“Dad,” Eddie said, “do you have a teacher at school named Simms?”
“Simms?” his father replied. “I don’t recall any Simms. What department?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “Teena and I saw him out fishing a couple of times with a fat man called Roy Benton. Then I thought I saw Mr. Simms last week on the college campus.”
“Well, we have nearly two thousand enrolled for summer courses, you know,” his father explained. “Many of them are adults. Teachers taking extra credit courses, or studying for their masters’ degrees. I imagine a lot of them go fishing on their days off. Any reason I should know this Simms?”
“I guess not,” Eddie said. He was a little embarrassed at the questions he had asked. He didn’t really know why he had asked them. Yet he felt that the various puzzling things which had happened during the past weeks might tie in together. He couldn’t explain the feeling, but it gained strength all of the time.
It was the reason, too, why he decided late that afternoon to go and take a look at the shack he and Teena had seen located back from the top edge of the bluff the previous week.
He decided not to ask Teena to go. She had worried the other day about the brush scratching her arms and legs. It would be simpler to go by himself. He decided to take Sandy along for company.
He stopped at Anderson’s Landing long enough to check with the owner about a boat for him and Teena the next day.
“That’s our agreement,” Mr. Anderson said, smiling. “After all, you earned it. Don’t want you chasing any submarines with it, though.” The boatowner laughed. Apparently people weren’t taking the rumored submarine sighting very seriously. Eddie supposed that, as long as there was no proof, perhaps it was just as well. Besides, even a foreign submarine was not likely to cause any trouble. After all, there was no war going on.
Still, Eddie couldn’t shrug it off so lightly. The tangle of strange happenings during the past days upset him, and he didn’t feel much like joking; not when his father and Teena’s father were both in the thick of serious trouble.