I felt sorry for Izzy. Here it was, her first full day at the shore, and she wasn’t even allowed out of the house.
I sat with her and Lucy on the porch for a while, reading. Lucy and I were in the rockers, and Isabel was stretched out on the bed at the end of the porch, as close to the Chapmans’ house as she could get. I noticed that she wasn’t turning the pages of her book. She gazed in the direction of the Chapmans’ yard, probably waiting for a glimpse of Ned. He and Mr. Chapman were working on their boat, and I doubted she could see their dock from her place on the bed, but when Ned walked through their yard to get something from their house, I could nearly hear Izzy’s heartbeat quicken. I understood how she felt. He was having the same effect on me.
Before dinner, I took the boat out by myself. Mom was nervous about it, but Daddy talked her into letting me as long as I wore the hideous orange life preserver. It was a Monday and the weekend congestion on the canal had vanished overnight. I took the boat right to the mouth of the bay. The water stretched in front of me wide and inviting and I longed to go out into it, just a little way, but I didn’t dare. Instead I turned around in a broad arc and headed for the dock between the colored fishermen and the rooster house.
Once inside the unfamiliar dock, I cut the motor. There was a short ladder on my left and I tied my boat to a rung, took off the life preserver, then climbed up. The colored fishermen made me nervous. I didn’t look directly at them, but I could feel their eyes following me as I walked between the cattails and the fence, heading away from them in the direction of the shack. I finally found a narrow path cut through the tall grass, and I followed it right to the front porch of the ramshackle little cottage.
“Who are you?”
I jumped at the sound of a man’s voice, disembodied because I couldn’t see through the screens of his porch.
“I was just coming to see where the rooster lives,” I said.
The screen door creaked open a few inches and a man stood in the doorway. He had a thick beard and a dirty old hat on his head. The early evening sunlight fell onto his face and he squinted, his eyes reduced to little beads of translucent blue, making him look a bit demonic. The Mystery of theWarlock’s Shack, I thought to myself. I liked the title. Maybe I would try to write my own book.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
I turned and pointed to my bungalow, which was barely visible through the reeds. It looked very far away.
“You come over by boat?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes,” I said, turning to go. “And I’d better get back.”
“What were you planning to do to my rooster?” he said, as I moved away.
“Oh!” I said. “Nothing. I wouldn’t hurt it. I just wanted to see where it lived.”
He held the door open wider. “Right here,” he said.
I looked past him onto the porch and saw the rooster and a couple of hens walking around on the floor as if they were mechanical toys. I took a step backward, wondering if the man’s sneakers were caked with the droppings of his feathered pets.
“Thanks for showing me,” I said.
“There are some people around here who’d like to wring my rooster’s neck,” he said, and I thought he sounded suspicious.
“Not me,” I said. “Thanks again for letting me see him.” I turned then and walked as quickly as I could through the tall grass. It probably only took me thirty seconds to reach the dock, but by that time I’d made up two or three different stories about the man. He kept children locked in closets inside the rickety old house. He’d murdered his wife and her bones were buried beneath the porch. When I was about to climb down the ladder, I spotted something shiny in the flattened grass near the head of the dock. I walked over and stared down at a pair of sunglasses, then picked them up. Maybe they belonged to the wife the old man had killed. Who knew? They would go beneath my bed to wait just in case.
That evening, Grandpop and I walked to the end of the dirt road. For as long as I could remember, he’d kept a path cleared through the tall grasses that rose a couple of feet above my head. We followed the path, and I loved the feeling of being closed in by the grass walls. Dragonflies flew along with us as we walked, but we were covered in insect repellant so the mosquitoes left us alone. We emerged from the path in a swampy area of still water that was connected to the canal by a narrow opening in the bulkhead. As he always did, Grandpop had set his bait trap in the shallow water here, tying it to a stake in the soft, sandy earth among the grasses. I pulled in the trap. It was full of green-gray killies, flapping on the wire mesh. Grandpop opened the trap and spilled the bait into his bucket. While he was doing that, I spied something in the water a few feet from where we stood. A baby shoe! I rolled up my capris as high as I could, waded into the water to my knees, and reached out to grab the little white leather shoe, a real prize in the world of clues.
“What do you do with all that stuff you collect?” Grandpop asked me as he closed the trap again.
“I keep them under my bed,” I said. “They might be clues to something that happened. Like, what if a baby got kidnapped or something? I could take this shoe to the police and tell them where I found it and maybe they could solve the mystery.”
“I think you need a better place than under your bed,” Grandpop said. “Your mother could clean up there and toss out all that old stuff you found.”
I loved my grandfather so much right then. He always took me seriously.
“Where else could I put it?” I studied the tiny shoe in my hands.
“I have an idea,” he said. He put his hand on the back of my neck as we walked, his fingers a little rough and damp against my skin. “When we get back to the house, you gather up your clues and I’ll show you where you can keep them.”
Once home, I did as I was told. I only had three paltry clues so far: the baby shoe, the sunglasses and the silly Ping-Pong ball, but that seemed pretty good for two days worth of sleuthing. I carried them out to the backyard. Grandpop was digging a hole near the corner of the house closest to the woods. Next to him was an old tin bread box with a removable red top.
He grinned at me, his sweet basset hound face lighting up for a moment. “What do you think, Nancy Drew?” he asked. “We’ll bury this bread box in this hole, cover it with a little sand and no one will ever know your clues are here.”
I helped him lower the bread box into the hole. I put my clues inside, then slipped on the lid and covered it with a couple of inches of sand. I loved my new hiding place. No one would ever know the clues were there.
Or so I thought.
CHAPTER 5
Julie
The sunburned waitress poured more iced tea into my glass, and I interpreted the look she gave me as sympathetic. This is why I don’t date, I thought. It was the waiting, the wondering, the analyzing. Why was Ethan late? Was he stuck in traffic? Had he forgotten we were to meet for lunch? Or had he simply been annoyed that I’d twisted his arm to talk with me? I wanted to explain to the waitress that, although I was meeting a man here, he was not a date. Not a romantic interest.
