A Treacherous Tide Read online

  1 SHARK!

  FRANK

  I STOOD ATOP THE CLEAR, AQUA-COLORED water, the gentle current lapping at the edges of my stand-up paddleboard as a warm island breeze tickled my cheeks.

  “This is the life.” I sighed, letting the long paddle rest idly in the water while our group waited for the woman paddling toward us from the sixty-five-foot research vessel anchored a hundred yards offshore from Lookout Key, a tiny island in the middle of the Florida Keys archipelago.

  “I tell myself the same thing every day,” the man on the paddleboard to my right replied, absently rubbing a tan bicep tattooed with a picture of a majestic shark gliding over a ship’s anchor. Below it was the name Sally, which also happened to be the name painted on the hull of the boat offshore. It wasn’t a coincidence. Captain Rogers—or “Cap” as he’d said to call him when he’d picked us up from the airport earlier that day—was the R/V Sally’s captain. R/V stood for “research vessel,” and it was one of the main reasons we were there.

  “It’ll get even better once we get you kids introduced to some of our friendly neighborhood sharks,” Cap added, pushing his sun-bleached blond hair off his forehead. “We don’t normally get too many of the really big boys and girls in the coastal area we’ll be surveying, but there have been a couple nice-size tiger sharks spotted. With a little luck, we’ll be able to get one on board the R/V to study while you’re here.”

  “I’m still not so sure about the sharks part of this trip, but I could definitely get used to the scenery,” a red-haired girl my age said with a little shudder. Abby was one of the other two Bayport Aquarium student volunteers besides Joe and me who’d signed up for the Oceanic Explorers Exchange Program with the Lookout Shark Lab, which used the R/V as its floating base.

  I breathed in the salty air and smiled. I was sure about both the sharks and the scenery. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been in the Atlantic Ocean before, but all the palm trees and pelicans made this practically another world compared to our hometown of Bayport up north. The Florida Keys are over a thousand miles south and a whole lot more tropical. We might not have been on vacation, but the built-in vacay vibes didn’t hurt.

  “So, um, how big are those tiger sharks you mentioned?” a kid named Randy, the fourth volunteer, asked timidly.

  “Don’t worry, we haven’t lost a student yet.” Cap laughed. “In fact, one of the main goals of our research is to let people know about the importance of sharks. They’re not the villainous monsters the movies make them out to be.”

  “Did you know you’re statistically more likely to be attacked by a cow than by a shark?” I said, trying to reassure Randy. To be totally honest, I was kind of trying to reassure myself, too. I mean, I believed a hundred percent in the lab’s mission and was super excited to get hands-on shark ecology experience. Still, it was hard not to be a little nervous around predators with such a fearsome reputation.

  “Yeah, but we’re not going to be swimming with cows,” Abby reminded me.

  I was just about to reply with another reassuring fact when I felt something bump the underside of my board. It wasn’t until it clamped down on my ankle that I screamed.

  My board rocked beneath my feet, sending me splashing into the ocean, where whatever horror lurked below was waiting.

  The creature that burst through the water beside me wasn’t a shark, though. It was my younger brother, Joe!

  “Hardy shark!” he cackled. “The awesomest and most mysterious shark of all!”

  “Very funny,” I grumbled, but even with my heart beating out of my chest, I couldn’t help smiling.

  I didn’t know about “awesomest,” but Joe had the mysterious part right. Or mystery-solving, at least. Joe and I had well-earned reputations as Bayport’s foremost teenage private eyes. We weren’t on this trip to detect, though. Not that a case involving a shark would be our first—we’d had a run-in with a pair of them when someone kidnapped an endangered sea turtle from the Bayport Aquarium a while back. The only mysteries we expected to find in the Florida Keys on this trip were mysteries of the deep!

  Everyone was still laughing as I climbed back onto my paddleboard, even Cap.

  “Get the horseplay out of your systems now, kids.” I looked up to see that the woman who’d been approaching us from the research vessel was now bobbing alongside us on her paddleboard. She was middle-aged and wore board shorts and a Lookout Shark Lab T-Shirt. Her shirt wasn’t the only shark-themed item she was wearing. A braided leather necklace with a shark’s tooth pendant hung around her neck. Her paddleboard stood out too. It had a vintage feel—a bright-blue-and-green paint job with wave patterns running around the edges.

  This was the first time I’d seen E. Ella Edwards, PhD, in person, but I recognized her from the video meet and greet before the trip. Dr. Edwards was the head of Shark Lab, and one of the world’s most renowned marine biologists.

  “I want you to have fun on this trip, but oceanic research is serious business. If you mess around like this on the R/V, someone could get seriously hurt.” She glared at each of us, Cap included, with clear, blue-green eyes that matched the water.

  “Sorry, Triple E,” Cap mumbled.

  “Sorry, Dr. Edwards,” Joe added.

  “I’m not just talking about people getting hurt,” she added. “We’ll be handling live sharks, and if we’re not careful, they can also be harmed. Global shark populations are declining rapidly, and we can’t afford to lose any because you’re goofing around.”

  Everyone nodded in solemn agreement. A big part of why we’d all wanted to come on this trip was the adventure, but as aquarium volunteers, we all cared deeply about the ocean and its inhabitants, and we were here to help make a difference.

  Dr. Edwards’s sea-colored eyes crinkled as the stern glare turned into a broad smile. “You can call me Trip if you want—everyone else does. Or Triple E, or EEE. I have a nickname for every initial.”

  “You got it, Trip!” I said.

  “I can’t wait to get you all trained as junior members of the Shark Lab research team. When most people think about sharks, they think about Jaws, but great whites are one of over five hundred species, and those are only the ones we know about. Sharks aren’t just the ocean’s premier apex predators. They are evolutionary marvels that have survived and thrived since the time of the dinosaurs.”

  “Up until the last century,” Cap added bleakly.

  Dr. Edwards’s smile faded. “A lot of people don’t think the survival of creatures like sharks affects them much, but sharks are a measuring stick for the entire world’s marine ecosystems.”

  “Without healthy oceans, millions and millions of people would go hungry, so it’s our food chain that’s affected too,” I chimed in. Part of my job as a Bayport Aquarium volunteer was giving little kids tours of the shark exhibits, so I knew more about our finned friends than your average teenage detective. “Lots of sharks means lots of fish and a rich diversity of the sea life that provides food for a huge part of the world’s population.”

  Trip snapped her fingers. “Bull’s-eye. Healthy sharks equal a healthy ocean. Without them, the entire ecosystem starts to collapse. Theirs and ours.”

  “And it’s us humans who are mostly to blame,” Cap said bitterly.

  “Knowledge and action can change that,” Trip asserted. “Shark Lab isn’t just here to help sharks; it’s to help people, too.”

  The sky had darkened while we were talking, and a thick bank of fog had begun rolling in toward the pier to our right, obscuring the old lighthouse poking up from the peninsula farther down the coast.

  Dr. Edwards held her palm out and looked up as the first drops of rain began to fall. “I’d hoped to start your trip off with a paddleboard tour of the m
angrove swamp past Alligator Lighthouse, where the lemon sharks have their nursery.”

  “Nothing cuter than shark pups,” Cap interjected.

  “Looks like the weather forecast was right, though,” Dr. Edwards said. “Cap, why don’t you get the kids settled onshore while I check on the pups.”

  There was a collective groan from me and my fellow volunteers.

  Dr. Edwards gazed toward the vanishing lighthouse. “This part of the country doesn’t usually get a lot of fog, but this island is a bit of its own microclimate. It’s not unusual for fog to roll in this time of day now. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to get turned around. From the look of that sky, a nasty storm is rolling in with it.”

  Cap nodded in agreement. “We don’t want any of you lost at sea your first night here.”

  “I second that,” Randy said heartily.

  “I’ll see you all at Chuck’s Shuck Shack for dinner,” Dr. Edwards said as she turned her board and began paddling toward the fog.

  “How come it’s safe for her and not us?” Abby asked.

  Cap chuckled. “No one said it was safe. But she knows her way around. Besides, Trip is fearless. Paddling out to the mangroves is her evening ritual whenever we’re not out on the R/V. It takes a hurricane to keep her inside.”

  As we paddled for shore, I turned to look back and caught one final glimpse of Dr. Edwards disappearing into the fog. We’d just stepped off our boards in the shallow water a few minutes later when we heard someone scream farther down the beach.

  “GET OUT OF THE WATER!”

  The word that followed was unmistakable.

  “SHARK!”

  Randy ran for the beach so fast, he tripped over his feet, tumbling face-first into the sand. Abby was right behind him.

  My heart was thumping too when I remembered Joe’s prank. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one with a predatory sense of humor.

  “Somebody’s probably just messing around—” I started to say when I saw Randy pointing toward the fog, opening and closing his mouth like he was trying to say something but couldn’t quite get the words out.

  I followed his finger, and that’s when I saw it for myself: a large gray dorsal fin slicing through the water where I’d last seen Dr. Edwards before she’d vanished into the mist.

  2 GONEEE

  JOE

  MY FIRST THOUGHT WHEN I saw the dorsal fin was, Cool! My second thought was, Wow, that thing’s gotta belong to a really big shark. My third thought was, Where’s EEE?

  The last time I’d looked, she’d been pretty much right where that shark was now.

  I wasn’t the only one wondering.

  “It’s going to get Dr. Edwards!” Abby called out as the last few swimmers fled the waves.

  The people onshore gathered at the water’s edge to gawk and take pictures of the massive fin as it dipped back below the surface. Lookout was one of the Keys’ smaller inhabited islands, so the beach wasn’t very crowded, but that fin had instantly attracted an audience.

  “Trip will be fine. She’s been in the water with sharks since before she was your age.” The worried look on Cap’s face didn’t match his words, though. “Hard to identify it at this distance from just the dorsal, but judging by the size, that was probably one of the big tigers that’s been hanging around.”

  “But aren’t tiger sharks one of the most aggressive species?” Randy’s voice cracked as he spoke. “I heard they’ll eat anything.”

  I knew from all the shark factoids my older, nerdier brother, Frank, had been rambling about leading up to our trip that tiger sharks had a reputation for being the “garbage cans of the sea.” Everything from tires to entire horse heads had been found in their stomachs. I also knew they could grow to be more than fifteen feet and up to two thousand pounds. There was a reason they weren’t called “kitten sharks.”

  “They have a bad reputation, but even with the more aggressive species, attacks are still super rare,” Frank offered, sounding not exactly confident as he squinted into the thickening fog.

  “It’s a good thing that wasn’t a cow, or she’d really be in trouble,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Don’t sharks sometimes see surfboards and paddleboards from below and think they’re seals or something?” Randy whimpered.

  “One out of millions and millions, maybe—” A clap of thunder cut Cap off before he could finish. The rain followed, turning the drizzle into a full-on tropical shower that sent most of the gawkers running for cover.

  An old beach bum in an open linen shirt and cutoff cargo shorts crossed the beach toward us. “You see the size of that thing, Cap? Mighta been a fifteen-footer,” he called, pushing wet strands of long white hair out of his eyes. “Want me to get a boat in the water to check on Triple E?”

  “She knows what she’s doing, Dougie,” Cap replied with less confidence than I would have liked. “I’m more worried about getting these kids out of the storm.”

  Dougie made a sucking sound with his teeth. “I don’t know, Cap. Woulda thunk she’d have turned around and come back when all that hooting and hollering started. She shouldn’t be out on that board in a thunderstorm, anyway. Been telling her that for years. She’s lucky she hasn’t been fried by lightning yet.”

  “By that reasoning, you shouldn’t be out on that boat either,” Cap pointed out.

  Dougie grinned, exposing a cracked incisor. “They don’t call me Danger Dougie for nothin’. I’m going out. You coming?”

  Cap sighed. “Might as well, so you don’t get lost. Everyone knows about your sense of direction. You kids get on up to the pier and out of the storm. Get yourselves some Key-lada smoothies and pink shrimp poppers at Chuck’s Shuck Shack while you wait. I’ll join you there.”

  “Pink shrimps are a local speciality,” Dougie said.

  Cap put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a gentle push toward the pier. “Just tell Chuck it’s on me. I’ve got a tab open.”

  Dougie made that sucking sound with his teeth again. “Don’t we all.”

  “We’re wasting our time, Doug. We’ll be lucky if Trip doesn’t bite our heads off for trying to tell her what to do. She’ll be fine on her—”

  That was when a woman’s scream echoed through the fog.

  Everything went silent again except for the pounding of the rain.

  Cap looked at Dougie. “Get the boat. I’m right behind you.”

  Dougie took off for the marina at a run.

  Turning back to us, Cap forced a smile. “The shark probably just scared her. I’m sure she’s fine.”

  His words sounded hollow. He’d just finished telling us how fearless EEE was. If she’d screamed like that, there had to be a reason.

  “We’re coming with you,” I volunteered automatically. Frank gulped, but nodded. We might not have been on a case, but if someone was in danger, we were going to try to help them if we could.

  “Sorry, Joe. I don’t think the Bayport Aquarium would forgive us if we got its volunteers struck by lightning. Go up to Chuck’s and get dry. I’ll be back soon.”

  Abby and Randy didn’t have to be told again. They took off running for the palm-frond-covered awning of the restaurant at the inland end of the pier. Frank and I reluctantly followed them, occasionally glancing back to watch Cap and Dougie as they headed for the marina.

  Chuck’s Shuck Shack was perfectly positioned to give anybody sitting outside under the awning or by the open windows a clear view of both the beach to the left and the marina on the other side. I looked back across the sand one last time and saw a small fishing boat heading into the fog. The storm had picked up, turning into a real downpour that made it all but impossible to identify the two figures I knew were Danger Dougie and Cap on its deck.

  When we stepped through the door, it was obvious we hadn’t been the only ones to see the dorsal fin. Whispers of “fin,” “shark,” and “man-eater” rose from some of the tables. Abby waved to us from a table near the window, where she was sitting
with Randy.

  Sharks weren’t just the talk of the restaurant. The walls were jam-packed with fishing pictures and mounted trophies among nets and oars and all kinds of other nautical tchotchkes.

  As we walked in, a short-haired woman with big brown eyes in her midtwenties looked up from drying glasses behind the bar.

  “How can I help you boys?” she asked with a smile.

  “We’ll take two Key-ladas and your biggest basket of shrimp poppers, please,” I said, my stomach suddenly rumbling louder than the thunder. I eyed the specials board over the bar. “Throw in the pickled red herring tacos, too.”

  The woman nodded approvingly. “Good choice. Go ahead and grab a table, and we’ll bring everything out to you.”

  “Is Chuck here? Cap said to tell him to put our food on his tab,” Frank said.

  “Oh, he did, did he?” The woman grinned and turned to a guy in a panama hat chowing down on a basket of calamari at the end of the bar. “Hey, Ron? Is Chuck here?”

  “That depends. You gonna cover my tab for me if’n I say no?” the guy asked.

  “Ha! The way you cleaned me out with that straight flush last week, I practically already am.”

  “Worth a try.” He shrugged. “You’re looking at her, boys.”

  “You’re Chuck?” I blurted. As a detective, I should have known that making assumptions is a good way to get yourself in trouble, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Chuck might not be a dude.

  “Chuck Junior, to be more precise.” She pointed to a framed picture over the bar of a grinning man with a bushy beard wearing a beat-up canvas cap. Even with the beard, the big brown eyes were a dead giveaway that they were related. Below the picture was a plaque that read CHUCK ADAMS, MAY HE FISH IN PEACE. “My birth certificate says Charlotte, if you want to get technical about it, but the locals would have revolted if I changed the name on the sign when I inherited the place.”

  A barefoot woman in a long yellow raincoat pushed open the door and threw back her hood. “Chuck, you hear about the shark?”

  “Only ten times in the last ten minutes.”