Unanswered Questions

“I still think you’re making a mistake, George,” Bess said, as we ate breakfast on Delia’s balcony the next morning. “How can you think of going out on the Island Scout when we still haven’t caught the guy who poached those orchids?”

It was way too early in the morning for me. The sun was barely up over the horizon, but I’d dragged myself out of bed when I’d heard George’s alarm. It seemed like we’d gone to bed the night before with so many unanswered questions—about Chick, the break-in of the Salazars’ boat, and what Steve was up to. I figured the earlier we got started trying to answer them, the better.

If Bess and George could work out their differences.

“I can’t miss being there when they find the Catarina. I just can’t,” George argued. Plunking her empty coffee mug down on the table, she reached into the sports bag that sat at her feet. A second later, she took out a bottle of sunscreen and started rubbing it on her face and arms. “You understand, right, Delia?”

“Hmm?” Delia glanced up from her toast and coffee. “Sure, you should go,” she told George. “I don’t know what we’re going to be able to find out here, anyway.”

She sounded glum, and there were circles under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept well. I noticed that Delia’s cell phone lay on the table next to her plate. She’d already checked it about twenty times to see if it was working.

It made me feel awful to see her looking so down. She seemed totally different from the smiling, energetic person who’d greeted us when we got to Key Largo. I guess I could understand how she felt. It had to be devastating to think her own boyfriend might be breaking the law, especially when he could be taking plants that she worked really hard to protect. I figured the best way I could help was to do everything possible to learn the truth.

“We can start by finding out what the police learned when they checked out the Salazars’ boat last night,” I suggested. Getting up from the table, I looked over the balcony railing toward the marina. “Diego and Lucy are already there. Let’s go talk to them before they head out.”

“Before we head out, you mean,” George corrected.

Bess rolled her eyes but didn’t argue. I guess she realized George wasn’t about to change her mind. Within a few minutes, we were all on our way to the Scout.

The rising sun gave a hint of the heat that would build later, but this early in the day, the breeze off the water was still refreshing. Low-slanting rays bathed the docks and boats—including the Scout —in a golden pink glow.

“You girls are just in time,” Diego called out from the deck. He lugged a garbage bag to the railing and handed it down to us. “Lucy and I are about done cleaning up, but we could use a hand getting these bags to the Dumpster.”

Lucy was behind him, holding a second bag, which she handed down too. “We’re lucky that intruder didn’t wreck anything important. Just some papers, manuals, and food,” she said. “And a printer that broke when it was knocked to the floor.”

“Your computer’s okay?” George asked. “The software programs and navigational equipment? The digging tools and that blower thing you used yesterday to clear sand from the gold bars?”

“All fine,” Diego assured her. “I double-checked the scuba equipment, too. None of the wet suits or oxygen tanks were damaged either.” He winked at George and said, “So, are you ready to find some treasure?”

“Definitely!” George didn’t waste a second getting on board. She and the Salazars seemed eager to get going, but they held back long enough to tell us that the police hadn’t found anything unusual when they’d searched the Scout.

“Nothing?” said Bess. “You’re sure?”

Lucy shrugged. “The police thought the same thing we did—that someone must have been looking for the old coins and gold bars we found yesterday. They made a mess doing it, but there’s no real damage,” she said. “The officers told us they’d be talking to that fellow whose truck you saw.”

“Chick Russell,” Delia said.

“That’s the one. We should be hearing from them after they speak to him, but they haven’t been in touch yet,” Lucy said. “Thank goodness you girls stopped him before he could retrieve information from our computer system.”

“Of course, we still haven’t figured out how anyone could know about the gold in the first place,” Diego added. “We’ve never even met any Chick Russell that I can remember. And we didn’t tell a soul about the gold.”

“Neither did we,” George promised.

It was the same question that had bothered me the night before: How could Chick know about the gold George and the Salazars had found? It was disappointing to learn that Lucy and Diego didn’t have an answer either. “Maybe the police will learn more when they talk to Chick,” I said.

“Let’s hope so,” Diego said. “Ready to help with those ropes, Delia?”

She had barely said a word since we’d gotten to the marina. But as she handed the first mooring line over to Diego, she suddenly blurted out, “Have you heard from Steve? I was hoping... well, that he might be here.”

Diego shook his head. “We haven’t heard from him since yesterday morning, when he called to say he’s quitting our operation.”

So it was true, I thought. Steve did quit.

“I tried calling him to let him know about yesterday’s find. I thought he might change his mind,” Diego went on. “But he never picked up.”

“At least Delia’s not the only one getting the silent treatment from Steve,” Bess said to me under her breath.

I wasn’t sure that made Delia feel any better. She stood on the dock, frowning and squinting into the sun, until the Island Scout motored out of Rock Harbor. Then, all at once, she shook herself and turned to Bess and me.

“Let’s do something fun today,” she said.

Bess and I looked at each other. “What about the poaching?” Bess asked.

“We can find out more about Chick and... and everything else this afternoon,” Delia said. “But I’ll feel awful if you guys don’t see some of the sights while you’re here. Besides,” she added, with a shaky smile, “I really don’t want to hang around here worrying about what Steve might be up to.”

When she put it that way, how could we refuse? “Well?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at Bess.

She grinned back at me. “What are we waiting for? I’m dying to see the reef!” she said.

After changing into our bathing suits, we drove to Pennekamp and rented snorkeling equipment and a motorboat. Before we knew it, we were heading out toward the ocean along the same mangrove-lined channel we’d taken our first day in Key Largo. This time, we didn’t see any suspicious-looking boats—just pelicans, egrets, and some bird with a yellow-tufted head that sat atop one of the channel markers.

“There are nine diving sites inside the park,” Delia explained. “But Molasses Reef is the biggest, and the snorkeling is fantastic. It’s a few miles offshore, so it’ll take us awhile to get there.”

Not that Bess and I minded. The deep-blue water and sky stretched out endlessly in front of us, and whenever we looked back we saw the tree-lined shore and a lighthouse off to the southwest. I couldn’t believe it when a pair of dolphins jumped up in a graceful arc right next to us as they raced alongside the boat. The salty sea breeze felt fantastic, and it made the sun seem a little less intense.

“This is the place,” Delia said, cutting the engine and reaching for the anchor. She pointed to our right. “Actually, the reef is over there. We’ll drop anchor here where there’s no coral, and then swim over.”

The next hour was unbelievable. Just a few feet beneath the surface was an underwater world of tubes, fans, pillars, horns, whips, ledges, channels and walls—all made of coral. Some were pink, while others were yellow, orange, brown, white, purple, and even an amazing peacock blue. Coral fans and flowers waved gently in the current alongside harder corals that looked like all sorts of things: brains, lettuce, stars, fingers, and even the horns of a deer. Tropical fish swam by in flashes of neon blue, yellow, and orange, darting in and out of the coral caves and nooks and channels.

“I don’t know what’s more beautiful,” Bess said, as we treaded water after exploring for a while. “The reef, or all the fish and things swimming around it!”

“It is amazing,” Delia agreed. “More than three hundred kinds of tropical fish live here. Not to mention manta rays, sponges, coral shrimp, crabs, and lobsters. That’s one reason protecting the reef is so important. Coral grows really slowly, less than an inch a year.”

“So when poachers take coral, or the reef gets damaged by boaters who run into it, they could be destroying hundreds of years of growth,” I said, doing the math in my head. I knew it was the same story for rare plants like butterfly orchids. They could become extinct, too. As we swam back to the boat and toweled off, I felt all the more determined to do something about it.

“Are you guys ready to head back?” I asked.

Bess was soaking up some rays on the back bench seat, with her eyes closed and her sunglasses on. She nodded vaguely and mumbled, “Wake me up when we get there, okay?”

Delia was sitting on her towel behind the wheel, but I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. Then I saw the cell phone she was holding to her ear, and the hurt expression on her face. Obviously, Steve still wasn’t answering her calls.

“Maybe it’s not such a good idea to keep calling him,” I said, glancing toward shore. “If we want to get answers from Steve, we should probably talk to him in person. How far are we from the Ocean Reef Club?”

“You think Steve could be at his mother’s?” Delia asked.

Bess lifted her head, squinting at us over the tops of her sunglasses. “Why not?” she asked. “He uses her boat, right? And it was barely light when we saw George off, so it must still be pretty early.”

“Nine-thirty,” Delia said, checking her watch. “You’re right! If we hurry, we might get there before Steve heads out.”

She started the engine, her face filled with determination. I knew we were taking a chance. Steve might have left already, or he might not be using his mother’s boat today. But I couldn’t help thinking that whatever we found out would be better than calling a cell phone number he obviously wasn’t answering.

As Delia steered our boat toward the northern end of the island, the solid mangroves along the Coral Reef State Park gave way to the golf greens, marinas, and resort condos of the Ocean Reef Club. After rounding a point where some windsurfers cut across the water past a beach with a volleyball net set up on it, we headed around to the bayside. Delia cruised past smaller channels lined with condominiums and private docks. Before long, the Card Sound Bridge came into view, and I caught sight of Mrs. Manning’s peach-colored stucco house.

“Her new boat’s there,” Delia said, pointing. “And so’s Steve!”

It was easy to see the bright red boat, moored opposite the white one at her dock. Steve stood on the dock next to it. As we watched, he stepped on board to put something in the back of the boat.

“What is that?” I wondered, but we were too far away to see clearly.

“Steve!” Delia called out, as we got closer.

Steve straightened up in the back of the boat and turned our way. He peered at us, shading his eyes, then quickly turned away again. In the next instant, we saw him frantically shaking out a blue tarp.

“What’s he doing, hiding something?” Bess wondered.

Delia didn’t answer, but as we got closer I saw the way her eyes zeroed in on the bulky mound covered by the blue tarp.

“Oh, great. He’s already been out,” she said, groaning. “And whatever he poached is right under that tarp.”

Steve’s Story

“Delia... hi!” Steve called, in a voice that sounded falsely bright to me. He smiled at us, but there was a wary glint in his eyes. “What are you guys doing here?”

“Looking for you,” Delia told him. Her cheeks were an angry red as she maneuvered our boat up to the dock. Cutting the motor, she jumped onto the dock before Bess and I even had time to tie us up to the mooring post. “Apparently, this is the only way to talk to you, since you’re not answering your cell phone. Or calling me back.”

“Look, Delia...,” Steve began. He shot an uneasy glance at the tarp, but that just made Delia angrier.

“I can’t believe I’ve been defending you!” she said, climbing right onto the red boat and jabbing a finger at the tarp. “What are you hiding under there? Corals? More orchids?”

Bess and I finished tying up our boat just as Delia yanked on a corner of the tarp.

“Don’t!” Steve yelled. He tried to stop Delia, but it was too late. The tarp flew off, revealing the bulky load underneath.

Bess pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head and glared at Steve. “What’s going on?” she asked.

I was wondering the same thing myself. Heaped in the bottom of the boat were all kinds of digging tools: two shovels, a couple of pickaxes, a big metal sledge-hammer, and some smaller trowels and rakes. At first, all I could do was stare, trying to make sense of it.

“You wouldn’t need all this heavy stuff to poach orchids,” I said, thinking out loud. “A little knife would be enough.”

“Poach?” Steve held up a hand and shook his head back and forth. “You’ve got it all wrong. I’m not poaching. I’m—”

He stopped short and clamped his mouth shut.

“What?” Delia insisted, looking him right in the eye. “Why can’t you tell me? If you’re not breaking the law, then what are you being so secretive about?”

I guess she finally got through to Steve, because he looked pretty embarrassed. “Look, I didn’t want to say anything until after I found it, but you’re right. I owe you the truth,” he began.

“About time,” Bess said under her breath.

Steve shoved his hands into the pockets of his shorts and blew out a long breath. “I’ve been looking for pirate’s gold,” he said.

“Pirate’s gold?” Delia stared at him, as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No. And that’s exactly why I didn’t say anything before. I knew you wouldn’t take me seriously,” Steve said. He sat down on the bench seat that ran along the side of the boat. “Look, everyone knows pirates were all over the Keys back in the old days. Jean Lafitte, Gasparilla, John Rackham, Henry Morgan... They hid treasure all over the place.”

“Really?” Bess’s eyes lit up as she gazed out at the bay. “Sunken ships, pirate’s gold... This place gets more exotic and mysterious every minute,” she said.

Key Largo did have a fairy-tale past, but that didn’t change the fact that everything we’d learned about the poached orchids pointed to Steve as a very real bad guy.

“Are you trying to tell us that when we chased you in the mangroves, you weren’t poaching orchids? You were looking for pirate’s treasure?” I asked.

Steve shifted uncomfortably on the bench seat. “I didn’t poach anything, I promise,” he said. “Maybe I’d better start at the beginning. A couple of days ago, it suddenly hit me that the Salazars might never find the Catarina. I mean, why would they? No one else has.”

“Actually...,” Bess began, but Steve didn’t give her a chance to finish.

“So I bought a map,” he went on. “The real thing—on this old parchment that’s practically falling apart. Chick swears it was made by Jean Lafitte himself and—”

“Wait a minute. You got the map from Chick?” Delia interrupted. “That guy would cheat his own mother! It’s probably a fake, Steve.”

“You don’t have to be so cynical,” he said. “Take a look for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

You can bet Bess and I weren’t going to miss out on that. We scrambled onto the red motorboat as Steve opened a storage compartment next to the bench seat. He pulled out a mottled brown parchment that looked so old and weathered it was hard to make out the ink markings on it. The edges were frayed and crumbling, and in some places there were holes in it. I had to look closely to see the crudely drawn map and faded, old-fashioned handwriting.

“Wow,” Bess said, tilting her head to the side while she scrutinized the map. “Too bad I can’t make heads or tails of this thing.”

“It’s kind of hard to read,” Steve agreed. “That’s because Lafitte buried the treasure in the backcountry. Keeping all the islands straight isn’t easy. There’s Calusa Key, Buttonwood, Manatee, Rabbit Keys...”

As I listened, something about his explanation felt wrong to me. I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

“That one there, with the X, is where the treasure is,” Steve went on, pointing. “I was sure it was Black Betsy Key, but when I went there yesterday—”

“I hate to break it to you, Steve,” Delia interrupted, “but I don’t think this map is as old as it looks.”

“Huh?” Steve glanced up, frowning. “What do you mean?”

“Check it out,” Delia said. She’d been fingering a corner of the parchment. Now she gently scratched it with her fingernail, scraping away the weathered brown surface and revealing a fresh white layer underneath.

“That doesn’t look very old,” Bess commented.

Delia nodded. “Exactly. I think Chick must have taken a new parchment and scraped it thin, then burned the edges and stained the surface with tea or something to make it look old,” she said.

“That can’t be right,” Steve insisted. But when he scratched at another spot, the same thing happened. “I don’t believe this,” he muttered. “I spent the last two days buzzing all over the backcountry trying to find the right island, and now I find out my map isn’t even real!”

“The backcountry?” I repeated. I blinked as it hit me. “That’s it!” I snapped my fingers. “ That’s what didn’t feel right to me!”

Delia, Bess, and Steve all stared at me as if I were some kind of alien that had suddenly beamed down from another planet.

“Steve,” I said, turning to him, “you told us you were looking for Lafitte’s treasure in the backcountry, right?”

“Yeah,” he said, shrugging. “So?”

“ So... the mangrove trails where we chased you aren’t anywhere near the backcountry,” I pointed out. “They’re on the total opposite side of Key Largo. You couldn’t have been in both places at once.”

“You’re right!” Delia breathed. Crossing her arms in front of her, she shot a piercing look at her boyfriend. “No more lies, Steve. I want the truth.”

Steve glanced nervously down at his feet. “It wasn’t me,” he mumbled.

He must have realized how lame he sounded, because he quickly went on, “Really. It’s the truth! Look, when I bought the map, I didn’t exactly pay with money. I traded certain... services.”

“Huh? What kind of services?” Bess asked, crinkling up her nose. But I thought I had a pretty good idea of what he was talking about.

“You lent Chick your mother’s boat?” I guessed.

Steve nodded and said, “I couldn’t believe it when he brought it back with that huge scrape on it. He told me he banged it when he came too close to a channel marker.”

“So you gave the same phony story to your mother, right?” Bess said.

“I didn’t know it was a lie,” Steve insisted. “If I’d known Chick was going to use the boat to poach orchids, I never would have lent it to him.”

For the first time since we’d arrived in Key Largo, I found myself believing him. Maybe the guy had made some dumb choices, but it didn’t look like he was poaching. “That would explain why the guy in the boat wore a baseball cap like Chick’s,” I said, thinking out loud. “It was Chick.”

“Hey!” Delia said, straightening up all of a sudden. “We can’t just sit around here. Not when Chick could be out in the park poaching something right now.”

I felt a little bad about leaving Steve after dropping the bombshell that his treasure map was a fake, but Delia was right. We needed to find out what Chick was up to—and the sooner the better.

“We’ll call you later,” Delia said, as we got back on board the motorboat we’d taken from Pennekamp. We were just pulling away from the dock when she snapped her fingers. “Oh—I almost forgot to tell you,” she called back to Steve. “The Salazars are closing in on the Catarina. They think they’re going to hit the mother lode today!”

“What?” Steve cupped a hand around his ear, yelling over the sound of the motor.

Delia started to tell him again, but then she just waved and said, “Never mind... I’ll tell you later!”

“Boy, is he going to be in for a surprise,” Bess said, as we motored back around the northern tip of Key Largo.

“I’ll say,” I agreed.

“Maybe I should feel sorry for him,” Delia said, tucking her hair behind her ears. “But I just keep thinking how crazy it was for him to trust Chick in the first place. If he’d just been honest with us...”

“We would have found out a lot sooner that it was Chick who we chased in the mangrove trails,” I finished.

Bess’s long hair blew out behind her as Delia picked up speed. “I guess the lure of treasure can make people do crazy things, huh?” she said.

I had to agree. Even as she said it, I found myself wondering what crazy things Chick might be up to. I must have checked my watch a zillion times during the boat ride back to Pennekamp. It was already late morning, and Chick could be anywhere, taking coral, or orchids, or some other rare thing to sell on the black market. The more impatient I got, the slower time seemed to pass. It took forever before we were back at the marina in Pennekamp.

“Where to now?” Bess wondered, as we hurried to Delia’s car.

“Chick’s houseboat,” I said, without hesitating. “He might not be there, but maybe we’ll find some clue to where he is.”

It only took about five minutes to drive to the Pelican Bay Trailer Park. As we made our way along the winding road to the bay, I kept an eye out for Chick’s truck, but I didn’t see it anywhere.

“Doesn’t seem like he’s around,” I said, as we pulled into the empty spot next to his boat.

“Looks like the neighbors might be out too,” Delia commented, glancing at the empty chairs on the deck of the boat next to Chick’s. “At least we won’t get the third degree while we look around.”

The three of us got out of Delia’s car and quickly made our way to Chick’s houseboat. I didn’t see any sign of movement inside. Bess kept glancing nervously next door. Maybe she expected the neighbors to suddenly pop out and surprise us.

“Hey—do you guys hear that?” Delia said, as she stepped onto the rear deck of Chick’s boat.

When I stopped to listen, I did hear it. “Voices,” I said. “I guess Chick is home after all.”

I strode over to the door and knocked loudly.

“Hello?” I called. “Chick?”

Inside, the voices kept on without the slightest pause. It sounded like they were right on the other side of the door, but when I pressed my face against the Plexiglas, I didn’t see anyone. Except for the clothes and dishes and things that were scattered around, Chick’s living area and galley looked deserted.

“Weird,” I said.

“Hey, wait a minute!” Bess said, coming up behind me. “I know those voices...”

As soon as she said it, I realized that I recognized them too. “It’s George!” I said. “And Lucy and Diego Salazar!”