”

“It wasn’t missing,” Martha spat. “It wasn’t missing at all. Your lie was a poorly considered one, Agent Marston.”

“My lie?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at her as I exchanged a bewildered look with Tessa. “Do you mean to tell me that the journal is still here, in the museum?”

“Of course it is,” Martha said curtly, sitting up a little straighter now and dawning a prideful expression on her face. “I would never let one of my artifacts slip away out from under my nose like that. Who do you think I am, exactly?”

“I’m sure you’re an excellent museum manager,” Tessa said quickly. “It’s just that it’s clear you’re in over your head with something here. Why don’t you tell us about that?”

“Not so fast, young lady,” the manager snapped. “You’re not getting out of this one that easy. I just trapped you in your own lie. The journal was never sent to you. Otherwise, you’d still be accusing me of lying about having it here.”

Well, she had us on that one, though not in the way she thought.

“You’re sort of right and sort of wrong on that one,” I said, crossing my leg over my knee and folding my hands in my lap. “The journal was sent to me—or rather, a journal was sent to me. It wasn’t the one we thought it was, however.”

It was Martha’s turn to be taken aback.

“What?” she asked, shaking her head uncomprehendingly. “What do you mean by that? How can there be more than one journal?”

“Well, here’s the one I was sent,” I said, reaching into my jacket pocket and pulling out the fake journal, which I had made sure to grab before we left the bed-and-breakfast in anticipation of just this kind of scenario. I didn’t hand it to the manager, however, and I made sure not to tell her that this one was a fake, merely planting the idea in her head that one of them had to be.

Martha’s eyes lingered on the journal, widening with recognition when she saw its cover. The old book repairman from New Orleans, Percy, had been right when he said that this was an excellent copy, then. It must closely resemble the original for the manager to look so alarmed at the sight of it.

“Where did you get that?” she breathed, not taking her eyes off the journal as it lingered in my hand, hovering between her desk and my chair.

“I told you,” I said simply. “It was sent to me.”

“I… I…” she stammered, shaking her head. “It isn’t possible. We have the journal here. I double-checked right after you called, right after you told me this story the first time…”

Her voice trailed off as she no doubt tried to sort out the different possibilities of what was happening here. As far as she knew, the journal I had could be a fake. Or the museum’s copy could be the fake one. Or they could both be fake, or some other scenario that none of us had thought of yet.

This last thought concerned me the second that it occurred to me. My body had been buzzing with the possibility of being so close to the real journal since the second that Martha had mentioned its continued presence there in the museum. However, the idea that I could get my hands on it at long last only to be told for the second time that I had