Skeleton Sea

by Dwiggins, Toni

  “Nao compreendo,” he said.

  She narrowed her eyes. Oh yeah, I bet you do compreendo. You just don’t want to say. She said, “I saved you. You owe me an explanation.”

  “No so much English.”

  “Why’d you leave the hospital?”

  He shook his head, smiling.

  “You illegal?” she snapped.

  He jerked. She might as well have slapped him.

  She said, “It’s okay. I don’t give a... I’m not a cop. No policia. Whatever.”

  His hands were flat on the table. Ready to shove him up and get gone.

  She’d hoped he would talk to her, right here. But she hadn’t counted on it. She said, “If you’re scared the policia will find you—or anybody who’s looking for you—guess what? Took me about ten minutes to figure out where to look.” That was a lie. It had taken her all afternoon but no reason to tell Silva that.

  He was sweating now.

  She was hurting. Migraine starting up. Too little sleep, too much worry. All thanks to Lanny. She needed to find out what was in the dive bag, why it was so damn valuable that Lanny had to steal it, lie about it. She could hope that Lanny hadn’t done something unfixable, like he'd done five years ago. Like she'd done. The Shitstorm. She breathed deep. Knuckled her forehead. The sea snake that liked to squeeze her brain began to uncoil.

  Silva stared at her.

  She held his look. Set the bait. “Look Joao, you want your dive gear? That how you make a living? I bet you can’t afford to replace it, right?”

  He went rigid. Listening hard.

  She pointed at him. “Joao’s dive gear.” She pointed at herself. “Come to my house. Compreendo?”

  He slowly nodded.

  “You come to my house, we’ll see about your gear, maybe talk a little more?”

  “You house?

  “Yes. I saved your life. I wish you no harm.” She placed her hand over her heart. “Friend.”

  He took a long time with that, maybe calculating the cost of new dive gear, but then at last he placed his hand over his own heart. “Amigo.”

  Same as the Spanish. So we got big, and friend. Her Spanish was iffy but in a pinch, worth a try.

  ***

  Sandy did not try to question Silva during the drive to her place.

  Best to get him there first.

  She pulled off the highway, onto the windy road that ran through the pines, and when her house on the bluffs came into sight Silva let out a huh of surprise. People always made some sound when they first saw the place. Surprise, awe, jealousy. Not the house they thought of when they thought of Sandy Keasling.

  The hacienda rambled long and low, commanding its view of the sea, red tile roof and wood-trim windows and whitewashed walls and a long narrow porch with carved oak posts. It took people’s breath away, until they got close enough to see the flaking paint and windows that did not sit flush on their sills.

  She stopped the car and they got out. Silva started for the front door. She was going to have to disappoint him. No hacienda tour. She touched his arm, motioning him in a different direction.

  “Dive?” he said. “Mine?”

  She nodded. Just keep him following.

  She led him along the path that skirted the northern end of the house, that ran along a jutting ridge to the gazebo sitting on the thumb of rock above the sea. He made that sound again. What’s wow in Portuguese? She opened the gate in the gazebo fence and started down the steep steps. It was a moment before she heard his halting steps on the metal mesh. The steps led down to a long skinny cove, rock-floored, walled by shaly bluffs that had yet to crumble under the onslaught of high tides.

  She had a sudden ache, a need to sing out the tide.

  Low tide now, so they did not have to navigate the high rocky path. They walked on sand, all the way back to the skinny mouth of the cove.

  When they reached the cleft in the wall, and he could see the chain-link gate and the darkness beyond, he halted.

  “It’s safe,” she said, “in there.”

  “Seguro?”

  “Yes, seguro.” She took out her key, unlocked the padlock, and went in first. She turned on the two electric lanterns that flanked the entrance. Between that and the overhead cracks that admitted sunlight, the cave glowed.

  She heard Silva behind her. Making that wow sound again. Oooh. Aaah.

  She smiled. She never much liked showing off the hacienda because she had not created the hacienda. But she had created this. Well, her father had installed the gate, but then he’d turned over the cave to his kids. Sandy’d been in charge. It was Sandy’s vision that made this place. She showed it off, now, to Silva. Glowing bone-white was a network of driftwood. Driftwood dragged in here over the years by her and her brothers, driftwood crafted into tables and chairs and shelves and sleeping pallets and coat racks and candle holders and at the back of the cave a driftwood ladder that spiraled from the floor to the hole in the ceiling. She and her brothers used to go up and down that ladder, in and out the hole, hide-and-seek, spying on each other, wicked little pirates.

  She pointed out the ladder to Silva and shook her head and drew a finger across her throat.

  Silva’s eyes widened.

  “Danger,” she said. “No climb.”

  His focus shifted away from the fantastical shapes and came to rest on the line of storage bins. “Dive?” he repeated.

  “In a minute, Joao.” She sat on top of the closest bin. “Sit.” She indicated the next bin. “Talk first.”

  He sat, edgy.

  She sat facing him. Put him at ease. “When I was a kid,” she said, “I played in here. Pirates.” She covered one eye and slashed an imaginary sword.

  “Corsario!” He actually grinned.

  “Real corsarios used to come here. Prohibition rum-runners. Come in by boat, offload their cases of whiskey, hide them in here until the men with the trucks came.” She saw she’d lost him. It didn’t matter. “Corsario...illegal. Like you.”

  He was frowning now.

  “I don’t care. But policia might care. They might come looking to your little village.” She jerked a thumb, in the general direction of the highway. “But if you want to hide, you can stay here.”

  Still he frowned, showing the effort of trying to understand. He sagged now, giving up the effort of sitting straight.

  She thought, he’s exhausted. Toxic purple-stripe sting, hypothermia, allergic reaction, delirious. Or faking it—could you fake unconscious, in the hospital? Anyway, he’d been well enough to escape this morning, to get himself to the village somehow. But he didn’t look so well now. She said, slowly, “The cave stays dry. There’s blankets, pillows, air mattress.” She pointed at one of the bins. “Make a bed.” She pointed at a rocky ledge, mimed sleeping. “I’ll bring you food. Boa comida.”

  He started to nod.

  “Stay until policia stop looking. Stay long as you want. It’s safe.”

  “Seguro?”

  “Right, seguro. Sometimes I stay here, to be alone.” Away from Lanny and his neediness. “Nobody comes here. For Joao now. Seguro.”

  He rose from his bin and went to the gate and pointed at the lock and shook his head.

  “You don't want to be locked in?”

  He kept pointing and shaking his head.

  “Fine.” She removed the padlock.

  He slowly smiled. He held out his hand.

  She took it and they shook.

  “Dive gear?” He still smiled.

  Now, she thought, the rubber meets the road. She opened the closest storage bin.

  He came over and looked inside. His smile died. He looked up at her, outrage squaring his face. “No dive gear.”

  “No,” she said. “The cops took your dive gear. And I didn’t really lie to you back at the park, I told you to come to my place and we’ll see about your gear.”

  He gaped.

  Either he didn’t have enough English to understand that, or he didn’t appreciate s
plitting hairs. “Joao,” she said, “we will see about it. I’ll help you get it back. Unless you want to go to the cops and ask for it?”

  He shook his head, tight. He understood that.

  “I will help you,” she repeated. “But you have to help me.”

  He sagged again. Nearly collapsed onto the rocky ledge.

  Sandy went to the bin he’d been sitting on, opened it, and pulled out a black mesh bag. Held it up, let him look at it, its emptiness.

  His eyes widened.

  “With your gear there was a dive bag like this one.” She’d bought it at Morro Marine. Standard style. She held it out to him. He didn’t want to take it. “There was something in your bag, Joao.” She opened the drawstring, mimed putting something into the bag. “What was it? Que in bag?”

  He shook his head.

  “And then somebody took it out. Stole it.” She mimed taking something out of the bag. “I didn’t take it.” She put her hand on her chest, shook her head. “But I think I know who did. I can get it for you.” That was stretching the truth. She had no idea where it was. Whatever it was. Red mystery object. Last night when Lanny was at Jake’s place—and what was up with that, Jake inviting Lanny over to watch the idiot box?—she had gone through Lanny’s closet, his drawers, all his special hidey-holes. The red thing wasn’t there. But come hell or high water, she was going to find out where Lanny had put it.

  She gave Silva a straight look. “Joao, tell me what was in the bag. Where did you find it? Why did you have it? What does it mean?”

  He shook his head. Lifted his palms. Smiled sadly. Nao compreendo.

  She said, softly, “You will.”

  CHAPTER 11

  As I was picking through the evidence in my culture dish—a pinch of the sand from Donie’s duffel bag—I caught a familiar odor.

  I leaned in closer and with the tweezers nudged aside sand grains and shell fragments and teased out the tiny green seed. Easy to ID because I’d seen its like yesterday out on the Sea Spray. Chewed on it, and blessed Lanny Keasling for the relief.

  Fennel.

  For a wild-ass moment I envisioned Robbie Donie and Lanny Keasling together on the Outcast, chomping fennel seeds to ward off seasickness. And then I put them on shore because this fennel was mixed in with sand. Now I envisioned Donie taking a day off to lounge at the beach, Lanny coming across him and that old Keasling rivalry sparking and somehow Lanny drops his day pack and out spills his jar of fennel seeds into the sand, and then Robbie in a huff gathers up his towel, encrusted with fennel-laced sand, and he stuffs it into his duffel and...

  And that led to the uncomfortable and unlikely scenario of Lanny encountering Donie again aboard the Outcast, ransacking Donie's duffel. And that didn’t sit well with me because—as Jake Keasling noticed—I’d grown a soft spot for the sweet boatman.

  Well, someone had ransacked the duffel bag. At least, that was Tolliver's theory. Tolliver's word. The duffel lying open on the deck, empty but for a little sand.

  I stole a glance at Walter at his microscope analyzing his pinch of sand and then I returned to my own evidence at hand.

  Theoretically, it could have originated offshore.

  Seafloor sand came from beaches, from eroding coastal rock faces, swept by wave action out from shore. Sand did not form in deeper water, it just ended up there because it moved down slope.

  Unfortunately there was no geological marker on a grain of sand under a microscope that would distinguish seafloor from onshore origin.

  And so we had to look at context.

  According to Tolliver, Robbie Donie was not a diver. That put 'onshore origin' at the top of my list.

  That, and the fennel in my sample.

  I decided to learn about fennel. A quick googling taught me two things. First, fennel grew on the sea coast and around river banks. Onshore. Second, fennel seeds turned a dull gray as they aged.

  My seed was green. Fresh.

  Either Robbie Donie or some unidentified person had spilled fresh fennel in his duffel, or the fennel was in the sand to begin with. Either way, this stuff had not been sitting in Donie’s pack for a long time—else the seed would be gray.

  Walter said, “Getting anywhere?”

  “You want fast or you want thorough?” I shot him a smile.

  “Thorough.”

  I finished separating out the organic bits and then put the sand under my stereoscopic scope.

  The obvious stared back at me—mostly quartz, feldspars, augite, hornblende—and indeed those minerals gave our sand its grayish gold hue. But Walter was doing the in-depth mineral analysis. My job was to sort the grains by size and shape.

  Shape mattered.

  Sand was shaped by wind and to a lesser degree by water. The most rounded shapes—heavily wind-blown, banging grains into one another, abrading the edges—suggested desert sand. Less rounded, it likely came from inland dunes. Angular shapes indicated beach sand.

  The trend of Robbie Donie’s duffel sand, under my scope, was angular.

  “Walter,” I said, “I'm calling it beach sand.”

  He looked up.

  “But we don't have enough grains for a useful size analysis.”

  Size mattered. Coarse grains would indicate a beach where the waves were big. Fine grains were found where the wave action was smaller.

  He said, “Then we’ll want a closer look.”

  Thorough. I smiled. For that, we needed a sexier piece of equipment.

  ***

  I phoned Doug Tolliver and asked if he could get us time on a scanning electron microscope at the county lab. He called back to say that the lab’s scope was down for emergency repairs—and the electron scope at the nearby college was booked for three days.

  I groaned.

  “Give me half an hour,” Tolliver said, “and I might be able to scare up something.”

  We took a coffee and donut break and then Tolliver called back.

  “It turns out,” he said, “there’s a fellow who has an electron scope. Right here in town. How about that?”

  “He works in a...” I cast about. “A scientific company of some sort?”

  “No. He works for himself. Name of Oscar Flynn.”

  “Well that’s great. That, actually, is surprising. I mean, it’s not an ordinary scope.”

  “He’s not an ordinary fellow.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Oscar Flynn lived in a cave.

  His house clung to the side of the hill overlooking Morro Bay, a multi-level place of redwood and tile, a place with terraced gardens and patios and a million-dollar view. In the late afternoon light, the place looked golden.

  And yet, once through the front door, the visitor entered a cave. There were no windows. The walls were faux rock—worse, painted black. The floor was real slate—criminally, painted black. The vaulted black ceiling was inset with dozens of recessed lights, which cast a starry glow over the room.

  Flynn flipped a switch on a control box near the door and the lights went up so bright I flinched.

  The cave took on a more domesticated look, with leather seating and glass tables and a huge flat screen TV. Expensive domesticated.

  Flynn faced us. Arms folded, feet apart, like some massive sentry. I thought of Morro Rock. He was well over six feet, well over two hundred muscled pounds. He wore a snug long-sleeved T-shirt and cargo pants and high-top sneakers—all in black, which streamlined his bulk. He wore a black goatee, which gave his round face some contour. His black hair was buzz-cut nearly to the scalp. He said, gruffly, “Show me your credentials.”

  Walter shot me a look. I shrugged. He pulled out his wallet. I opened my purse and followed suit. We held up our driver licenses. We are who we said we are.

  Flynn scowled. “That’s no good.”

  Walter extracted a business card from his wallet. “Will this do?”

  Flynn read the card. Unimpressed. “You carry nothing else?”

  “Such as?”

  “A professional
association identification. Something prestigious. I carry mine in my wallet.”

  “I'm afraid my semi-prestigious membership cards reside in my desk drawer. Back at our laboratory, in Bishop, on the eastern side of the Sierras. Bit of a drive.” Walter worked at a smile. “I was under the impression that Detective Tolliver vouched for us.”

  “He did,” Flynn said. “And he directed me to your website.”

  “Well, then.”

  “People say anything they want on a website. If you carried a professional association card, that would lend some credence to your website claims.”

  Walter’s eyebrows lifted. “Is this really necessary?”

  “I don’t let laymen near my equipment.”

  “PhD, geology,” Walter said, thinly. “And a master’s in criminalistics. UC Berkeley.”

  “I’m a Stanford man. My degrees are microbiology and computer science—double PhD. Master’s in mechanical engineering.” Flynn turned to me. “You?”

  “Me? I went to UCLA. Double master’s—geology and criminalistics.”

  Flynn said, “I see.”

  I suppressed a smile. Nothing to see here. I wasn’t going to be impressing Oscar Flynn with my credentials. Perhaps if I pulled out my library card I could truly piss him off. Bad idea, though. We needed access to his machine.

  “Mr. Flynn,” Walter jumped in, “there has been a disappearance, possibly a death, possibly a murder—the victim’s boat was found adrift this past Sunday. Three days ago. I assume you’ve heard the news.”

  “What’s that got to do with my machine?”

  “We’re trying to shed light on events by analyzing some samples of sand, and unfortunately the equipment we have at hand is insufficient to the task. Your scanning electron scope would be of great help, Mr. Flynn.”

  “It’s Doctor Flynn.”

  “Ah.” Walter nodded, correcting himself. “Well Dr. Flynn, might we use your SEM?”

  “You may, Dr. Shaws.” Flynn abruptly turned and walked away.

  I threw Walter a wink, and whispered, “He’s all yours.”

  We followed Flynn across the cave room to a hallway that had normal walls. It led past three closed doors and a circular stairway with metal treads that rose from a level below to a level above. It looked like something from a firehouse. I thought, this is a pricey playhouse and Oscar Flynn is an overgrown kid. With a surly teenage attitude.