Chapter 3: Questions Must be asked!
Andrew and James talked it over for a bit and decided they could do more damage if they split up. James went in search of legal information regarding The Bouncing Skipper and Andrew went to ask questions of the locals.
It took James a couple of hours to find where in town to go and he had to wait his turn due to the other reporters all wanting to look at the same documentation. But eventually James managed to see for himself that the Bouncing Skipper was owned and captained, or at least had been owned and captained, by a local named Walter Matthias.
Andrew managed to find out a bit more on the subject. His winning smile and disarming innocence worked in his favor and soon several of the local sailors were confiding in him at a local bar. There had been only two ships enter the harbor in the last 36 hours. The first had been the Bouncing Skipper, captained by Walter Matthias. It had arrived from Boston with a nearly empty hold. About twelve hours later a second ship had anchored, The Hydra Queen, also out of Boston and also with a nearly empty hold.
“Walter Matthias was a scared man,” one of the men told to Andrew.
“Scared?” said Andrew.
“Yeah,” agreed another “He was scared, but it wasn’t until that other ship, The Hydra Queen arrived in port.” There was a chorus of agreement from the rest of the men.
“Did he say what he was scared of?”
“I asked him that in this very room,” said the first speaker, “He muttered something crazy and left. He said something was coming after him out of the sea or something like that. Made no sense. Then he walked out of here and I never saw him again. Poor guy’s probably dead now and at the bottom of the sea, God rest him.”
“I wonder if we will ever know what happened?” asked Andrew with a sigh and a shake of his head.
“I know who might have seen something if anyone would think to ask him,” chuckled a big brawny man, on of the dock workers.
“Who would that be?”
“Fred Jenkins, a local lad. I do believe I saw him earlier that night with Tracy, his girl. Walking the piers they was, holding hands. I’ll bet they was still around when it happened.”
“Fred Jenkins, you say,” said Andrew pulling out his notebook, “You know where he lives?”
The Jenkins house was not hard to find. Fred jenkins, the oldest child in the family, Andrew had been told, was seventeen. He was supposed to be in school but fortunately for Andrew he was not. He was at home. Alone. And hiding something. Or at least that was the impression Andrew received when the door opened and he first saw the young man’s face.
“Can I help you?”
“Are you Fred? I just wanted to ask you a few questions,” said Andrew with a smile, “I understand you might have been walking along the docks last night?”
The young man started and then said quickly, “I am sorry. I don’t know what you are talking about. Please excuse me!” And then he slammed the door shut. There was the sound of a bolt being slid home.
“Hmm,” said Andrew to himself, “Well perhaps Tracy will be more help.”
Tracy Penny was also home alone and by the look of her face she had been crying. She was a sixteen year old girl and proved to be much more receptive to Andrew’s dimpled smile and consoling words.
“You have to promise you won’t tell anyone,” said Tracy. They were sitting in the living room. She was rocking in her seat slightly.
“Tell anyone what?”
“You see,” she said with a bit of a sniffle into a paper handkerchief, “We weren’t either of us supposed to be out last night. We snuck out you see.”
“Ohh.”
“We didn’t do nothing, just walked and held hands, but we heard things. There was shouting from that ship and someone screamed and it looked like there was a funny looking man aboard. He threw something in the water that looked like a body.”
“What did you do?”
“We ran. Both of us but we ran right into an ugly old man. He had these huge staring eyes and was bald all over his big head. He was walking funny and he had a cane, a cane with a golden head. He scared us half to death!”
“Was he green or something?”
“What,” said Tracy with a blink, like she almost remembered something she didn’t want to, then she laughed, as if the question was a joke, “No. He wasn’t green. But… But there was something… He did smell sort of funny…”
“He smelled funny?”
“Yes, like rotting fish…”
There was not much more to be learned from Tracy Penny and soon Andrew found James who, in fact, had in turn been searching for Andrew. They traded stories.
James, listening to Andrew’s account of Tracy’s story. When Andrew got to the part about strange and ugly man, James thought of Hugh Roger’s Neptunians and asked with a smile, “Was he green?”
