They took off their masks and mouthpieces, then started helping each other unfasten the heavy oxygen tanks from their shoulders.
“The Sanchez sisters, I presume?” asked Agatha, walking toward them.
Both sisters had short, jet-black hair, full mouths, and shiny, dark eyes. Their wet suits clung to strong bodies, sculpted by constant diving.
“Excuse me, but who are you?” asked one of the twins, sharing a puzzled look with her sister.
Agatha briefly explained why they were on board.
“So old Sharkface suspects something fishy is going on,” sighed the twin who introduced herself as Ramira.
“He’s probably looking for a scapegoat,” said her sister, Ramona.
Uncle Conrad flashed them both a flirtatious smile. “Ladies, can I give you a hand with those heavy tanks?” he asked gallantly.
“Not now, Uncle,” whispered Agatha, winking at him. She turned back to the twins. “If you have a minute, we’d like to hear where you were on the night of the storm,” she explained.
“There isn’t much to tell,” replied Ramira. “We were below deck, in our cabin. There wasn’t anything much we could do to help out. The captain was at the helm, Richie was in his lab, and O’Connor was in the hold.”
“And Santiago was outside on deck,” concluded Ramona. “We decided it would be best to stay in our cabin, where it was warm and dry, and check out our diving equipment for the next day.”
“You didn’t go up on deck at all?” asked Agatha, checking her notebook.
“Well, I did,” replied Ramira. “O’Connor came out of the hold, saying there was a leak and he needed the captain’s help, so I offered to go up and fetch him.”
Dash shot a significant glance at his cousin. “But the captain said it was Ramona who came looking for him,” he said.
“He was wrong,” said Ramona, shrugging. “As you can see, we’re as alike as two drops of water.”
A lightbulb lit up in Agatha’s mind. “So what did you do?” she asked the twins.
“When the captain followed me down from the bridge, I went back to my sister and we continued our work,” said Ramira. “Then Santiago came below deck, soaking wet, and we fixed him some hot herbal tea and chatted for a while.”
Her sister nodded. “Till the captain came back, yelling like a madman because the Mayan calendar had disappeared into the sea.”
Agatha elbowed her cousin discreetly. “There’s something that doesn’t sit right with their version of events,” she whispered. “Add the Sanchez sisters to our list of suspects.”
“If you don’t need anything else right now, we’re going to go hose off this salt water,” chirped Ramira. “We’ve got another dive to prepare for.”
Agatha glanced at the pulley, which Santiago was still trying to hammer back into shape. “Are you trying to locate the AUV?” she asked.
“No, we’ve given up on that. We’re surveying the perimeter of the wreck zone . . . ,” Ramona began, and her twin sister jumped in to finish her sentence. It was as if one person was speaking.
“. . . because the captain wants to recover the gold coins the AUV found in the wreck . . . ,” continued Ramira.
“. . . but the storm shook everything up down there, too . . .”
“. . . and without the AUV’s magnetometer, the only way to locate the doubloons is by eye!”
“Okay, that’s all we need for now.” Agatha nodded. “We’ll keep you updated.”
The twins collected their scuba gear and headed for their bunks. Ramira patted Watson’s head while Ramona winked at Uncle Conrad, who immediately responded with a winning smile.
When they had gone below deck, Dash asked, “So, cousin, what’s your intuition telling you?”
Agatha thought for a moment, her eyes fixed on the calm sea. “Remember when the captain said that he found the twins wearing wet raincoats?”
“Yes, what about it?”
“The Sanchez sisters said no such thing,” whispered Agatha. “They said they were down in their cabin keeping dry. What if instead of staying below deck during the storm, they were really up above?”
“The captain could be lying,” said Chandler impassively.
“That’s true,” Agatha admitted. “But Larsson wouldn’t have made up a lie that could be disproved so easily. And besides that—”
“I bet you’re thinking about the strange case of mistaken identity between Ramira and Ramona. Right, cousin?” Dash jumped in.
Agatha nodded. “Exactly. Why would the captain have pretended that he was confused?”
“So to sum up,” said Dash, “the Sanchez sisters are definitely hiding something!”
Uncle Conrad leaned on the ship's railing and sighed, looking dreamy. “But two such bewitching and beautiful girls . . . I can’t imagine them getting caught up in something so shady,” he objected.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Agatha declared with a smile. “And let’s not forget the evidence against Santiago.”
“The severed AUV cable!” cried Dash.
“You would need a very sharp tool to cut a cable like that one,” agreed Uncle Conrad with a shiver. “Something like that awful machete Santiago wears on his belt!”
“Machete?” repeated someone from behind them. The voice had the salty rasp of a veteran sailor. Sun-bleached hair, a week’s worth of stubble, and a checkered shirt over torn jeans completed the picture. He wiped the grease and oil from his hands. “I heard that. What about Santiago’s machete?”
Agatha recognized the man from his photo on the EyeNet. It was Davey O’Connor, the Loki’s Irish steward.
“Now, Miss, has this beautiful white cat got your tongue?” he chuckled, slipping a chipped wooden pipe into the corner of his mouth.
“No, Mr. O’Connor, my tongue is right where it belongs,” replied Agatha. “And something’s not right on this boat!” She explained the reason for their visit for the umpteenth time. “So we need to hear your version of events and check the cargo hold,” she concluded.
Davey O’Connor pulled a flask from the back pocket of his jeans. “First I’ll take a sip of my medicine, if you don’t mind.” A moment later, they were walking along the narrow corridor in the bowels of the ship, approaching the hold.
The air smelled briny and stale. O’Connor sat on an old crate and began to speak. “The other night, I came down here to secure the cargo while the storm was raging. I’ve never seen anything like that storm, let me tell you!” He stared at the floorboards for a moment. “Then we must’ve hit a rock, because we started taking on water. That’s the last thing you want, especially in a storm.”
“Were you by yourself?” asked Agatha.
“I had my pipe,” said the Irishman, smiling. He cleared his throat, took another sip from his flask, and continued his story. “Since I couldn’t stop up the leak on my own, I called for the captain.”
“How did you contact the captain?” Agatha interrupted.
“As I was rushing up to get him, I ran into Ramona. She’s a lovely lass, isn’t she? She offered to go fetch the captain, so I came back down here and got to work while I waited for Larsson to come lend a hand.”
“Are you positive it was Ramona?” asked Dash.
“Well, that’s what she told me,” replied the Irishman. “I swear, I can never tell those two apart. They are every bit as pretty as each other, don’t you think?”
Uncle Conrad gave him a smile of agreement.
“What happened after the captain arrived?” Agatha continued.
“We played checkers!” he said, then burst out laughing. “What else do you do when the ship’s got a leak?” Agatha looked baffled. “Excuse the joke, Miss. Where was I? Oh yes, Larsson came rushing below and we got to work on the pumps because the hold was flooding.”
“How long did he stay down he
re?”
The Irishman took another sip. “Must have been close to an hour or so,” he said vaguely. “Takes a lot of elbow grease to pump out a hold, you know? When I saw that I could handle the rest by myself, I told the captain to go back up to the bridge. A few minutes later, I found out the golden calendar had gone overboard. Larsson knows some very colorful curses, and his voice travels a long way!” he concluded with a chuckle.
Chandler carefully observed the hull. “I suppose the leak has been repaired?” he said.
“It surely has, my friend,” replied O’Connor, pointing to the starboard. “There’s where it was. I finished welding a patch on it this morning.”
Agatha headed over to inspect it. Dash and Uncle Conrad followed, while Chandler stayed behind, listening politely while the Irishman rambled on about the miraculous properties of the medicine in his flask.
At the bottom of the hold, the repair was easy to spot. There was a copper patch and a blackened smear left by a blowtorch.
Uncle Conrad knelt down and ran his hand over the patch. “Hmmm . . . ,” he muttered.
“What is it?” asked Dash softly.
“I could be wrong, but this repair . . . well, it doesn’t seem recent to me.”
“What makes you think that?” Agatha asked in a whisper.
“That solder looks fresh enough, but the patch is already beginning to oxidize. That’s a sign of a much older repair,” he explained.
“Are you sure?”
“No doubt in my mind,” he said. “I’ve been knocking around on boats for years, and I’ve seen a lot of hull patches.”
“So, Miss, are you satisfied?” interrupted the Irishman, shaking his flask.
“Indeed,” replied Agatha. “Thanks for your time.”
“It’s nothing. I’m always pleased to assist a lovely young lass such as yourself. Come and find me again soon. It gets mighty lonely down here.”
Agatha led the group back up into the sunlight.
“Well, what do you think?” asked Dash dubiously.
The young girl stroked her turned-up nose. “O’Connor’s story confirms the captain’s alibi—at least that he was down in the hold. But that repair is a fake, according to Uncle Conrad. I suspect the steward is hiding something, too. Maybe they’re in cahoots.”
“It’s nearly evening,” said Dash, sounding worried. “I have a bad feeling that we’ll never get to the bottom of this!”
“Don’t worry,” Agatha soothed him. “We still need to interview Richie Stark. Maybe he’ll be able to shed some light on the situation!”
As they made their way to the opposite end of the Loki, Chandler raised a question that left them all deep in thought. “Do you still believe Captain Larsson is responsible for the calendar’s disappearance?” he asked.
“At this point in the investigation, the only thing that we have against him is McBain’s suspicion,” said Agatha. “On the other hand, we’ve collected evidence that raises questions about everyone else on the crew.”
“You’re in a very difficult line of work, kids.” Uncle Conrad grinned. “I’d rather hang out with the dolphins and ride on a Jet Ski!”
“The solution will fall into place eventually, you’ll see,” Agatha assured him. “It always works like that, doesn’t it, Dash?”
The young detective snapped his fingers. “That’s it!” he cried. “Maybe Captain Larsson left false clues all over the ship, and we’ve fallen for them, hook, line, and sinker!”
Agatha let out a hearty laugh. “Dear cousin, the most likely explanation is usually the simplest,” she said. “I don’t think the captain would have had time to lay down a whole trail of false clues. Plus, even though Larsson didn’t know it, Richie Stark works for McBain, and he’s been keeping an eye on Captain Larsson this whole time. If the captain got caught leaving false clues, McBain would probably already know about it!”
The chugging of the ship’s engine was overrun by the deafening sound of heavy-metal music. Thrashing guitars and a tuneless voice wailed from the doorway of the ship’s laboratory. Peering through the porthole-shaped window in the door, Agatha saw a sloppily dressed young man hunched over a desktop computer. He had his back to the door, and didn’t realize that he was being watched.
“Hey, Agatha! Look at the screen!” exclaimed Dash.
The monitor showed a detailed relief map of the Florida coastline, with a flashing red light that seemed to be moving somewhere out in the ocean.
“Looks like a satellite-recovery program,” murmured Agatha. Her expression hardened. “It’s about time we solved this mystery. I suggest we don’t let Richie know we’ve been spying on him.”
Chandler knocked so hard that Richie Stark shot up out of his chair. “Whoa! What was that, an earthquake?” he cried, turning toward the door. His pale complexion was offset by his black T-shirt, and despite his annoyed expression, he had a baby face. According to the file, he was twenty-five years old, but he looked even younger.
“Mr. McBain sent us,” explained Agatha as they entered the lab. “We’d like to have a chat with you.”
“Yeah, sure.” Richie Stark hurriedly turned off the computer and lowered the volume of his blasting music. He looked nervous.
The lab was crammed wall-to-wall with computers and marine-research instruments: navigational systems, deep-sea thermometers, hydrological scanners, Fathometers, sonars, ocean-floor mapping devices, drills, and a thousand other electronic gadgets.
Dash raised the patch from his eye and looked around, awestruck.
Agatha had already begun questioning the technician. “Mr. McBain told us you’ve been working for him, is that right?”
“You got it,” said Richie, with a bit of a stammer. “I supervise all the research and analyze the data.”
“And keep a close eye on the captain, too,” Dash added.
The technician’s pale face pinkened. “Umm . . . let’s just say that Mr. McBain was very convincing when he offered to double my pay . . . ,” he admitted sheepishly.
“We don’t have a problem with that,” Agatha cut him off. “What we want to know is if you have any conclusive proof that the captain is responsible for this theft.”
Richie shook his head. “I wish. But I can’t prove a thing,” he replied. “Larsson is a pretty sly dog. For some time now, he’s been lobbying hard to replace this old tub with a brand-new ship. That costs lots of money.”
“That’s it?” asked Dash. “That’s what you’ve based your suspicions on, that he wants a new boat?”
Richie looked cornered. “He knows every corner of the Loki. He could have hidden the calendar anywhere!”
“To be honest,” Chandler interrupted politely, “I don’t see how he could have managed that by himself. A yard’s worth of gold would weigh—”
“Yes! That’s exactly my point!” cried the young man, jumping to his feet. “The captain is a man of many resources, and he must have had an accomplice!”
“Like a young lab technician, for instance?” Agatha suggested with a smile.
“Where were you during the storm?” Dash asked.
“Right here in the lab,” Richie responded. “I could see from my weather data that the storm was gonna be bad, and I wanted to back up the rest of the research data in case we lost power.”
“Did you see anything unusual?”
“Not a thing. I stayed in the lab the whole time, getting seasick as we got tossed around by the waves. Then the captain rushed in to tell me that the calendar was missing, and I spent the rest of the night on the bridge, repairing the radar and echo sounder so we could start searching for it in the morning.”
“Larsson told us that there was a lot of damage, and that the AUV sank,” Agatha said.
“The Shark just about had a stroke when I told him the AUV was gone,” said Richie. “That thing c
ost him millions of dollars!”
Uncle Conrad gave a whistle. “It’s that expensive?”
“It was a next-generation prototype . . .”
“Can you tell us about it, Richie?” asked Agatha.
The man’s eyes lit up, and he immediately became more enthusiastic about talking to the group. Clearly research was his passion, and talking about it electrified him. “Well, you see, normally an AUV has very specific instruments: sonar for identifying submerged objects, a magnetometer for detecting metal objects, a current meter for measuring marine flow, and lots of other analytical apparatuses,” he rattled off.
“Do you control it from inside the lab?” asked Dash.
“Not exactly. The AUV is a type of robot. I enter the research coordinates, and it maneuvers itself. My job is to analyze the data and refine its movements by entering new coordinates.”
Agatha stopped scribbling in her notebook and interrupted him. “What additional instruments did this next-generation prototype have?”
“It was equipped with two mechanical arms for working on the seabed, and a set of solar panels to increase its range,” replied the technician. “But the most useful thing for our purposes was a powerful claw for picking up objects, even when they're buried beneath sand and debris. That’s what enabled us to recover the calendar. In fact, I can show you how it works.”
He turned on his computer, clicking open a video file. “Look, the AUV’s cameras captured the whole salvage operation. See how the claw is lifting it up?”
They all turned their attention to the screen.
Richie continued enthusiastically. “If you’re into this stuff, I have thousands of photos of the seabed, the wreck, and a lot of weird deepwater fish,” he added. “It’s a whole different planet down there!”
Agatha gently nudged Dash with her elbow, whispering something into his ear.
The Treasure of the Bermuda Triangle Page 4