The Missing Manatee

by Cynthia DeFelice

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Also by Cynthia DeFelice

  Copyright

  For fishing guides Cleve, Pat, Earl, Ben, Monty, Keith, Mike, Bill, Rick, Eduardo, Oscar, Allen, Willie, Martin, Dudley, Ken, Tom, and the real, original Dirty Dan—thanks for all the stories

  One

  The day I found the dead manatee began badly. I was walking past my mother’s bedroom when I overheard her talking on the phone.

  “No, Mac. I don’t want you to come back. Not now. Not ever,” she said.

  Mac is my father.

  I left the house and got into my skiff and ran a couple of miles out into the Gulf of Mexico, hoping the speed and the salty breeze would blow the words right out of my head. But now, hours later, they continued to cut into the corners of my mind, hard and sharp.

  So I decided to call it quits and was heading back upriver when I saw the manatee. It was rocking back and forth like a big, round baby in the gentle waves that lapped the saw grass growing at the edge of a small island.

  I guess a tourist might have thought the creature was scratching itself or having a snooze. But I’ve lived all my eleven years on the river, and I’ve spent a lot of time watching manatees. Something was wrong with this one.

  I cut the engine and glided up to the grass to get a better look. Right away, I could tell it was dead. There wasn’t any rotten smell yet, or any swelling, and no gulls or crabs or crows were picking at the flesh, so I knew it hadn’t been dead for long.

  Looking at that body with all the life gone from it gave me an achy feeling in my chest. Manatees—when they’re alive, anyway—are irresistible, the same way puppies and kittens and baby chicks are. They wallow around in the water, too trusting or too lazy to move out of the way of danger. They’re so dopey-acting and so homely they’re cute.

  I read someplace that when the old sailors told of seeing mermaids, they were actually looking at manatees. Which really cracked me up. I mean, a manatee looks kind of like a gigantic dark brown Idaho potato. Or a balloon that got blown up wrong. How those guys imagined that a roly-poly animal with tiny little eyes and a whiskery face was a beautiful woman with a tail—well, if you ask me, they must have been out at sea for a long, long time.

  I checked the creature’s back for propeller scars. Most manatees have slashes across their backs because they don’t know enough to swim away from boats. Lots of boaters either don’t know that or don’t care, so collisions between boats and manatees are pretty common. Not on our river, because it’s a manatee refuge, but when the creatures go out into open water, they’re almost like sitting ducks.

  Yep, I could see that this manatee had had at least one run-in with a propeller, but the scars were old and healed over. I wondered if it might have simply died of old age. I guessed it happened that way sometimes. Was this one old? I didn’t know how to tell.

  I noticed some streaks of an odd, reddish color swirling in the water. And then I saw a round hole in the back of the creature’s head. The red stuff was seeping from it, mixing quickly with the brackish river water. It took a while before I got it: I was looking at blood coming from a bullet hole.

  But that didn’t make any sense! Manatees are a protected species. Nobody can hunt them. You can get a stiff fine just for bothering or chasing them. There are bigger fines, even jail sentences, for actually harming or killing one—although I’d never heard of anybody doing that. There was no reason to. The idea of somebody feeling threatened by a manatee and shooting it out of self-defense was so ridiculous it was almost funny. What kind of person would fire a gun at such a harmless animal?

  The question made my heart pound unpleasantly, first with anger and then with fear. I looked at the manatee’s wound, still bleeding. Whoever had done this might be lurking nearby, watching. He wouldn’t want to be discovered, that was for sure. And he had a gun.

  Suddenly, I had the feeling that I was being watched. I looked around quickly. To the west the river ran into the gulf, where I’d come from. To the east it headed back inland, toward Chassacoochie Springs, the town where I lived. On both sides of the river were acres and acres of saw grass, mangrove trees, scrubby cedars, and palmettos. There were about a million places for a person to hide, and all I saw were some mullet jumping and an egret preening on the opposite bank.

  I took a deep breath to slow the beating of my heart and tried to decide what to do. I knew there was an 800 number to call if you found a dead manatee, or one that was injured, orphaned, or wearing a tag. I’d seen the posters hanging at the marina and in stores hundreds of times, but I’d never memorized the number and, anyway, I didn’t have a cell phone.

  The radio in my boat wasn’t working, either. It needed a new antenna, and I hadn’t saved enough yet to get one, although I was getting close. I’d broken the rules that morning, going out in the open ocean without a working radio, and if Mom knew she’d ground me for the rest of my life. If it was up to her, I wouldn’t be out alone in the boat in the first place, but Mom realized she couldn’t stop me. I’d passed the boating safety course, and had my photo ID card to prove it. Besides, I was Mac’s son.

  See, Mac—my dad—is a fishing guide. He grew up right in Chassacoochie Springs, and began handling boats when he was six years old. He tried to raise me the same way, and it drove Mom crazy. She was always fussing and calling Mac irresponsible, and he was always telling her to relax, what did she want to do, wrap me in plastic for safekeeping?

  That was one of the things they used to argue about, until Mom told Mac to move out three weeks ago. He went down the road a little way to live in a trailer.

  “Just for a while,” Mom told me, until they “figured things out.”

  When I asked Mac why he was leaving his own house, why he was leaving me, he said he didn’t want me to have to listen to any more fighting.

  “Then why don’t you guys stop?” I said, but he only looked sad, gave me a hug, put a garbage bag with a bunch of his clothes in it in the back of his pickup, and drove off.

  Now Mom had decided she didn’t want him to come back, and I heard her say it. She hadn’t asked me what I wanted. So right then I didn’t much care what she would have to say about my being out in the gulf with a busted radio.

  Besides, I was looking at a manatee that had to be at least twelve hundred pounds of dead weight. I knew from experience that if I got out of the boat, my feet would sink knee-deep into the wet, oozing mud. If I were lucky, and someone came along and pulled me out, both my sneakers would be sucked under, never to be seen again. But even if I could get out of the skiff, I wasn’t strong enough to lift the manatee. And if I were able, by some miracle, to get it into the boat, it’d probably sink my skiff. I was going to have to leave it and go tell somebody.

  I wasn’t worrie
d about finding it again: I knew the river the way I knew my own bedroom. I checked the tide; it was going down. Good—the body wouldn’t wash away with high water, and a light wind was pushing it right up against the island.

  All of a sudden, I couldn’t wait to get away from there. Being alone with that dead body was starting to give me the creeps.

  But when I came back less than an hour later with a deputy from the sheriff’s department, the manatee was gone.

  Two

  “It was right there,” I said.

  Deputy Sheriff Earl Wells looked at the little island, empty of everything except a cormorant drying its wings in the sun, then at me. “You sure it was dead, Skeet?” he asked. “Maybe it was just relaxing, you know how they do. Maybe it swam off.”

  I shook my head. “It was dead, Earl.” Earl played cards on Tuesday nights with Mac, so I’d known him my whole life. I tried to remember to call him Deputy when he was on duty, but I usually forgot. “It was right there,” I repeated, pointing.

  There was silence for a second as we both stared at the deserted stretch of mud and saw grass. Then I said, “Wait a second. Look! Somebody was here! Check out those marks in the mud. Like something was dragged. Whoever did it tried to smooth it over, see?”

  “I’ll be doggoned,” said Earl, leaning down and peering at the mud, which had obviously been disturbed, then roughly smoothed over.

  “Somebody came after I left and took it,” I said. “I don’t believe this.”

  I stared at Earl, who always looked to me as if he had a fishing bobber in his throat, the way his Adam’s apple stuck out and moved up and down when he talked. “Had to have a boat,” he observed. “Nobody could carry a thing like that. Couldn’t have dragged it farther up on shore without sinking.”

  I was still so stunned by the manatee’s disappearance, I just nodded in agreement.

  “I’ll be doggoned,” Earl said again, straightening up. He shaded his eyes with his hands and scanned the horizon, but there were no boats in sight. “Could have done it alone, though, if he tied a rope around it and towed it. It’d float,” he went on thoughtfully. “Could have cut it loose anywhere out there,” he added, gesturing with his arm to indicate the miles and miles of mangrove swamp crisscrossed by hundreds of little channels and creeks, not to mention the whole Gulf of Mexico.

  “But why?” I blurted out. “Why not just leave the body? Why go to the trouble of getting rid of it?”

  I shivered as a possible answer occurred to me. The killer had been watching when I discovered his dirty work. And he knew that if I went and reported it and the body was examined, there might be a clue that would reveal who he was.

  Earl swallowed, and the fishing bobber bobbed. “I believe you saw a manatee here, Skeet,” he began, sounding apologetic. “And if you say it was dead, I guess it was. But, I gotta ask—are you sure you were looking at a bullet hole?”

  “Well, yeah. What else could it be?”

  “I don’t know. An ear, maybe?” Earl scratched his own ear speculatively.

  Living near the refuge the way we did, we’d studied manatees in school, and I knew a lot about them. “Manatees’ ears are little openings up near their eyes,” I said. “This was farther back. And there was only one. It was round. And it was bleeding.”

  Earl nodded again, staring out toward the horizon. “Just the one hole?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I answered, not sure what he was getting at.

  “Entrance wound, no exit wound,” he said thoughtfully. “So the bullet—”

  “Is still in there!” I finished excitedly. “That’s why he wanted to hide the body. If you had the bullet, you could figure out who did it!”

  “Not necessarily,” Earl corrected. “But it would sure help.”

  We were quiet for a minute, thinking about it. “Hard to understand, though, why anybody’d want to do such a thing,” Earl said, shaking his head. “They’re harmless critters, far as I know.” He paused, then mused, “Never heard of anybody eating the meat.”

  “Yuck,” I said, not even wanting to think about it. Eating a manatee would be like eating somebody’s pet dog or cat.

  “And I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a trophy manatee head hangin’ on the wall of anybody’s den,” Earl drawled, looking at me with a sideways grin.

  Imagining it, I grinned back. But then I pictured the lifeless body again, and felt the smile slide off my face.

  “The only people I’ve ever heard complain about the manatees are some of the fishing guides,” Earl said thoughtfully. “Not Mac, but some of the others.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard ’em, too,” I said. “They hate having to slow down when they go through the refuge area. It takes them longer to get where they’re going, and cuts down on their fishing time.”

  Earl laughed and said, “You know what Dirty Dan calls manatees, don’t you?”

  I shook my head. Dirty Dan was a friend of Earl’s and Mac’s.

  “Live speed bumps,” said Earl with a chortle.

  Ordinarily, I’d probably have laughed, too, but not right then. “He doesn’t mean anything by it,” I said.

  “Nah,” Earl agreed. “He’s only griping ’cause he likes to run his boat flat out.” After a minute he said, “About the only thing I can imagine is that some good old boys, or maybe some teenage kids, got drunked up and stupid.”

  I nodded. It was a possibility. “So how are we going to catch ’em?” I asked.

  “Hold on now, Skeet,” Earl said. “I don’t think we’ll be sending out the posse on this.”

  “We won’t?” I said, feeling confused. Did Earl mean we were going to go after the guy ourselves? I felt first thrilled, then terrified, at the prospect.

  But Earl said, “First thing we’ll do is go back and report it to Fish and Wildlife. Ordinarily, they’d be the ones to investigate if somebody killed or even hurt a manatee. If we had the body, they’d probably send it to St. Pete for study. But—” He shrugged, holding out his empty hands.

  “But what?”

  “Without a body, there isn’t much to investigate. They might even take the position that without a body, there’s no proof there was a crime.”

  “But there was a body!” I protested.

  “I know, I know,” Earl said soothingly. “It’s too bad it up and disappeared. What I’m saying, Skeet, is that law-enforcement folks are busy. This isn’t going to be real high up on their list of priorities.”

  I couldn’t believe this. “It’s because I’m a kid, isn’t it?” I muttered. “Nobody ever listens to kids.”

  “It’s not that, Skeet,” Earl said. His Adam’s apple bobbed and he said softly, “I’m just trying to be realistic here.”

  “But somebody shot a manatee!” I said. “It’s against the law, right? You think he should just get away with it? That’s not fair!”

  “No, all I’m saying—”

  “It’s not right, Earl.”

  Earl sighed. “I hear you, Skeet, but—”

  I interrupted again. I couldn’t help it. “I should have stayed here until somebody else came along in a boat,” I said in disgust. “Then we’d have the proof.” Even as I said it, I remembered the fear I’d felt there with the dead creature at my feet, imagining the killer nearby.

  “Listen to me, Skeet,” Earl was saying. “You did the right thing. Think about it. Whoever did this was near enough to take the body away before we arrived, and we got out here pretty quick. I’m glad you weren’t here for long, especially if it was a bunch of drunks that did the shooting.”

  Maybe Earl was right, but I figured he was just trying to make me feel better.

  “We’ll go back and make our report,” he said. “And who knows? Maybe I’m wrong and they’ll pursue this thing. But don’t count on it, Skeet. We don’t have any evidence, and the departments are all pretty strapped right now.”

  “Okay,” I said, even though it wasn’t okay at all. Earl was making it sound as if I was supposed to go back, m
ake a stupid report, and wait to see what happened, which would be nothing. But I wanted to know who killed the manatee and hid the body, and why. Whoever it was ought to be caught and punished, plain and simple.

  I sighed, and stepped back into the patrol boat.

  Three

  Even with the dead manatee on my mind, I enjoyed the ride back upriver in the sheriff’s boat. Earl zoomed through the curves and bends of the river, going close to sixty miles an hour. That felt really fast compared to my skiff, which maxed out at around twenty-five. He throttled down to idle speed when we reached the upper section of the river, where the manatees’ refuge began. This was the section Earl and I had been talking about, the section that irritated some of the guides who had fast boats and wanted to use them.

  It was April, and there were still about two hundred manatees around. They arrived in October to spend the winter, and some never left when spring came. They were eating and swimming and hanging out in the warm water coming from the spring at the river’s source. We passed a bunch of them, lolling contentedly. Which is what a manatee should be doing, I thought, not getting ditched someplace with a bullet in its head.

  We passed other boats, too. The river was busy with tourists who came every winter, like the manatees, looking for warmth and relaxation. A good number of the boats belonged to local folks, who recognized either Earl or me and waved as we passed them.

  It was spring break, so I wasn’t surprised to see some kids from school casting off the pier at the public dock when we idled by. I waved to my friend Lenny. Watching his face as he waved back, I could tell he was wondering what the heck I was doing out with the sheriff’s department.

  Then I looked upriver and called to Earl above the engine noise, “Hey, there’s Mac!”

  Earl knew I called my father Mac, but it confused most people. “He’s your dad,” kids would say. “Why don’t you call him Dad?”

  I’d always shrug and say, “Nicknames run in our family.” Which was true. I was called Skeet, short for Skeeter, which was short for mosquito. That’s what Mac claimed I looked like when I was born. “Why, he’s no bigger than a skeeter,” he said when he first saw me, or so I’ve been told.