Secrets from the Deep

by Linda Fairstein

  Booker hung his head. “By the end of the day, it seemed like everyone knew about it. But we’re to blame for telling Artie.”

  “Now here’s a fact about Artie,” I said, backing up Booker’s point. “He’s restoring the outside of the lighthouse, and he had a barrel full of red paint right at the foot of the staircase.”

  “You saw the paint?” Hadley asked.

  “I fell into it,” I said. “I was pretty clumsy coming down that huge staircase.”

  Hadley laughed. “Did it stain your clothes?”

  “Booker’s grandmother washed my T-shirt. The paint came right out,” I said, “and it washed off my skin easily, too.”

  “I can test this for paint, but I doubt that’s what it is,” Hadley said. “Paint wouldn’t make it underwater for even twenty-four hours without chipping some. Especially with sand around it and a current making waves on the beach. That would scratch the surface, and I just don’t see any marks in this spot.”

  “Even if it’s not Artie Constant’s red paint,” Booker said, “that doesn’t mean he’s not the guy who broke into my grandmother’s house, looking for gold.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “After all, he was really pushing to take Becca out for the evening, wasn’t he?”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourselves, kids,” Hadley said. “You got another character?”

  “The next ones are actually a trio,” I said. “A trio of bullies.”

  “I’ve got no use for bullies,” Hadley said.

  Booker told Hadley the story of Zee and the carousel, and how we ran into Ross Bagby and his dad at Larsen’s Fish Market the next day.

  “You say the kid’s dad is a coin collector?” Hadley asked.

  “I found an article about him online,” I said. “I’m going to ask Sergeant Tapply to run a background check on him for us.”

  “You’ve got the best connections in the Puzzle Palace,” Hadley said. “I better stay on my toes here.”

  “So when we ran into Ross and his dad,” Booker said, “they were covered in blood from head to toe.”

  “Blood? Are you sure?”

  “Fish blood,” Booker said. “They’d caught some sea bass on their way to sneak around this old farmhouse.”

  No point in my correcting Booker. We were the ones sneaking around the farmhouse. The Bagbys were sneaking around on the pond.

  “Okay,” Hadley said. “That’s easy. I just need a pinprick of the spot to test it for blood, but I’m pretty sure it’s not that either. The color is too bright.”

  “Too bright?”

  “It’s oxygen that makes blood bright red,” Hadley said. “When blood dries outside the body—yours or Moby Dick’s—it dries much darker.”

  “Well, the three of them are still bad dudes,” I said. “They were incredibly mean to Booker’s cousin.”

  “Guilty of that,” Hadley said. “Anyone else?”

  “Last night we met this woman named Jenny Thaw who comes from the family that may actually have a claim to the gold,” I said. “We were invited into her home.”

  “So what was in this lady’s place?” Hadley asked. He seemed eager to get back to his own cases, with folders stacked on his workbench. “Blood? Paint? Tomato juice?”

  I cleared my throat. “Glop.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what,” I said. “It was some kind of gloppy red stuff that had spilled on her table and in her bathroom sink.”

  “I never solved a crime with glop,” Hadley said, “but there’s always a first. Can you be more specific?”

  I opened my crossbody bag again and removed the emery board.

  Hadley looked at it, took it from me in his gloved hand, and then nodded at me.

  “I mean, I didn’t preserve it properly,” I said, “but the chain of custody is good.”

  He turned it over in his hand. “Ms. Thaw gave you this?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “The emery board had been thrown out in a wastebasket, so I think that was abandoned property.”

  “That’s a legal search and seizure, Officer Hadley,” Booker said. “Aren’t we right?”

  “I think any judge would go along with that,” Hadley said, holding the emery board up to his nose. “Garbage is fair play.”

  “I just ran the board down the sink bowl and scooped up the red stuff,” I said. “But I don’t know what it is.”

  Hadley sniffed at the emery board again. “Did it smell when it was wet?”

  “Yup. I know I’ve smelled it before, I just don’t know where.”

  He pulled his chair back into the workbench and examined the spot on the coin under his scope again. Then he moved the coin aside and put part of the emery board in its place.

  “I’m just going to take another pinprick from the coin,” he said, “and a snip from your nail file. Is that okay with you?”

  “You’re in charge,” I said.

  “Seems to me that you’re pretty much in charge, best as I can tell,” Hadley said.

  “Dev usually is,” Booker said.

  “Something about your maternal DNA?” Hadley asked.

  “Must be,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  Hadley put both pieces of shiny red material on a single glass plate about two inches long and moved that under the scope.

  “I’m comfortable telling you that until I do the chemical analysis on this,” Hadley said, “it appears that the substance on the coin and the dried glop you captured on the emery board are the same.”

  “Really? That’s kind of amazing,” I said. “Are you going to find out what it is?”

  “That’s my plan,” Hadley said. “But I’ve got some other work to do first.”

  “Booker and I can wait. That’s okay.”

  Hadley shook his head. “I’ll run some tests and call you later,” he said, handing me back the gold coin. “And don’t go jumping to any conclusions. I certainly can’t tell you that the lady who had this stuff in her house is the person who put it on the coin. That could have happened months apart.”

  Hadley lifted the emery board to his nose again before he passed that back to me.

  “There’s something you’re not telling us,” I said. “What is it you smell?”

  “This is what we call an educated guess,” Hadley said. “You can’t hold me to it.”

  “I promise.” I couldn’t stop wiggling, crossing my fingers and holding them tight.

  “I spent a lot of time in chemistry lab, mixing compounds and agents—that’s the educated part of it,” Hadley said, “and the guess is just being around girlfriends.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “I’m thinking this bright red spot is actually nail polish,” he said, “the same thing that was dripping in Ms. Thaw’s sink.”

  “Nail polish!” I exclaimed. I sniffed at the emery board. “Of course that’s the smell. My mom gets a manicure every week, and sometimes when I go along with her the fumes are enough to make you sick.”

  “Every brand of nail polish has a different chemical formula,” Hadley said. “I don’t want to fill you up with fancy scientific terms right now, but there are ingredients to make the film less brittle, there are dyes to create the specific colors—like this bright red—and there are solutions to make it more difficult for water or oil to penetrate the polish after it’s applied.”

  My mind was racing faster than Officer Hadley could fill it with an explanation of the polish ingredients.

  “One thing is for sure,” Booker said. “Jenny Thaw had nail polish in her house just last night.”

  “Right,” I said. “She told me she was using whatever it was—I didn’t know it was polish at the time—to mark the date of Illumination Night on her new lanterns.”

  “We can call her up and ask her about it,” Book
er said. “We can ask her if she knows about the doubloon, and if she had anything to do with the drop of red nail polish that’s on the face of it.”

  “Now don’t go calling anyone based on a mere hunch of mine,” Hadley said, giving us his sternest expression. “I’ll have a more reliable answer for you in a couple of days.”

  “But if we just ask her,” I said.

  “There are no ‘buts’ in a science laboratory,” Officer Hadley said, standing up between us. “Especially one that’s run by a police department. When I have an answer, based on results I can validate, then you can make all the calls you want.”

  “When will that be?” I asked.

  “Today’s Thursday,” he said. “Monday at the very latest.”

  “Monday?” I asked. “You can’t imagine all the terrible things that could happen between now and then.”

  I couldn’t quite imagine them myself, but I didn’t think Hadley would ask me to give him an example, and I was just trying to establish the urgency of all this.

  “Hey, Cody,” Hadley called out to Sam. “Ready for your next stop. You ought to take these two to be fitted for police officer uniforms. They’ll be putting us out of a job, the way they’re going.”

  23

  “I’m okay, Mom,” I said, squeezing her so tightly she could barely get out of the SUV and onto the sidewalk. Our detour to the crime lab made it smarter to drop me off at home, instead of One PP. “I really am.”

  Sam had dropped Booker and me at our homes and then gone downtown to wait for my mother to leave the office at five p.m. My dog, Asta—a totally lovable rescue—was so excited to see me that he could barely stop licking my cheek long enough to breathe.

  “Sometimes I think being New York City’s Police Commissioner is the easiest part of my life, Dev,” she said, holding me at arm’s length and spinning me around as though she was making sure all my parts were intact.

  “It’s not like Booker and I started out to cause any trouble,” I said. “Stuff just happens to me.”

  I threw my arms around her again while Sam grabbed her briefcase and tote so she could return the big squeeze. I may be twelve, but my mother’s affection and her approval still meant pretty much everything to me.

  She held me close and kissed the crown of my head. I guessed there might be tears involved.

  “Let’s go upstairs so you can tell me all about it,” she said. “Sam, will you stay for dinner?”

  “Another time,” he said, passing Mom’s briefcase to me.

  My mother had one arm around my shoulders, shepherding me toward the door of the building. She didn’t let go of me for the entire ride up in the elevator.

  Natasha had made a super-size serving of mac and cheese in honor of my return home—they even let me skip the salad—and I filled them in on everything that Booker and Zee and I had done. I showed them the gold doubloon and then Jenny Thaw’s emery board, before Natasha left to meet up with her friends.

  “Why do I get the feeling that you’re leaving out some of the details of your adventures?” my mother asked as I cleared the table.

  “I’m not hiding anything, Mom,” I said. “It’s just that everything was happening so fast it’s hard to keep track of it all.”

  Every now and then I did have this habit of filtering out some of the things I had done, just so she wouldn’t worry about my every move. After all, I didn’t have a bodyguard like Sam to keep me out of harm’s way.

  “Want some ice cream?” she asked.

  “Nope. It can’t be as good as Mad Martha’s.”

  My mother laughed. “So you’re going full Vineyard on me, are you?”

  “You did sort of cut my time up there short, didn’t you? Booker and I were having a blast.”

  “I admire your search for the real owner of the old coin,” my mother said, “and for the circumstances of its disappearance. But once there was a burglary at Becca’s last night, I really had no choice but to bring you home.”

  I followed her into the living room. She sat on the far end of the large sofa and I curled up on the opposite side of it. She had the clicker in her hand and was about to turn on the TV to catch the local news.

  “Are you ever going to take that bag off from around your neck?” my mother asked. “In a few days, you won’t be able to hold your head up straight.”

  “I feel like it’s the safest place for the coin at the moment.”

  “Have it your way,” she said.

  “Do you think the Oak Bluffs police sergeant is right?” I asked. “That the coin belongs to Booker and Zee and me because we pulled it up out of the water? Finders keepers and all that?”

  “If Becca is right and enough people on the Vineyard know about the coin, maybe the owner will come forward to claim it.”

  “Would someone have the right to claim it?”

  “You want a mother’s answer,” she asked, “or a lawyer’s answer?”

  I smiled at her and stretched out my leg to poke her with my toes. “I love it when you can out-prosecute everybody else. Tell me.”

  “The law of the seas is a very complicated matter, Ms. Quick,” my mother said. “Cases like this come before the highest court all the time.”

  She was talking like a judge now, using a British accent, too, to make me laugh.

  “The main difference, the key question in these cases, is whether the discovery of the gold,” she said, pausing to point at my crossbody bag, “is that the gold you’re hiding was the result of treasure-hunting . . . or salvage.”

  “Salvage?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  “Salvage occurs when someone saves property that’s adrift at sea, or abandoned. Under international law, the ‘salvor’ is required to return the goods to the original owner, in exchange for a reward.”

  “Well, we weren’t treasure hunting,” I said, “and it wasn’t exactly a salvage operation—and I wouldn’t begin to know who to return it to, since it wasn’t part of a shipwreck so far as we can tell. And there should be some consideration for the fact that I was experimenting in the name of science.”

  “An excellent point for the defense,” my mother said.

  “When did I become the defense?” I asked, getting into her game. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Then, are you likening yourself to Sir Isaac Newton, Ms. Quick?” my mother said. “He discovered gravity while sitting beneath someone’s apple tree, so you believe that he was entitled to eat the apple? Is that it? I mean, identifying fish scales might entitle you to keep the fish that washed up on the Inkwell Beach, but I’m not so sure about the gold doubloon.”

  “Be serious, Mom. There’s a lot at stake here,” I said, changing positions to argue my case more effectively, drawing my knees up beneath me.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I was just being silly. There’s a rule in American law that refers to territorial waters, and from what you’ve told me about where the coin was, it’s probably the property of Massachusetts.”

  She reached for the antique brass ruler on the coffee table in front of us. She lifted it and brought it down with a bang, like a judge’s gavel on the bench.

  “So ordered,” she said.

  I sat back on my heels and groaned.

  “Don’t be so glum, my dear,” my mother said. “If no one comes forward to claim the pirate treasure, perhaps the state will give the coin to you after all.”

  “The state is a big place, Mom. How will the governor even know how to find me?”

  “Just wear that ridiculous bag around your neck for another five or six years and everyone will know how to find you and that valuable coin.”

  “Mom! Be serious.”

  “I’m going in to take a refreshing bubble bath,” she said, coming back to tousle my hair and kiss me on top of my head. “Think about doing the same, and getting a
good night’s sleep.”

  “Do you have any ideas to help us, Mom?” I asked. “Anything Booker and I should do?”

  “The Oak Bluffs police have to handle the burglary, Dev, because it’s a crime in their jurisdiction,” she said. “They didn’t come away with any leads this morning, but Sergeant Wright and I are going to talk to each other tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Then you’ll tell Booker and me what you find out, right? So we can work on this end of things and keep our piece of the investigation going.”

  “We’ll see,” my mother said.

  “We’ll see? Oh, Mom, that’s just parent-code for ‘no.’ That’s all those two words ever mean.”

  My mother laughed. “Hey, it took you twelve years to break the code.”

  “Just say yes. Please?”

  “Okay, darling. Yes,” my mother said. “Let’s start fresh in the morning. You give me every fact, and I’ll find out what Sergeant Wright knows and we’ll put the whole picture together. Yes, you and Booker deserve to be part of all this.”

  I stood up on the sofa and jumped off, over the arm. “You’re the best, Mom. Okay if I call Booker to tell him?”

  “Of course it is,” she said, removing her earrings and pearl necklace and kicking off her heels as she walked toward her bedroom.

  “Great,” I said. “We’ve got some ideas about what the cops need to do next. Or maybe Booker and I can take some of the basic assignments for ourselves.”

  It sounded like my mother was laughing as she walked off. “We’ll see about that idea,” she called out to me. “We’ll just have to see.”

  24

  “How did it get to be eight thirty?” I asked Natasha the next morning.

  I was still in my pajamas. I walked into the kitchen, rubbing my eyes, and sat down at the table where she was reading the newspaper and sipping her coffee.

  “Detective work is exhausting,” Natasha said. “You must have worn yourself out on the Vineyard.”

  “Mom was supposed to wake me up before she left,” I said, pouring myself a glass of orange juice. “We made a plan.”

  “Maybe it’s something I can help with,” she said. “I don’t have class until one o’clock today.”