Mysteries in Our National Parks: Deadly Waters: A Mystery in Everglades National Park

“Let’s go find Mom and Dad,” was all Jack answered.

CHAPTER TWO

“Spray me, Mom.” Ashley stretched out both arms as her mother took aim with the can of bug repellent. “Mosquitoes sure do love you, honey,” Olivia said, covering Ashley’s arms with a fine mist. “Turn around so I can get the backs of your legs. Maybe you should have worn jeans, like Bridger, instead of those shorts.”

“Jeans are too hot,” Ashley answered. “Anyway, it’s not fair. I get all chewed up, and Jack hardly has any mosquito bites at all.”

Their father, Steven, said, “It’s because you’re so sweet, Ashley.”

She started to giggle. “That must mean you’re sour, Jack.”

“Hey, I can handle personal rejection from mosquitoes,” Jack answered. “No problem! But I’ll put a few squirts of that stuff on me, too, just in case.” The bite of insect repellent filled his nose as Jack squirted his skin. “Here you go, Bridger,” he said, ready to toss the canister, except that Bridger held up his hands like a traffic cop.

“Don’t need it,” he said, which was probably true. Bridger was so covered up by his long-sleeved plaid shirt, blue jeans, boots, and Western hat that any mosquito would have had a hard time finding a place to land on him.

Olivia raised her eyebrows. “You sure about that, Bridger? Try guessing how many different species of mosquitoes live in the Everglades.”

“Don’t know,” Bridger said.

“Twenty!” Ashley guessed.

“Nope. Forty-three. But only the females bite.”

Bridger asked, “So why don’t they get rid of the mosquitoes? You know, spray stuff from airplanes and kill them all?”

“Can’t do it,” Steven answered, scratching his wrist where an early-breakfasting mosquito had already sampled him. “Much as we don’t like mosquitoes, they’re part of the ecosystem.”

Bridger frowned. “Eco—what?”

“That means,” Olivia began, “that all the creatures in the Everglades are linked together. Mosquitoes lay eggs that hatch into something called wrigglers, and they get eaten by Gambusia. That’s the scientific name, but usually they’re called mosquitofish. Other fish eat the mosquitofish: snook, snapper, redfish—the ones you’ll be fishing for today, Bridger. And then, of course, birds eat the fish, and other animals eat the birds, all the way up to the biggest animals in the park. If you take out the mosquitoes, everything gets affected.”

“I get it,” Bridger said, nodding. “Chain reaction.”

“No spraying for bugs, huh?” Jack considered that. “So then it can’t be pesticides that are making the manatees sick.”

“Actually, the park people checked out another possibility, Jack, that herbicides used to kill weeds in the canals might have washed into the Everglades waters. But when they did the necropsies on the dead manatees—”

“What’re ‘necropsies,’ Mom?” Ashley interrupted.

“A necropsy is an autopsy on an animal. Anyway, the necropsies didn’t show any high level of herbicides in the manatees’ tissues. So it’s something else,” she told them, frowning. “And the biggest part of the puzzle is why only about 20 percent of the manatees are getting sick. The rest seem just fine. That’s the reason they brought me here: to find out what's happening with these sick sea cows.”

“Cows?” Bridger asked, his pale brows knitting together.

“Not your kind of cows,” Steven answered, laughing. “Sea cow is just another name for manatee, and not a very accurate name. Manatees are distant relatives of—get this!—of elephants.” Olivia put the half-empty can of bug spray into Jack’s camera bag as she added, “They call them cows because they graze on plants all day, just like dairy cows.”

“OK, everybody,” Steven called out, “time to get into the car. Frankie will be waiting at the dock.”

As the three kids jammed side by side in the car’s backseat, Ashley explained to Bridger, “Frankie was my grandmother’s friend even before my mom was born.”

“Hmmm,” Bridger murmured, peering out the car window. Not too far from them, the waters of the bay sparkled in the sunlight. As Steven maneuvered the car along a palm-lined two-lane road, past houses that looked like boxes with legs, Bridger asked, “How come all these houses are built up on stilts like that?”

“Hurricanes?” Jack suggested, and his father agreed, “Uh-huh. When hurricanes cause big waves to surge up over the land, houses built high on pilings don’t get damaged as much.”

“Looks like they could just get up and walk away,” Bridger murmured.

“Yeah, they do look like that. That’s a good one, Bridger,” Steven told him, grinning as they pulled over in front of a general store near the water.

Ashley shouted, “There’s Frankie, waiting for us.”

Scanning the sidewalk in front of the store, Bridger started to say, “I don’t see—” But by then Ashley had darted out of the car and into the arms of a short, wiry, white-haired woman.

“You’ve grown so big!” the woman was telling Ashley, as Olivia, Jack, and Steven caught up with them. “And Jack—look at you! Twelve years old and you’re almost as tall as a man.”

“Frankie, it’s great to see you again!” all the Landons exclaimed as they hugged her.

Half in disbelief, then in alarm, Bridger exclaimed, “Frankie is a woman?”

Taking his hand, Olivia pulled him forward and said, “Bridger, I’d like you to meet Captain Frankie Gardell, the best fishing guide in all of the Everglades.”

With his eyes narrowed to a squint, Bridger touched the brim of his cowboy hat and mumbled, “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.” At first he looked anything but pleased, but then his face lightened a bit as he said, “Guess you just own the boat, right? Who runs it for you?”

“Me!” When Frankie smiled, the skin around her mouth crinkled into dozens of wrinkles that connected to other dozens of wrinkles in her sun-browned cheeks.

She was small, barely over five feet two, and dressed in a red-and-white-striped shirt that hung over cutoff jeans. It seemed odd, even to Jack, for a 70-year-old woman to wear cutoffs, but somehow on Frankie it looked all right.

“To answer your question, Bridger,” Frankie went on, “when my husband, Gene, was alive, we made the fishing trips together. But Gene’s been gone for eight years now, rest his soul, and in that time I’ve run this business by myself.”

Bridger looked even more confused. “Your husband’s name was Jean?”

Chuckling, Frankie answered, “Spelled G-E-N-E. Short for Eugene. And I’m Frankie, short for Francesca. And yonder’s the Pescadillo.”

Thoroughly flustered, Bridger burst out, “What the heck is a pescadillo?”

“It’s my boat! The name is kind of a combination of ‘pesce,’ which is Italian for ‘fish,’ and ‘peccadillo,’ which means—well, I’ll tell you later, Bridger. We need to get moving.”

“Good idea,” Olivia said, glancing at her watch. “I have a meeting in 20 minutes. Lots of people coming: park rangers, researchers—everyone with information on the manatees. I feel as if I’ve got a thousand pieces of a big puzzle, Frankie, and no picture on the box to guide me. So do you mind if Steven and I leave now and don’t see you off?”

“Go, go!” Frankie urged them, shooing Steven and Olivia with sun-browned hands. “My new shipmates and I will be just fine. Won’t we, Ashley?”

“You bet!”

Steven said, “Then we’ll see you tonight. Get busy out there, guys—if you make a good catch, the restaurant will cook it for us.”

From the end of the dock, the four of them waved, watching Steven and Olivia pull away in the car. Once they’d disappeared, Frankie placed her hands on her hips and surveyed the kids. Jack wondered if she could tell that Bridger was unhappy about her being a woman, but if she knew, she didn’t let on. Instead, she began to bark out orders like a real ship’s captain.

Pointing briskly, she went down the line. “Jack, you load up the rest of the gear that’s right by your feet. Bridger, you take that cooler on board and stow it between the captain’s chair and the gunwale. Ashley, you’re going to get the line off the piling, and when

I tell you, throw it onto the boat deck and then jump in after it. Don’t wait too long, or the boat’ll get away from you and you’ll end up with an Everglades bath.”