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

“Absolutely not. He was violently opposed to drugs,” said Estava. “Pilcher used to fire employees just because they were rumored to use illegal drugs. Check with Marilyn if you don’t want to take my word for it.”

Jupe thanked him. Estava then gave Jupiter his telephone number and hung up.

“This case is full of loose ends,” said Jupe, “and none of them seem to connect anywhere. I don’t think we’re any closer to finding Mr. Pilcher than we were two days ago.”

“I bet Sogamoso isn’t going to help us either,” said Pete. “By the time Marilyn goes there and finds the right old woman, her dad could be dead.”

“Of natural causes,” agreed Bob, “like old age. Okay, what’s the next step?”

“Mrs. Pilcher suggested that we search the Bonnie Betsy ,” said Jupiter. “We have already been over the house with a fine-tooth comb, so why not try the yacht? Marilyn must know where it’s moored.”

“And if we find the bishop’s book, she may get her dad back,” said Bob. “Then he can tell her firsthand about the old woman and the tears of the gods.”

Jupiter called Mrs. Pilcher’s house in Santa Monica. Marilyn answered the telephone. She told them her father’s yacht was in dry dock at the Central Coast Marine Corporation. “It’s that shipyard on Bowsprit Drive,” she said. “I’ll phone there and tell them you’re coming so they’ll let you go aboard the yacht.”

Soon the boys were riding their bikes up the Coast Highway. Twenty minutes of brisk pedaling brought them to the Bowsprit Drive turnoff.

Bowsprit ran onto a man-made finger of land that jutted out from the shore for more than a mile. A yacht club and a series of ships’ chandlers occupied the south side of this jetty. On the north were several shipyards. Central Coast Marine was about a quarter mile in from the highway. It was protected by a businesslike cyclone fence and by a gate where a uniformed security man kept watch from a small guardhouse.

Jupiter and his friends skidded to a halt at the gate and Jupe identified himself to the guard.

“Oh, yes, Miss Pilcher phoned,” said the man. “I was expecting somebody older, but if Miss Pilcher says it’s okay to let you in, I guess it’s okay. Sign in here.”

He thrust a notebook at them. They signed the book and he noted the time beside their signatures, then took a bunch of keys from a pegboard behind him and held them out to Jupe. “The cabins and the wheelhouse on the Bonnie Betsy are locked. You’ll need these.”

He pointed to the right. “Go down that way past that schooner — you see the one that’s having her bottom scraped? — and you’ll see the Bonnie Betsy . She’s in the dry dock down the quay. You can’t miss her. Big ship with a black hull and the name in gold on her stern.”

The boys thanked him and rode on, feeling the breeze that came fresh from the ocean. Gulls circled and swooped overhead, screaming harshly. The air was now filled with the smell of kelp and the fishy odor of the barnacles drying on the hulls of the boats that had been hauled out of the water for repairs.

Most of the boats the boys passed were large sailboats, wooden or fiberglass pleasure craft from forty to sixty feet long. The Bonnie Betsy , when they found her, turned out to be quite different. She was practically a small ocean liner. She had a black steel hull and a white-painted superstructure that gave her the look of a luxury cruise ship.

“Wow!” said Pete. “Old Man Pilcher wasn’t kidding around when he bought that one!

“He didn’t pinch pennies there,” said Bob.

The ship had not been hoisted out of the water like the smaller yachts the boys had seen. Instead she had been floated into a huge concrete trench called a dry dock. Gigantic waterproof gates on the seaward side of the trench had been closed. The water had been pumped out, leaving the Bonnie Betsy high and dry. She rested now on steel struts inside the dry dock.

A gangway led from the quay to the ship. Jupe was the first to cross. As he stepped onto the deck of Pilcher’s vessel he let out a small sound that was part surprise and part disappointment.

“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.