The Mystery of Dolphin Inlet

by James Holding

  A minute later she said, “I can make out Dolphin Point now, I think. Isn’t that what you said it was called?”

  “Yep.” I squinted under the boom at the shoreline. “There’s the house.”

  “Where?”

  “Under those slash pines toward the base of the fin. Sort of a nothing gray color. See it? It’s real little.”

  “I see it!” We were getting closer. “Pete, it looks a hundred years old.”

  “Probably is, too.” We were rapidly nearing the mouth of the inlet now, and I was about to lay the Sailfish over on the other tack and beat to seaward again when I got this crazy idea. It was absolutely none of our business, but I thought it might be interesting for Susan to meet the Osgood brothers and see their house for herself. Not to mention how curious I was!

  So without even checking with Susan, I took a quick look at the set of the tide and the wind, and let our sail down with a bang. At the same time I reached forward, grabbed our centerboard and pulled it up free.

  “What’s happening?” Susan asked in a startled voice.

  “How’d you like to visit the Osgoods?”

  “Now? Right now?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, dear!” Susan didn’t sound too enthusiastic. “Are you going to tell them somebody followed us through their woods Friday night?”

  I shook my head. “Not a word. All that would do is tell them I was trespassing again on their property…twice the same day. And had the nerve to bring a girl along the second time!”

  She laughed. “Are you serious about going in?”

  “If you’re game,” I answered.

  With our sail down and our centerboard up, our little boat bobbed like a cork on the Gulf and, directed by the tiller, drifted quickly toward shore near the Osgoods’ house, as I had figured it would. The Gulf was too calm for us to be in any danger of capsizing. Susan didn’t know that, however. She said in a small voice, “Watch out, Pete! I think we’re going to bump the shore! And it’s terribly rocky!”

  “Relax,” I said. “Here’s the idea, Susan. Our sail has jammed a little and I want to see if I can fix it. That’s what we’ll tell the Osgoods. Maybe we’ll get a chance to look around Dolphin Inlet while we’re at it.”

  Susan said, “Look, there are two men in front of the cottage.”

  “Reception committee,” I said. There were a lot of big boulders along the water’s edge, as Susan had pointed out, so I didn’t look up from my steering until we had drifted safely ashore and scraped our keel gently in the shallow water not a stone’s throw from the Osgood shack of pecky cypress. Even then, I pretended to fool with our sail rings until Susan gave a forced laugh and said, “Oh, I’m sorry if this is your private beach, but something’s wrong with our boat, and we thought we’d better…”

  She floundered and I came to the rescue. “It seems to be all right now, Susan,” I said. Then, putting surprise into it, I said, “Hi, Mr. Osgood! Is this your house?” Perry Osgood and his brother were standing a few yards away, watching us. “I’m Pete Hobbs from Hobbs’s Fish Market, do you remember me? I talked to you yesterday when you bought some snappers from us. And this is Susan Frost from Tallahassee. She’s staying at the Freebooter.”

  “Hello, Pete,” Perry Osgood said pleasantly enough. He didn’t introduce his brother who was standing beside him, a balding, hook-nosed man with thick lips and the tense squint of the nearsighted. “Run into trouble with your boat, eh?” He peered closely at our Sailfish. “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  I threw a fast look at their house which was set on the fin-shaped ridge, a few feet above sea level. “Nothing to worry about,” I answered him. “The lines seemed to catch there for a minute, wouldn’t run free.” I tried a smile on Hamilton Osgood. He smiled back noncommittally. Then his eyes switched to Susan. And I couldn’t blame him for that.

  Susan was saying enthusiastically, “Oh, what a darling cottage, Mr. Osgood! I’m a beginning painter, and I’d love to paint your house! It’s got marvelous character.”

  With that, she leaped ashore as lightly as a fluff of goose down and started toward the Osgoods’ shack with a long limber stride that was something to see, dressed as she was, in bathing suit and lifebelt, with a huge beach towel wrapped around her shoulders and arms to keep off the sun.

  I looked apologetically at the Osgood brothers and said, “Susan’s nuts about Florida beach scenes, sir. Do you mind?”

  Ham Osgood still didn’t say anything.

  Perry said, “Of course not, Pete.” He sounded hearty. “She’s welcome to look around as much as she wants.” He turned to his brother. “I went to school with this kid’s father. Remember Rusty Hobbs?”

  Only then did Hamilton Osgood nod and relax a little from his neutral stance, as though Perry had said, “These kids are okay.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Osgood,” I said. “We can only stay a minute.” I tied the sailboat’s painter to a handy rock and started after Susan, splashing through the shallow water. Perry and Ham Osgood followed along, giving the impression that they rather enjoyed entertaining teenagers on Sunday afternoon.

  Susan was standing in front of their shack by this time, admiring its weathered beauty out loud. It was about as beautiful as an old shredded wheat carton, but artists can get away with calling anything beautiful, I guess. And Susan knew it.

  As the four of us drifted around the house on a sandy footpath that began at the front door and disappeared around the house corner, Susan was going on about the artistic attractions of Dolphin Point and the Osgood cottage at a great rate. She got really enthusiastic about a small rustic lean-to that was built onto the back of the house. It was a weather-beaten old enclosure that at one time must have served the original owner of the house, Jude Skanzy the fisherman, as a catch-all for nets, oars, lobster pots and other fishing gear. Its sagging door, held by a rusted latch, gave on the path that came around the house from the front door. The rear of the house faced into the inlet but was concealed from it by a stand of slash pines and a few live oaks.

  We walked through this screen of trees, and there below us was Dolphin Inlet, a glittering sheet of busy water that flashed in the sunlight like fish scales. I said, “Did you ever see a niftier beach, Susan?” pointing to it.

  Susan had seen that beach for herself only two nights ago in the moonlight, but she acted now as though it were all new to her.

  Neither of the Osgood brothers said a word all the time we were admiring their house and their view. They seemed pleased that we liked their home, however.

  Finally I saw what I was looking for—the gleam of still water in the heavy growth of palmetto and palms below the Osgood house on the inner curve of the headland to our left. The path from the house ended down there, apparently. I pretended surprise. “Is that a canal, Mr. Osgood? Is that where you keep your boat?”

  “Boats,” he corrected me. “We got two of them.”

  I started for the canal through the brush and trees, along the path that led from the back of the house. “Gosh, I’m interested in boats,” I said. “I want to be a commercial fisherman like Pop. Do you mind if I take a look, Mr. Osgood?”

  “Help yourself,” Perry Osgood said genially from behind me. “Our specimen boat ought to interest you.”

  “Specimen boat?”

  “Yep. The boat we use for diving and gathering marine specimens. And getting bottom samples,” Perry said easily. “We spend most of our time in or under the water out here, you know that?”

  “You do?”

  “Yep. We’re underwater hobbyists, you might say. Only amateurs, of course. But it beats playing golf or fishing off the bridges for passing the time. Occasionally we even find something of interest to the marine laboratories down on Halfmoon Key.”

  Perry led Susan and me to the far end of the blind canal where two boats were tied up. His brother trailed along be
hind us, still silent, although his eyes had kindled a bit, it seemed to me, when Perry talked about their underwater activities.

  The skiff with the outboard motor that Perry had used to come to our fish market was tied up to a long rickety wooden dock that edged the canal. Just behind it lay the specimen boat.

  It was interesting, I’ll say that for it. It must have been a converted Navy launch or some similar craft, for it was fully thirty feet long and wide in the beam, with a lot of flat deck space fore and aft of the deckhouse. A movable boarding ladder of aluminum that could be hung over the side lay on the deck amidships below the low rail. The rest of the deck space was pretty well cluttered up with diving gear of various kinds; compressed air tanks, face masks, neoprene diving suits, air hoses, water pumps, haul-up baskets on long hand lines and a couple of spearguns with their missiles, half covered by a tarp. There was a wide-mouthed pipe arrangement, too, like an old-fashioned stovepipe. I’d never seen anything like it.

  “What’s this thing?” I asked Perry Osgood, pointing to it. Perry had followed me aboard. “The thing that looks like a vacuum cleaner?”

  He smiled. “That’s our own idea,” he said with what seemed real pride. “Rigged it up ourselves. It’s a dredge we built to help us suck up samples of Gulf bottom for analysis.”

  “What’s the use of analyzing Gulf bottom?” I asked.

  “Ever hear of striking oil in the Gulf, offshore? You can tell a lot from bottom samples, Pete. And you never know—we might get lucky.”

  “How’s the thing work?”

  For the first time, the other Osgood brother, Hamilton, opened his mouth. “Works with a water pump and a hose,” he explained, “to create suction through the pipe and to the surface.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I see.” His voice was a surprise. It was as soft and well modulated as Mr. Neuman’s, my English teacher at Sarta City High. Judging from his harsh, hawk-faced appearance, I’d expected Ham Osgood’s voice to be rough and tough.

  I turned around to say something to Susan, and found she’d walked with Perry Osgood to the other side of the deckhouse to admire the view from the short canal into Dolphin Inlet. They were talking a mile a minute. Nobody could resist Susan’s naturally appealing ways for long. I knew that from personal experience.

  I said to Ham Osgood, “I guess it was you I saw fishing the other day when I trespassed on your property by mistake and took a swim in the inlet?”

  “Friday?” Ham said in his smooth voice. “Was that you? About four o’clock? Yes, I was fishing in the outboard, out in the Gulf. I saw you swimming and running on the beach.” He didn’t acknowledge my indirect apology for trespassing, nor invite me to come back for another swim sometime, but he went on pleasantly, “Perry and I both are fond of fish. So we fish a great deal. For food as well as specimens.”

  “What do you catch, mostly?” I asked idly.

  “Mullet. They’re quite plentiful usually.”

  “I didn’t notice your net,” I said. “I thought you were using a pole.”

  “I was. I can usually catch enough mullet for the two of us with hook and line,” he explained.

  “What do you use for bait? Live shrimp?”

  “Yes.” He made a leisurely move toward the dock. I followed him off the boat. Susan and Perry Osgood were ahead of us.

  When we caught up with them, I said, “I sure envy you some of that diving gear! I love to dive myself.”

  “Well, it’s mostly secondhand,” Perry said frankly, “but it works all right.”

  We went back to our sailboat on the Gulf side of Dolphin Point. Susan waded a few feet out and climbed aboard. I untied the painter and followed. As I shoved off, Susan was fluting, “Your house and this point are so darling! Thank you so much for letting us see them, Mr. Osgood.” I raised our sail, grabbed the tiller and, when the water was deep enough, I dropped the centerboard in the slot. “May I come back, please, and paint them sometime?” Susan begged.

  “Just a beat-up old shack, miss,” Perry answered, “seems a silly thing to paint. But if you want to, come ahead. We’re usually here.” Did he hesitate a fraction of a second before issuing that invitation? I wasn’t sure.

  Our sail took the breeze and we quickly widened the distance between us and the Osgoods, who stood gazing after us from the boulder-strewn shore in front of their cottage. I raised one hand to them, they returned the salute, then I gave my attention to sailing. The breeze had freshened a little while we were visiting the Osgoods.

  Susan sat very quietly for a few minutes with the beach towel draped around her like a blanket. She looked like a pretty squaw. Finally I said to her, “Boy, talk about a performance! Are you as good an artist as you are an actress?”

  “Better,” she said, “but I wasn’t too bad, was I? And we did get a look at their place.” Then, on a faint note of regret she said, “But they didn’t seem exactly sinister to me, Pete. I thought they were nice.”

  After a short silence, I said, “Perry Osgood is probably a marine expert as advertised, Susan. But his brother Hamilton is not.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Because no marine expert would think of going fishing for mullet with hook and line and live bait. And that’s what Ham Osgood told me he was doing when I saw him fishing Friday afternoon.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Mullet is a vegetarian fish. You catch mullet in nets…and only in nets. Once in a long long time a real patient fisherman may be able to catch a mullet on a little bitty hook hidden in a streamer of seaweed, or with a snatch pole off a bridge when the tide’s right. But not with a regular rig and live bait!”

  “You’re joking!” she said.

  “No, I’m not. Pop’s a fisherman, don’t forget. And I know a little bit about stuff like that, too.” I patted her shoulder through her towel to soften the impact of what I was going to tell her next. “What’s more, Susan, I’ll make you a bet right this minute that Hamilton Osgood isn’t Hamilton Osgood!”

  Her mouth opened in amazement. “He isn’t?”

  “I don’t think so. Pop remembers Hamilton Osgood as ten years younger than his brother Perry, and six inches shorter. How tall was that guy today?”

  “Almost as tall as Perry. Within an inch or two.”

  “Right. And how old would you say? Older than Perry or younger? At a rough guess?”

  “Older,” Susan said in a shocked voice. “He’s bald and that makes a difference, I suppose, but I’d say older. Quite a bit older.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.” I hauled around onto the starboard tack. We ducked the boom. “So how about that?”

  Susan recovered fast. “Couldn’t your father be wrong?” she asked. “Anyway, after seeing them and talking to them, you can’t tell me those two shy men could be doing anything mysterious or…or…illegal, Pete! They said I could come back and paint their cottage whenever I wanted to, don’t forget. And they showed us around like perfect gentlemen.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “There’s still something funny about them, though. And that wasn’t Hamilton Osgood, I’ll bet you. There’s nothing wrong with Pop’s memory.”

  “Then who was it?” Susan asked.

  “Search me.” I was thoroughly confused.

  Susan’s eyes sparkled with excitement. “Let’s call him Mr. X,” she said. “That sounds kind of mysterious and sinister, doesn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 6

  WHO IS MR. X?

  That evening, before Pop took his boat out on the Gulf, I had a chance to talk to him for a few minutes alone. Gloria was riding around with Mike Sebastien in his patrol car, having what she called a “traveling date.” Mike was on duty every other Sunday night and had to stay within reach of his shortwave to answer any calls that might come in from headquarters.

  I brought Pop up to date on everything that had been happening: Perr
y Osgood’s visit to our market at the recommendation (so he said) of a man named Roscoe Chapin; Susan’s tracing of the rental car to cottage eighteen at the Freebooter which was occupied, apparently, by this same Roscoe Chapin; our afternoon call on the Osgood brothers at Dolphin Inlet by sailboat.

  I finished, “So we’re pretty sure it wasn’t Hamilton Osgood who followed us through the woods the other night, Pop. Susan and I think it was the fellow named Roscoe Chapin.”

  Pop stopped sucking on his pipe and said, “I never heard of anybody named Roscoe Chapin, Pete.”

  “Neither did Gloria,” I said. “And neither did I.”

  “So Perry Osgood is getting a little befuddled, I wouldn’t wonder,” said Pop, blowing smoke. “After all, he is middle-aged, you know.” He chuckled. “Can’t remember names any more, probably. Like me. Or remembers the wrong ones. What’s so serious about that?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “except it seems kind of hard to put a finger on Hamilton Osgood, Pop. You thought that’s who was following us the other night in the woods. And it wasn’t. And we thought, Susan and I, that it was Hamilton Osgood out at Dolphin Inlet today with his brother Perry…only it wasn’t.”

  Pop lifted one eyebrow at me. That meant he was surprised. “You said there were two of them at the inlet,” he protested.

  “There were two men there, all right,” I said. “And one of them was Perry Osgood. But the other man, who didn’t say much and acted as though he was pretending to be Hamilton Osgood, wasn’t Hamilton Osgood. Or Roscoe Chapin, either. At least, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t.”

  “Then who was he?” Pop said, reasonably enough.

  “We don’t know. This guy was almost as tall as Perry Osgood, and you said Hamilton was short and chunky. He was also older than Perry, at least he looked older. And you said Ham Osgood was younger.”

  “I also told you that middle-aged men get befuddled, Pete.” Pop grinned at me. “Maybe I was remembering Ham Osgood all wrong.” He was needling me a little, but I didn’t pay any attention.

  “And the funniest thing was about the mullet fishing,” I said. I told Pop about that.