Secrets from the Deep

by Linda Fairstein

  “Devlin,” I said. “Devlin Quick.”

  “Don’t worry, Devlin,” Mr. Bagby said. “We didn’t wrestle with a bear, if it’s our clothes you’re staring at. Ross and I caught some fish this morning—some sea bass—and I got a little messed up getting them unhooked.”

  “Don’t you believe in catching and releasing?” I asked. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, but I sort of couldn’t help myself. “Aren’t you supposed to throw them back into the water and buy your dinner here at Larsen’s?”

  “You still have to get the hook out to let the fish go,” Mr. Bagby said. “The blood will come out of our clothes in the wash. It always does.”

  Booker, Zee, and I walked out and sat down on one of the wooden boxes on the edge of the dock. I used a plastic knife to cut each of the lobster rolls in three pieces.

  “See that?” Booker said. “That’s Mr. Bagby’s boat.”

  He pointed to a boat that was tied up alongside the dock, with its name painted on the rear.

  REVENGE was written in bold black print, outlined in red. The words CHILMARK, MA, its home port, were below the name.

  “You know what I was taking pictures of when the police officer pulled into the Thaw farm?” Booker asked me.

  “I have no idea, but this lunch is amazing,” I said.

  “Bagby’s boat,” Booker said, pulling up the photos on his iPhone.

  Zee was too busy chowing down his lobster roll to get into the conversation.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Look,” he said, scrolling through the photographs.

  “You’re kidding,” I said, wiping the mayonnaise off my face. “Mr. Bagby was cruising in the pond, right below the sheep barn? Really? What if he had trespassed on our trespassing?”

  “Yeah, that would have been very interesting,” Booker said. “The return of the Revenge to Menemsha Pond. That’s quite a coincidence.”

  “You know better than that,” I said. “Sam says there is no such thing as a coincidence in detective work. There’s always a reason behind the curious linking of events.”

  “Like what, in this case?” Booker asked.

  “Hold up,” I said, putting my finger to my lips. “You should never rush my deductions. Here come the Bagbys.”

  “How did you three get up here to Chilmark?” Mr. Bagby asked as he walked up to our spot on the dock.

  Booker answered him. “We took the bus.”

  “Well, Ross and I could give you a speedy ride back in our boat,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day for a trip on the ocean. If you’ve never done it before, it’s quite a treat, and it gives you an entirely different way to see the island.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. My mother had always taught me not to accept rides from strangers—except for cops in uniform—and I’m sure she meant even rich strangers who had boats.

  But at the very same moment, Booker spoke up. He was excited by the offer. “Is that one yours, right there?”

  “Sure is,” Mr. Bagby said. “We’re going to eat our crab cakes on board and then head out to sea. Why not come along?”

  “Why did you name her Revenge?” I asked, trying to make Booker get my point. “Was it after a pirate ship?”

  “No. No, it isn’t.”

  “You mean it’s just a coincidence that Lemuel Kyd sailed in these very waters and had a ship named Revenge?” I said.

  “I’ve never heard of Lemuel Kyd,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. He must have heard the sarcasm in my voice. “You’re a Vineyard summer person, so you probably know a lot of the folklore. You’re right here in Menemsha Pond, where Kyd hid from the Spanish and you never—”

  “How about Blackbeard?” Mr. Bagby said, interrupting me. “He sailed all up and down the New England coast and he had a ship called Revenge.”

  Zee spoke up quickly. “Blackbeard’s ship was named Queen Anne’s Revenge,” he said. “Different thing.”

  “Well, my vessel is named for the HMS Revenge,” he said.

  “HMS?” I asked.

  “Her Majesty’s Ship,” Zee said, picking the biggest pieces of lobster claw out of his roll to chew on separately so his sandwich would last longer. “That’s how the British fleet is named, all for Her Majesty or His Majesty.”

  “Exactly right,” Mr. Bagby said. “Sir Francis Drake sailed the Revenge into battle in the Spanish Armada. That’s why I chose it for my little boat.”

  I wasn’t giving up without a fight.

  “That word is kind of a mean name for a boat, don’t you think?” I said. “Revenge is all about causing injury to someone—”

  Mr. Bagby nodded his head in my direction. “It’s about causing injury or insult to someone who injured you first.”

  “Who insulted you first, sir?” I asked.

  “You do a very good cross-examination, Devlin,” Bagby said. “I guess you’re going to be a lawyer when you grow up.”

  “An investigative journalist,” I said. “Just like my dad.”

  “Someday I’ll tell you that story, young lady. It might make a good article for you to write,” Mr. Bagby said, taking his bag of crab cakes and walking to the steps that led down to the dock. “Let’s go, Ross. We’re on a schedule.”

  “Were you fishing at Tarpaulin Cove yesterday?” I asked him.

  He stopped in his tracks and looked at Ross. “Must you tell people everything we do?”

  “But, Dad, I didn’t say a word about it,” Ross Bagby whined to his father.

  I tried not to snicker but it was tough.

  “Or was the fishing better today inside the pond?” I asked. I didn’t mean for Ross to get blamed for something that Artie Constant had told us.

  Mr. Bagby’s head snapped in my direction. “Ross just told me that you’re a Ditchley girl, aren’t you? Well, maybe the instructors there should spend more time teaching manners than on perfecting your skills at being busybodies.”

  Wilhelmina Ditchley had founded her school for girls almost a century ago. She prided herself on encouraging young women under her care to develop an inquisitive nature. I was happy to think that generations later, her wisdom had inspired me to question things at every turn. Our school motto, after all, is “We Learn, We Lead.” I find it impossible to learn unless I ask loads of questions.

  “Ross didn’t tell us anything about where you’d been. Booker and Zee and I—well, we try to be really observant.”

  Cole Bagby stepped onto his boat and Ross followed him by leaping off the dock. Neither one of them waved good-bye, which didn’t surprise me.

  We watched them start the motor and cruise till they got out of sight—till the letters that spelled Revenge looked smaller than the letters on the bottom row of the eye chart at my doctor’s office.

  The three of us walked down the road to the Texaco station and sat on the bench to wait for the bus.

  I took out my phone and Googled Cole Bagby.

  “It would have been fun to take that boat ride back to Oak Bluffs,” Booker said.

  “You don’t even know those people,” I said, waiting for the information to load. “Yesterday, you would have bopped Ross Bagby on the nose if you could have, and now it seems to me his father isn’t entirely honest.”

  “I wanted to go with them, too,” Zee said.

  “All that blood kind of freaked me out,” I said.

  “You heard the man,” Booker said. “Fish bleed, just like people do. It’s as simple as that.”

  “‘Does Cole Bagby have a bag of tricks’?”

  “Why would you say that?” Booker was on his feet, watching a small yacht refill its gas tanks at the dock behind us.

  I held up my phone. “I didn’t say it. It’s a headline in a magazine article about the man.”

  “Let me see,” Booker said.
r />   Booker was skimming the piece, scrolling as fast as he could. “Seems that Mr. Bagby owns a chain of restaurants.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “Keep reading.”

  “He’s a numismatist,” Booker said.

  “Numismatists are coin collectors,” Zee said. “Those guys love doubloons.”

  “How could you possibly know what that word means?” I said, giving Zee a playful nudge in the side.

  “I figured everybody knows that. Numismatics is the study of coins,” Zee said. “That’s how come I bought all those reproduction pirate coins when Becca took me to the museum. To study them.”

  “Well, I sure didn’t know,” I said.

  “You were kind of right not to accept a ride from the man, Dev,” Booker said. “Bagby and his bag of tricks? The whole point of this article is that Cole Bagby tried to pass off some fake coins at a Numismatic Society event.”

  “Sometimes, like Sam says, you’ve just got to go with your gut instincts.”

  Zee jumped to his feet. “Were they fake pirate booty?”

  Booker handed me back my phone. “Yup. Just phony old things with a portrait of Sir Francis Drake on them.”

  “I knew he was a crook,” I said. “He had a slimy look to him.”

  “Just ’cause he had fish goop on his clothes? That’s the stuff that looked really slimy,” Booker said. “But I don’t think it would hold up in court.”

  “I didn’t get to the end of the article,” I said. “Was Mr. Bagby arrested for passing fake coins?”

  “Nope. Just kicked out of the society.”

  The bus turned the corner and came driving down the road toward the gas station.

  “I, for one, am glad we didn’t take a ride with the Bagbys,” I said, standing up and digging in my pocket for the bus pass. “I wouldn’t want him anywhere near our valuable doubloon.”

  17

  “Tonight is all about tradition, Dev,” Becca said. “It’s my favorite night of the summer.”

  I like tradition as much as the next girl, but it just seemed crazy for me not to be able to solve the puzzle of who is the rightful owner of the doubloon before I had to leave the island on Saturday, and it was already Wednesday evening.

  “Do you think Jenny Thaw will be at her house in the Campground tonight?” I asked. “It would be amazing if we could meet her.”

  “I heard from the butcher in town that Jenny went off-island last week,” Becca said. “Hard to imagine anyone with a house in the center of all the action would ever miss Illumination Night, but we’ll see.”

  “The butcher told you?” I asked. “There are no secrets in this town, are there?”

  “Very few. And what there are,” Becca said, “are always out of the box in a day or two.”

  She dimmed the lights in the kitchen and living room.

  “Gentlemen,” she called out to Booker and Zee, “are you ready to go?”

  “We’re on the porch, Becca,” Booker said. “Couldn’t be hungrier.”

  This tradition involved a lot of food, as Vineyard things usually did.

  We headed off to Circuit Avenue for dinner at Fat Ronnie’s. Apparently, Ronnie didn’t consider the name an insult, since he chose it for himself. He served the biggest and best burger on Martha’s Vineyard, and we weren’t the only people who thought so.

  “We’re going to be late,” Zee said, looking at the length of the line.

  “I’ve had this timing under control for the last fifty years or so, so just hush up.”

  After we ate our burgers—piled high with cheese and pickles and lettuce and just about everything else you could get your mouth around—Becca led us to the side of the bakery halfway down the block where an operation called Back Door Donuts stayed open half the night serving fritters and donuts right out of the oven as they prepared the front counter of the bakery for the morning rush.

  “I couldn’t eat another thing,” I said. “What’s next?”

  “We’re off to the Tabernacle, where the Camp Meeting Association is,” Becca said. “Back around the time of the Civil War, a whole lot of religious communities began to have meetings. Right here in Oak Bluffs is where John Wesley started the Methodist movement. People camped out in large tents for a week or two at a time, built up around a central tabernacle to join in a community of prayer and such.”

  “So we’ll be sitting in tents?” I asked.

  “Hardly,” Becca said.

  “They were all replaced ages ago by cottages,” Booker said. “Dozens and dozens of tiny cottages painted all different colors, sitting as close together as it was possible to build them. Wait till you turn the corner and see it, Dev. It’s like a gingerbread village.”

  I put out my arm to stop Becca. “Don’t look now, but there goes Artie Constant,” I said. “He’s headed into the Campgrounds.”

  “Maybe he’s two-timing me with another granny since I turned him down for a date tonight,” Becca said. “I wouldn’t blame him if he does.”

  “Keep an eye on him, Booker, will you?” I said.

  “Just relax and have a good time tonight, Dev,” he said.

  “I plan to do that. I just never lose track of my surroundings, either.”

  But I almost did! When we squared the block and followed the growing crowd past the Wesley Hotel and into the narrow street behind the hotel, it was like stepping back into another century.

  There were gingerbread cottages—like a village of oversize dollhouses—as far as I could see in every direction. They were trimmed in yellow and red and bright blue paint, and there was one that was entirely the color of pink bubble gum from roof to foundation.

  “Grab some seats,” Becca said, and Zee rushed ahead of us.

  In the center of the large square, surrounded mostly by houses and one large church, was the Tabernacle—a large circular structure with a roof, but no sides, where people gathered for church meetings. Whatever religious purpose it usually served, tonight it was just a festive place to be.

  Becca took the aisle seat so she could greet all her friends and neighbors. Zee sat beside her and then Booker and me.

  The band came onto the stage and the bandleader tried to get everyone’s attention to start the community sing.

  Booker slumped down in his seat. “This is the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Ever?” I said, giggling at his comment. “I could name a few others.”

  “Every year I say I’ll never do this again, and every year Becca takes my ear and twists it until I give in.”

  The first piece was “This Land Is Your Land,” and the audience came to life singing along with the familiar music and words. Folk song after folk song followed. If Booker was waiting for a Bruno Mars or Demi Lovato hit to stir the crowd, I knew he was going to be disappointed.

  “Check it out,” he said. “On the other side of the aisle.”

  “The three bullies,” I said, looking over. “Last guys I imagined at a sing-along.”

  The trio seemed to be with a woman, probably the mother of one of them. They didn’t look too happy to be at the event. In fact, Emil leaned over and whispered something to the woman, then all three of them got up and marched out to the back, behind the last row of benches.

  Must be something like a horse. You can drag a teenager to water—or in this case a sing-along—but you sure can’t make him sing. Booker just crossed his arms and was probably wishing he was somewhere else right now, too. I found myself enjoying it, though.

  Everyone stood for the finale—“God Bless America”— and then Becca leaned over to tell me to turn around facing the rows of houses.

  The bandleader thanked everyone and announced that tonight’s ceremonial honor of starting the first lights of Illumination Night would go to Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Carl. Everyone clapped, and in an instant, a white
cottage trimmed in aqua went from appearing to be a dark shadow to a glowing beacon of light. The Carls must have been the people on the porch getting the illumination under way.

  “What is all that?” I asked.

  “Those are paper lanterns all over the porch and the deck and the rafters of the house. Each one is very delicate, and each has a small bulb inside,” Becca said.

  There must have been twenty of them illuminating the Carl Cottage, and within two minutes, every other house that formed part of the circle around the Tabernacle was bathed in the warm glow of lighted lanterns—hundreds and hundreds of them—outlined against the darkened little buildings and the navy blue night sky.

  “That’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said to Becca. I was twirling in a circle, taking in all the colors and all the decorations.

  “You’re right about that.”

  “Are you ready to go now?” Booker asked, yawning and stretching his arms. “The Game Room is open. We can hang out there.”

  Zee was yawning, too, but trying to fight it. “Can I go with them, Becca?”

  The Game Room was an arcade, right on Circuit Avenue. Kids could go without parents, and it was where all the teenagers met to chill at the end of a summer day.

  “You’re coming home with me, Zee,” she said. “And you two can stay out till ten-thirty That’s almost another hour.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” I said, grabbing the back of Booker’s shirt. “Aren’t we going to say hello to Jenny Thaw?”

  The lanterns were strung together like enormous orbs and hung from building to building, up and down the frames of the houses, and covering every porch.

  “Look, Dev,” Booker said, “a couple of girls from my school are going to be at the Game Room tonight. Why don’t we just go there?”

  “Are we into pirate treasure or not?” I asked, hands on my hips.

  “All right. All right,” he said. “Five minutes, okay?”

  Becca had Zee’s hand in hers, and he was leaning against her. “See the Carls’ cottage? Count five to the right. That’s where Jenny Thaw lives,” she said. “If she’s on the island, you can be sure she’ll be out on the porch, meeting and greeting everyone.”