The Mystery of the Cranky Collector - Carey M. V. - Страница 17

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“What’s the matter?” asked Bob.

“Nothing, I guess. I just expected it to feel the way boats usually feel when you step aboard. You know how they seem to be alive? Everything moves just a little. This is so… so dead!”

“Yeah,” Pete agreed. “Like they built it on solid ground with a basement that goes down thirty feet.”

The boys went forward and up a ladder to the bridge, and Jupe tried the keys that the security man had given him. When he found the right one, he opened the door to the wheelhouse. They went in and saw plate-glass windows that were streaked and salty. There were cabinets with drawers under the windows. The wheelhouse itself was trim and shipshape.

“I was expecting more of a mess,” said Bob. “Mr. Pilcher has so much stuff everywhere.”

“Maybe he feels differently about ships,” said Jupe. “Ships aren’t supposed to be hip-deep in clutter.”

“Or maybe he hired someone to be skipper and the guy wouldn’t let him mess up the bridge,” Pete suggested.

Jupe opened a drawer in one of the cabinets. He saw maps neatly lined up, one on top of the other. Jupe thumbed through them. They were nautical charts showing reefs and shallows. Several were for the waters off the coast of South America.

“I wonder how often he went to Colombia,” Jupe said.

“Sogamoso isn’t a port city,” Bob told him. “If he wanted to get there, he’d have to travel in from the coast — or maybe from one of the ports in Venezuela.”

“Hey, I thought we were here to find a bishop’s book,” said Pete. “Where is it?”

“Good question.” Bob began to open one drawer after another, to shuffle through charts. Pete peered into storage cabinets. Jupe checked some open shelves. The boys found books on navigation and some navigational instruments but nothing that could possibly connect to a bishop.

When they had searched every inch of the wheelhouse, Jupe locked the door and the boys climbed down the ladder to the main deck. Cabins opened onto the decks on both sides of the ship. The boys started going through them.

Most appeared to have been unused. Bunks and beds were stripped. Mattresses were turned up. There were signs that the crew’s quarters had been occupied fairly recently. One of the crewmen had left a rumpled T-shirt under his bunk. Crumpled cigarette packs and bits of paper still sat in the waste-baskets.

The Investigators came at last to a cabin that was larger than the others. Blinds were pulled down over windows and the place was quite dark. When Jupe flipped a switch beside the door, there was no flood of light.

“I guess there’s no power aboard the Bonnie Betsy right now,” said Jupe. “She really is a dead ship.”

Leaving the door open so that there would be more light, he went into the cabin. A wide bed was covered with a sheet of plastic. Plastic sheets shrouded chairs and draped tables as well. On the far side of the cabin were shelves and shelves, each with a small ledge in front to keep objects from falling off when the seas were rough.

Jupe saw a flashlight on one of the shelves. He picked it up and snapped it on, then swept the beam back and forth.

“Yep, this is Old Man Pilcher’s cabin!” said Pete.

The shelves were jammed with the clutter that the boys now associated with the old collector. Books and papers were stuck in every which way. A couple of battered tennis balls were crammed in among the books. One leather glove nestled close to a bowling trophy that the Westside Keglers’ Club had awarded to Ernest J. Krebs.

“Why would Pilcher keep a bowling trophy someone else won?” Bob wondered.

“Because it was there,” said Pete.

Jupe stepped forward toward the trophy and almost stumbled over a pile of things on the floor. One of the shelves had split and pulled away from the bulkhead behind it. It had sagged outward, spilling books and papers onto the carpeting. Jupe bent to pick up a book from the top of the pile. It was an extremely old book with a leather cover that was fastened shut with a clasp. The clasp gave out a dull golden gleam when Jupe shone the flashlight on it. The cover was so old that it left flakes of rusty leather on Jupe’s fingers.

Jupe frowned at the design embossed in the leather on the front of the book. It was shaped like a tall, pointed cap. There was a cross on the front of the cap.

Jupe looked toward his friends. “I think this is a picture of a miter,” he said. “That’s the sort of cap a bishop wears. I think we’ve found the bishop’s book!”

He turned toward the door, ready to go out on deck. But his way was blocked. A man stood in the doorway, a husky man with broad shoulders that stretched the cloth of a blue work shirt.

“What’ve you got there?” said the man. He held out a huge calloused hand. “You aren’t going anyplace with that. Give it here!”

Jupe tried to hold on to the book. He couldn’t. The man in the blue shirt yanked him out onto the deck, then wrestled the book away. There wasn’t a thing Jupe could do about it. Two more husky men had appeared. One of them had a length of pipe. He held it loosely in one hand and slapped it into his other palm. He looked longingly at Jupe, as if he really wanted to bring the pipe down on Jupe’s head.

“We’re fed up with you kids coming over the fence and wrecking stuff,” he said. “This time we’re not just going to toss you out the gate. This time you’re going to stay for a while and find out what happens to vandals.”

“We are not vandals!” Jupe was indignant. “We are here at the request of Miss Marilyn Pilcher. We signed in properly. Ask the man at the gate.”

The men looked at one another doubtfully, none willing to admit he might be making a mistake.

“If any harm comes to us, you’ll have to answer to Miss Pilcher,” said Jupe.

“And that’s just for openers,” Pete declared.

“We’re friends of Police Chief Reynolds,” added Bob. “Go ahead! Call the Rocky Beach Police Department and tell them you’ve got Jupiter Jones and Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews. See what they say!”

“What do you think, Bo?” said one of the men.

“They’re snowin’ us,” said the man who had the book. Just the same, he looked back toward the gate where the boys had checked in.

“I’m goin’ to make sure,” said the third man. He set out at a trot for the gate.

The others waited, and in minutes the big man was back. The gateman was with him. He looked at the boys, gave a quick nod, and said, “Yeah, that’s them. I let ’em through myself not half an hour ago.”

“Oh.” The fellow with the book seemed very disappointed. “Okay, you can go back to whatever you were doing,” he said.

“I’d like that book, if you don’t mind,” said Jupiter.

The man handed it over. “Sorry, kid, but we’ve had a lot of trouble here.”

The men drifted off and the security guard returned to his post. Jupe and his friends watched them go. When they had disappeared into the jungle of beached yachts that covered the quay, Jupe took a deep breath and looked at the book in his hands.

“You’re shaking,” Pete accused.

“Nonsense!” said Jupiter, mentally telling his hands to hold steady. “Those men were bluffing. They wouldn’t have done anything.”

He pried open the catch that held the book closed and lifted the front cover. The spine creaked as if it might split and send pages raining down onto the deck. But the book didn’t come apart, and Jupe began to turn the pages. They felt as fragile as autumn leaves, dry, ready to crumble. A gap in the middle of the book showed where some pages had been cut out.

“It’s a diary, or something like a diary,” said Jupe. “It’s handwritten, and there are dates. It starts with ‘Enero.’ That’s Spanish for January. On January first the bishop — if he’s the one who wrote the book — he was at… at a place called Santa Fe de Bogota.”

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