The Mystery of Dolphin Inlet

by James Holding

  I went back into the woods about ten yards and stripped off my clothes in less than no time and pulled on my swimming trunks. Then I ran across the beach and through the shallow water and plunged into the surf and did a fast crawl fifty yards straight out before I turned over on my back and floated. The water felt good. I splashed, dived, rubbed my head, face, hands and arms with salt water and hoped I was killing the fish smell. I should carry a cake of soap in the truck, too, I thought to myself. Then I started toward shore, giving the beach and inlet another good look, and I just couldn’t believe that they had been here all the time on the seaward side of Perdido Key and I hadn’t known about them. I even had the passing thought that it might be fun to show this private cove with its beautiful beach to Susan Frost, if she was inclined to like such things.

  It was getting on to four o’clock. The sun was still hot enough to dry me quickly, though. I ran up and down the beach a few times to speed up the drying process. Then I went into the woods, found my clothes, jumped into them and made tracks through the woods for Gulf Road and my truck. I took my wrist watch out of my pants pocket as I walked, and put it back on my wrist.

  I came out on the road about where I’d left it—opposite my parked truck. There wasn’t another car visible on the road in either direction. So I strolled across. Halfway over, I reached into my right-hand hip pocket to pull out my truck keys. And suddenly, with one foot lifted to take a step and my hand still in my pocket, I froze. I knew something was wrong.

  I must have known it by instinct, I guess, because it was a second or two before I figured out that my wallet, which had been in the same pocket as my keys, was no longer there.

  Well, when I got that worked out, I calmed down, because I don’t carry much money in the wallet, usually, and today I knew there had been only two one-dollar bills in it. But my driver’s license, my lifesaving card and some snapshots of Gloria and Pop were in the wallet, too.

  I thought to myself, the stupid wallet probably fell out of my pocket when I undressed in the woods and I didn’t notice it. Certainly nobody stole it…or they’d have stolen my wrist watch as well. And they hadn’t. So there was only one thing to do. Go back through the woods and find the wallet.

  I turned around, furious with myself for being so stupid, and crossed the road again to re-enter the woods. That’s when I put my hand in my other hip pocket and found my wallet snuggling there safe and sound.

  I froze again. Because that wasn’t right, either. I knew the wallet had been in my right-hand hip pocket when I’d put the truck keys there before my swim. And now it was in the left-hand pocket. But the truck keys were still in the right one. The question that naturally occurred to me then was, how come?

  There was only one answer to that. Somebody had gone through my clothes while I was swimming, searched them and put the wallet back in the wrong pocket by mistake.

  In growing bewilderment, I checked the wallet’s contents. The two dollars were still there. So was everything else.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE MYSTERIOUS PROWLER

  I must have got the worst of the fish smell off because Susan didn’t refuse when I asked her for a date. When she came to the door of cottage twelve at the Freebooter, I handed her the fish and shrimps and asked her for a date before I had a chance to change my mind. Much to my surprise, she said, “Wonderful! I’d love to, Pete. If Mother says it’s okay. What’ll we do?”

  I pretended that a date with a pretty girl from Tallahassee was an everyday thing with me. I said, “Why don’t we go to the movies in Sarta City? There’s a good spy picture at the Crescent Theater.” Then I remembered that the pickup truck was the only car we had in our family, and asked her if she’d mind riding in it. She said of course not, it sounded exciting. After that was settled, she took me in and introduced me to her mother, who was taller than Susan and wore glasses with fancy frames, but looked a lot like her with the same blue eyes and dark hair. Susan told her mother I’d asked for a date. Mrs. Frost was quite nice to me even if I was only the delivery boy with the fish for their dinner. She looked me over and chatted a minute with me; then she smiled and said okay, if I had Susan home by midnight, at the latest. I promised. I told Susan I’d pick her up at the Freebooter at eight o’clock.

  So now it was ten minutes after eight and we were driving south on Gulf Road toward Fiesta Village and the causeway to Sarta City on the mainland. Susan was dressed in some kind of a sweater and skirt deal that looked fine on her, I thought, even if I couldn’t see the color too well in the truck cab. I had on my dark blue slacks and a yellow golf shirt that Gloria says I look almost human in.

  A three-quarter moon was sailing over the Key. The air was as warm and balmy as summer almost, though it was only late March. In the garden of one of the houses we passed there must have been some night-blooming jasmine because we could smell it plainly, very sweet, as we drove by.

  I was telling Susan about finding that inlet with the dolphin-fin headland, and what a beautiful beach it had and how deserted it had been, and so on. I told her about my swim. And when I came to the part about my wallet being in the wrong pocket, Susan said, “Why would anyone search your clothes while you were swimming, Pete?”

  “It beats me,” I said. “Especially since they didn’t take anything.”

  “Could it have been a squirrel or a…a raccoon, maybe?”

  “Not likely.”

  “If it was a man, you’d have seen him, wouldn’t you?”

  I shook my head. “I left my clothes ten yards in the woods, and the brush was thick there. I wouldn’t have seen him, even if I’d been looking for somebody, and I wasn’t.”

  “It’s pretty funny that you didn’t hear anything, though,” Susan said. She was giving my story the big treatment, as though she got a kick out of trying to solve little mysteries like this. Anyway, she seemed just as nice and natural to me tonight as she had earlier; she hadn’t looked once at the scar on my cheek, or tried to get pushy or pretended to have a phony weakness for boys with big muscles or anything like that. And I hadn’t once felt uneasy or awkward with her—a real switch. I began to think she was a pretty special kid. In fact, I was so busy thinking I forgot to answer her question until she asked it again. “Didn’t you hear anything in the woods, Pete?”

  “Nothing except the usual stuff,” I said then. “Birds, and bees humming and the surf.”

  She said, “If somebody went through your clothes while you were swimming, he must have come from some place close by, I should think. Did you see any houses in the inlet?”

  “Not a single one. The cove was empty. And I mean empty.”

  She kept still for a minute. I tended to my driving. Our old pickup banged and rattled, even on Gulf Road’s good surface, but it didn’t worry me the way it would have with some other girls I knew. Her next question was, “Where is this inlet you discovered, Pete?” She looked over at me and her eyes glinted in the dim light from the dashboard. “I’d love to see it. The whole thing sounds very exciting and sort of mysterious, don’t you think? And I bet there is a house somewhere in the inlet. Where the man who searched your clothes came from.”

  What the heck, I played along with her. “How do you know it was a man?” I asked. “It could have been a woman just as well.”

  “O-oh, I never thought of that!” she said. She seemed charmed by the idea. “Where’d you say the inlet was?”

  “Another mile south, I’d guess.”

  “Let’s stop!” said Susan impulsively. “Please? It would be fun to see it.”

  I looked up at the moon through the windshield and pictured myself walking along that white beach in the moonlight with Susan, and I thought it might be fun at that.

  I made one weak attempt to sidetrack her. “What about the movies?” I said. “That spy picture?”

  “A private cove where wallets move from pocket to pocket in mysterious ways
is much more interesting than a spy picture could possibly be, I think.”

  “It’s just a beach,” I said. “Nothing really special. What say I show it to you in daylight when we can take a swim there?” That was just a plug for another date.

  “No, now,” she said. “Tonight. I haven’t ever had a chance to do anything as different as this before, Pete. I’m trying to learn to be a good painter, and I adore beach scenes and maybe the inlet you found is a place I’d like to sketch. Honestly, everything is so normal and boring in Tallahassee most of the time. You have no idea. So let’s look at the cove, all right? We have to practically pass it anyway, don’t we? Come on. I’ve seen dozens of spy movies, but not a single mysterious inlet with a tongue of land that looks like the fin of a dolphin! Please?”

  I saw she was serious. So I said, “Okay.”

  And why not? If this is her idea of amusement, I thought, it’s harmless, it’s fun and it’s cheap. And that’s my idea of amusement, too. Especially the cheap. “Another quarter of a mile and we ought to be there,” I said. “We’ll stop and take a look if you want to.”

  It was full dark now, and even with the help of the moonlight, I had trouble picking out the exact spot along the featureless stretch of Gulf Road where I’d stopped that afternoon for my swim. I remembered I’d parked under two cabbage palms beside the road, but I couldn’t be sure which ones, now, so I pulled up on the shoulder of the road opposite a couple of likely specimens, turned off my headlights, switched off the ignition and helped Susan down from the truck cab.

  “Here we go,” I said. “You aren’t scared of the dark, are you?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “That’s good. Because it’s going to be pretty dark in these woods until we reach the beach.”

  “You sure this is the right place?” She looked around.

  “Near enough. Follow me close, now. I wouldn’t want to lose you.” I plunged in, holding branches and palmetto fronds aside for Susan to come after me.

  Once into the woods, it was dark all right. Susan hung on my heels like a suckerfish on a shark’s belly, and I had a sneaking suspicion she didn’t feel as brave and sophisticated as she let on.

  If it came to that, I didn’t either. For about three minutes after we entered the woods, I thought I heard a movement in the bushes behind us.

  At first I thought it was Susan making the noise. I whispered, “Whoa, Susan, stop for a minute, isn’t it quiet?” and we both stood stock-still and listened. There was just the smallest bit of rustling in the underbrush back there after we’d stopped.

  Susan heard it, too. She said in an unnaturally loud voice, “What are we waiting for? Where’s the beach?” and urged me to move forward.

  I figured that going ahead made more sense than going back. And it took less nerve, too. So I grabbed Susan’s hand and started walking again, pulling her along at a good clip. She didn’t say a word or even try to pull her hand away, I remembered later, but right then I was too scared to even notice that I was holding her hand. In a couple of minutes of fast walking and stumbling, we came out onto the white beach I’d seen for the first time that afternoon.

  And don’t ever think I wasn’t glad to see it again! For as I led Susan out of the blackness of the woods into the bright moonlight of the beach, I was certain that somebody or something had followed us every step of the way from the road to the beach. And whoever it was…or whatever…made enough noise in the underbrush so even a deaf guy couldn’t have missed it. It sounded as loud in the night woods as a couple of sea gulls sound outside a church window on Sunday, arguing over a fat clam.

  At least, I told myself, we were out in the open now. Nobody could sneak up on us without our seeing them in the moonlight. I took a quick look at Susan and her face seemed even paler than the moonlight should have made it.

  She squeezed my hand and whispered in a scared voice, “What was that, Pete? Behind us in the woods?”

  “Probably a possum,” I said. Old Pete, the nature lover! I told her the first thing that came into my head. “They mess around in the woods at night a good bit.”

  We walked across the beach to the water’s edge—as far from the woods as I could lead Susan without getting her feet wet—and started strolling toward the dolphin-fin headland which we could see plain in the moonlight.

  “Some possum!” she said. “Are you sure?”

  “Well, it could have been a black bear or even a panther,” I said, trying to laugh her out of her scare. She didn’t know it, but an occasional black bear was still sighted on the Key, once in a long long while. “I know more about fish, actually, than I do about the night creatures of the great Florida woods.”

  That got a weak laugh. “You know what it sounded like to me?” she asked. We went on walking, pretending to be calm.

  “What?”

  “Like a man. A clumsy one, maybe, but a man all the same. Didn’t you notice? When we stopped, he stopped.”

  I said, “What man?”

  “The same man who searched your clothes this afternoon, probably,” she answered promptly. She was a pretty logical girl.

  I glanced hurriedly over my shoulder at the spot where we’d come out of the woods onto the beach. To my relief, no one was in sight. Nobody had followed us into the open, anyhow.

  I said, “That’s silly, Susan. What would a man follow us around at night for? And if he was following us, why did he quit when we came out on the beach?”

  “He didn’t,” Susan said. “Can’t you hear him?”

  I could hear him all right. The sound of movement through the underbrush was keeping pace with us just inside the edge of the woods across the thirty yards of beach. I was kind of hoping she hadn’t noticed, because I didn’t want her to be as scared as I was. But she noticed. A sharp kid who didn’t miss much, that was Susan. “So now’s the time to locate a house near by where we can go and telephone for help,” I said as lightly as I could, “or at least borrow a flashlight.”

  “If only there were a house! What’ll we do, Pete? I’m scared!”

  I was still holding her hand. I could feel it trembling a little bit. I had a tough time keeping mine from trembling right back at hers. “So am I,” I said truthfully.

  The funny thing was, that seemed to buck her up some. You know, a sort of misery-loves-company type of bucking up. Her hand stopped shaking and tightened on mine. “Shouldn’t we try to get back to the road?” she asked.

  “Wait.” I stood still. She stood still, too, since I was holding onto her hand like grim death. Both of us strained our ears. There wasn’t any doubt of it. A subdued thrashing and rustling in the underbrush inside the trees and out of our sight came clearly across the beach to us for a moment. Then it stopped, just as we had.

  “He’s still there,” whispered Susan.

  “Yep.” I was trying to think what to do. I was plenty scared, more for Susan than for myself. So I said, “Here’s what we do. We walk casually toward the woods, right where we just heard that noise. When he sees us coming toward him, he may run, I hope, whether he’s a man or a black bear.” I tried to grin at her. “When we get pretty close, I’ll charge into the woods right at him. And you run back down the beach to the place where we came out of the woods. You know where that was?”

  “I-I think so, yes.”

  “Okay. Look for our footprints in the sand if you’re not sure. When you get there, cut through the woods as fast as you can the way we came, get out to the road and into the truck, pronto. Then lock yourself in until I get there. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” she said. “What about you, though?”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t try to catch him or anything. I’ll just hold his attention long enough for you to get back to the truck okay. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.” She squeezed my hand. “Ooh, I’m really scared, Pete! I’m sorry I got us into this.”<
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  “Forget it,” I said. “It’s fun. Remember?”

  I’d been listening hard. No more sound from the woods. So whoever was trailing us must still be in the same spot.

  We walked slowly across the beach toward the edge of the woods. Ten yards from the trees, I whispered, “Now!” to Susan. She let go my hand and took off down the beach like a girl trying for the ladies’ hundred-yard dash record. Her steps threw up geysers of sand that looked like white smoke in the moonlight.

  I charged straight at the woods. I aimed a little to the left of where I judged those last sounds to have come from. I wanted mainly to get between the prowler and Susan, to cut him off from her. And I must have figured his location pretty accurately, scared as I was, because I hadn’t covered half the distance to the woods when this loud swishing and crackling in the brush broke out a few yards to my right, and started to move away, deeper into the woods.

  That figured. Whoever was in the woods watching me could see every move I made, of course. I was spotlighted on the white beach by the moonlight like an actor on the stage. As soon as he saw me start for him, he took off ahead of me.

  And that was all right with me, very okay, as long as he didn’t bother Susan. I was glad to let him escape, whoever he was. Especially if he was a bear or a panther. I had to admit, though, as I dashed into the dense blackness of the woods, that Susan was probably right. It was a man.

  He moved through the woods like a man, anyhow. I stopped under the first trees and listened again. I could plainly mark his progress ahead of me by the thrashing of palmetto fronds, running footsteps on crackly footing and occasional thuds as he ran headlong (I guessed) into trees and creepers. And once, after one of those soft collisions, I heard what I was sure was a curse.

  I felt a lot better when I realized he was trying to get away from me. The noise of his passage began to fade in front of me. I followed as fast as I could, trying to keep between him and Susan’s path through the woods. Every minute or so I had to stop and listen in order to keep him located, and the first couple of times, I thought I could hear faint noises off to my left. That would be Susan, hurrying through the woods to my truck. I breathed a sigh of relief.