His next question came very quickly. “What gave you the idea this Roger Chapin, or whoever he is, was a friend of mine?”
“Why, you told me he was, Mr. Osgood. You told me he was the friend who recommended our fish market to you. Don’t you remember? When you bought the snappers?” I gave him a surprised look.
He growled, “I never heard of anybody named Roger Chapin in my life.”
“Roscoe Chapin.”
“Him, either. You must have misunderstood me, Pete.”
I acted puzzled. “Well, that’s funny,” I said, “I was sure he was a friend of yours. I ran into him right here in Dolphin Inlet the other day… scuba diving out there by the point.”
I thought that would shake him. And it did. He jumped as though I’d stuck a pin in him. “What?” he said.
“Yes, sir, he was out there just beyond the mouth of the inlet. And Susan and I have seen him hanging around here a lot.”
He swallowed. “Nobody’s been hanging around here, as you call it, except you nosy kids and us,” he said then, angrily.
I stuck in another pin. I had to. I was desperate to find out about Susan. The airplane was making another circle over the inlet. This could be the last pass, I realized. Professor Harris had said last night that the aerial survey shouldn’t take very long. So I picked Osgood up on his last remark. “Nobody except ‘us,’” I repeated. “Who do you mean by ‘us’?”
“My brother and I, who else?” He gave me a startled look.
I laughed. “Oh, no, not you and your brother, sir. You’ve got to be joking. You and the mysterious Mr. X, maybe, but not you and your brother.”
He wet his lips with his tongue and if he’d had eyebrows, he’d have frowned with them. The faint trace of something; that could have been fear showed on his thin face. “Mr. X? Have you lost your mind?” was all he could come up with. “Who’s Mr. X?”
“That’s what I call the fellow who lives here with you, Mr. Osgood,” I explained to him. “The man who’s posing as Hamilton Osgood, your brother.”
He was ready for that one. It was his turn to laugh.
“Pete, you’re a pure caution!” he said between guffaws that didn’t sound quite right. “You trying to tell me you believe my brother Ham is somebody else named Mr. X?”
“That’s it,” I said. I remembered clearly the last line of the letter we’d found in the Osgoods’ burner basket. “And what’s more, Mr. Osgood, I think your brother Hamilton is dead!”
Perry Osgood went still as death himself for a split second. Then his lips curled in a half-smile. “Well, now, that’s certainly an odd thought,” he said. He paused long enough to shift his burlap sacks to the other arm. “Maybe you better come on up to the house right now and tell that one to my brother in person. Tell him he’s dead. He’ll be surprised to hear it!”
His tone was so right, his amused manner so real, that for a minute I had a sinking feeling that I was all wrong about Mr. X and Roscoe Chapin and the whole Dolphin Inlet mystery—that I was just a brash kid sticking my nose into business that didn’t concern me and making a real fool of myself in the process.
But what about Susan? She had to be here still. And she had to be either hurt, dead or a prisoner or she would have shown up by now, what with my yelling and Osgood’s loud laughter. And if she was a prisoner, what was the only good prison around? The Osgoods’ house.
So I said, to hide my eagerness, “I thought you wanted me to leave?”
“That was before you went out of your head. Now I want you to come up to the house. I wouldn’t want my brother to miss your act, Pete. It’s hilarious.” He wasn’t laughing any more.
I hesitated like a kid who knows he’s in over his head and can’t figure how to back out… which I was. Osgood grinned and threw in the clincher. “My brother talked to your girlfriend a few minutes before she left,” he said. “Maybe he can tell you where she went.”
I made up my mind. “All right,” I said. “Let’s go, then.” I brushed past him and started for the beach a few yards away.
“Not that way.” Osgood put out his free arm and stopped me. “Through the woods. It’s shorter.” I didn’t go for that. I was sure the real reason was that Perry was suspicious of the plane, and he was afraid we’d be spotted if we went out I n the open. But I didn’t say anything.
We made fast time to the house on the point. Before we reached it, I heard the loud drone of Mr. Frost’s airplane begin to soften a little. Soon it had faded away entirely. I’d been expecting that. But I felt awfully lonesome suddenly, all the same.
We came out of the trees at the rear of the Osgood house. Just as we walked up the slight slope to reach it, Mr. X, in what looked like a big hurry, popped around the corner from the front and went loping down the path that led to their anchorage below. He was carrying what I took to be an auxiliary can of gasoline in one hand. It looked heavy enough to be full. And his other arm was full of canned goods.
Perry Osgood hailed him. Mr. X stopped and stared at us as we came out of the slash pines into the open. Especially at me. “What now?” he barked at Perry Osgood.
Osgood said, “It’s just Pete Hobbs. The kid from the fish market. He’s looking for his girl friend.” He shot a warning look at Mr. X. “Also, he’s got some very interesting ideas about you.”
Mr. X turned to me. “What about me, Pete?” he snapped.
I was tempted to give it to him straight. “I think you and Perry Osgood killed Roscoe Chapin,” was what I wanted to say. But that was no way for me to stay alive if they were killers. And no way to help Susan, either, if they had her.
So I said instead, “I know you aren’t Hamilton Osgood, for one thing. And for another…” I paused long enough to let the tension build a little, “I know what you and Mr. Osgood are doing in Dolphin Inlet. You’re diving for sunken Spanish treasure!”
CHAPTER 15
I TAKE THE BAIT
All that got me for a minute was a lot of silence from Osgood and Mr. X. Their eyes shuttled back and forth from me to each other. While we were all busy saying nothing, I could hear the soft rush of the surf on the shore rocks around at the front of their house, the rattling of the palm fronds in the breeze down near their anchorage and the occasional slap of water against the wooden dock where their boats were tied up.
Mr. X recovered his powers of speech first. He didn’t argue with me about the first part of my remark; I guess he didn’t think it was important to them just then in the light of the second part of what I’d said. “Sunken Spanish treasure,” he murmured, not like a question but like the simple repetition of a fact he’d decided to admit. “What made you come to that conclusion, Pete?”
I answered him with another question. “It’s true, isn’t it? You have found a Spanish treasure ship on the bottom of Dolphin Inlet, haven’t you?”
Mr. X ignored that. He merely asked again, “What gave you that idea?”
“I’ll tell you,” I said, “if you’ll tell me what’s happened to Susan Frost.”
Osgood spoke up. “I already mentioned to Pete that you’d seen her this morning.”
Mr. X slowly put down the can of gasoline he was carrying. He placed his cans of tomatoes and baked beans and stuff on the path beside it. “She’s all right,” he said slowly. “I give you my word she is, Pete.” He made a half gesture toward the old lean-to shed that was tacked onto the back of the house—the one Susan had been so keen about painting. “You can see her if you want to. In a minute.”
He shut up and stared at me. I could tell that that was as much information as he was going to give out about Susan. Little as it was, it was enough to relieve my mind a lot. Because the way he said it, I couldn’t help believing him. They hadn’t hurt Susan. I pulled my gold doubloon out of my pocket and held it out between my fingers.
“This is what tipped me off to a treasure ship in t
he inlet,” I said. “I found it on the undercut beach over there.” I pointed to the northern shore of the inlet. “When I put the doubloon together with your constant diving and your suspicion of everybody who comes near the inlet, including me, I came up with a treasure ship. It wasn’t too hard to figure out.”
I thought they’d snatch my doubloon and examine it but they didn’t. I put the gold piece back in my pocket.
“Who else knows about it?” Mr. X asked. “The treasure.”
“If Pete knows, the girl knows,” said Osgood.
“And who was in the airplane?” Mr. X said. “If you know so much, maybe you know that, too?”
I said, “One thing I do know is that Roscoe Chapin, the man who was found dead on the beach this morning, must have been working here with you, helping you to get up the treasure.” I hoped that would take their thoughts away from the airplane. It did.
“What makes you think that?” Mr. X said.
“Because I saw him around here so much. Moving around in your woods at night. Diving in the inlet the day he drowned. And Mr. Osgood mentioned his name to me at the fish market one day as a friend of yours…”
Mr. X glared at Perry Osgood. He seemed more shaken by this talk about Chapin than by my knowing about the treasure. And that figured, if he and Osgood had killed Chapin.
Mr. X’s mouth tightened up, his voice got deeper, and he looked straight at me. He said, “You’re perfectly correct, Pete. On all counts except that one. As you say, I’m not Hamilton Osgood. My name is Bascom Harter. And we have been diving for treasure in Dolphin Inlet.” He was talking fast, as though in a great hurry to finish. “We’ve recovered quite a lot of it, too, incidentally.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“I’ll show you in a minute. First, though, I want you to know that Roscoe Chapin was not working with us. He was a criminal, a blackmailer, a hijacker. He was after our treasure. He was having us watched…”
“I thought he’d hired you to watch us, Pete,” Osgood broke in. “That’s why I checked your wallet when you came swimming here.”
I said, “He didn’t hire me. I never spoke to the man in my life. He must have been watching you himself, if anyone was. Anyway, if he was a crook, after your treasure, I suppose you’re relieved that he’s dead…” I bit off the word. I hadn’t intended to go that far.
“He deserved what he got!” Perry Osgood said savagely. “He killed my brother. In Spain.” That came out in a rush before he stopped to think.
This caught me unawares. I gaped at Osgood like a nut. No wonder he had feared Chapin—and hated him—if Chapin had killed his brother. This was a pretty strong reason why Perry might have killed Chapin in return. A much stronger one than merely protecting the treasure against a hijacker.
But even so would Perry have deliberately driven a heavy boat at Chapin, helpless in the water? Killed him in cold blood? I looked at the tall, narrow-faced, weather-beaten man in front of me. His rifle-barrel eyes were boring into me. I had to admit it: he looked perfectly capable of murder. And so did bald-headed Bascom Harter, if it came to that. Suddenly I was surer than ever they were responsible for Chapin’s death.
Harter snapped, “Shut up, you fool!” at Perry Osgood. Osgood got the sheepish look of a scolded kid.
“You promised I could see Susan, Mr. Harter,” I said.
He nodded abruptly. “Yes. And the treasure we’ve recovered so far. Well, they’re in the lean-to.” He pointed at the ramshackle shed. “Show him, Perry.”
Osgood bustled toward the shed. I followed him, willingly enough. I was pretty sure this shed was a set-up of some kind, a trap, because Osgood and Harter were obviously in a tearing rush to leave the inlet with their treasure, and they wouldn’t want a witness like me running around loose while they took to their heels. Nor one like Susan, either. So if they wanted to make us both prisoners in their shed, it was okay with me. If Susan was unharmed, I’d give Osgood and Harter my blessing on a quick getaway. I didn’t care whether they escaped or not, or kept their treasure or not. What I cared about was finding Susan.
Osgood pulled the door of the sited open and stood aside for me to go in. I said, “Susan?” and was walking through the door when a hard hand hit me in the back between my shoulder blades. Harter’s hand. It gave me a stiff shove. I stumbled into the dark interior of the shed, off-balance, tripped over my own feet and went flat on my face with my head almost against the back wall.
I wasn’t hurt. I jumped up and whirled around toward the door of the shed. It slammed shut and the latch clicked into place before I could reach it. A small shower of dust, knocked loose by the slamming door, rained over me. I sneezed.
It wasn’t quite dark in the shed. Years of exposure to tropical sun and damp had shrunk and warped the six-inch vertical boards that formed the door until cracks showed between them. A couple of the cracks were half an inch wide. A kind of half-light came into the shed through them. It was enough to see by.
My first quick look around showed me that Susan wasn’t there. Neither was the treasure. Neither was a latch or handle of any kind on the inside of the door. The only thing in there was me, Pete Hobbs, the great detective, the believer of false promises. The dope.
I was pulling in a big breath to yell bloody murder when Harter’s voice came through the cracks in the door. “Watch the kid, Perry,” he said. “He could be big enough to break down that door. It’s stronger than it looks, maybe, but we can’t take chances. So watch him till we’re set to go. His being here doesn’t change anything. We’ll still do it the same way. I’ll finish loading the outboard. We’ve got to move fast.”
“Okay,” Osgood’s voice answered. Then, “How about the loot?”
“Give me the sacks,” Harter said. “I’ll get that, too. Be ready to take off in ten minutes.”
I peeked through one of the half-inch cracks in the door and saw Harter pick up the gasoline and canned stuff, take Osgood’s burlap bags, and start down the path toward the anchorage.
CHAPTER 16
THE GAFF
Osgood, left behind, looked dubiously at the sagging door of my shed. In a minute, he went a few yards under the slash pines and picked up a solid piece of driftwood about two feet long. He swished it through the air a couple of times before he came back with it and stood on the path right outside the shed door, not more than six feet away. I didn’t like the looks of the driftwood club. Applied to my head, it ought to have about the same effect as an iron bar, I figured. I gave up the idea of trying to break down the door of the shed.
I put my lips to the widest crack and said, “Mr. Osgood. Listen. I’m not trying to keep you from getting away with your treasure. All I want to know is that Susan Frost is okay. Please, where is she? Is she all right? You haven’t hurt her, have you?”
“Quiet!” Osgood said. Then, grudgingly, “She’s all right. Harter told you she was.”
“I’m sorry we’ve been a bother to you. You and Mr. Chapin and your treasure were none of our business. I know that now. I apologize for troubling you. Won’t you tell me where Susan is? Please?”
Osgood hefted his club and began to slap it against the palm of his left hand. “You listen, Pete,” he said. “We didn’t want to touch the girl. And we wouldn’t have touched her, except so many things were going on around here this morning that there didn’t seem anything else to do when she showed up. Then you came sticking your nose in again, right in the middle of everything. That’s why you’re in that shed. But you haven’t been hurt, and neither has your girlfriend. I’m not a thug, Pete. I’m just Perry Osgood who went to school with your father. Just a normal, law-abiding citizen. We both are, Harter and I.”
And probably murderers, too, I thought silently.
Osgood’s voice took on the kind of noble indignation a high pressure preacher sometimes uses, as though anybody who thought he and Harter would ever
step out of line ought to have his head examined. “We wouldn’t hurt anybody, Pete. You can see that. Not even you.” He got a little bitter. “Much as you deserve it! You’re a rank nuisance!”
But not as much of a nuisance as Roscoe Chapin was, I thought. “I’m sorry, Mr. Osgood,” I said, as humble as I could make it. “I said I was sorry. Won’t you tell me where Susan is?”
He laughed, the same snorting horselaugh he’d given in the woods. At length he said, “Your girlfriend is in the house behind you. In the bedroom on the other side of that shed’s back wall. And she’s all right. Ask her yourself if you don’t believe me.”
I thought he was lying again. Having some sport at my expense. I went close to the back wall of the shed and yelled “Susan!” at the top of my voice.
He wasn’t lying. Faintly I heard Susan’s voice come back to me through the house wall. “Is that you, Pete?” she cried. “Pete?”
“Right here, Susan! Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes, Pete. I’m locked in, but I’m okay. Are you?”
“I’m fine!” I yelled back. And I really was feeling fine now. For I knew at last that Susan was okay and that Mike Sebastien or Sergeant Carroll or Susan’s father and his friends or somebody ought to be here very soon to put on the big rescue act. By then I hoped Osgood and Harter would be long gone with their lousy treasure. No reason why they shouldn’t be. A pocketful of Spanish gold can buy a lot of fast transportation, with no questions asked, in our part of the country. And with a decent head start, I knew Osgood and Harter might never be found. But who cared?
Susan’s voice reached me through the wall. “Have they got you, too, Pete?”
“I’m locked in the shed behind the house!” I felt silly yelling it all out like that while Osgood stood outside the shed door grinning and listening to every word.
“Oh, dear!” Susan called in a discouraged sort of way.
Osgood spoke through the door. “It’ll only be for a little while, Pete,” he said. “You won’t be shut in there long. Just until Harter and I can get safe away from this blasted inlet with our treasure!”
The Mystery of Dolphin Inlet Page 13