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Terror on the Tide

I couldn’t put this book down! By the time I hit page twelve, it was glued to my hands. Terror on the Tide combines everything I like to read about: football, adventures, and mysteries. I think this was Mr. Holland’s best book yet!

-- Stan Dutton, age 15

In this eerily timely mystery, Charles Oliver Jones takes on a terrorist plot.

I loved the way the book was presented from the two main character’s points of view, and it was great to see Charlie Dollarhide appear again.

Charlie and Pete also have great senses of humor, even when they are in danger. This book is not only a real page-turner, it is a triumph!

-- Joey Myers, age 13

Chapter One

Jetsam (by Charlie)

The jetsam started coming ashore early Sunday morning on the incoming tide, washing up on the beach at Gay Head. I heard about it when Charlie Dollarhide, who had been fishing the early tide with his Dad, called me on his cell phone at six in the morning.

Even though it was kind of on the early side, I called my best friend, teammate, and partner Pete Heyward. He was not pleased. But I knew he wouldn’t be. Pete’s not exactly an early riser to begin with, and on the weekends he sleeps in as long as he can, which means till his mother wakes him up for breakfast. So he was kind of ... grumpy, maybe even a little over the top.

"Dude! You called me in the middle of the night, you woke me up to tell me a bunch of junk washed ashore at Gay Head?" He groaned. "Do I care, do I even give a ...!" It was, after all, two days after the Nauset Regional game, which had turned into a major struggle. For some reason our offensive line kept coming off the snap late, and not once did they hold the pocket, which meant that Pete had spent the whole game using his wheels to escape the defenders and get his passes off.

What he did was demonstrate that he could scramble and throw accurately on the run. We won, but only by a touchdown. By the end of the game he was dragging.

"I’m sorry about waking you," I said, "but this is not ordinary stuff. This is personal belongings and anything that could be thrown overboard to keep a ship afloat. It’s the kind of stuff that used to wash ashore a hundred years ago when sailing ships were taking on water and the crew threw stuff overboard to lighten the load!"

"Tell me about it in the morning, dude. I gotta get all the sleep I can before I gotta go to church." He hung up. Me? Complain? No way. Pete, after all, had rescued me from geekdom just a few months ago and I owed him a debt I could never repay. For three years in high school I was the guy nobody wanted to be seen talking to and now I was one of the guys everybody wanted to talk to.

I made the coffee, toasted up a fat bagel, covered it with cream cheese and smoked salmon, left a note for my folks, and headed up-Island in the old pickup I had restored the winter before I got my driver’s license.

It is one cool truck: four-wheel drive, a big V-8 engine and like they say in the commercials, "Built Ford Tough". It does use more than a little gas but on Martha’s Vineyard people own cars for ten years and never get to thirty thousand miles. That cuts down on the gas you use but the gas stations on the Island charge nearly a buck more than on the mainland, so it probably evens out. But who’s counting? Certainly not me. I make enough putting up and taking down signs for my mother’s real estate business to cover my expenses.

At that time of day in the off-season there was no traffic and not even the cops were out. We’ve got a lot of cops on the Island. For reasons no one understands, every town has its own force. Fortunately, in the off-season, they’re pretty laid back, which meant I could travel a little faster than normal … well maybe even a little faster than that. Even so, by the time I got there, the Coast Guard guys had arrived and were just dragging the last of the jetsam out of the water and up above the high tide line. Nobody knew what to make of it. They had no reports of any ship in trouble (and it would have had to have been a ship, judging by the amount of jetsam. It sat in a long twisting row for a hundred yards down the beach).

I’d never met C.D.’s dad before. He and C.D. look a lot alike except that C.D. has blue eyes. His father’s eyes are almost black and he looks like what he is: a Mohawk. It’s impressive.

He smiled and we shook hands. "Nice to meet you, Charlie," he said, "you guys are having a heck of a season."

"All the receivers have to do is run downfield and hold up our hands and Pete finds us." He laughed. "He’s got one heck of an arm but he’s also got three guys who can catch the ball and then run with it."

"It’s pretty cool," I said. I swept my hand to the side, pointing at the stuff on the beach. "I’ve never seen so much jetsam."

"Jetsam?" C.D. said. "What the heck is jetsam? Sounds like a weird name for a cat."

I laughed. "It’s the stuff the crew throws overboard to lighten the load when their boat’s in distress. Flotsam’s the stuff that floats after a boat has sunk."

Mr. Dollarhide laughed. "Now that, I never knew." Chief Platt from the Coast Guard Station walked up behind us. "Jetsam is right. All jetsam and no flotsam." He took off his baseball cap, ran a hand over his short, black hair, and then replaced the cap. "And it’s old, like it came off a ship from a hundred years ago."

It was a subject I knew a lot about. After all, Martha’s Vineyard is an island, and islands have three-hundred and sixty degrees of shoreline where things can wash up. I could remember when I was younger and I used to walk miles and miles of our beaches, hoping to be there when stuff started to wash up.

It never happened, at least in any big way, but doing that got me interested in the history of the Island and that history is mostly about boats and ships.

So, I filled in the blanks. "Ships," I said, "used to run aground in these waters all the time, but more over on the Cape because of the shoals and the way the ships had to sail across a northeast wind in a storm. The combination of the storm winds and heavy seas kept driving them closer to land, and keeping them from tacking out to safer water. "

C.D. laughed. "As usual, Charlie’s got the information."

"I read a lot."

"Apparently a whole lot and a whole lot more than the rest of us," Chief Platt said. "But what we need now are workers and I wondered if you guys could help us gather this stuff into a pile so we can take it back to the station and look it over."

For the next hour we picked up articles of clothing and boxes of ship’s stores, even pieces of tables and chairs and carried them back to the parking lot, where we tossed them into a pile. The whole time I grew steadily more curious and I knew I’d be spending a good deal more time trying to find an explanation. It was what I did. It was what Charles Oliver Jones, private investigator, did.

Of course, a real private eye wouldn’t have bothered unless he had a paying client, but then I wasn’t a real private eye. I didn’t have a license and I couldn’t even get a license because I wasn’t old enough. I’d looked into it. There was also the matter of needing to have some experience, like having been a cop. No way could I qualify for anything but office boy.

And of course I couldn’t carry a gun because you have to be twenty-one to get a permit and that was four years away.

C.D. and I stood next to the pile of stuff while Chief Platt and Mr. Dollarhide stood over by the cars. The rest of the Coast Guard crew, three of them, sat on the seawall talking and laughing.

"What do you think happened?" C.D. asked. I shrugged, picked up a sodden blue shirt, shook it, until I could find the top, and then looked inside the collar for a label. No label. But it wasn’t just missing. It had been snipped away.

"See if you can find a label on something," I said. Not only did we not find any labels, we didn’t even find any markings.

"Wow," C.D. said, "is this weird or what?" "Yeah, pretty weird," I said.

C.D., who has a great imagination, hardly hesitated in making a leap into the mystic. "You think maybe it was a ghost ship?"

I grinned, reached out, and gave him a gentle shove.

"Give it up, dude," I said. "There aren’t any ghost ships." His eyes were wide and I could see he wasn’t convinced. But he also wasn’t about to mention it again. You can’t be too careful about things like that. First thing you know somebody blabs and then everyone is on your case about it, especially the girls.

Of course, that was less likely to happen to C.D. now that he was a certified football dude. The guys on the team might ride him but anybody else would be very careful.

"Hey, Charlie," Mr. Dollarhide called, "we gotta go."

He turned to me. "Are you gonna investigate this?"

I shrugged. "Maybe."

"You oughta," he said.

"Pretty tough," I said. "There’s absolutely nothing to go on here. And besides, I don’t have a client and I only work when someone hires me."

"That is so cool … hey, gotta run. See you tomorrow."

"Hey!"

He stopped and looked back.

"How was the fishing?"

"Lousy. We never got a single hit." I walked over to the pile of jetsam and stood staring at it, trying to get my mind to stop grabbing at the fantastic. But it was hard. I’d watched Pirates of the Caribbean way too many times.

What you do at a time like that is try to make your eyes focus on the smallest detail and then give your mind time to figure out what you’re looking at. I picked up item after item, examined it and set it to the side.

When I focus, I stop hearing anything around me. People can talk to me and I answer but I don’t remember what was said and I don’t even remember who talked to me. About fifteen items in, I picked up a pair of pants. I needed to have someone from the Historical Society look at this stuff, I thought, maybe somebody who knew what clothes looked like in the past.

And then as I held the pants up I noticed a bulge in the pocket. I dug my hand in and pulled out a lighter, a cigarette lighter made by BIC. It answered one thing, anyway.

"Chief?" I called.

He walked toward me. "Find something?"

I tossed him the lighter.

He looked at it and smiled. "Well, I’m guessing that probably eliminates ghost ships."

"Still leaves a few doors open, though," I said. "That it does." He looked at me as though he were seeing me for the first time. "You get the chance and you want to come by the station and go through this stuff, feel free."

"Maybe this afternoon sometime?"

"We’ll get it all spread out."

"Have your men check all the pockets."

"Got any other advice?"

I looked at him, decided he was not being sarcastic and nodded. "I think it’d be good to know how old some of the rope is. It doesn’t look right to me."

Chief Platt nodded. "I know a guy who can tell us. I’ll get him to come over and take a look."

"The more experts the better." I looked up at the water, letting my eyes drift toward the horizon, wondering if anymore of this gear was on its way toward the beach. I tossed the pants onto the pile.

"About one o’clock okay?" I asked.

"See you then."

I climbed into my truck and headed back down-Island. What I needed to do right now was curl up in my office and let my mind go to work. But I also needed another cup of coffee and the only place open was in Vineyard Haven. It was still too early for Kronig’s Up-Island Market, and I thought there must be another place somewhere up-island, but the thing is, once the summer trade falls off a lot of places close up and here we were over halfway through October. I’d never spent much time up-Island. If you live in Edgartown, or even anywhere down-Island, you don’t go to Aquinnah or Chilmark or even West Tisbury unless it’s to fish or to visit friends, and I didn’t have a long list of friends. I’d spent too long being the weird guy in the trench coat and slouch hat and only since the first game in September had that begun to change. It was like coming out of hiding and I wasn’t sure I knew how to handle it.

Another wrinkle in the road to growing up. Then I remembered Alley’s store, and in the center of Chilmark I turned down the South Road to West Tis, as it’s commonly called.

The store was open, the coffee was on, and already people were coming in to pick up their Sunday papers. Most everybody buys the Cape Cod Times and one other paper, The Boston Globe or The New York Times. That tells you a lot about the Vineyard. It also makes Dad pretty grumpy, which is why he got all excited when The Wall Street Journal came out with its Saturday edition this year. Now, he only reads the news in the other papers and not the editorials. In the Journal he reads the entire op-ed section, every piece, every word.

I’ve started doing that too, and I also read the financial news because with the money Mrs. Waters left me, I figured that I ought to know something about how to invest money. What I didn’t understand about that, Dad explained. Instead of taking my coffee with me, I hung around the store and listened to what people said. It wasn’t much. Mostly a few good mornings, but for awhile I listened to two older men, probably in their seventies.

"You hear about the stuff washed up out to Gay Head?" one asked.

"No, haven’t heard a thing."

"Coast Guard’s hauling it away. Take two dump truck loads at least, s’what I heard."

"What was it?"

"Well, I heard it was mostly clothes and some boxes full of drugs"

"Drugs, huh? Well, why doesn‘t that surprise me? Whole island’s a drug runner’s paradise. Any island is. Too much coastline to keep track of."

"Well, at least this bunch won’t get on the street." The subject changed and I drifted back to the counter for a second cup of coffee, smiling at how fast the rumor mill had got to grinding. I hadn’t seen any drugs in the few boxes we’d opened, mostly just canned goods and some kind of hard biscuits.

I headed out of West Tisbury and on down the South Road, wondering now about those boxes, because it had occurred to me that it probably wouldn’t be so hard to pack some drugs in cans and bottles to make them look like something else.

It was also pretty clear that whether I had a client or not didn’t matter.

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