The Mystery of Dolphin Inlet

by James Holding

  I nodded. “It’s possible. It might explain why Mr. X gave me all that jazz about mullet fishing. He’s not really a fisherman but he wants me to think so, see?”

  “No,” said Susan simply. “I don’t.”

  “Well,” I said, “suppose Perry Osgood or Hamilton Osgood, whichever, happened to be in the woods between here and Gulf Road and saw me—or heard me—coming into their precious private inlet? And suppose they didn’t want anybody to know that Mr. X was diving out there on the water? So Perry or Hamilton whistled loud enough for Mr. X to hear. A prearranged danger signal. And Mr. X, who happens to be in the boat at the time and not underwater, puts a fishing pole over the side, claps on a straw hat and fakes the fishing scene. And when I called him on it yesterday, he dreamed up that fairy tale about mullet fishing.”

  “But why? Why would they go through all that rigmarole?”

  “I told you. To keep me from suspecting that Mr. X was actually diving out there and not fishing.”

  Susan shook her head at me. “You’re the absolute limit, Pete!” she said. “What an imagination! Just answer me one little question: why would they care in the slightest whether anybody knew they were diving or not? After all, your father and Dr. Terrill both told you they bring specimens to the laboratory. And they told you yesterday themselves that they dive all the time, and even look for oil. And they showed us their diving boat yesterday. They’re making no secret of the fact that they dive. So what’s all the excitement about?”

  I had to admit that was a pretty good question. And the answer to it, I realized all of a sudden, was why I’d had this sneaking desire to take a look under Dolphin Inlet—why I’d had the crazy impulse to bring a mask and flippers with me today.

  I said, “Look, Susan. Maybe the Osgoods and Mr. X don’t care who knows they’re diving at Dolphin Inlet. What they want to keep secret is where!”

  “Oh!” she said. I could see the idea hitting her. She was quick. “So if they’ve discovered a promising spot for an oil well or something, they don’t want anybody else to know where it is? Is that what you mean?”

  “Sure.” I looked at my watch.

  “Should we be leaving?” Susan asked.

  “I’m sure we’ve still got a good half hour before they can make it home,” I said. “They had to spend some time in Sarta City. I think I’ll swim out there where Mr. X was fishing, and take a look at the bottom.”

  Susan’s eyes went to the expanse of Dolphin Inlet. She turned back to me with a frown and put one hand on my arm. “The water’s pretty rough, Pete,” she suggested, “even inside the inlet. Do you think you’d better?”

  “Sure,” I said, “no problem.” The weather station had forecast a thirty-mile wind by evening and there were already whitecaps on the Gulf, but I didn’t think there would be any risk in just swimming out beyond the inlet mouth and taking a peek below.

  “Don’t stay long,” Susan said. “I really wish you wouldn’t try it.”

  I grinned at her. I felt good enough to swim eight miles in a hurricane, it was so nice to have her worrying about me. I said, “A few little waves won’t bother me, Susan. I’ll be fifteen minutes at the most.”

  “What if Mr. X and Mr. Osgood come back and find me here alone?”

  “Remember the rough water will slow them down, too. They’ll have to crawl in that little outboard. There’s plenty of time.”

  “All right.” She closed up her sketch pad and walked down to the beach with me. “Hurry up, Pete. And you remember, please, that only Mr. X and Perry Osgood are in Sarta City in the outboard. So where’s Hamilton Osgood? Taking another bath? He might show up any minute.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “No matter what Pop says.”

  I waded out from the beach and took off for the mouth of Dolphin Inlet in an easy crawl, turning to lift one hand at Susan, who stood on the beach and watched me until I got well started, then walked up the rise to the Osgood house again.

  I had often swum in rougher seas; it was no trick at all to reach the inlet mouth. Outside, though, in the open Gulf, the water was rougher and although the swimming was easy enough, the waves made it hard for me to locate, even approximately, the place where Mr. X had anchored in the outboard. It was tough to set any kind of a fix from landmarks because the waves kept hiding them from me. And a pretty good rip tide was going there beyond the inlet mouth. It tossed me around enough so I couldn’t get properly oriented.

  I wasn’t about to give up on that account, though. When I got to a spot about where I thought Mr. X’s outboard had been anchored, I gulped in a couple of big breaths of air that was now growing cool, and dived. With my flippers scissoring behind me and my eyes looking ahead through the glass of my mask, I swam strongly for the bottom of the Gulf, hoping it wasn’t too far below the surface here.

  It wasn’t. I touched hard ridges of gray sand with my hands at what I figured might be maybe fifteen feet. I peered around me with as much curiosity as a cat in a fish market, looking for something—anything—that might represent the object of Mr. X’s diving efforts.

  I hardly need to say that I didn’t see anything. Not only because there wasn’t anything there to see except sand bottom with a scattering of shell, rocks and waving sea grasses, but because the wind, tide and surging surf off the inlet mouth had combined to stir up sand, seaweed, algae and everything underwater into such a swirling turmoil that visibility was reduced to about elbow length. I should have realized what I’d find before I swam out here. I’d been too interested and curious, I guess (or too anxious to show off before Susan) to think very clearly about it.

  Anyway, it was all too plain that I’d wasted my time. I wasn’t in the right spot in the first place, I was fairly certain of that. In the second place, as I said, the visibility was practically zero. And what was I expecting to find, anyhow? My blood started to thud in my ears, warning me that I was about out of wind and ought to surface soon. If I’d only been halfway smart and brought scuba gear, I was thinking, so I could stay down for more than a minute at a time…

  I’d got this far in my thoughts when an incredible thing happened. It happened so fast, and so unexpectedly, that I was hardly aware of it until it was all over. Yet I’ve never known anything that actually lasted such a short time to seem so endless. The last part of it, at least. And if you think that sounds confused, it is. Because I was about the most confused kid in Florida at that particular second.

  I was holding onto a rock on the bottom, anchoring myself against the surge of the water and trying to make up my mind to surface and give up this crazy business, when out of the corner of my mask I caught a glimpse through the cloudy water of what looked like another swimmer.

  I thought I was dreaming. And then I saw it again. It was real. It was alive. It was a man.

  Whoever it was, he seemed to be brighter than I was, because I imagined I could make out some cylindrical shapes on his back which could only be compressed air cylinders. The bubbles rising in front of his head confirmed it. He was swimming along the bottom of the Gulf at a fair rate of speed, wagging flippered feet behind him and traveling, as near as I could make out through the murk, on a course that would pass my own position maybe five feet off to the right.

  I was so surprised at seeing this crazy sight fifteen feet down in the Gulf, all wavy and indistinct because of the violent water disturbance, that I forgot for a split second my urgent need for air. I just hung onto my rock, staring like a fool at the shadowy shape. The underwater silence pressed on my eardrums.

  My first thought, naturally enough, was that Perry Osgood and Mr. X had somehow returned from Sarta City earlier than I expected, and that this was one of them, making up a little diving time after shopping all morning. Or—the second idea that popped into my head—maybe it was Hamilton Osgood who was swimming there beside me, and the reason we’d never seen hide nor hair of him was because he spen
t all his time underwater! Which was a silly thing to think, you must admit.

  It shows you how wild I was. My heart started to thump against my ribs like a diesel chugging in an echo chamber. My air was all used up. All I could do was to go up to the surface, get some fresh air in my lungs and swim back to Susan as quick as I could.

  I let go of my rock. I squatted, flexing my legs for the big push upward.

  And then, at that exact second, the other swimmer caught sight of me! I could tell by the way he checked his forward movement, by the thick stream of bubbles he gave off, by the head-on view I suddenly got of his face mask. Then I noticed something else about the strange swimmer that made the Gulf water feel awfully cold all at once.

  The guy had a speargun in one fist.

  I could see it as he came to a dead stop and grabbed hold of the same rock I’d been hanging onto only a few seconds ago. He was less than four feet away. So what, I thought, trying not to panic. Plenty of scuba divers carry spears. For fishing…for fun. So why worry about this fellow?

  It was a good try, but I couldn’t find much comfort in it. Because as I strained my eyes to see more clearly through the cloudy water, I suddenly knew with terrified certainty that I did have something to worry about.

  Slowly, slowly—it seemed to take forever—I saw the mysterious swimmer’s speargun come around until its barbed, razor-sharp point was aiming directly at me. Then, to my utter horror, I saw a thick, sausage-like finger curl with incredible slowness around the trigger of the gun and deliberately jerk it back.

  The missile flashed toward me. If it hit me, I knew it would spit me as neatly and cleanly as a five-pound barracuda. And with the same fatal results.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE MESSAGE IN THE BURNER BASKET

  I acted by instinct, I guess, when I saw that fat finger begin to curl around the speargun trigger. Even at that, I was almost too late. I gave a hard push against the Gulf bottom with my feet—such a tremendous heave, in fact, that it’s a wonder I didn’t burst up through the water and take flight into the sky like a Polaris missile.

  As I shot upward, I felt a gentle touch along the side of my right thigh and knew with sickening relief that the fish spear had missed me. Or almost. I say almost, because when I lowered my eyes for a second I saw that there was a small cloud of pinkish water trailing behind my kicking right leg. And I knew the color of the water was caused by blood, my blood. Bad aim, poor visibility or just plain good luck had prevented the spear from hitting me dead center. And I do mean dead! I was more than glad to settle for the loss of a little blood.

  The same glance downward that showed me the blood showed me something else that sent a big wave of relief through me and helped quiet my nerves. The guy down there who had taken a shot at me was in a little bit of trouble himself. He was still hanging onto that rock on the bottom, but a surging swell coming out of the inlet had swept his feet from under him and turned him upside down, so that his flippers were pointing up toward the surface while his hands clung to the rock that anchored him. He would be as helpless for a few minutes, I knew, as though he’d been tied in that awkward position with ropes. For I’d had the same thing happen to me a few times when I was diving. A surge hits you and knocks you topsy-turvy. You grab hold of a rock or something to stay put so the next surge won’t sweep you back. Your heels are over your head and every surge twists you, and you swear the whole world is swinging around you like crazy. You get completely disoriented. You get dizzy. You can even get violently seasick sometimes. And that’s a pretty bad thing to be when your mouth is plugged up with a breathing tube!

  Anyway, my unknown attacker had his hands full down there for a few minutes. He couldn’t follow me right away, even if he wanted to take another crack at me. I felt great about that.

  Then I thought, maybe he didn’t really take a crack at me. Maybe he wasn’t trying to murder me. Maybe he only wanted to scare me a little. If that’s what he wanted, brother, it sure worked! I was practically as scared as I was mad. Or maybe, my thoughts kept circling around, he took me for somebody else because of the poor visibility? And he was trying to kill him and not me?

  Just then, I broke the surface of the Gulf. I pulled in some deep breaths of wonderful air, noticed with surprise how beautiful everything looked up there, and started to swim for the beach inside Dolphin Inlet as though my life depended on it. And maybe it did, for all I knew, because my leg was still bleeding and I didn’t need Dr. Terrill’s knowledge of sharks’ habits to know that blood in the water could easily attract them.

  So I made the beach in record time. Don Schollander couldn’t have covered the distance any faster. I waded out on the sand, and there was Susan waiting for me, looking almost as worried as I felt.

  Her eyes fell to the shallow groove the spear had cut along the side of my thigh and she saw the blood running down my leg. “What happened to you, Pete?” she said. Her voice sounded strange, but she didn’t turn pale or faint or anything like that, the way a lot of kids will do at the sight of blood. She twitched her handkerchief—or whatever girls call that three-cornered scarf they wear—off her head and wadded it up in her hand and slapped it on the cut in my leg. “Hold that on there,” she told me, “until we get to the cars. I’ve got a first aid kit in mine.”

  I put down my hand and held the wadded cloth in place and started to follow her down the beach toward the place where we could cut through the woods to Gulf Road.

  “What did happen?” she repeated, holding onto my arm as if I was so weak I needed her help to walk.

  “No time to tell you now, Susan,” I panted. I was still blowing from my swim. And from fear, too, I guess. “Let’s move a little faster, shall we? I’m fine…but I want to get out of here quick!”

  “Okay.” She began to run beside me and it reminded me of the other time when she had run down this same beach, frightened by something or somebody in Dolphin Inlet. It was getting to be a habit, it seemed.

  We zipped through the woods. I was limping a little as we ran, because I had to hold the cloth on my cut, but it didn’t slow us down much. We came out on Gulf Road right across from the cars, dashed over and climbed into the front seat of hers. She yanked open the glove compartment and fished out a little Red Cross first aid kit and opened it up on her lap.

  I felt real relaxed, now, and a little bit heroic again, to tell the truth. It was kind of nice to have Susan fussing over me. Now I could examine my leg, I could see the cut wasn’t anything at all—three-quarters of an inch long and not deep enough to need a stitch, even. It was bleeding some still, but a large-size Band-Aid soon put a stop to that.

  She put away the first aid kit. “Now,” she said to me, leaning back behind the wheel of the car, “come on, Pete, what happened?”

  I told her. Every detail as nearly as I could remember it. She listened with her lips apart a little and her eyes as big as ashtrays. When I ended my story, she was just as mad at that murderous scuba diver as I was.

  “He could have killed you!” she said indignantly. “What kind of a fool is that to have running around loose?”

  I had to laugh. “He’s probably thinking the same thing about me. Especially if he thought I was a shark.”

  Susan said with disdain, “Shark! You don’t look enough like a shark for him to make a mistake like that. Pete, who was it, do you think?”

  Knowing the answer before I asked, I said, “Perry Osgood or Mr. X?”

  She shook her head. “No, Pete. They didn’t come home.”

  “Hamilton Osgood, maybe?” I told her about my silly thought under the inlet, that Ham Osgood stayed underwater all the time like a fish. She said she hadn’t seen anybody in the inlet while I was swimming out there.

  “Okay,” I said. “So it could have been anybody. There are a million scuba divers come to Florida every year on vacation, and a lot of them like to dive off the Keys here on the we
st coast.”

  Susan said, “You don’t really believe it was a tourist, do you?”

  “Could be. They panic easy.”

  Susan turned her head and frowned out the window beside her. Then she turned back after a minute and put two fingers into the pocket of her blouse. She pulled out a little piece of paper, folded once. When she opened it out, I could see it was black and charred along three edges.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Part of a letter. I found it while you were swimming.”

  “At the Osgoods’?”

  She nodded. “There’s a place at the back of their house where they burn their rubbish and stuff. In a big wire basket. This must have blown out of the burner basket. It’s partly burned, see? I found it when I walked around to the back of the cottage to sketch it from that side.”

  I took it out of her hand and read the few lines of writing you could still make out on the partially burned paper. Here’s what they said:

  …delighted you are working so hard on our project. I am kept informed of your progress and will expect my full share at the end. Don’t try to cross again. It isn’t safe. Remember the cured ham.

  R.C.

  Susan said, “What do you think about that, Pete?”

  “It’s Greek to me. Seems like part of a letter, all right, but I haven’t any idea what it means. It’s private correspondence, Susan, and we probably shouldn’t…”

  Susan said, “The initials, Pete!”

  “Yeah. R.C. For a signature.”

  She bit her lip. “Well?”

  “Roscoe Chapin?”

  “Of course! Who else could it be?”

  I laughed again. “A million people, Susan. There must be at least that many with the initials R.C.”

  “You don’t really think that letter was signed by Ruth Corwin or Robinson Crusoe or Rannie Clunk, do you?”

  I grinned at her sarcasm. “Well, I admit Roscoe Chapin’s name seems to keep popping up all over the place around here recently, ever since we got interested in Dolphin Inlet,” I said.