The Mystery of Dolphin Inlet

by James Holding

  He listened quietly, serious now. When I finished, he tapped out his pipe and looked at his wrist watch. It was almost time for him to leave. We could hear his crew arriving in their rattly old car outside. He said, “Did Perry Osgood actually introduce this other man to you and Susan as Hamilton Osgood? Or did he call him ‘Ham’ while you were there?”

  “No-o,” I was forced to admit after thinking back.

  “Then forget it,” Pop said briskly. He stood up and stretched. “He wasn’t Ham Osgood and they weren’t pretending he was. He was probably just another friend of the Osgoods, like that fellow Chapin. Or some scientist helping them with their marine research, maybe. You and Susan just happened to go calling when Hamilton Osgood was away from the house on an errand. Or taking his Sunday afternoon bath indoors!”

  I wagged my head back and forth. I was feeling stubborn. “That guy’s no scientist, Pop,” I said. “You’ve got to admit he doesn’t know much about marine life if he says he fishes for mullet with live shrimp!”

  “What if he’s an oil geologist? Or an engineer, Pete? He might not know beans about mullet fishing then.”

  “Why wouldn’t he say so?”

  Pop paused in the doorway. “Lot of fellows don’t like to admit they don’t know much about fishing,” Pop said. “Especially civilized types.” He grinned at me. “Anyway, I’ll tell you one thing for sure, Pete. If I was your age and had a date with a pretty girl on a Sunday afternoon and a Sailfish supplied free to take her sailing in, I wouldn’t waste much time worrying about an ugly old boy like Osgood!”

  With these parting words of wisdom, Pop went out and joined his waiting crew. A minute later, I heard his motor begin to rumble quietly. Then the sound went away down the channel toward the bay, slow and dignified.

  For the first time in a long while, I didn’t sleep very well that night. I kept dreaming that I pulled in one of Pop’s mullet nets and there was Hamilton Osgood with a white featureless face like the off side of an egg, caught in the net among the fish. The only thing was, he had long brown hair like Susan’s, and kept tossing it back over his shoulder with a sidewise motion of his head.

  Mondays are a little bit slow so I didn’t really have enough work to keep me busy the next morning. I buried a dozen pint buckets of oysters in the chipped ice in our display case (we had to import them from Apalachicola because our own oyster beds were contaminated) and I arranged our mullet, pompano, snapper, trout and kings in the case to look as appetizing as it’s possible for dead fish with their mouths open to look, and then settled down to ducking Gloria’s questions about Susan.

  About eleven, Mrs. Terrill came in and bought some fish. She’s the wife of Dr. Terrill, the director of the Marine Lab down on Halfmoon Key south of us. She began to gossip with Gloria about her daughter’s forthcoming wedding to a chemist from up North, so after I’d filleted her fish I went outside for a break, leaving them talking. I found Dr. Terrill smoking a cigar in his car, listening to some rock-and-roll on the car radio.

  We’d known the Terrills ever since we were kids, so I went over and said hello to him. “Mrs. Terrill’s telling Gloria about Nancy’s wedding,” I said. “She’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Hi, Pete,” Dr. Terrill said. “Women are something when they’ve got a wedding to talk about, aren’t they?”

  “Seem to be,” I agreed. “Gloria’s been talking for eleven months steady now about her own, and she and Mike Sebastien haven’t even fixed on a date yet.”

  Dr. Terrill laughed. He reached over and switched off his car radio. “Why you kids think that racket is music I’ll never understand,” he said.

  “Sure it’s music,” I said, “It’s got a real good beat to it.” Dr. Terrill was always kidding his own children and anybody else’s he met about rock-and-roll. “I’ll admit that a lot of singing groups really ham it up these days, but…” and that reminded me suddenly of Ham Osgood. I said, “I met the Osgood brothers from Dolphin Inlet a few days ago, Dr. Terrill. And Pop says they’re interested in marine research of some kind. Don’t they bring specimens to you at the lab every once in a while?”

  “Yes, occasionally.”

  “What kind?”

  “Well, last winter, for example, they brought me a small mako shark they caught in Dolphin Inlet. Its stomach contained a can of screen paint that had been bought from a paint dealer in Key West.”

  “Paint?”

  “Sure. They thought it might help me in my studies about the geographical distribution and peregrinations of sharks.”

  “I haven’t heard about paint in a shark before,” I said, interested in spite of myself. “That’s a funny one.”

  “Not as funny as some other things found in sharks’ bellies,” Dr. Terrill said. He was kind of an authority on sharks. “Like the waterproof packet of documents that a sea captain suspected of piracy had thrown overboard to prevent its confiscation. Two years later, the documents were found in a shark’s stomach and were used to convict the pirate and hang him.”

  Pop had told me about that one. I switched back to the Osgoods. “Do the Osgoods really know very much about marine science?” I asked, kind of offhand.

  Dr. Terrill gave me a puzzled look. “They’re amateurs, of course,” he said. “But enthusiastic ones. And they have helped me in the past. Why?”

  “Oh, I’m just curious about them. Hamilton Osgood talked about mullet as if he didn’t know a mullet from a mangrove snapper.”

  “That’s funny,” Dr. Terrill said, “because they brought me jellyfish specimens with enlarged red granules in them during our last red tide here, as well as other plankton to study in connection with it. If they’re interested in helping me analyze a phenomenon like the red tide, they ought to know a mullet from a mangrove snapper, I should think.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I knew enough about the red tide to hate it and fear it, like everybody else on the Keys and coastal areas of the Gulf. When we get a red tide, the water turns a kind of pinkish-red color from an overabundance, near the surface, of plankton with red granules in their bodies. Pretty soon the plankton (some of the organisms are microscopic bacteria and some are as big as jellyfish) begin to die and decompose so fast they deplete the amount of oxygen in the water. That’s what Dr. Terrill says. Then an awful-smelling scum forms on the water and millions of fish die from lack of oxygen. The dead fish are washed up on the beach and lie there and rot with an unbelievable stench unless they’re buried or carted away.

  During a red tide, a vapor rises off the water and irritates your eyes and nose and makes you cough a lot, just as though you had a bad cold. Even if you live a couple of miles away from the beach. Nobody knows much to do about red tides, but believe me, they’re murder while they last! Sometimes it’s just for a few hours. And sometimes it goes on for a couple of weeks until the water gets mixed around enough so the amount of plankton is normal again. You can see that everybody would be scared stiff of a red tide. Especially fishermen like Pop. I was plenty scared of red tides myself, ever since I had to help bury tons of dead fish that were washed up on Fiesta Village beach during a red tide when I was thirteen.

  Mrs. Terrill came out of the market with her package of fish in her hand. Before she got to the car, I said hurriedly, “Do both the Osgood brothers bring you specimens, Dr. Terrill? Or only Perry?”

  He hesitated for a second, thinking back. Then he said, “Only Perry, I guess. He’s the tall skinny one with no eyebrows, isn’t he? But he talks about his brother Hamilton as though they were both research buffs. I can’t remember meeting Hamilton himself.”

  Just then, Mrs. Terrill came up. I opened the car door for her to climb in beside her husband. She thanked me and said, “Remember, now, Pete, I know how boys hate weddings, but we’re expecting you to come with Gloria and your father to Nancy’s next month!”

  “I’ll be there,” I promised, lifting my right hand solemn
ly. “I swear.”

  We all laughed, and Dr. Terrill drove off. I watched them go, and through the rear window of their car, I could see Dr. Terrill lean forward to switch on the car radio again—probably for some more of that rock-and-roll he pretended he didn’t like.

  I went back inside the market and killed a little time going over our list of standing orders, although I knew them all by heart. When Gloria took a ten-minute break at half-past eleven and went into our house behind the market to powder her nose and fix up a snack for our lunch, I looked up the telephone number of the Freebooter in the book and called Susan’s cottage.

  She answered the phone herself.

  “Hi,” I said, “you know who this is?”

  “Of course. Who could mistake that gravelly baritone? Aren’t you working?”

  “Sure. But it’s slow this morning. And I wanted to tell you that I talked to Pop last night about those Osgood brothers. He still thinks I’m a nut to worry about them.” That wasn’t the only reason I’d called her, of course, but it seemed like a pretty good excuse.

  “Did your father think our Mr. X was Hamilton Osgood?” Susan asked.

  “No. He thinks it was probably some friend. A casual visitor. He says Hamilton Osgood was either away from home yesterday or taking a bath when we were there.” Over the phone, her laugh sounded as pretty as musical chimes.

  “What’s more,” I said, “I asked the director of the Marine Lab if he’d ever met Hamilton when the Osgoods brought specimens into the lab. I was hoping we’d get another description of Hamilton to settle the thing. But Dr. Terrill only knows Perry.”

  “We saw them this morning,” Susan said.

  “Who? The Osgoods?”

  “Yes. At least, Perry Osgood and Mr. X.”

  “Where?”

  “Over in Sarta City, just pulling into the marina in their outboard.”

  “They don’t have a car, so I guess they must have been going shopping in the boat.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I began to get an idea. “How long ago was that, Susan?” I asked her.

  “Oh, half an hour ago. We were starting across the causeway to Perdido Key on our way home.”

  “Half an hour,” I said. “They can’t cross the bay, get through Sunset Pass and up the coast of Perdido to Dolphin Inlet in less than an hour in that outboard of theirs. Even if they started back right after you saw them.”

  “What are you thinking of?”

  “Well, I’m just curious enough about who Mr. X is, and about Dolphin Inlet, to feel like going out there while they’re safely in Sarta City and looking around a little bit.”

  “Pete! You wouldn’t! It’s none of our business, after all. And even if it’s been fun rigging up a little mystery for ourselves, I don’t think…”

  “You want to paint their house and the point, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “And maybe you could make a couple of sketches or something today when they’re away, couldn’t you? They said you’d be welcome to paint the place, remember.”

  She weakened. “You’re supposed to be working, Pete.” Her tone was severe, but I could tell she was as interested as I was now in going to Dolphin Inlet.

  “I know. But I told you it’s awful slow today. And maybe I can get Gloria to handle things for an hour here. If I can, will you meet me out there?”

  Susan said something to her mother, evidently about lunch, because when she came back on the phone, she said, “Mother says it’s okay if we don’t stay long. We’ll have lunch afterward.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “So unless I call you back right away, I’ll meet you on Gulf Road where we left the truck the other night. By those cabbage palms. Okay?”

  “How soon?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll bring a sketch pad.”

  “And I’ll bring a mask and some flippers. Maybe I can get a quick look under Dolphin Inlet, too!”

  “See you in fifteen minutes,” Susan said.

  CHAPTER 7

  UNDERWATER ENCOUNTER

  Susan was waiting for me in her car under the cabbage palms on Gulf Road when I arrived opposite the inlet. She got out of her car as I parked my pickup beside it and held up a big sketch pad in one hand and a couple of charcoal pencils in the other.

  “Hi!” she greeted me. “I still think this is a crazy idea, Pete, but I’m ready for action if you are.” She had on the same shorts and blouse she’d worn the day I met her.

  “It could be a crazy idea, all right,” I agreed, climbing down. “Probably is.” I had changed into swim trunks at home. Now I pretended to be busy getting my flippers and mask out of the truck. “But this crazy idea is giving me an excuse to see you in the middle of a working day, so why knock it?”

  I turned around and looked at her then, surprised at my own nerve. She blushed a little bit and smiled. “Okay, fisherman,” she said, “cut out the soft talk and let’s get moving before Mr. X and Mr. Osgood get back from Sarta City.”

  We went quickly through the woods together toward the Dolphin Inlet beach. Susan glanced around her at the thick underbrush and the spooky-looking Spanish moss that was hanging from some of the trees and her shoulders shook. “I’ll never forget how scared I was the other night,” she said, “when that man followed us here in the dark!”

  I nodded. “I was plenty scared myself. If I ever get a chance, I’d like to scare Mr. Roscoe Chapin as bad as he scared us.”

  “If it was Roscoe Chapin,” Susan said. “We’re not sure of that, even.”

  “Sure enough for me to hate the guy, anyway!”

  We came out on the beach and headed for Dolphin Point, whose curving scattering of trees hid the Osgood shack from our view. There wasn’t a sign of anybody in the inlet or on the water today. We reconnoitered around the point. The blank windows of the Osgood house stared back at us like empty eye sockets. I watched for five minutes without noting any movement in or about the shack.

  Susan was already sketching away on her pad, and from what I could see, she seemed to have a real flair for drawing, because the Osgood cottage took shape with astonishing speed in a series of bold, unhesitating pencil strokes that caught the dilapidated and weather-beaten quality of the place to the life. If she can paint as well as she can draw, I thought to myself, she’s a pretty talented kid! Just then, Susan looked up from her pad and said in a matter-of-fact tone, “You’d better start looking around, Pete, if you want to get out of here before they get home.”

  I left her sketching and went down the path that led to the blind canal where the Osgoods kept their boats. The specimen boat creaked against the rotting dock. After a minute’s survey to make sure it was unoccupied, I went aboard for another quick look at it.

  I didn’t see anything I hadn’t seen before. Through the windows of the deckhouse I could see nothing but a massive clutter of the same sort of miscellaneous gear that littered the deck. Ropes, pull-up buckets and baskets, frayed air hoses, a rusting compressor. Obviously the Osgoods didn’t spend many nights aboard their specimen boat, for there weren’t any sleeping accommodations. I decided the specimen boat had at one stage in its career been a naval launch, meant to ferry sailors from ship to shore. I took note of the fact that there were two neoprene diving suits on board, two complete sets of scuba gear. And I admired again the odd vacuum-cleaner device which Perry Osgood had told me could suck up samples of Gulf bottom.

  When I rejoined Susan, she was standing under the slash pines beside the house and still sketching. As I came up, she said, “I think this is the angle for my painting, Pete. It composes better from here than the front view from the Gulf. And I can get in that picturesque little lean-to at the back.”

  “Great,” I said truthfully, looking over her shoulder at the sketch. “Great economy of motion.” Even a fisherman
could tell that her black-and-white sketch would make an attractive painting in color. She made a swipe at me for kidding her about the economy of motion stuff.

  I reported to her on my search of the specimen boat. “There are definitely two divers working from that boat,” I said, “because there are two sets of everything.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something significant?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It might mean either that Hamilton Osgood does dive with his brother Perry, or that Mr. X is a diver himself. But all three of them can’t dive at the same time, because there are only two suits.”

  Susan laughed. “Maybe the third one doesn’t dive. I should think somebody has to be running that big boat while the others dive.”

  See what I mean? A pretty sharp girl. I said, “Yeah. And anyway, there may be a third set of diving gear in the house. Or maybe they sometimes dive from the outboard.”

  “They use the outboard mostly for fishing and shopping, I should think,” Susan said. “Mr. X was fishing in it when you came swimming, wasn’t he?”

  I started. “That’s right. He was. Fishing for mullet with live bait, he told me with a straight face. Maybe he wasn’t fishing, after all. Just pretended to be.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Search me. To keep me from suspecting that he was doing something else, maybe.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like diving.”

  “Diving? From that little outboard boat?”

  “Sure. Why not? It’s perfectly possible. You anchor the outboard in shallow water…” I stopped, struck by a sudden recollection.

  “What’s the matter?” Susan asked. She had stopped sketching and was watching me.

  “I just remembered that whistle I heard as I came through the woods for my swim.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Maybe,” I said slowly, “it could have been a warning.”

  “You mean somebody was whistling at Mr. X out in the boat?”