The Mystery of the Alligator Swamp (4 page)

“Don’t worry,” said Henry.

Swampwater, Rose, and Eve took the Aldens up and down the watery roads of the swamp. They passed brown pelicans perched on the ends of docks by fishing shacks. Ducks flew from the water as they turned into quiet channels. A raccoon peered at them from the shadows, then slipped away. They saw buzzards circling overhead. That made Violet shudder.

Rose said, “Buzzards aren’t so bad. Think of them as the garbage collectors for the swamp.”

“Ick,” said Violet.

“Wow,” said Benny.

Swampwater laughed and pulled the boat closer to the edge of one of the bayous.

“Do people get lost a lot in the swamp?” Benny asked.

Swampwater answered that. “All the time,” he said. “That’s why you need a good guide.”

“Have you ever gotten lost?” Jessie asked Eve.

Eve shrugged again. “I know my way around. To you, it all looks the same, but to me, traveling in the swamp is like going up and down streets in a neighborhood.”

“And if you stay in Alligator Swamp, you’ll see channel markers and the little yellow arrows that Billie put up,” added Rose. She smiled a little. “I think she got tired of having to look for lost fishermen. Some of those city folks can’t even read a map!”

“Speaking of alligators, look to your right,” Swampwater said softly.

At first they thought it was a log. Then the children realized that the log had small, shiny, half-open eyes.

“Oh! He’s watching us,” said Violet.

“She,” corrected Eve. “She lives in this bayou. We call her Mossy, because the pattern of her skin looks like the sun through the moss in the trees.”

Mossy’s half-open eyes glinted as the pirogue glided by. But she didn’t move. Benny didn’t know whether he was glad or sorry.

Swampwater said, “Now, that one’s no ghost. Told you not to worry about seeing ghosts.”

Just then a boat came out of a narrow channel so fast that it almost collided with the
Swamp Flower.

“Hey, watch it!” called Rose.

Two men were in the boat. One of them had bright red hair and was flapping his cap like a flag. He almost fell in.

“Sit down!” Swampwater shouted.

The man half sat, half fell down in the pirogue. “The ghost,” he said. “We saw the ghost alligator!”

“Oh, no,” said Eve. “Oh, no.”

“Where?” asked Benny. “Where?”

“Back there,” said the man who’d been waving his cap. “It slid out of the shadows and came straight toward our boat.”

“Hold on,” said Swampwater. “Back where?”

“It was that way,” the man in the cap said. He waved wildly. “Ed here saw it, too.” The man’s friend nodded.

“Of course, it didn’t try to eat them,” Eve said. She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself. “Where did you see it?”

Ed, who was bald and had a round, red face, seemed to get redder. “We don’t know how far,” he admitted. “We kind of lost our heads when we saw it swimming toward us. It was still pretty dark and we took off and we got kind of turned around.”

“But it wasn’t far from here,” insisted the other man.

“I see you’re in one of the boats from Billie’s fish camp,” Swampwater said.

Nodding and wiping his sweaty face with a damp bandanna, the red-faced man said, “That’s right. We left yesterday afternoon for an overnight fishing trip.”

“Which was going fine until that ghost gator came at us and Ed got scared and got us lost,” said his red-haired friend.

“You wanted me to stick around and be alligator bait? We’re not lost now, are we?” said Ed.

“Then you don’t know where you saw the ghost,” Eve said. She sounded relieved.

“No. Not really, I guess,” admitted Ed. “But not far from here.”

Rose frowned. She glanced over at Swampwater, then said to the two fishermen, “Come on. We’re headed back to the Bait ’n Bite camp ourselves. We’ll show you the way.”

Beau was on the dock as they pulled up. He reached down to grab the rope from the boat of the two fishermen. “Hey, there,” he said. “Good trip?”

“If you like getting lost and getting chased by ghosts and alligators,” said the red-haired fisherman, scrambling out of the boat so fast that he made it bounce up and down on the calm water of the bayou.

“Wow,” said Beau. “You saw the ghost alligator?”

Interrupting each other, the fishermen told their story.

“Looks like you caught some fish, anyway,” said Beau as he helped them take gear out of their boat.

“Welcome back!” It was Billie, striding down to the end of the pier to join them. “You’re early,” she said to the fishermen.

“They say they saw the ghost alligator,” Beau told Billie matter-of-factly.

“We saw it, and that’s why we’re back early. In fact, we’re going to cut our whole fishing trip here short,” said the first fisherman.

“Now, calm down,” said his friend.

“You want to go back out there and get eaten alive?” the fisherman replied.

“Eaten alive by an alligator? Maybe by a ghost alligator? Sounds terrible,” a new voice said. Travis, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, was standing at the foot of the dock.

“What?” Billie looked dismayed. “But you’ve reserved the cabin for a week.”

“We want our money back and we want out of here,” said the red-faced fisherman. “Next time I go on vacation, it’s going to be someplace where your life isn’t in danger!” He turned to Travis. “You were right. There’s a ghost in the swamp.”

Eve nodded knowingly. Rose looked uneasy.

It seemed everyone was beginning to believe in the ghost alligator!

Travis smiled. The sun glinted off his white teeth and his dark glasses. “It’s been chewing on the boats, too,” he said, pointing to the ragged edge of the old cypress pirogue.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Billie snapped.

“Biting boats? That’s it. I’m getting out of here,” said one of the fishermen.

“Now, wait just a minute,” Billie said. She followed the two fishermen up the pier and across the clearing toward their cabin.

“I guess that ghost is not so good for business,” said Travis.

Beau looked up. “No,” he agreed. “My grandmother doesn’t need all this worry. She was a lot more upset than she showed when she saw the cypress pirogue this morning. This camp is too much for her by herself.”

“That’s what I keep telling her,” Travis said.

His eyes met Beau’s. They looked at each other for a long moment. Then Beau picked up the rest of the fishermen’s gear and took it up to one of the cars in the parking lot by the restaurant. He set it down and disappeared around the side of the house.

“Nope, that ghost is not good for Billie’s business at all,” Travis said to no one in particular. He turned his dark glasses toward Swampwater. “On the other hand, it might be very good for the swamp tour business. Ghost alligator tours — the tourists should love it.” Travis smiled his alligator smile and strolled back up toward the restaurant.

Eve scrambled out of the pirogue. “I’ve got to go,” she said.

“Wait!” said Rose. “Eve —”

But Eve wasn’t listening. She almost ran up the pier, zipping past Travis and into the restaurant.

“I guess the ghost alligator really scared her,” said Jessie as she climbed out of the
Swamp Flower,
too. Her brothers and sister followed her.

“It made Travis pretty happy, though,” said Henry.

Swampwater said thoughtfully, “I don’t like that Travis, now, but it’s interesting what he said. The tourists have always liked it when I told them ghost stories from around the swamp.”

Rose sighed. She said, “Nelson, it’s almost time for our next tour. We have to hurry if we’re going to make it back to the tour dock in time. And I’m on a tight schedule. Don’t forget, I have the afternoon off.”

Swampwater nodded. “Eve can walk back to join us, if she wants,” he decided.

“We enjoyed the tour,” said Violet.

“It was great!” cried Benny.

“Glad you enjoyed it,” Swampwater said with a grin and a tip of his hat. With that, the
Swamp Flower
puttered away and Swampwater Nelson and Rose disappeared from sight around a bend in the bayou.

“Let’s go find Eve,” suggested Henry. “She knows all about the swamp. And I’d like to ask her a few more questions about the ghost alligator and Crying Bayou.”

But when they got up to the restaurant, Eve was nowhere to be found.

“Well, if we can’t find Eve, let’s find some breakfast,” said Jessie. “I’m hungry.”

“I don’t think Billie makes breakfast at the restaurant,” said Violet.

“There’s Grandfather!” Benny waved both arms. “Hi. We’re back! We saw a ghost!”

“Ghost?” said Grandfather. “I didn’t know you could see ghosts during the day.”

“Oh, Benny, we didn’t see a ghost,” Violet said. “We met some fishermen who said they’d seen a ghost.”

“But now we know there
is
a ghost,” Benny argued. “The fishermen saw it. And we saw the bite it took out of the pirogue over there.” He pointed.

Grandfather looked at the bite mark. “It sure looks like a bite. But when I was up here earlier for coffee with Billie, she was sure it wasn’t,” he said. “She said it was some person’s idea of a joke.”

“It’s a ghost alligator bite,” said Benny.

Grandfather said, “Well, whether it is or isn’t, let’s go get a bite of breakfast in town and you can tell me all about it. I told Billie I’d drive to the store and pick up a few supplies for her.”

“Oh, good,” said Benny.

Soon the Aldens were sitting down in a tiny diner in the nearest town. It was a small town, much smaller than Greenfield. They ordered breakfast and discussed the mystery of the ghost alligator.

“So three people that we know have seen the ghost,” concluded Jessie. “Eve and those two fishermen. And Eve seems very frightened by it.”

“Seeing the alligator made the fishermen scared, too,” Benny pointed out. “They ran away.”

“They did leave. And Billie lost business,” said Violet.

“That made Travis happy,” said Jessie. She remembered Travis’s shiny alligator smile and wrinkled her nose.

Setting down their breakfast plates, the waitress said, “Billie? You’re staying at Billie’s fish camp? Now, isn’t that funny? I just had two fishermen through here this morning who’d been staying there. They were telling everybody about this ghost alligator they’d seen.”

“Did you believe them?” asked Jessie.

The waitress shook her head. “There have always been ghost stories about the swamp. Some people will believe anything. I know Gaston Doucet — he’s a birdwatcher who lives here — talks about the ghost alligator often. Course, Gaston’s glad of anything that might keep people out of the swamps. Says they scare off the birds.”

“Gaston’s talking about the ghost alligator?” asked Jessie.

“Can’t blame him. After all, it scared that poor little niece of his. And then there’s that other fellow who’s staying at the Bait ’n Bite who’s always telling those ghost alligator stories in here, too. Black hair, sunglasses, big smile. I finally asked him if he’d seen the gator. He just laughed.”

“Travis,” muttered Jessie.

“He’ll tell anybody who’ll listen. Might as well take an advertisement out in the local paper. ‘Stay away from haunted fish camp. Beware of alligator.’ Terrible for Billie’s business.”

With that, the waitress bustled away to take another order.

“If business gets bad enough, Billie might be forced to sell the camp to Travis,” said Henry.

“He’s the one who told the fishermen about the ghost,” Jessie said.

“And he’s been spreading stories about it here in town,” said Violet.

“Could he be the one who’s behind all this? Turning over the boat, making it look like an alligator bit it? Somehow making it seem like there really is a ghost?” asked Henry.

“Swampwater said Travis would have fallen into the swamp if he tried something like that,” Violet reminded them. “How could he do any of this?”

“And both Eve and the fishermen saw
something
out there,” said Jessie.

“They saw the ghost. Because it’s real,” said Benny. “Besides, Travis was at the fish camp when we got back this morning. How could he have anything to do with those fishermen seeing a ghost?”

“Gaston knows all about the swamps, and he doesn’t want more tourists around here,” said Violet.

“Yes. He could have done it,” agreed Henry.

“He and Billie seem to be awfully good friends,” Grandfather pointed out. “Do you think he’d do something that would hurt Billie’s business?”

“Maybe he doesn’t mean for that to happen,” said Henry.

“Then why turn over the boat at her dock? Why not do it at someone else’s dock?” asked Jessie. “Like at Swampwater’s tour dock?”

“I don’t know,” said Henry. “Maybe we should visit Swampwater and take a look at his place. We could ask him some questions, too. We might learn something.”

“I know another place we need to visit,” said Jessie. “Crying Bayou.”

“How would we get there?” asked Jessie.

“Borrow a boat from Billie,” suggested Henry.

Grandfather said, “I think I’ll come with you — I’d like to see more of the swamp myself.”

“Okay,” said Benny. “You can help us hunt for ghosts.”