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I absolutely loved this book! With all the mystery and action I couldn’t put it down. It was great how someone like Charlie could take out all those goons when no one thought he could. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves mystery. And if you need to read a book, this is definitely the one to read. I can’t wait for another one.

--Jon Nelson, age 15

From the first page I knew this would be a great book. It was ad- venturous, exciting, and surprising. Charlie is different from any ev- eryday kid.

When other kids are out doing ordinary things, he’s figuring out a mystery. What I liked best about Charlie is that he’s independent. What I liked best about Spooks is how Charlie could think his way out of things.

--Christopher Soule, age 10

Chapter One

Talking to Q (Charlie)

So there I was at one in the morning, sitting on the sand at Menemsha, my legs folded Indian style, talking to a statue, and unable to escape the feeling that someone was watching. I couldn’t remember ever having felt that before and it kind of rattled me.

But then, in the summer, at Menemsha, even at one a.m., there are people around. Every slip in the marina was taken and now and then cars came and went from the parking lot. Even so I kept looking over my shoulder. You need to know that this is not just any statue, no way, I mean like, if you think I’m the kinda guy goes around talking to statues, you’re thinking of somebody else. Me? I only talk to this statue, the only statue in Menemsha, and it’s no ordinary statue of some famous general or president, but of a guy standing on a swordfish getting ready to hurl a harpoon. It’s a great statue, even if the sculptor did mess up on the tail. Swordfish have a vertical tail not horizontal but he made it look as if the tail is horizontal to give the harpooner a place to stand, and that would have been okay if he’d made a twist in the body of the fish to explain why the tail is horizontal. I guess you call that artistic license, but it seems to me that it wouldn’t have hurt the statue to have made the tail look right, especially since it was meant to honor the sword fishermen who go out from Menemsha.

Despite that, from the time it went up, something about the harpooner always fascinated me.

I don’t remember when I first started talking to him or even why except that at some time every guy needs someone to talk to and the harpooner never talks back. I guess probably there’s more to it than that and I think it has something to do with the way the harpooner stands, sort of erect, as if he were waiting patiently for the great fish to surface and offer him a target.

Or maybe not.

Maybe such things can never be known. All I can say is that I feel a connection to the statue. For now that’s enough. That doesn’t mean I won’t wonder about it from time to time because there’s no way I can’t wonder. Sometimes you have to follow your head just to find out where it leads.

Of course I’ve been stopped by the local cops in Chilmark, well, not stopped, really, because I was always just sitting there, but they assumed that a guy my age (16) just sitting on the sand at one in the morning looking at a statue had to be doing drugs.

But I told them that it was just a good place to sit and think and sort things out and after that they let me alone. Still, I wouldn’t want it to get out, and I told them that, because you can imagine how much grief I’d get if any kids knew I was talking to a statue.

Guys like me, tough guys, guys who can handle themselves, can’t allow something like that to bite a chunk out of their reputation, because you wind up in fights and then things get really ugly.

More to the point, people take notice of you and in my line of work, the closer you can stay to anonymous, the better. No private investigator wants to be famous. It gets in the way and people won’t answer questions.

The thing is, I don’t have a lot of choice here. The way I see it, the harpooner is Quequeeg, the Indian in Moby Dick, and he is my guru, he’s the guy I talk to when a problem pops up that has no easy solution and threatens to overload my circuits.

And on July fifteenth I had a problem, well not my problem because guys like me, Charles Oliver Jones, Private Investigator, solve other people’s problems.

Now, let me be upfront here. I don’t carry a heater because guys my age can’t get a license to carry a gun. And for the same reason I don’t have a private investigator’s license either. In fact, I don’t even have any clients. But none of that matters in the end, because the short of it is, I can solve mysteries and crimes and when you’re starting out in any business, you have to develop the right reputation before you can attract the kind of work that pays for gas and rent. So, you take what you can get. For example, when cookies began to disappear at home, I staked out the cookie jar by hiding in the broom closet and when my dad stuck his hand into the cookie jar, I videotaped him and turned the tape over to Mom. Took her by surprise, I can tell you, because she had it in her mind that the dude purloining the goodies was none other than yours truly.

And when my friend Pete Heyward’s bike got stolen, I got it back within a week while the Edgartown cops (I live in Edgartown on the island called Martha’s Vineyard) spent their time directing the tourist traffic. Well, that’s not quite fair, because they also have a lot of other stuff going on, especially in the summer when our island literally crawls with people from the outside, a lot of them wobbling around on mopeds and running into nearly anything vertical.

Getting the bike back was simple enough. All it took was old fashioned detective work, going from bike shop to bike shop. I found the bike at the Round Wheel Bike Shop. It was in the used bike section. Of course, it helped that Pete’s bike is a red Klein mountain bike and I had the serial number. The guy who owned the shop said he’d bought the bike from a guy looking to raise some money, and at first he wasn’t gonna give it back, but the fact that I had the serial number from the bike made it easier to convince him to surrender it to Pete.

Naturally, the cops had a hand in this, because I make a point of letting the cops in early on any investigation, and, as a result, I get excellent cooperation, which is not something most private eyes get much of from the police. The way I see it, I’m a great help to them because the cases I take are usually pretty low on their list of hot crimes. And I’ve gotten to know Chief Espinoza, who’s a golfing and fishing buddy of my dad’s, pretty well in the past year and he helps me out whenever he can. The truth is, in my business, you don’t survive very long unless you’re in with the police. Like in the bike caper, it was the fingerprints I asked the cops to lift from the bike that led to the real bike thief, one Bobby Ray Hopkins, who’d already been busted twice for drugs, so his prints were on file.

Then Chief Espinoza went a step farther and used the prints to connect Hopkins to a stickup at the Shell station on the Oak Bluffs Road. It was my suggestion, based on the review I’d made of the tapes from the security cameras at the RapidoMart.

The reason I got to look at those tapes was because the owner, Mr. Fernandez, had kept a copy and, to his mind, the police weren’t acting quickly enough.

What I saw on the tapes was that while the stickup man had worn a ski mask and clothes that you can buy anywhere, the reflector on the back of his left Nike had gone missing. Like they say, the Devil is in the details.

So I made a point of being there when they brought Hopkins in for questioning, and sure enough, the reflector was missing from the back of his left Nike. After that they ran his prints against the prints they’d lifted in the RapidoMart and Bingo! A perfect match.

That’s just a couple of examples of the cases I’ve cracked, and right now I’ve got the idea that I’m the hottest item since Sherlock Holmes. Hey, if you haven’t got confidence, you haven’t got anything.

The thing about Chief Bart Espinoza is that he’s one smart, honest cop who’s worked hard to get where he is. What’s surprising is that he takes me seriously. What adult takes a guy who is sixteen seriously?

To make up for the lack of credibility I get from being thought of as a kid, I’ve read all the books on criminology that the library could get for me. That’s how I got to know Dr. Ted Lambert. He teaches at UMass and summers in Edgartown, and Mrs. Harricomb, the librarian, told him about me and we met a number of times.

He’s a nice guy and he gave me some other books to read and I took notes too. He even let me take some of his old tests and I absolutely hammered them. All A’s. He’s trying to get the college to give me credit for two courses in criminology. Yeah, and any second now pigs will start teaching high school ... come to think of it, maybe some already do. I looked up at the statue, the figure so still and poised and it bothered me that he wasn’t crouched, his body coiled like a rattler ready to strike. And yet, I liked the feeling of patience, the fisherman waiting and waiting and waiting ... the way all fishermen wait for time and tide.

Now, talking to statues is probably not what most people think of as normal, but then I almost never do anything that anyone would think of as normal. But there are things to talk about and in my kind of business I can’t go blabbing away to just anyone. This stuff is secret.

Again, unable to shake the feeling that someone was watching, I looked over my shoulder. I stood up and walked to the top of the nearest dune. The parking lot was empty but for my truck. Most of the boats in the slips and along the pier were dark.

I shrugged, blamed it on my imagination and walked back and dropped into the sand below the statue. "Q ..." I called him Q, for short. "I think I’m gonna need your help on this one," I said. "I’m pretty sure my next door neighbor, Mrs. Abigail Waters, was murdered, but I’m the only one who thinks so. Since I was twelve I cut her grass and shoveled her sidewalk and took out her trash. Nobody paid me for that. I just did it because she was always a very nice old lady who told me lots of amazing stories.

"But over the last year, well, her memory began to go and I told my folks about it and because my dad was her lawyer, he got some people in to help her. Then I got on the Internet and tracked down some relatives, you know nieces and nephews and such.

"They had all thought Aunt Abby had died years ago, so they were surprised to hear from me. But none of them came to help, or even to visit. Both Mom and Dad checked on Mrs. Waters every day and I stopped by nearly as often.

"Dad had gotten power of attorney so he could take care of her affairs and he paid her bills and kept everything up to date. There was plenty of money from a government pension, and more from trust funds and annuities, so money was not a problem.

"I went on cutting the grass and pruning the bushes, and Dad paid me but I would have done it for nothing. She’d always been nice to me and when she was pretty much helpless, it was my duty to help take care of her.

"After a while, we hired a very nice woman, named Norma, to live in the house because Abby’s memory was so bad that she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten a meal. "Mom and Norma made sure Mrs. Waters got to the doctor for checkups but apart from her memory there was nothing wrong with her except that she was ninety-six, and when you’re that old, nothing works very well.

"Knowing old people has given me a great advantage, Q, and I’m always surprised when I hear kids calling them old fogies. It seems to me that the old fogies got us to where we are now and that they have some pretty cool stuff to tell us if we’re willing to listen. Some of it seems pretty old fashioned but lately I’ve had the idea that maybe I haven’t always understood what they’re really saying.

"Some afternoons after school I went over and sat around with Norma and Mrs. Waters and it was kind of sad because I could remember lots of afternoons I’d spent listening to Mrs. Waters’ neat stories and now she ... well, she didn’t really talk much anymore.

"On June sixteenth, Mrs. Waters died. The doctor said it was a heart attack. Things got a little strange when one of the nephews, Whembly Kerry, showed up and moved in.

"He’s a short man, built like a barrel with a bald head and a black mustache. His narrow eyes are black like the lumps of coal I put in the snowmen I used to make when we got enough snow.

"Of course Dad told him he couldn’t stay but he wouldn’t leave. He said to Dad, ‘so you’re one of the leeches, is that it? One of the miserable people around here who was stealing away all of Auntie Abby’s money? All you people around here were trying to get into her good graces so she’d change her will,’ he said.

"This guy was not only nasty, but he obviously thought Abby’d had a lot of money, and he wanted to make sure he was included in the estate.

"Dad stayed pretty calm. He told Whembly once again that he would have to leave and if he refused, Dad said he’d get a court order."

I looked up at the figure standing out against the sky and shook my head. The knees should have been bent more, the body leaning back so you could see the power and the energy as he got ready to throw the harpoon. But then I’m always too picky. I want everything to be perfect and nothing ever works out that way. Maybe it’s just that the statue is so close to being perfect.

"So what’s that all about, huh, Q? I mean, once you’ve been a P.I. for a while, you begin to develop a sixth sense about whether people are hiding something, and in my opinion this guy is up to something that’s either illegal or immoral or both.

"Anyway, we were standing there, with this guy lighting into us like he’d discovered a pair of socialists on his porch, and he says, ‘You people around here, you’re all alike, trying to take advantage of a poor old lady so you could get her money. Oh no, you can’t fool a man like me, I know leeches when I see ’em!’

"There was no point in saying anything but it seemed to me there might be something to gain by taunting this guy, so I gave it a try.

"I remembered the strange man who had called one afternoon when I was there with Norma and Abby, and I wondered how he’d react to that information, so I asked him why he hadn’t come to visit Abby like the English guy had?

"He bit like a big bass with a herring in his sights. ‘Who was it? Did you talk to him? Where did he come from? What did he look like?’ I didn’t answer because sometimes the best way to draw people out is to say nothing. It worked. ‘Was he tall and dark, a thin man wearing a dark suit?’

"‘Not exactly,’ I said.

"‘He was old, wasn’t he? Had a short mustache? A foreigner. They knew lots of foreigners.’ He seemed almost to snarl at me. ‘I know who that was all right. Another leech!’

"The guy who’d come to visit didn’t look anything like that. He’d said Henry and Abby had been close friends of his family years ago. He was a little older than Dad, and very nice and polite, and he came in to visit but Abby didn’t recognize him.

"But now I knew that Mr. Kerry was worried about a tall, old man with a moustache, and most likely an Englishman. That night I began my surveillance. I watched from the dark with my binoculars as Whembly went from room to room, checking into every drawer in every piece of furniture, pulling apart all of the closets. What I was watching was a man looking for something and, Q, the only something I could think of was a will.

"And then I began thinking about how healthy Abby had been right up until she died, so I went to see Doctor Alcorn, who is also our family doctor. I asked him about her heart attack and whether there had been an autopsy. He told me there had been and that it was definitely a heart attack, but he also said it had pretty much surprised him because her heart had been very strong. She hadn’t been taking any medications except some Motrin for her arthritis, but even that wasn’t much of a problem.

"The only real problem, he told me, was something called dementia, which was what had happened to her memory." I got up from the cool sand. "What I’d like your opinion on, Q, is whether I should continue my investigation or just forget about it? I don’t have anything that would interest the police and there’s no evidence that she was murdered. The only evidence I have is that there’s a shady character living in her house who is looking for something. I’m thinking about putting a tap on the phone line, which is easy enough to do just by running a wire from the box on the outside of the house over to my office, but that would be a pretty clear violation of the law. Of course, as any P.I. can tell you, sometimes, to find things out, you have to ignore the law.

"The thing is, Q, I know there’s something going on and if I can find out what, then maybe I can put to rest the idea that she was murdered." I sighed and stuffed my hands into my pockets. "Tomorrow I’m going downtown to look up the medical examiner’s report, which is perfectly legal because it’s a public document. I’ll get a copy made and then try to figure out what it means.

"What I need is a reason why somebody would want to kill her. She was just a nice, harmless old lady. At least I think she was." I shrugged. "What I need to do is think about this whole thing because I have this idea that there is a whole lot I don’t understand. It’s the best part of being a P.I., Q. It’s like having a license to be nosey."

I walked down off the dunes, my trench coat belted and buttoned, my slouch hat pulled low over my face, and walked to my truck, trying to look casual but scanning in all directions. Nothing. I began to relax.

It was going to be an interesting summer, I thought, but then every summer on the Vineyard is interesting. There are simply a lot of things to do. I sail a lot in our J-24 and I spend plenty of time fishing for bass and blues, bonito and false albacore, both from the beaches and from our other boat, a twenty-four foot Grady White with two big Yamaha outboards. I climbed into my truck. It’s an old four-wheel drive GMC that I restored last year. I’ve got a permit to drive the beaches and I spend a lot of time firing plugs out into the surf. I also have a parking permit for Aquinnah because my folks own a cottage there which they rent out and that’s where I was headed just then: Lobsterville.

I also have a commercial license which allows me to sell what I catch to the fish markets when I catch more than what we can eat fresh at home.

As I came up to the stop sign I saw a man walking along the road. When I passed, he turned his head away as if he didn’t want me to see him, which meant there had been someone watching. But why? Somehow I had a notion that I’d find out soon enough.

At the stop sign I saw a lone car parked at the restaurant and I turned that way, took down the plate number, just in case, and then began the run out to Lobsterville.

It was 2 a.m. by the time I parked and got my rod off the roof rack and walked down to the beach to begin casting. That I was off fishing, was, of course, the only excuse I needed to visit Q. Plan ahead.

On my fifth cast I had a fish on. A good fish. And from the way he fought I knew it was a striper. Man, do I like eating striped bass, and this one was a keeper.

I cleaned the fish and put it in the fish box loaded with ice in the back of truck, thinking about the guy who had been watching. It was making me nervous. But hey, it’s the kind of thing you expect in my business.

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