4 PROOF NEGATIVE
JOE
DIAMOND PUSHED HIS WAY PAST a spaced-out-looking gangly guy in his early twenties who didn’t get out of the captain’s way fast enough. The guy tumbled to the floor, muttering an apology.
I narrowed my eyes at Diamond’s leather-vested back. I had to admit, he was kind of a cool-looking dude, but I can’t stand bullies, and it was pretty clear the guy liked pushing people around as much as he did sharks.
“Sorry for losing my cool, Chuck.” Cap massaged his temples. “That guy just does something to me.”
“Hey, I don’t blame you for getting heated at that sea slug. I just don’t want you two killing each other in my restaurant.”
Cap barked out a bitter laugh. “I’ll make sure to kill him somewhere else. The creep had at least one thing right, though. Tomorrow’s a big day and I need some sleep.” He turned to Frank and me. “I really appreciate you boys wanting to help, but I think it’s best if you go home with your friends. This isn’t what you signed up for, and I’m not going to have time to babysit you.”
“We signed up to help the shark conservation effort, and right now the best way to do that is to find Dr. Edwards so she can get back to work,” Frank said resolutely.
“No babysitting required. We can hold our own,” I assured him.
Cap gave us both a measuring look before replying. “Meet me at the marina at four a.m. I still don’t know about this detective business, but as long as you’re here, I’m responsible for you, and I want the R/V on the water before sunrise.”
“Aye, aye, Captain!” I said.
He looked at me sadly before walking out the door. When I turned back, the gangly guy Diamond had knocked over had squeezed up to the bar beside me.
“How you doing, Shaggy?” Chuck asked.
I gotta say, the name fit! He looked just like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.
“Oh, I… um, nothing!” Shaggy answered nervously. He seemed about as composed as his cartoon namesake too. “I just… um… Can I get an order of pink poppers and whale fries to go?”
The back of Shaggy’s T-shirt read Scuba-Doo Dive School, with a cartoon of Shaggy giving a thumbs-up while scuba diving.
“Now, there’s a guy who knows how to lean into his nickname,” I whispered to Frank.
“You know, Shaggy from Scooby-Doo is kind of a fellow detective, if you think about it,” Frank noted.
Our fellow-ish detective placed a bill on the bar. It was only a twenty, but Chuck looked back and forth between the bill and Shaggy like she couldn’t believe her eyes.
“Shaggy paying cash for food instead of adding it to his tab? Today keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
“I just, you know, had a big day at the dive school, and figured it was good luck to start settling up.”
Chuck smiled warmly. “Glad to hear things are looking up for you, Shag.”
She hollered the order to the waiter we’d seen earlier.
“We should probably call it a night too, Joe,” Frank suggested, “Let’s head back to the hotel.”
“I’m with you, bro. With a four a.m. start time, we’re really going to earn those shrimp.”
I was about to say goodbye to Chuck when she turned around and rang a big bell behind the bar. The noisy Shuck Shack went instantly quiet.
“Wow, Chuck has her customers trained well,” I quipped.
“Okay, listen up, folks!” she hollered, her hands cupped around her mouth. “We’re closing early tonight. I want everyone with a boat joining the search first thing tomorrow. Let’s bring Trip home!”
* * *
“I’m sorry if I was hard on you boys last night,” Cap told us early the next morning as the R/V Sally headed south into the cloudy dawn sky. “Trip going missing like this just has me really shaken up. I really do appreciate you sticking around to help.” Abby and Randy, our fellow volunteers, were heading to the airport in a few hours.
We’d left behind the familiar landmarks of Lookout Pier and Alligator Lighthouse an hour before and were slowly cruising just offshore, closely scanning the coastline. The R/V was basically a sixty-five-foot floating research station with multiple decks, a ton of cool equipment, and a full-time crew of five besides the captain. Everyone seemed to recognize that Cap wasn’t in the mood for small talk, and the crew took their commands diligently, going about their jobs without bothering him.
You could tell it was a tightly run ship. Everyone seemed to know their roles and did their work efficiently. Cap’s first mate, Kat (who told us to “try not to get in the way” in not the most friendly voice), was monitoring the radio to communicate with the coast guard and the other local ships participating in the search party. Every other free hand without an urgent task was on lookout duty. The fierce storm the night before had turned into more-on-than-off rain, which didn’t make our job any easier. Or any more comfortable, although custom R/V Sally rain slickers helped a little. If the weather forecast was right, we were going to be getting plenty of mileage out of them—there was another big storm front on the way.
“Is there anywhere you can think Trip might try to take shelter if she did wash up onshore?” Frank asked Cap.
“In a storm like last night’s? Wherever she could,” he said, binoculars fixed to his eyes. “That storm got a whole lot worse a whole lot quicker than anyone expected. She knows the coastlines of the Keys as well as anyone, though, so she’d be able to find shelter if there was any. Last night’s current could have carried her pretty far south, so that’s the direction we’ll start our search.”
“If anyone can find her quickly, it’s you, Cap,” Frank said. “You and Trip have probably explored every inch of these waters together researching sharks, huh?”
Cap lowered the binoculars.
“I know a little something about sharks and marine biology, sure, but I’m no scientist. I just believe in what Trip and Shark Lab are doing. She supplies the brains, I supply the boat.” He gave the starboard rail a squeeze and smiled down at the vessel. “I don’t have kids, and Sally here is like my baby. We couldn’t be prouder to be helping Trip and Shark Lab accomplish their mission. I can’t even imagine what will happen to the research without her.”
“If she’s out there, we’ll find her,” I said as confidently as I could. It felt strange trying to reassure a real captain.
He nodded at the binoculars he’d given us both earlier. “Holler if you see anything. That includes any large dorsal fins. I’m not going to assume the worst, but like you said last night, that shark we saw is a suspect.”
He stared into the mist, sighed to himself, and walked off.
“We’ve questioned some pretty fierce customers, but I am kinda curious to get to interrogate an actual shark,” I admitted.
We were watching Cap pace the deck with his binoculars when Kat’s voice called out from the main cabin. “Cap! Dougie’s on the radio! He says he found something!”
Cap sprinted for the cabin, and so did we.
“Hit me,” Cap commanded as he ran inside.
“Go ahead, Dougie,” Kat said into the radio. “You’re on with Cap.”
“I was checking my lobster pots before joining the search,” Dougie’s voice crackled over the radio receiver. “You know, like I do every morning. And I—”
“Did you find her?” Cap urged.
“Not her. I found her board. And—Cap, you’re gonna want to see this for yourself.”
An hour later, we were standing on a rocky beach a few miles south of Alligator Lighthouse. Last night at Chuck’s Shuck Shack, we’d tried to be the voices of reason to calm the shark panic, reminding everyone that we still didn’t have any evidence that Dr. Edwards had been attacked. She could have just been swept off course by the storm current. We might still find her stranded somewhere. That’s what we’d said, anyway.
That hope went out the window when we saw the huge bite mark ripped out of the paddleboard Dougie was guarding.
5 TOWN VS. SHARK
FRANK
THE ISLAND-WIDE SEARCH HADN’T TURNED up EEE, but it had turned up something. The bright blue-and-green board with wave-patterned trim stood out on the rocky shoreline like a neon light as we made our way across the beach toward Dougie.
“That looks like the same board she was on yesterday, all right,” Joe observed.
“With just one big difference,” I remarked grimly.
The jagged, half-moon-shaped bite torn from the back of the board was impossible to miss.
Dougie chewed nervously on his lip, exposing his cracked incisor as he replayed for Cap what had happened.
“I’ve been fishing this same stretch of beach every day for twenty years, so I noticed it right off. Knew from the color it had to be Trip’s, and my heart done leaped thinking I might find her too, but then I took a closer look at her board, and…” He trailed off.
Dougie had shown a detective’s instincts by leaving the board where he’d found it, partway up the rocky beach where the tide appeared to have carried it. Protocol is for the first person at the site to leave everything untouched so they don’t disturb any evidence or contaminate the crime scene before a forensic expert arrives to make their analysis. I don’t know if you could technically call a shark attack a crime scene, but the implications for EEE were just as bad.
As for the evidence, it was obvious enough from the large chunk missing from the rear of the board that it had been made by a shark, but that still left a pretty large suspect pool. If Dougie had moved the board, I might never have spotted the smoking gun the perp left behind. Only in this case, the smoking gun wasn’t a gun at all. It was a tooth.
The sun peeked through the clouds as I leaned over to examine the board, sending a glint of light off something embedded in the jaw-shaped bite.
“There’s a tooth still stuck in the board!” I exclaimed.
Cap and Dougie leaned in as I gently pulled it out. The serration on the blade of the sharply angled tooth was a dead giveaway.
“Tiger shark,” Cap and I both said at the same time.
Shark jaws are built like conveyor belts with multiple rows of teeth, and they’re constantly growing new ones. When they lose a tooth hunting, a new tooth rotates in from the row behind to replace it. Sharks lose teeth all the time, but to actually find one embedded in a paddleboard was shocking.
Dougie gave a low whistle. “That’s a big chomper. Gotta be at least an inch and a half.”
Cap’s shoulders slumped. “The kind of tooth you’d expect to see on a shark with a dorsal fin the size of the one we saw yesterday.”
I could hear the defeat in his voice. It was hard to draw any conclusion except one: Ron, the mayor, Captain Diamond, and the other anti-shark alarmists at the Shuck Shack had been right about what happened to Dr. Edwards. The same shark we’d seen had attacked her.
We couldn’t make the argument that EEE had been blown off course in the storm anymore. We could only hope she’d escaped the shark unharmed and taken shelter onshore somewhere after the attack.
A shiver ran down my spine. We’d still been in the water when we’d spotted the shark’s dorsal fin. If that storm hadn’t forced the rest of us to make for shore early, Joe and I would have been right in the shark’s path, beside EEE when it attacked. I could tell from the look on his face that Joe was thinking the same thing.
“It could have been any of us,” he whispered.
* * *
The search continued for a few more bleak hours before the rain became too heavy and Cap gave Sally’s crew the command to head for shore. They were the first words he’d spoken since the morning.
When we got back to the marina, the shark attack wasn’t the only thing on people’s minds. Everyone was heading to the same place—town hall.
“The town council vote!” I’d been so focused on my search duties aboard the R/V, I’d forgotten all about the big meeting to decide the fate of the resort development.
“Well, we’re here. We might as well go check it out,” Joe suggested as we fell in with the crowd heading a couple of blocks inland.
“Wow, I bet the whole town is here,” I said as we filed into the packed room, grabbing two of the last seats.
“It’s standing room only!” Joe said, looking back at people still pushing their way in.
As everyone settled down, one detail jumped out, setting the tone for the whole meeting: the empty seat on the dais where EEE would have been seated among the other council members. A little plaque was set up on the table in front of her seat as a reminder that Councilwoman Edwards wouldn’t be coming.
“It sounds like everyone realizes Trip would have been the deciding vote against the development,” I said to Joe as I looked at all the concerned faces in the audience and overheard fragments of the heated conversations happening around us.
Joe shifted in his seat. “The vote is about sharks, too, since it’s the lemon shark nursery that’s holding things up. I’m no doctor, but I think this town has come down with a bad case of shark fever.”
“I’m afraid it’s the sharks that are going to get the wrong end of that diagnosis,” I whispered as Mayor Boothby strode up to his seat at the center of the table and brought the meeting to order with a bang of his gavel.
“Ladies and gentlemen of Lookout, the vote on the Mangrove Palace Resort development plan on this evening’s agenda”—the mayor paused dramatically—“has been postponed.”
There was a sudden eruption of reactions from the surprised crowd—sighs of relief from those against the development, groans and angry shouts from the development’s supporters, including Ron, Captain Diamond, and a whole bunch of others. Oddly, Maxwell himself wasn’t one of them. I turned to see him quietly nodding approval from his seat in the back.
“Huh, you’d think he’d be yelling the loudest,” Joe commented. “Without Trip here to stop him, his project sounded like a slam dunk.”
“It’s like the development’s opponents snatched victory from the jaws of defeat,” I said without thinking first. Joe and I both cringed. “Sorry. That came out wrong. What I meant was, this could give the development’s opponents a chance to rally more support against it.”
Cap was sitting a couple of rows in front of us, staring at the dais with his mouth hanging open. Talk about a lot for one guy to process in a single day. The postponement was an unexpected victory for Shark Lab’s cause, but without the lab’s director, it was bittersweet. I could understand why he wasn’t joining in the cheering.
Mayor Boothby motioned everyone to settle down. “We have bigger fish to fry today, my friends. In light of the horrible tragedy—nay, horrible assault—that has befallen our beloved councilwoman Dr. E. Ella Edwards, I have deemed it necessary to postpone all other town matters until our current crisis is addressed. In memory of my dear, departed colleague, I am now calling an emergency meeting to present my new anti-shark defense initiative.”
I watched as Cap’s mouth dropped open even farther. His wasn’t the only one.
“Trip could still be out there! We still might find her!” Chuck called out, earning shouts of approval from others in the room.
“I have just received word that the coast guard has changed the status of their search from a search and rescue to search and recovery,” Boothby continued, ignoring the outburst. “Councilwoman Edwards is tragically gone, and we need to make sure she’s the last one to suffer this horrible fate.” He pounded his fist on the table. “We need to make this town safe again from the cartilaginous man-eaters that are invading our shores!”
The room erupted in a competing chorus of cheers and jeers.
“The mayor’s right! It’s us or the sharks!” Ron yelled, leaping out of his seat.
“Did you see the news?” a curly-haired councilwoman seated to Boothby’s left asked. “The attack on Dr. Edwards was one of the big national stories. It’s got the tourists scared. I had three cancellations at the hotel today.”
“It’s not just the tourists
who are scared,” an elderly councilman said. “I’m afraid to step into the water in my own town. And my grandkids— I had nightmares last night just thinking about it.”
Mayor Boothby nodded along vigorously with each new complaint. “How much more can we let our economy suffer because of this threat? How many more of our loved ones must be lost to this menace?”
“How many more?” Chuck asked incredulously. “There’s only been one in the past thirty years! More people are injured in car and boating accidents every day.”
“And cows!” Joe shouted, looking at me for approval.
That may not have been exactly how I would have used that statistic, but it did underline just how rare attacks were—a fact that unfortunately seemed to be entirely lost on the mayor, and from the sound of the crowd, at least half the people at the meeting.
Cap had been looking more and more pained since the opening gavel. It was a lot harder to convince people that sharks weren’t to blame now that EEE’s board had been found. Defending the animal that had attacked his partner might have seemed weird to some people, but EEE had been one of the world’s biggest shark advocates, and I knew that was what she would want him to do.
Cap stood up, clearing his throat before addressing the crowd. “When attacks do happen, they’re terrible tragedies, of course, but out of hundreds of millions of people in the water around the world each year, there are only a handful of fatalities because of shark attacks. You act like it’s us under siege, but it’s the other way around.” Now that he had everyone’s full attention, he seemed more confident as he continued. “I wouldn’t have known this if it weren’t for Trip, but as many as two hundred million sharks are killed by people every year. More than we can count have their fins cut off and sold for the shark fin soup trade. Millions more are tossed away as bycatch by commercial fishing fleets or overfished by the food industry as a cheap alternative for frozen fish products. Then they’re mislabeled or nicknamed something tastier-sounding, so a lot of the time, people don’t even realize what they’re eating.”
A Treacherous Tide Page 3
