Aruban Nights (Coastal Fury Book 19) Page 21

  “Come on,” Holm insisted as he got up and pulled me to my feet. “Let’s get back to shore and get something to eat. I’m starving after that dive, and you look like you could use some food yourself.

  “That’s a good idea,” I replied as I changed out of my wetsuit and back into my regular clothes.

  I shook a hand through my wet hair as I sat down on one of the leather couches. As Holm took the helm to begin the boat ride back, I looked out over the water and tried to clear my mind. That had definitely not been the Rogue, so I could at least be glad about that fact. Nevertheless, now that the thought had crossed my mind, I couldn’t banish it entirely. It had always been a possibility, but I’d never allowed myself to really dwell on it. Now that it had been ruthlessly thrust in my face, though, I could no longer ignore the fact that I might never find the Rogue. It was entirely possible that the ship I was looking for was lying at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, in just as bad a state as the one we’d just explored, or worse.

  I tried valiantly to push the thought from my mind as the boat raced over the water, droplets of ocean spray washing gently over my face as I leaned against the back of the chair and against the side of the boat.

  I was absolutely famished by the time we made it back to shore nearly four hours later. Holm and I had switched off already, and between steering the boat and the growing hunger pangs, I’d managed to shelf my worries about the Rogue completely. I pulled the boat back into the Marina and docked it carefully before stepping off, wobbling slightly as my legs got used to being back on solid ground. We’d been out so long now that the sun had started to dip back down.

  “I’ll go return the keys,” I called to Holm as I walked back toward the small building we’d rented the boat from. Even though it was only a little after five, Holm and I had no plans of going back out again today.

  When I made it to the window, It surprised me to find a young man sitting there, rather than the older man who’d helped us earlier. The man was wearing a pair of headphones and scrolling idly through something on the computer as I walked up to the window.

  “Hey,” he greeted me as he pulled the headphones off. “How can I help you?”

  “I was just returning the boat I rented earlier today,” I replied as I held the key out to him. The young man looked at me in bewilderment before looking down at the key.

  “You rented a boat?” He asked as he took the key from me.

  “Yes?” I replied with uncertainty, confused by his reaction.

  “Uncle Erik,” he sighed as he shook his head. “He must have forgotten to put it into the computer. Don’t worry about it. I’ll sort it out. Thanks.”

  “No problem,” I replied before stepping away. Holm was waiting just off to the side.

  “Ready to go?” He asked as I joined him.

  “Yeah,” I replied just as my stomach gave a growl. “We should have taken something out with us on the boat to eat until we got back.”

  “Let’s just go to the first place we come across,” Holm suggested, and that was exactly what we did. The first place we walked by turned out to be a small bar just off the beach. It clearly catered to tourists since the menu was all standard bar fare and nothing like the pastechi we had that morning. Nevertheless, it all sounded good right about now, and the added bonus of being able to enjoy a beer at the same time sounded great.

  Holm and I took a seat at one of the tables on the veranda, where we could see the view of the marina and the ocean beyond it. A server came by almost immediately.

  “Hello,” she greeted us with a wide, toothy smile as he pulled a small notepad out of a pocket in her apron. “What can I get you?”

  “I’ll have a beer to start,” I replied as I plucked one of the thin, plastic menus out of the rectangular holder set in the middle of the table.

  “Same,” Holm replied.

  “I’ll get that for you right away,” the server replied as she tucked the notepad back into her apron before turning and walking back toward the bar.

  “So when are you going to call Tessa?” Holm asked as he looked through the menu. It had all the typical things I would have found in any bar back home, wings, sliders, and onion rings, but being so close to the ocean, it also had things like prawn and calamari. My mouth was watering just looking through it.

  “Probably later tonight,” I replied as I thought about what I wanted to eat. “Why?”

  “Oh, just wanted to know if I’d need to give you two your privacy.” He smirked at me. “Since you ran off to answer the last time she called.”

  “Shut up,” I deadpanned. “I just wanted to make sure I was somewhere quiet, so I’d be able to hear her.”

  “Yeah, of course,” Holm snorted sarcastically. “That restaurant we were at was pretty busy. It was completely necessary for you to run off and hide in the bushes just to talk to your girlfriend.

  “I wasn’t--” I clamped my mouth shut. Nope, I was not about to take Holm’s bait like that. “What are you going to order?” I asked instead in a pointed move at changing the subject.

  Holm frowned at me but looked down at the menu excitedly, anyway. “I think I’m going to try the crab cakes,” he replied. “They look pretty good. You?”

  “I dunno yet,” I replied as I continued to look over the menu.

  In the end, I settled for some wings. Not the most adventurous of choices, but I was hungry, and I wanted something I could fill up on. It wasn’t until much later, after Holm and I were both halfway through our meals and I had sated my hunger, that my mind drifted back to what we’d found out in the ocean.

  I wiped my hands with a napkin before pulling my phone out of my pocket to do some research. However, no matter how much I read into the subject of pirates and old ships, I only seemed to be coming up with more questions rather than answers.

  “See? I was right,” I grumbled out loud as I read through an entry on the significance of figureheads.

  “About?” Holm asked after swallowing a mouthful of food.

  “About the figurehead,” I explained as I leaned my elbows onto the table. “They were considered incredibly important features of the ship. Sailors believed in all kinds of stuff back then, and I mean really believed it. Going out to sea without your biggest good luck charm would be suicide.”

  “So maybe someone did steal it?” Holm asked. “I assume the bigger and more impressive, the luckier it should be, right?”

  “That could be it,” I muttered as another thought crossed my mind. I suddenly recalled the gold hoop earrings we’d found in the same wreck that we’d discovered the first piece of map in. We’d determined back then that they were most likely a good luck charm as well.

  “I did read something else,” I continued. “Back then, it was common for ship captains to give each other good luck charms as gifts.”

  “Geez, was everything about luck with them?” Holm scoffed as he picked up another forkful of food.

  “Pretty much.” I chuckled. “Though I’m not sure how much of a thing it was between pirates, considering they tended to not be the best of people in the first place.”

  “That doesn’t mean they couldn’t be nice to each other,” Holm argued. “Grendel gave some of the stuff he stole to the poor, right? That seems pretty decent. Anyway, do you think that’s what happened? Grendel just gave the figurehead away to someone else as a gift?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied again, leaning back in my chair with exasperation. “I mean, it doesn’t make a lot of sense when you put it that way, but it still seems more plausible than the idea that it was stolen from him. This was Grendel, after all. The guy stole a ship and evaded capture for… well, forever, technically, since no one knows what happened to him or the Rogue. Somehow, I don’t see him going down so easily and having the ship stolen.”

  “So we’re back to square one,” Holm surmised. “No idea how or why the figurehead is down there on some random ship.”

  “No idea,” I confirmed as I looked out ove
r the water. We were miles away from the wreck now, but I could still see it in my mind’s eye, as clear as day. Curiosity was burning me up from the inside, but further research and speculation would have to wait. The sun was setting, and Maduro and the shipment would be arriving early tomorrow morning.

  For now, I’d have to shelve thoughts of the Rogue in order to focus on the case.

  22

  Ethan

  No sooner had I made the conscious decision to put all my focus back on the case than my phone suddenly rang. It was still in my hand, and I nearly dropped it with surprise when the vibration startled me unexpectedly.

  “Who’s that?” Holm asked as I looked at the screen. “Tessa again?” He smirked at me, clearly still poking fun at the way I’d handled my earlier phone call with her. I blinked down at my phone screen in surprise when I saw that it actually was Tessa calling.

  “Wait, is it actually her?” Holm asked as he leaned over the table to glance at my phone.

  “Yeah,” I replied as I moved to answer it, curious as to what she could be calling about. As pleasant as it was to get a call from her, it wasn’t all that common for her to contact me this often.

  “You’re not going to run off this time?” Holm asked me with mock innocence as he took a sip of his beer.

  “Shut up,” I replied as I answered the call and held the phone up to my ear. “Hello?”

  “Ethan, hey!” Tessa’s voice rang out through the speaker. As usual, just hearing her was enough to make me smile. “Sorry, you’re not busy, are you? I thought you might be, but I found something out, and I really couldn’t wait to tell you.”

  “I found something out too,” I replied, unable to contain my excitement over the discovery Holm and I had made earlier that day.

  “Oh, really?” Tessa replied eagerly, her voice rising in pitch in the way it always did when she was excited. “You go first-- Wait! Did you go? Out to the spot marked on the map?”

  “We just got back,” I replied.

  “What? Ethan!” Tessa exclaimed. I could practically hear her smile as she spoke elatedly into the phone. From the surprised look on Holm’s face, he could hear her, too. “That’s amazing! What did you find? Tell me all about it.”

  “Tell me what you found first,” I countered, in part to tease her and in part because I really was curious about what could be so big that she would call me over.

  “Oh, right,” she replied. “Yeah, my news is way less exciting in comparison. Anyway, the museum forwarded me the donor’s contact information, the man who donated the map pieces to the museum.”

  “Really?” I asked, excited by the news but also admittedly a little shocked that the museum had divulged someone’s personal information like that. “They just gave that over to you?”

  “Yeah, I was surprised, too,” she replied. “I guess it’s that small-town mentality? I looked up the census records, and apparently, the town’s population is only about a thousand. I guess they’re laxer about that kind of stuff.”

  Once again, the entire situation left me dumbstruck. Just how had a set of pirate maps ended up in the actual middle of nowhere, dead center in the United States, in a tiny town, miles and miles away from any bodies of water? That in itself was enough of a mystery and one that I was looking forward to exploring now that we had a contact.

  “Anyway,” Tessa continued, “even though it was his grandpa’s stuff, I figure he might know something, right? Or maybe there’s something in the grandfather’s records that could point us in the right direction.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I agreed as I lifted my glasses to take a sip of beer.

  “Right?” Tessa replied. “Anyway, enough about that. It’s your turn now. Tell me what you found!”

  I smiled at how enthused she sounded and took another long gulp of beer before diving into the details.

  “A shipwreck,” I replied. “I was right about the X being located just off the coast of Venezuela. Holm and I went to check it out and found an entire ship there on the ocean floor.”

  “I thought that might be the case,” she replied brightly. “That note next to it said ‘disaster,’ right? I figured it must be a shipwreck. Was there anything exciting on it? Treasure?”

  The smile slipped off my face just slightly as I thought about how to answer her question. There certainly had been something quite valuable on that ship, though definitely not what she was imagining.

  “There was something, actually,” I replied tentatively. “There was a lot of treasure too, but most of it was in pretty bad condition, too rotted away to really be worth saving.”

  “Aw, that’s too bad,” Tessa replied, her voice wavering. “But there was something? What was it?”

  I pursed my lips together, the silence between us stretching on for several inexorable seconds.

  “The Dragon’s Rogue’s figurehead,” I finally replied plainly. As fun as it was to tease her, I was still too in shock over the entire situation to drag this out or make a joke of it.

  “What?” she mumbled, her voice hollow. “I… What does that mean? Is the Rogue--?”

  “It wasn’t the Rogue,” I hurried to correct her. “The shipwreck wasn’t the Rogue. It was another ship entirely.”

  “Oh, thank goodness,” she breathed over the phone. The relief in her voice was palpable. “That is a good thing, right? I mean, I know you’ve been looking for it, but--”

  “It’s a good thing,” I assured her. “I want to find the Dragon’s Rogue, don’t get me wrong, but I’d like to think that wherever she is, she’s in a better state than the sorry wreck we found earlier today.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Tessa muttered over the phone. “But I don’t understand. The figurehead is that thing that goes on the front, right? Usually in the shape of a mermaid or something? What was the Rogue’s doing on some other boat?”

  “I honestly have no idea,” I replied. “I’ve been wracking my brain and doing research to try to get to the bottom of that question myself. There’s no logical reason why it would be.”

  “Well, I’ll do some digging as well,” she replied, her voice already several leagues more cheerful. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure this out. And hey, this is kind of a good thing when you think about it. It means that this wreck you found is connected to the Rogue in some way, right? That means you’re one step closer to finding it!”

  “I guess that is one way to look at it,” I conceded as I smiled at her over the phone.

  “Of course it is,” she replied forcefully. “Seriously, Ethan, don’t you think it's crazy how this is all connected? The first piece of the map was found next to an envelope bearing Grendel’s seal, and now a different piece led you to a shipwreck that had the Rogue’s figurehead attached.”

  “That is a good point,” I replied as I went over all the interconnected clues we’d discovered thus far. She was right. Somehow, everything ended up tracing back to Grendel and the Rogue.

  “Like I said, we’ll figure it out,” she insisted, her voice bright and confident. “Anyway, I need to get back to work now. I promise I’ll look into the figurehead more as soon as I get some free time. I’m sure that, between the two of us, we can figure out just how it got there.”

  “Thanks, Tessa,” I replied gratefully.

  “It’s my pleasure, Ethan,” she responded. “I’m just as curious about this as you are. I’m seeing this hunt through to the end. Okay, I’ll let you go now. Bye!”

  “Bye,” I replied.

  The call dropped a moment later, and I realized that I felt significantly less stressed out just having spoken with her. I tucked my phone into my pocket, and when I looked back up, Holm was staring at me with an odd, almost disapproving expression on his face.

  “What?” I asked, confused as to why he was looking at me like that. He continued to stare at me for several silent moments.

  “I just don’t get you, Marston,” he finally sighed, before picking up his glass and downing the rest of his
beer.

  “Huh?” I furrowed my eyebrows at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Seriously,” he muttered. “You’ve got this sweet, kind, amazing woman who-- No, never mind. This conversation is just going to end in you going on about how you don’t ‘do’ girlfriends or something.”

  I opened my mouth to retort, but then clamped it back shut again. Holm was right. No matter what I said, he’d probably just make some dumb quip about my romantic endeavors and my supposed multitude of partners.

  “Anyway,” I replied, pointedly changing the subject, “you ready to go?”

  “Yeah,” he replied as he dabbed his mouth with a napkin before pushing his chair back and standing up. I followed suit, dropping a tip on the table before making my way toward the entrance of the small bar.

  The sun was still peering out over the horizon when we left the bar, if only barely. Night had almost entirely fallen by now, and I was sure that it would be completely dark within the next twenty minutes or so. It was a good time to head back to the hotel since that would leave us with a little more time to rest before the mission tomorrow morning.

  “That truck from this morning is gone,” Holm noted sadly as we passed the spot where we’d bought the cheese-filled pastries for breakfast.

  “Didn’t you just eat?” I teased as I took note of the disappointed expression on his face.

  “Yeah,” he grumbled. “But it would have been nice to grab some for tomorrow morning. With how early we have to be up, we won’t have time to eat anything.”

  “We’ll just have to wait until after.” I shrugged as we continued to walk down the street.

  Though the sun had started to set, the city was still alive with movement. It was early in the evening, and Aruba’s nightlife was just getting into motion. Trucks similar to the one Holm and I had just talked about lined either side of the street, enticing aromas floating out of their open windows. I could hear music playing from bars and clubs along the main street, which itself was bustling with people.

  My eyes landed on one woman in particular, who was gawking up at the brightly colored dollhouse buildings with wide, awestruck eyes. She was quite pretty, tall and curvy, with short wavy hair. She was so taken in by the view in front of her that she didn’t even notice when a man suddenly reached his hand into the purse that was dangling from her shoulder and yanked something out.