Secrets from the Deep

by Linda Fairstein

  “He did, Devlin,” Booker said, taking off Zee’s baseball cap and replacing it on his cousin’s head, turning the bill to the back. “Zee’s the man.”

  “That’s so cool,” I said. “How did you get to do that? And who did you name her for?”

  “Gertie Thaw,” Zee said, puffed up and proud to tell me the answer.

  I screwed up my nose and gave it a quick think. “Should I know who that is? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of her.”

  “I guess you don’t know anything about pirates,” he said.

  “I know who Blackbeard was. I know that Queen Elizabeth made Sir Francis Drake one of her famous ‘Sea Dogs.’”

  Pirates were another of Zee’s obsessions, which I sort of remembered just now when he said the word. Sea Dogs, he had told me, were raiders given permission by Queen Elizabeth I to loot the Spanish ships carrying treasure from Central America back to Spain.

  Zee bowed his head and readjusted his baseball cap.

  “Gertie Thaw was real, too,” he said. “Lived on Martha’s Vineyard. She was the girlfriend of a pirate who stole a lot of treasure and sailed it right here to Oak Bluffs.”

  “Then that’s a great name for a shark,” I said. “Especially a Vineyard shark.”

  “Do you know what an anagram is?” he asked.

  “Sure I do. It’s words you make by rearranging all the same letters from other words.”

  My math teacher used the identical example over and over to tell us what an anagram was. “Young ladies,” she would say, with a satisfied grin, “a decimal point with its letters moved around spells the words ‘I’m a dot in place.’” Even mathematics has its anagrams. Pretty cool, when you think about it. Exactly the same letters, all switched about.

  “It’s not just that she was a pirate’s friend,” Zee said, trying to dumb it down for me. “Gertie Thaw’s an anagram, too.”

  “For what?” I asked. A pirate’s girlfriend and a ginormous shark? I didn’t get the connection.

  Booker was laughing and giving his cousin two thumbs-up.

  “Fifteen feet long and 3,500 pounds,” Zee said. “The letters in ‘Gertie Thaw’ also spell the words ‘great white.’”

  3

  Zee’s two obsessions—pirates and sharks—blended into a single creature, a huge predator with hundreds of incredibly sharp teeth who had messed up my plans for a morning swim.

  “Here’s my idea,” I said. “I’m betting that you know what DNA stands for.”

  “Sure I do,” he said. “It stands for deoxyribonucleic acid.”

  Zee had gone from four syllables “oceanographic” to seven syllables “deoxyribonucleic” without missing a beat.

  “It’s what stores all the genetic material about living things in our cells,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Booker said. “It’s like our individual fingerprint. Even though we’re related, your DNA is different from mine.”

  Zee looked up at Booker’s face and smiled. “But the DNA would show that you’re my cousin”

  “You bet. There’s no denying that fact.”

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “A team of scientists who work at the same lab on Cape Cod as the guys who tagged your sharks have made an important discovery.”

  “What?”

  “That pail of water that I was filling this morning? If I mail a container of it to the lab, they can tell me what kinds of fish were swimming right here off the Inkwell this morning. Stripers, blues, tuna . . .”

  Zee glanced at me like I was telling a tall tale.

  “No kidding,” I said. “Think of it—it’s about the DNA that’s in every scale on every fish. Stuff from the fish’s body that identifies its species comes off in the water.”

  Now he was absorbed by the idea of my experiment.

  “Every girl in my class at Ditchley has to come back to school with water samples,” I said. “Katie Cion is doing hers right now, out at the end of Long Island, in Montauk. Some are dunking their pails in the Hudson River or in Turtle Pond in Central Park.”

  “What kind of fish are in Turtle Pond?” Zee asked.

  “There’s largemouth bass,” Booker said, “and brown bullheads. But what’s really crazy is that people sometimes dump stuff from their fishbowls—you know, tropical fish from their homes—into the park ponds. Dev’s friends are going to come up with some super-strange fish scales.”

  “We can beat that with Gertie,” Zee said, jumping up next to me.

  “I would have been content with stripers and blues, Zee,” I said, happy to include him in my project, “but you’re going to turn my science class on its head.”

  Zee high-fived me and looked around on the beach. “We need another pail.”

  “Isn’t that woman in your grandmother’s book club?” I asked, pointing twenty feet away. “The one over there? I’m counting two toddlers and six pails.”

  Zee took off in her direction, quickly talking the woman out of a bright purple bucket.

  I headed toward the pedestrian walkway onto the pier. The next ferry was nowhere in sight, so I figured we had almost an hour before the cars would line up to load for the return trip to Cape Cod.

  “Know any of those old guys fishing off the pier?” I asked Booker, as Zee caught up to us. “Gertie was swimming at least twenty feet below the edge of the dock. Do you think you can get some extra fishing line to tie to the handle of the bucket?”

  Booker gave me two thumbs-up and came back with a line, which I double-knotted around the handle of the pail before passing the pail to Zee.

  “You’re my partner in this,” I said to Zee. “Why don’t you make the scoop?”

  Zee got down on his knees and then stretched his body across the platform we were standing on. He lowered the pail, played with different angles until he got some water in it, and then looked back up at me.

  “It’s really deep water here,” he said. “Do I have to get a lot of sand from underneath it, too?”

  “No, my sand sample is good. Get as much as you can. It’s mostly whatever came off Gertie’s scales that we want from this spot, if we’re lucky.”

  Zee carefully hoisted the pail up to the pier so that the water didn’t slop over the sides.

  “You did it!” I said. “No other kid in my class has a chance of getting shark DNA.”

  “No guarantees on that,” Booker said. “Katie’s scooping her water from the ocean, too.”

  “Well, not one of them will know the name of their shark if they do get it,” I said, smiling at Zee, “never mind who named it.”

  We walked back to the beach to retrieve my first pail and our shoes and T-shirts. I spread a towel on the sand and took out a few clean plastic containers from my beach bag.

  I dumped out the water from my earlier scoop and took off the lid of a second container. Now there was only sand in my first pail, sand that I hoped was inhabited by lots of tiny critters.

  “Hand me the strainer, please,” I said to Booker.

  “What strainer?”

  “It’s in the bag,” I said. “Becca let me borrow it this morning.”

  Booker and Zee’s grandmother, Rebecca Dylem, was called Becca by just about everyone who knew her, and she had known me since the day I was born. She once told me that when Booker started to talk, he couldn’t pronounce Rebecca, so her nickname had been given to her by him.

  “Can you hold the strainer really still over the specimen jar?” I asked.

  I angled the pail and slowly poured its contents into the strainer, watching the grains of sand filter through the mesh. “Let’s do your pa

  “Whoa!” Zee said. “There’s snails and teeny sand crabs and some weird-looking things with green wings. They’re all plopping into the strainer.”

  “I’m hoping I got some rare species they’ve never even seen at the lab
before.”

  I tilted the pail and poured out more sand, until it had all run through the wire mesh.

  “Let’s do your pail now,” I said to Zee.

  He passed the pail he had dunked in the water off the pier to me after I opened another clean container to pour his water into.

  Carefully, I tipped Zee’s bucket, aiming for the mouth of the container. Water and sand slid through the strainer into the plastic specimen bottle, with nothing else—no little creatures—of particular interest.

  Suddenly, I saw a flash of something shiny roll out of the pail, bigger than any snails I had dug up earlier, and heavier, too. It bounced off the edge of the strainer and landed on the beach beside us.

  “What’s that?” Booker asked, reaching his hand out to touch it.

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “It might have someone’s DNA on it. You don’t know how long it’s been hidden in the sand.”

  I was so excited that my hand was shaking as I shaded my eyes. I leaned over to check out my find, but Zee was in there first. His nose was practically rubbing against the bright object.

  “It’s gold!” he said, loud enough for people on Cape Cod to hear him.

  “It’s what?” I asked.

  “It’s a gold doubloon, Dev,” Zee said. “We’ve found some pirate treasure right here on the Vineyard.”

  I looked closer and saw the raised outline of a man and woman facing each other—crowns on their heads, like a king and a queen—carved into the shiny metal.

  “Sharks and pirates in the very same place, on my favorite beach, and a piece of buried treasure that I scooped up in a pail all by myself,” Zee said, now on his feet, spinning around and around with his arms spread wide. “This is the best day of my entire life.”

  4

  “Where’s the police station?” I asked, not budging an inch for fear of taking my eyes off our treasure.

  “The police?” Zee asked. “Why? We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I think we’d better report that we found this doubloon,” I said. “It must belong to someone.”

  “C’mon, Dev,” Zee said. “There aren’t any more pirates around these days. Can’t we just keep it?”

  “Dev’s right,” Booker said. “It’s only fair to tell the police, in case someone lost it. I mean, lots of people collect valuable coins. Nobody is saying Blackbeard dropped it here last week.”

  “I need something to put it in,” I said.

  Zee was bummed. “How about the plastic Baggie your iPhone was in to keep it dry?”

  “That won’t work,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Booker asked.

  “You can’t put evidence in plastic bags,” I said, shaking my head. “If there’s moisture on the coin, which there certainly is right here, the plastic just locks it inside and sometimes the police lab can’t do work on the object because it gets ruined.”

  “Whoa,” Booker said. “Who’s talking about evidence? You’ve always got crime on your mind.”

  “We have to err on the side of caution,” I said. “It’s one of my mom’s favorite rules of thumb. Always be more careful than you need to, when something important may be at stake.”

  My mother was a lawyer who had prosecuted crimes for years. Now she was the police commissioner of New York City, appointed by the mayor—the first woman to hold the job.

  My elbows dug into the sand as I tried to get as close to the coin as I could, hoping to see the detail on the face of it.

  “What’s at stake?” Zee asked.

  “We need to try to find the rightful owner of the doubloon, don’t we?” I said. “That’s only fair. You don’t have any idea what it’s worth, either.”

  “If it’s hundreds of years old,” Booker said, “and it’s real gold, it might be worth a fortune.”

  I blew gently across the top of the coin. “And if it’s a replica, then we’ll have less to worry about.”

  “Can you tell who’s on the coin?” Zee asked.

  “Not sure. Maybe it’s Ferdinand and Isabella,” I said, thinking of the Spanish king and queen who had financed so many of the sailors—like Christopher Columbus—who had set off from Europe to explore the Americas.

  “Get your nose out of the sand,” Booker said to me. “You’ll be sneezing crabs before you know it.”

  “See that?” I asked.

  “Do I see what?”

  “The red stuff that kind of looks like paint.”

  “I see it!” Zee said, practically butting heads with me.

  “Where?” Booker asked, getting back down on his knees for a piece of the action.

  “Next to Isabella’s ear,” I said. “There’s a spot not much bigger than a freckle that’s bright red.”

  “Whoa!” Booker said. “Guess this hasn’t been in the water very long or that would have been washed away.”

  “Or the layers of sand protected it,” I said. “What we need is a paper bag. A clean one. Paper bags can breathe, but plastic ones can’t.”

  “Who told you that?” Zee asked.

  “Sam Cody,” I said. “He’s the detective who helps my mom. He knows everything there is to know about being an investigator. I kind of shadow him whenever he lets me so I can learn how to be a good sleuth.”

  “There’s a food truck right next to the ferry ticket office,” Booker said, turning to run up to the sidewalk. “I’ll get a small bag for you.”

  “Why do you want to be a sleuth?” Zee asked, still staring at the crowned heads on the coin as it gleamed in the morning sunlight.

  “People sometimes do bad things to other people, Zee,” I said. “You know what I mean—whether it’s stealing from them or hurting them.”

  Zee was so smart that sometimes I had to remind myself that he was only eight, and that I shouldn’t talk to him about subjects that he might not be ready for.

  “Booker told me that someone killed your dad,” he said.

  I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. “He did?”

  “Is that why you want to be a detective?” Zee asked. “Do you want to know who did it?”

  “I’m kind of curious about why Booker told you that,” I said. “I mean, it’s true, but why would he bring that up?”

  “He didn’t. I asked him about it,” Zee said. “I think it’s sad that your father died before you were even born, like Becca says. I think it must be hard that you never knew him.”

  I took a deep breath, fighting back tears.

  “It’s very sad. You’re right about that,” I said. “My father had been working in Paris while my mom was pregnant with me, and he died in an explosion that killed a bunch of people. I was determined that someday I would figure out who did that and why.”

  “I just think it’s cool the way detectives help people solve their problems, Zee,” I said. “They use their brains and all kinds of skills to figure out things.”

  “Your dad’s name was Devlin, too, wasn’t it?”

  That fact made me smile again. “Yup. My mom named me for him. Well, my first name anyway.”

  My dad’s name was Devlin Atwell, and my mom is Blaine Quick. From the moment I was born, it was clear to her that she and I were going to be facing the world alone together, without my dad. So she gave me his first name, but wanted me to have her surname. The older I get, the more I appreciate having a combination of them both.

  Booker came running toward us and I shook off my thoughts and got back to the work at hand. He handed me the bag.

  “Where did you say the police station is?” I asked, gathering up all our gear and our specimens.

  “It’s across the street from the ferry ticket office,” Booker said. “Right over there, that white building facing Ocean Park. What were you two talking about?”

  “I was just about to ask Zee,” I said, changing
the subject as we started to walk, “how he got so interested in pirates.”

  “It was kind of by accident,” Zee said, trying to keep up with Booker and me. We both had long legs, and Zee was pretty short for his age. I was in a hurry to get our doubloon to the local cops.

  “It was more clever than that,” Booker said.

  I really liked how Booker was always happy to pump Zee up.

  “It started with my dad’s name,” Zee said. “I was playing around with anagrams, and it was just like a lucky thing.”

  “So what is it about your dad’s name? Dylem.” I said it out loud three or four times as we waited for the guard to wave us across the busy road. “Luke Dylem. What’s lucky about that?”

  I was playing with the letters in my head but getting nowhere.

  “Mud. Mud key. I know that doesn’t use all of them, but am I close?” I asked. “Maybe if I had a piece of paper I could play with the letters.”

  “You’re taking too long,” Zee said. “It was so easy for me.”

  “It was easier for you when you were five than it is for me now at twelve,” I said, crossing the street behind Booker and Zee.

  “I saw my dad’s name one day, written out, on an envelope—Luke Dylem,” Zee said. “The letters sort of jumped right out at me.”

  “They did?” I said. I just couldn’t see it.

  “Those same letters also spell the name Lemuel Kyd.”

  I stopped to think for a minute as I stepped up on the curb. “You got me again, Zee. Am I supposed to recognize that name?”

  His eyes opened wide as he stared at me in disbelief. “You don’t know about Lemuel Kyd? He was one of the most famous pirates ever!”

  “Lemuel Kyd? That’s news to me.”

  “He’s not as famous as Blackbeard, but he was a really cool sea bandit, Dev,” Zee said. “I can tell you lots of stories about him. How he attacked the Spanish ships sailing home from South America with tons of gold on board, and then he came up to the New England coast to bury his treasure.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, stomping my foot on the sidewalk. “The pirate who buried treasure on islands all along the Northeast was Captain Kidd. But William Kidd, not Lemuel. You’re just teasing me.”