The Mystery of Dolphin Inlet

by James Holding

  She looked at me when she made this announcement to see if I was impressed. I was. But not Mike.

  “Is that the sinister part, Susan?” he said.

  “Why, of course! After all, it proves Roscoe Chapin is a scuba diver, doesn’t it? And so it was probably Mr. Chapin who shot that spear at Pete yesterday! What could be plainer than that?” She was excited.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Mike soothed her. “That’s no kind of legal proof, Susan. None at all. Thousands of tourists carry scuba gear in their trunks. You know that. Skin and scuba diving isn’t as big as surfing down here now, but it’s still big!”

  “Yes, but not very likely at Dolphin Inlet!” Susan answered. “Roscoe Chapin would be the only scuba diver aside from the Osgoods who might be diving at a private place like Dolphin Inlet.”

  “And Pete,” Mike said mildly. “He was diving there. And what about that mysterious man you call Mr. X? I gathered from Pete’s story that he might be diving there, too.”

  Susan’s eyes began to shoot sparks. She said to Mike, “You’re not taking this seriously! Pete was nearly killed yesterday and here you are, making a joke of it!”

  That shook him a little. I couldn’t help laughing. “That’s telling him, Susan,” I cheered her on.

  “Now wait a minute!” Mike protested. “I’m trying to help you kids. You must see that. But I can’t help you unless you’re willing to be reasonable. I just promised Pete I’d check out Mr. Chapin very carefully.”

  “When?” asked Susan.

  “Whenever I can get in touch with him.”

  “That might be next week sometime!”

  “Listen, Mike,” I said, “Susan’s got a point, hasn’t she? Chapin hasn’t come back here since yesterday. So maybe he’ll never come back.”

  Mike raised his eyebrows. “His stuff’s still here.”

  “Sure. But what if that was Roscoe Chapin I met underwater yesterday? And what if he drowned in Dolphin Inlet?”

  “Oh!” Susan said.

  Mike said, “That’s a bare possibility, I suppose. You said he was in trouble the last you saw of him. And the storm was blowing up.”

  “Yeah,” I said eagerly. “And there’s one thing that might tell us whether Chapin really went to Dolphin Inlet yesterday.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His car.”

  “How do you figure? His car’s missing, too.”

  “That’s right,” I said, lining up my idea. “Look, Dolphin Inlet’s a good five miles from here, right? If Chapin wanted to do any diving there, he’d certainly not try to swim all the way from here. The natural thing to do would be to drive in his rented car to some place close to Dolphin Inlet. Right?”

  “Of course.” This was Susan.

  “And you think if he drowned or is still at the inlet we ought to be able to find his car somewhere close by, is that it?” Mike said.

  “Sure. Doesn’t that make sense?”

  Mike grinned. “In a kind of a knot-headed way, I guess.” He got back into the police cruiser. “All right. I give up. Come on, kids, we’ll have a quick look for Chapin’s car at Dolphin Inlet. Then will you be satisfied?”

  While I got in beside Mike, Susan ran for her car under the carport of cottage twelve. “I’ll follow you!” she called. “I can’t bear to miss this!”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE GOLDEN DOUBLOON

  I was so sure we’d find Roscoe Chapin’s car parked somewhere near Dolphin Inlet that I was in a real hurry to get there, but Mike kept the speed of his patrol car down to a measly thirty-five miles an hour. The limit on Perdido Key is forty, and I had a hunch Mike was crawling along that way just to keep me on edge.

  I said, “Can’t we pour on a little coal, Mike? We haven’t got all day. I’m supposed to be working.”

  “So am I.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “There’s no hurry, Pete. If his car’s there, it’s there. And it won’t run away…especially if he drowned yesterday. Right?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “And if Roscoe Chapin does decide to head home in his car at this very coincidental minute,” Mike went on, “he’ll have to pass us to get there, won’t he? And we’ll meet him.” He glanced at his rearview mirror. “That girlfriend of yours is going to get a summons for tailgating, Pete, if she doesn’t drop back a little.”

  I looked back, and the nose of Susan’s Chevy was practically in our back seat. I laughed. “I guess she’s in a hurry to get there, too.”

  Mike said, “Why are you wasting your time on Roscoe Chapin and Dolphin Inlet when she’s around?”

  “That’s what Pop asked me. I don’t know, Mike. Honest. Except the whole thing’s kind of got my curiosity up, and we’re both pretty mad at whoever it was who scared us that night in the woods and shot at me with a speargun yesterday.”

  Mike nodded. “I can understand that.” He began to slow down. “We’re two miles north of Dolphin Inlet here. So start keeping your eye peeled for that rental job Chapin is driving. Dark sedan, license 16E-714, wasn’t that it?”

  “Yeah.” I began to scan both sides of Gulf Road and the occasional houses that bordered it here very carefully. I checked the license number of every car we passed on the road or saw standing in driveways or carports along the way. “I think it’ll be closer to the inlet than this,” I said.

  “I do, too. If it’s here at all. Might as well be thorough, though. Lucky for us it’s so easy.”

  “What do you mean, easy?”

  “Only place the car can be is along Gulf Road, one side or the other. For this is the only road, right?”

  “But there’s a lot of driveways and lanes from houses and…”

  Mike shook his head. “Not near Dolphin Inlet, Pete. Nothing but woods on both sides of the road. You know that. No roads in them, either.”

  “Anyway, the car’s got to be here somewhere,” I said stubbornly. “If it’s not parked on the edge of the road…”

  “And it’s not. We’d have seen it when we drove to the Freebooter, wouldn’t we?”

  “…then it’s hidden in the woods some place,” I finished lamely.

  “How? In those woods? There isn’t any way you can drive a car a hundred feet into them from Gulf Road. At least, not without leaving a trail of broken palmettos and brush we could spot a mile away.”

  “Well, let’s look anyway, Mike. We’re nearly there now.” Some way ahead, I could see the two cabbage palms beside the road that Susan and I had been using for a parking landmark on our visits to the inlet. And that’s all I could see. As far as my eye could reach southward on Gulf Road, there was absolutely no sign of a car parked on either side of it.

  “You look under the trees on your side, I’ll look on mine,” Mike said. He slowed to a crawl. “Sing out if you see anything looks like a car.”

  Susan wasn’t following so closely now. She had dropped back and was turning her head from side to side as she drove very slowly. She was searching for Chapin’s car, too.

  When we’d gone two miles south of the Dolphin Inlet area, Mike pulled up. He could see I was disappointed, and there was a note of sympathy in his voice.

  “We’ll make one more pass over the road each way, Pete, shall we? Just to be sure? It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  “Thanks, Mike,” I answered. “I guess it wouldn’t do any good.”

  Susan pulled up behind us. She stuck her head out of the window and called to me, “Did you see any sign of the car?”

  “Nope. Did you?”

  “No.” She sounded let down. “What’ll we do now?”

  I didn’t answer her. I turned to Mike and said, “I don’t suppose you’d want to make a call on the Osgoods, would you?”

  “What for?”

  “To look them over, kind of. Especially Mr. X. The way you were going to loo
k over Roscoe Chapin?”

  Mike shook his head. “No excuse in the world to go barging in there, Pete. Nobody in the inlet’s done anything out of line, far’s I can see. Now, if it had been one of the Osgoods or Mr. X tried to shoot you…”

  “I was afraid you’d say that. Oh, well.” I climbed out of the patrol car.

  “Where you going?”

  “I’ll ride back to the market with Susan,” I told him. “Then you can go straight back to headquarters. Thanks, Mike, for trying to help us figure out Roscoe Chapin. I hope he’s not drowned, that’s all.”

  “I imagine he’ll turn up safe and sound. And I’ll check his alibi, if any, for that speargun attack on you. That’s about as far as I can go now. Unless you want me to ride this road again.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Susan and I’ll take one more look. There’s no reason to waste your time, though. Thanks again.”

  He waved a hand and pulled away. “Any time,” he said.

  I walked back to Susan’s car, opened the front door and got in beside her. “Darn the luck!” she said. “I was sure we’d see some sign of the car!”

  I gave her a big grin. “You’re a better cop than Mike. At least you’ve got more persistence. And more faith in my hunches.”

  She began to turn the car. “Let’s take one more look,” she suggested.

  “Fine. That’s what I hoped you’d want to do. Because I do, too. And by the way, can you drive me back to work afterward? I told Mike you would, so he’d leave. If you’re busy…”

  “If I’m busy, you’ll walk the five miles home, and get there just in time to close up shop for the day, is that it?”

  I had the grace to stutter a little. “Well,” I said, “yes, I suppose so. See, I wanted to talk to you for a few minutes without Mike…”

  “What about?” she asked innocently.

  “About how smart you were to find out that Roscoe Chapin had scuba gear in his car trunk.”

  “Oh. That was easy. And kind of fun. I was so mad at whoever shot at you under the Gulf yesterday that I got a kick out of trying to find out who it was.”

  “Well, thanks, Susan. Mike doesn’t think it means anything—what you found out—but I do.” I admired her profile for a second. Then I said, “So let’s find that rented car of Chapin’s if we can, okay?”

  “All right. And in answer to your question, Pete”—she looked sideways at me—“of course I’ll drive you home. I have nothing to do until Daddy arrives at Sarta City Airport at half-past twelve. I’m going to meet his plane from here. So I’ll drop you off on my way.”

  “Where’s your mother?” I asked.

  “She’s having her hair done.”

  “Great,” I said. “I forgot your father’s due in today.”

  “You’ll like him.”

  Slowly she cruised northward on Gulf Road and we gave both sides of the highway another careful inspection without any more luck that we had the first time.

  A quarter-mile beyond the cabbage palms, Susan suddenly tramped on her power brakes. I nearly went through the windshield. “Look at that!” she said, pointing dramatically out of the window on her side.

  I craned my neck to look past her. “What?”

  “Don’t you see it? That entrance to a track or lane of some kind…all overgrown?”

  She was right. Just beyond the gravel shoulder of the road a kind of flat, grassy patch of sand made a slight indentation in the line of woods. It was so overgrown with weeds and ground-hugging vegetation that you’d hardly know it was there. I peered into the woods and saw that there seemed to be an opening through the trees and scrub away from the old track entrance Susan had spotted.

  “Hey!” I said. “The demon detective! You’ve done it again!”

  She hurriedly pulled her car over to the left side of the road. We jumped out. “Doesn’t it look as though that could be what’s left of an old lane or something?” she asked.

  “It sure does. One that hasn’t been used for years, by the look of it.” I bent down and squinted at the low growth of grass and weeds. I felt excitement build inside me. “Here’s something that could have been made by an auto tire, Susan! See this mark?”

  She bent and looked where I pointed, her hair falling forward past her cheeks. “Yes!” she said. “It is! Come on, Pete! I bet we’ll find Chapin’s car in here!”

  She reached out and grabbed my hand and held it tightly as we plunged into the woods along the faintly marked ancient track. The vicinity of Dolphin Inlet seemed to make her nervous, for which I was glad, if it meant holding hands with her.

  We made fast progress. Around us, trees and bushes smothered the old path we followed almost completely, but not quite. There was still room for an automobile to negotiate the track if driven slowly and carefully over potholes and windfalls and between trees. And evidently one had passed this way several times lately. For we found other tire marks as we went deeper into the woods and the ground grew softer.

  The track appeared to me to bend slightly south and west as we followed it hand in hand. Occasionally we could see the deep-blue sky, barred with long fleecy clouds, above us through the trees. And after we’d gone maybe five hundred yards, the reflection of sunlight on the open Gulf suddenly made a bright shimmer ahead of us.

  “Where do you suppose we are?” Susan spoke in a tense whisper as though she was afraid somebody might be listening.

  “About opposite the end of Dolphin Point,” I calculated, “figuring from the way this track has bent. Across the inlet from the Osgoods’ house. On the northern point of the inlet crescent, maybe. This must have been an old logging road, or one that led to some oyster beds on the north shore of the inlet years ago…”

  Susan said, “Now who’s the detective? Here’s a pile of oyster shells.”

  And there they were, several piles of old shells among the trees, almost hidden by creepers. I started to say something, I forget what, because just then Susan said in a sort of squeak, “There it is!” and nearly pinched my hand off, she squeezed it so hard.

  I looked ahead and saw the looming shape of an automobile silhouetted against the brightness of the Gulf.

  The car was parked where the old track petered out in a small clearing inside the wooded north edge of Dolphin Inlet. It was far enough back from the narrow beach that bordered the inlet on this side to be nearly concealed from any curious eyes in the inlet itself.

  My own curious eyes, once I’d taken in the situation, went like striking snakes to the license plate on the rear of the automobile. Susan was ahead of me, of course, because she was already reading the license number out loud. “16E-714.”

  It was Roscoe Chapin’s car.

  Cautiously we drew nearer. She didn’t let go of my hand. Pretty soon we could make out that the windows were all closed. And the doors were locked, as we found out when we tried to open them. The car was absolutely empty.

  “Never mind, Susan,” I said. I was whispering now, myself. There was something pretty oppressive about that quiet deserted car hidden among the trees. “We know it’s Chapin’s car. And we know he’s not in it.”

  “The trunk?” Susan whispered.

  I shivered in spite of myself. “Cut it out!” I managed to blurt. I wasn’t at all sure that Roscoe Chapin might not be curled inside that locked trunk listening to every word we said.

  I hoped he wasn’t, though, because the next thing Susan said was, “Then it was Roscoe Chapin who shot that spear at you, Pete!”

  I nodded. There didn’t seem much doubt about it now. I pulled her forward until we were past the car and standing at the edge of the woods. Five yards ahead of us, a kind of low sand dune made a little hump between us and the water’s edge. I remembered there had been a narrow beach here yesterday; last night’s storm, however, had sent wild water crashing ashore here that had wiped out the beach and
badly undercut the sand dune itself.

  As my eyes went out across the water toward the inlet mouth, Susan whispered “Look, Pete,” and pointed to a single line of dimples in the sand at our feet. They led from where we crouched to the lip of the sand dune before us. They were nearly filled with blown sand now, yet there wasn’t any doubt what they were. Or whose they were. Roscoe Chapin’s footprints.

  “Only one set,” Susan said.

  “He went into the water here. But he didn’t come out here,” I said. I pointed in my turn. “Look out there.”

  Not more than a hundred yards away, the Osgoods’ specimen boat was anchored outside the inlet’s mouth. The Gulf was still choppy from last night’s storm, so the specimen boat was moving around over its anchor. For a few seconds, the deckhouse hid most of the boat’s deck from us; then the water worked it around enough for us to catch a quick impression of somebody leaning over the low rail on the boat’s starboard side.

  “There’s somebody on it,” I said. We were back to whispering again. We watched for another shift in the boat’s position so we could see more. Temporarily the deckhouse again blanked things out for us. That’s when something occurred to me that I should have thought of sooner. If we could see the Osgoods’ boat out there so plain and make out a man on it, there was no reason why the man on the boat, whoever he was, couldn’t see Susan and me just as plain if he happened to look in our direction. We were standing in full view at the edge of the woods, elevated two or three feet above sea level.

  I grabbed Susan’s arm and pulled her down into a crouch. “He’ll see us if he looks this way. Let’s crawl behind that sand dune up ahead, shall we? If we lie on our stomachs, we can peek over it and be pretty well hidden from the boat.”

  “Okay,” Susan agreed instantly. “Lead the way.”

  I got down on my stomach and wormed my way quickly to the sheltering sand dune. It was only seven or eight feet. Then I kept my head down and turned to motion to Susan. She followed me, flat on her stomach, wriggling forward as cool as a platoon sergeant on jungle patrol. When we were lying side by side behind the dune, we cautiously lifted our heads until our eyes topped the sand ridge.