The Mystery of Dolphin Inlet

by James Holding

  CHAPTER 4

  SUSAN MAKES A DISCOVERY

  The next day was Saturday. I knew I’d be as busy as a minnow dodging sea gulls because next to Friday, Saturday is our biggest day at the fish market, and I always have plenty of cleaning and filleting to do for customers, besides a lot of deliveries to make.

  I was sort of looking forward to it, though, because it would bring me one day nearer to Sunday when I had another date with Susan Frost.

  Isn’t that something? Here I was, just putting in time, you might say, until I could see Susan again, and I hadn’t even met the girl twenty-four hours ago! The all-new Pete Hobbs, I thought to myself as I worked over a fat pompano for Mrs. Hendricks. The sophisticate, the man-of-the-world, the cool, poised dater of pretty girls from Tallahassee. I began to whistle under my breath.

  Gloria heard me. She looked over at me between waiting on customers and gave me the big smile that says, “Aha, Pete! I told you she was a doll!”

  About ten-thirty I heard an outboard motor coughing its way up our channel from the bay. This channel is a short curving one from Sarta Bay that dead-ends right beside our fish market in a little landlocked pool where Pop ties up his boat. There’s always a mess of empty baskets and fish crates and scales and nets and miscellaneous fishing gear kicking around there, but it’s handy for Pop because the channel gives our boat access to the bay…and, through Sunset Pass, to the Gulf itself.

  Anyway, I heard this outboard coming up our channel. It died out with a last gasp at our dock. And a minute later, somebody came into the market, letting the screen door slam behind him. It didn’t surprise me much that a customer should come up our channel by boat, because that happened fairly often. What shook me up was the customer himself.

  I took a casual look at him when he came in and when I realized he was a stranger I’d never seen before, I turned back to the cleaning table where I was working on a black grouper for Mrs. Casey. A half second later, I did a quick double-take and came near cutting off my thumb with the fish knife. For all of a sudden it hit me that I’d never seen this customer before in the flesh, maybe, but I had seen a picture of him. Only last night, in fact. In Pop’s high school yearbook.

  There couldn’t be two guys with that long sharp chin. And the sticking-out ears. And the crop of curly grayish hair on a narrow skull. And with that tall skinny build besides, and no eyebrows. He was older but he was the same guy, all right.

  Perry Osgood.

  There were three customers ahead of him in the line waiting for Gloria to take their orders. I put down my knife and stood and stared at him for a minute before I could get myself to operating again. What was he doing here? He’d never bought fish from us before. I couldn’t help remembering Pop’s suggestion that one of the Osgoods had taken a look at my driver’s license while I was swimming in the inlet. If so, then Perry Osgood knew who I was and where I lived. Was that why he was here? To find out about me, look me over, talk to me?

  “Mrs. Casey’s waiting,” Gloria called to me. I came out of my trance and finished filleting the grouper. Gloria wrapped it up. I started on a mackerel.

  A shadow fell over my cleaning table. I looked up. And there he was. Standing right where Susan had stood yesterday admiring my “economy of motion,” whatever she meant by that. Some art term, maybe? She’d said she was a painter.

  Perry Osgood said in a raspy voice, “Are you Peter Hobbs?”

  I went on scraping scales off the mackerel. “Yes, sir,” I said. “My sister will wait on you over there at the counter. I just clean the fish.”

  He tried to be friendly. “You’re pretty good at it, too.”

  “Thanks.” Then, like an idiot, I said the same thing I’d said to Susan yesterday. “It’s all in the knife.”

  Grinning, “That’s what I always say, too,” Osgood commented. He was quiet a second. I went on working. “Reason I asked you, are you Rusty Hobbs’s boy?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s Pop.”

  “Oh.” A shade of warmth, interest, relief in his voice? I wasn’t sure. “I used to know him, years ago.”

  “That so?” I wasn’t going to help him.

  “Yep. So now he owns a fish market! You doing any good with it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Making any money?”

  “Pop’s main business is fishing,” I said shortly. “This market is just a sideline.”

  “Still,” Osgood said, strangely persistent, “I guess a lot of people come to buy from you, don’t they?”

  “Quite a few, yes, sir.” What did he think? After all, it’s a fish market.

  “People from the Key?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Winter visitors, too, I imagine?”

  “Some. Not many tourists on the Key. Do you live on Perdido?” I asked him innocently. “I don’t remember seeing you before.”

  “Yep. Up north a way. Dolphin Inlet.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see he was giving me a sharp glance when he said that.

  I pretended I’d never heard of the place, which I hadn’t, till last night. “Oh,” I said, acting uninterested. Then I thought, what the heck, if he’s so curious, I’ll give him a little of his own medicine. I said, “You haven’t ever been in to buy fish from us before, have you?”

  “Nope.” Perry Osgood shrugged his narrow shoulders under the sun-faded blue work shirt he was wearing. “Ain’t got a car. And this is pretty far by boat just for fish. We catch our own fish mostly, anyway.”

  I noticed he said “we.” I remembered how this guy’s brother had scared Susan and me—half to death. I said, “Then what brings you in this time all of a sudden?”

  He hesitated before he answered that one. He flicked an eye to our display case to see what we had for sale. Then he explained in a hale-and-hearty kind of way, “Couldn’t resist trying your snapper, I guess, son. Heard about it for years. People say it’s almost like a different fish, as though it was caught in some hole in the Gulf that nobody else knows about. Fellow mentioned it just the other day, so as I happened to have an errand down this way…”

  He broke off as Gloria finished waiting on Mrs. Kreiling and called to him, “Can I help you now?”

  He nodded and said, “Two of those small red snappers in the case, please, miss. Whole. Just the way they are.”

  Gloria reached into the case for the snappers. “Don’t you want Pete to clean them?”

  “I’ll handle that myself,” Osgood said. He didn’t move away from my cleaning table. “Just wrap ’em up, please.”

  While Gloria was wrapping his fish, I said, “It’s nice to hear that our snapper is popular. Who did you say told you about it?”

  He paused. Then he said slowly, “Oh, some fellow, probably one of the winter visitors, not a local man, I kind of forget who.” Osgood put up a knobby-knuckled hand and rasped the day-old beard on his sharp chin. “Now what was that guy’s name?” He snapped his fingers. “Got it!” he said. “It was a fellow named Roscoe Chapin. Do you know him?”

  I looked up into his eyes. They had the cold intentness of 12-gauge shotgun muzzles. He was watching me like a hawk. Why? To see if that name registered with me?

  I shook my head. “Roscoe Chapin? No, sir. I never heard of him, far as I can remember. Did you, Gloria?” After all, she works alone in the shop when I’m in school and knows our customers far better than I do. She said she’d never heard of Roscoe Chapin, either.

  The intentness faded out of Osgood’s eyes. He must have thought we were telling the truth. Which we were. At least I was. The name Roscoe Chapin didn’t ring any bells with me.

  Osgood took his package of fish from Gloria and paid her. I thought he looked relieved.

  “Nice to meet you, Pete,” he said to me as he left. “Tell your father I said hello after all these years. And thanks very much, miss,” he said to Gloria.
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  “Who’ll I tell Pop was saying hello?” I asked, just to be sure.

  “Perry Osgood. He probably won’t remember me. From Sarta City High.”

  “I’ll tell him, Mr. Osgood,” I said. He went out, and it wasn’t long until we heard his outboard start up and go racketing down our channel to the bay.

  * * * *

  Twenty minutes after Osgood left, a car pulled up in front of the shop and another customer came in to join the three or four who were already waiting their turns with Gloria. I was on the telephone at the time, taking an order for smoked mullet from Mrs. Canaday, and I had my back to the counter so I didn’t see right away who it was.

  As I hung up the receiver, Gloria said in a certain kind of voice, “Pete,” and I swung around and there was Susan Frost.

  I felt my Adam’s apple give a twitch or two. “Hi, Susan,” I said, keeping it cool and natural, as though I wasn’t tickled half to death to see her.

  Susan came over by the tubs and said in a low voice, “Can you come outside for a minute?”

  I stropped my knife on the whetstone. “Sure,” I answered. “Soon as we get these customers taken care of. Maybe five minutes?” I looked at her closely then, and I could see that she was really excited about something, for her eyes were shining like calm water in a low sun. I wondered what it was, and I was half tempted to walk outside with her right then and find out, making the other customers wait a few minutes, but I couldn’t do that, of course.

  Susan nodded and touched my wrist with the tip of her finger and turned toward the door. That finger touch was like being touched by a mild electric current. “I’ll be outside,” she said in a voice so soft that nobody else in the market could hear her. “In the car.”

  I guess I never cleaned and filleted fish quicker than the ones I did in the next few minutes. When the last customer went out with her package, there was a lull, so I whipped off my apron and said to Gloria, “I’m going outside for a minute, sis. To talk to Susan. I’ll come right back in if another customer shows up. Okay?”

  Gloria put a hand up to her hair in the grand manner she likes to put on sometimes. “What! Quitting right smack in the middle of our busiest morning?” She was indignant. Then she grinned impishly, “Get on out there, dope, before she decides to find herself another fellow!”

  Gloria’s pretty crude sometimes about stuff like that.

  I followed her advice, though. I took the whole flight of steps in front of the fish market at one jump. Susan was sitting behind the wheel of a gray Chevy thirty feet away. I went over and opened the door and climbed in beside her.

  “I couldn’t wait to tell you about it, Pete!” she said before I even got the car door shut.

  “What?” I said.

  “Something I found out this morning.”

  “You’re killing me. Give.”

  “It’s really not very much, but I felt a sort of personal interest.”

  I pointed one finger at her like a gun and said, “In what? I’ve only got a few minutes, Susan. What happened?” She told it straight, then. “After breakfast this morning, I was walking down to the beach at the Freebooter…you know, on that path that goes by the swimming pool and all the cottages…and I was noticing the states the cars in the cottage carports came from. And when I came to this one cottage, number eighteen, it had a dark-blue sedan in the carport. And when I looked at its license plate to see what state it was from, what do you think, Pete?”

  “What?”

  “It was a Florida plate. And this is the exciting part—the number was 16E-714!”

  I felt a thrill go through me. I told myself that license number didn’t mean a thing, but I felt this stab of excitement, anyway.

  When I didn’t say anything, Susan shook my sleeve. “How about that?” she cried. “Don’t you recognize that number? It’s the one I got last night when I chased that car! It belongs to the man who scared us in the woods!” She was awfully pleased with her detective work, I could tell that. “Why don’t you say something? Is anything wrong?”

  “No,” I said, “except that the car doesn’t mean anything, Susan. I told Pop what happened to us last night, the way I promised I would, and he explained everything very simply, even the car.”

  “Well!” Susan said, and sank back against the car cushion like a deflated balloon.

  I gave her a sketchy account of what Pop had told me about the Osgood brothers. “Perry Osgood, the older brother,” I finished, “was in the fish market himself not half an hour ago. For the first time. Only thing I can figure is, he came in to check up on me, see who it was who took a swim in his precious inlet yesterday, without his permission. He gave me a phony story about some guy we never heard of, named Roscoe Chapin, recommending our red snapper to him. But that was just a gag, I’m pretty sure, just an excuse for coming in. When he found out I was Rusty Hobbs’s son, he decided not to give me a hard time over trespassing in his inlet, I suppose. Probably felt ashamed of himself, too, for sneaking that look in my wallet since I turned out to be Rusty Hobbs’s kid.”

  “But how about last night?” Susan asked, her eyes big.

  “The other brother. Hamilton Osgood. So there goes our big mystery, Susan.”

  Susan made a face. “Isn’t that the way!” she said. “My absolutely first mystery, darn it! And now your father’s taken all the fun out of it!” Her mock-rueful expression didn’t quite come off. She was enjoying some private joke of her own, I suspected.

  “Who needs mystery?” I said. “Tomorrow we’re going sailing. That’s fun.”

  “I know. I guess I’m silly. I did enjoy the excitement while it lasted, though, didn’t you?”

  I tried to be honest. “Well,” I answered, “maybe a little. But what I enjoyed more than the excitement was being with you when it happened.”

  Can you beat it? To come out with a corny crack like that?

  Susan gave a whistle. “Hey!” she cried. “What nice things these fishermen say!”

  I switched in a hurry. “So what Hamilton Osgood is doing at the Freebooter with his rented car parked by cottage eighteen I don’t know,” I said hastily.

  She gave me a slanting glance. “Huh-uh,” she said.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked her.

  “It isn’t Hamilton Osgood, Pete.”

  “At the Freebooter? With the car?”

  “It can’t be,” Susan said, “unless the records are wrong.”

  “What records?”

  “At the Freebooter.” She was teasing me. “Or else the car must have been rented again to somebody else since last night, Pete.”

  I started to open the door to get out, for Mrs. Loring was going up the steps to the fish market and I’d be needed inside. “What are you talking about?” I said to Susan.

  “Listen,” she said, “when I saw that license number this morning, I went into the Freebooter’s office and asked the girl at the desk who was occupying cottage eighteen. She looked it up for me in the card file of guests. Same license number. But it wasn’t anybody named Osgood.”

  If Susan wanted to keep me in her car for another few seconds with that news, she succeeded. I stared at her. “It’s got to be,” I finally said. “Why, the car was heading right for the Freebooter when you chased it last night. And how could it be rented to somebody else so fast? Pop said…” My voice trailed off as I saw where my questions were leading me. I looked at Susan. “It wasn’t Hamilton Osgood who trailed us last night, then?”

  Susan said brightly, “Evidently not.”

  “Then who was it? Who’s occupying cottage eighteen at the Freebooter?”

  She let me in on her private joke. “It’s a fellow named Roscoe Chapin,” she said.

  CHAPTER 5

  A VISIT TO DOLPHIN INLET

  The next day was just right for sailing. The Gulf was flat and lazy and b
reathing deep, as we say, but with enough liveliness in the water to make sailing fun, and a four-knot breeze from the southeast. The sun was bright and hot.

  I drove up to the Freebooter in the pickup after lunch. Susan and I took one of the little Sailfish sailboats they supply their guests with, and sailed south along the coast of Perdido Key about half a mile out.

  I handled the boat, and Susan sat there with her legs in the well and her hair tied in a ponytail with a blue ribbon, looking slightly gorgeous and telling me about Roscoe Chapin. “I caught a glimpse of him this morning, Pete. He’s dark and short. And quite sinister-looking, really. Even in broad daylight.”

  I was feeling good. I didn’t want to talk seriously about anything just then, least of all Roscoe Chapin. I said, “We can’t be sure it was Roscoe Chapin in the woods, Susan. After all, if you got just one digit of that license number wrong the other night, it could have been almost anybody.”

  “I didn’t get any digits wrong!” Susan said. “I was close enough to see the number very plainly. Besides, Roscoe Chapin looks like the wrestler type you chased out of the woods—squatty and low-slung. Isn’t that suspicious?”

  I nodded at her. “I guess so. Suspicious enough so I’ve thought about it a lot. And all I can come up with is that if it was Chapin who followed us through the woods, he has to have some connection with the Osgoods, because Perry Osgood mentioned his name to me. You see what I mean?”

  “Of course. Mother always told me I had a natural talent for intrigue. So why was Chapin following us?”

  “I don’t know. Unless he ran into us by accident and was curious.”

  “But what was he doing in the woods? Do you think he could have been spying on the Osgoods?”

  “Search me.” I tacked in toward shore. “We ought to be about opposite the mouth of Dolphin Inlet here,” I said.

  I knew what Susan would do. And I was right. She half stood up in the well and said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to sail in close enough to see their house? The Osgoods’?”

  “Watch the boom,” I said. “Sure, why not? That’s why I mentioned it.”