Skeleton Sea

by Dwiggins, Toni

  “If I were Lanny,” Walter said, still glassing the fence-line, “I would choose a spot based on the geomorphology.”

  I said, with an edge, “Who made you a geologist, Lanny?”

  “I don’t need to be a geologist. I just need to look for a good place to dig a hole.” Walter lowered the binoculars. “I’ve made a fine start. I’ve chosen a parabolic dune, after all.”

  I said, “Parabolic, Lanny? As in an arcuate feature?” I examined the sweep of the dune. I saw it, the U-shaped depression, the form of the parabola with its wings pointing upward and its convex U pointing downward. I said, “You take my breath away, Lanny, with your amazing expertise.”

  Walter cast me a grin.

  I said, slightly ruffled, “I presume you're going to tell me where Lanny would choose to dig?”

  “I can make a prediction.”

  “You're going to predict where a man with a trowel would choose to dig? A non-geologist?”

  Walter took a trowel from his pack. “I am now a man with a trowel.”

  “You're a man who knows what parabolic means.”

  “Yes I am. You run off kayaking to the dunes at night and return with an interesting tale, and I start to study dune morphology.”

  “You didn't mention it.”

  “It wasn't pertinent.” He raised the trowel. “Now, it is. Now I can tell you that geomorphic features are predictable in their development. Parabolic dunes often develop from small depressions called blowouts. A blowout is a wind-scoured gap in the dune ridge. Blowouts are most common there because the dune crest is the site of maximum wind acceleration.”

  “Well then. Somewhere near the crest.” At least I’d got that bit right.

  “A man with a trowel could do worse than choose to dig in a place that is already in a deflationary form.” Walter tucked the trowel under his arm and cupped his hands. “A place with established structural integrity, where the walls won't collapse as the man is trying to dig in the loose sand.”

  “The blowout.”

  “Which Lanny Keasling stumbles upon in his search for the perfect place to bury the red float. Which he calls a hole. Which suffices.”

  I nodded. “But we’re not going to wander around until we stumble upon it, because we know where to look. More or less.”

  “With a dash of luck,” Walter said. He shouldered his pack. “Shall we go see if we can find a developing blowout?”

  We found two.

  One was a broad saucer-shaped depression. The other was a deeper narrower cup-shaped depression.

  We selected the cup because it was adjacent to a fence post, because that was one more point of reference, should Lanny wish to find his burial site again.

  ***

  We did not have to dig far. Troweling down half a foot brought us to a piece of black plastic, which upon further excavation turned out to be a garbage bag wrapped around a cylindrical object.

  We swapped trowels for latex gloves.

  We removed the bag from the hole and set it on the sand.

  We slipped off the rubber bands securing the bag.

  Still on hands and knees, we opened the bag wide and peered at the object inside.

  It was a red float.

  Walter said, softly, “Well well.”

  Yeah.

  It was real. I had theorized for so long, never entirely certain that the red thing I'd glimpsed in Joao Silva's mesh bag on board the Sea Spray—the thing Lanny had squirreled away in his duffel bag—was indeed a float. When we found the yellow float in Robbie Donie’s shrine I had thought that’s the shape of the thing Lanny took—but I was going on supposition and memory. One solid thing I’ve learned in my work is that memory is a slippery fish. And easily shaped by desire. I had wanted to fit the mysterious red object into the parameters of the case. Once we discovered the yellow float, the glimpsed object became in my mind a red float.

  I'd lucked out.

  The red float was real.

  Walter said, “Let's have a look.”

  He carefully slid aside the edge of the plastic bag, laying the float bare in the bright light of day. It was molded plastic, about two feet long. Structurally, it was like its cousin the yellow float, a standard marine float, so common you could surely find its like on a standard working boat in the Morro Bay harbor.

  But there were differences. First, most obvious, was that the red float did not have a nylon rope attached.

  Second—a much larger difference—was the nature of the color.

  I said, “This float’s been painted.”

  “Indeed,” Walter said, “and a rather slapdash job of it.”

  Indeed. Either the paint had been applied hastily, or the painter was unskilled. The red coating was streaked, splotchy. Darker here, lighter there. And in one spot, I saw, the painter had missed a spot entirely, a thin strip with no red coating at all. The strip was yellow.

  Somebody had covered a yellow float with red paint.

  I didn't get it. “It's a molded-plastic float with molded-in color. Why apply a different color coating—even sloppily?”

  Walter got his hand lens and bent to study the paint under the twenty-power lens. And then he sat back and folded the lens. He gave me a twenty-power look, that face he wears when he's circling a hypothesis. “It’s a somewhat granulated paint.”

  “I know zilch about paints. Granulated or not.”

  “Consider the color.”

  I looked at the float, red as that bat-shaped starfish in the tide pool outside our motel. That color had lived in my dreams. “Yeah?”

  “I know enough about paints to say that the red iron oxide hematite is often used as a pigment in red paint.”

  I hadn't known that. Now I did. How about that—hematite in the rub-off on the Outcast and the Sea Spray, and used as a pigment here. I wondered if this was going to qualify as an aha moment. Neither of us said the word. Best to get this sucker back to the lab and confirm.

  I still wanted a look at the eyebolt end of this float. The yellow float had a rope attached and I wondered why this float did not. I took out my hand lens and made my own small discovery. There were a few scratches on the eyebolt end and I thought perhaps the float had caught on something scratchy and then been yanked free and the rope fastener had broken.

  I showed Walter my discovery and presented my small hypothesis.

  “Plausible.”

  “Good. Because I have no freaking idea about your discovery—why this float's been painted.”

  He said, “We'll find out.”

  ***

  We returned to the lab high on discoveries and vexed by questions and put the X-ray diffractometer to work.

  The first answer came easily and made a certain sense. The scratches on the base of the float contained residue of stainless steel, a composition that included nickel and chromium—marine grade.

  It was not out of the question that this float had been attached to something like that instrument cage we had found on the reef. Something with a sharp edge or two.

  We moved on to the red paint.

  Walter took a scraping and put it through the XRD and confirmed the identification of the powdery granules as the iron oxide Fe203. Hematite. It was an aha moment until the XRD identified a second component in the paint, sodium polysilicate. Googling identified that as, among its other uses, an adhesive agent that was soluble with extended duration in water.

  This float was getting odder and odder.

  Why use a water-soluble binder in a marine paint?

  Further Googling led us to a class of marine paints called anti-fouling. They used biocides that were slowly released to repel organisms that liked to attach to all sorts of substrates in and around the sea. Hence the need for a water-soluble adhesive.

  Not only that, red iron oxide primer was used as an anti-corrosive coating before the anti-fouling paint was applied.

  We could have made sense of our paint, but for one thing: we did not have a biocide.

  Wh
at we had was a puzzle.

  I gazed out the glass door at the blue sea, and then back to the red float on our worktable. “So what's the point of this paint, with a temporary adhesive? If not anti-fouling?”

  “I'd like to put that question to a forensic paint specialist.” Walter picked up his cell phone.

  “You have somebody on speed-dial?”

  “I'm phoning Doug, first, to bring him up to speed.”

  “Maybe he'll know about weird marine paints.”

  “You put marine and Doug Tolliver in the same sentence and who knows what pops up.”

  CHAPTER 30

  A small crowd was coalescing on the waterfront.

  We were up above—on the outdoor deck of Fresco, Tolliver's favorite cafe—and I could not get a full view of what the crowd down below was examining.

  Something in the water.

  I nearly rose from my chair to see but then Tolliver said, “Anybody want dessert?” and I returned my attention to the table.

  After leaving the Shoreline half an hour ago Walter and I had met up with Tolliver at the cop house. We'd dropped off the black garbage bag, which Tolliver dispatched to the county lab for fingerprinting. He'd had no idea what to make of the paint; we'd said we were keeping the float until we could consult with a specialist. Then we'd headed to the waterfront for lunch and further updates. Tolliver's only news was that the divers he'd sent out to Cochrane Bank this morning had found no sign of Robbie Donie's body, either at Target Red or Target Blue, and that he'd not yet learned who installed the instrument array. And so we'd spent lunchtime discussing the puzzle of the red float with the strange paint job.

  I heroically declined dessert and Walter sighed and followed suit and Tolliver said, “You sure? They make an olallieberry pie that'll knock your socks off.”

  I was sure the pie was all that he promised. The main course of smoked fish tacos would have dislodged my socks, had I been wearing socks. My stomach full, luxuriating in the warmth of the sun on my shoulders, I could understand why Tolliver was fond of this cafe. I could understand why he was fond of the entire town, of the picturesque waterfront and the shining blue water and the muscular tower of rock guarding the harbor. I could see why he was fond of the sea beyond, of his patch of blue ocean. I could darn near picture myself living here in a shack by the sea, kayaking through the gentle waters of the channel.

  “Look at ‘em all.”

  The shout drifted up from the waterfront.

  I could definitely picture myself having a look this time.

  This time, all three of us rose and moved to the deck railing and gazed down at the channel.

  The water was lumpy.

  Walter left two twenties on the table and we hustled down the stairway to the waterfront.

  ***

  There was no reason to be afraid.

  There had been no reason to be afraid yesterday on the swim through the eddy to the tunnel, when we had been engulfed in a bloom of comb jellyfish.

  Comb jellies didn’t sting.

  I stared down into the water.

  “Moons,” Tolliver said.

  Four nights ago I'd kayaked through this channel, paddling through a garden of jellies that looked like saucer moons and fried eggs and blue flowers, but here and now there were only moons.

  Thousands of them. Swarming the channel. The bloom stretched out—back the channel toward the bay, and up ahead toward the harbor—and right in front of us the jellies clumped into a nearly solid mass.

  They were pretty and lacy and their translucent bells were the shape and size of large saucers stamped in the center with four-leaf clover designs and they jostled one another at the surface and in the few patches where they weren’t carpeting the surface, they were visible down below, a vast and pale moon army.

  Two kayakers, farther out in the channel, were heading over to have a look.

  I nearly shouted a warning, watch your paddle, don’t hook one of those suckers and flip it into your boat.

  Even so, there's no reason to be afraid.

  When Violet Russell gave us her slideshow of two warming-seas winners—Humboldt squid and moon jellyfish—she assured me that Aurelia aurita delivered only a mild sting.

  Still, a word came to my mind. A whispered word—devils. Lanny had been speaking about moon jellyfish. Or so I thought. He’d denied saying devils. I could have misheard.

  Tolliver suddenly spun to look upchannel.

  I looked where he was looking. What?

  Anchored boats bobbing.

  A couple more kayaks on the water.

  The sunlit water shimmied and dimpled along at a brisk pace and the drifting moon army rode the outgoing tide toward the mouth of the harbor.

  Walter said, “Doug?”

  Tolliver raked his pompadour. “I’ve never seen a bloom like this.”

  I said, “I assume they’re coming from the back bay. Given the direction of the tide.”

  Tolliver turned to look downchannel.

  He said, “Oh shit.”

  ***

  We all piled into Tolliver’s Dodge Charger and he drove above the speed limit up the road that paralleled the waterfront and then curved with the channel along the causeway out toward Morro Rock. As he pulled into the parking lot he muttered, “This is my goddamn beach, I bring my sister and her kids out here all the time.” He slammed the car into park and we all piled out and Tolliver led the way down to the pocket beach.

  Déjà vu all over again. Walter and I had been here a week ago, tracking the sand from Robbie Donie’s duffel bag.

  This time, it wasn’t the beach sand that demanded attention.

  It was the water.

  Sheltered between the jetty and the Rock, the water was inviting and on this bright sunny day it was being used. There were a dozen or so swimmers in the water and more at the water's edge getting their feet wet.

  They didn't see what was coming.

  The leading edge of the moon jellyfish army rode the outgoing tide through the channel toward this swimming hole.

  And then two teenage boys kicking a boogie board along the wet sand took notice. They halted. Pointed.

  Tolliver shouted, “Get out of the water.”

  He didn’t need to explain it, I got it—even though moon jelly stings were mild, there were a lot of moons and lot of tentacles.

  People on the beach heard Tolliver. They got up from their blankets, they abandoned their beachcombing and castle building, they all swarmed down to the wet sand at the water’s edge. They all started to point and shout.

  One swimmer, just deep enough to wet her chin, began to thrash toward shore.

  Others, farther out, took forever and a day to take notice of the commotion on the beach, or of what the tide was bringing their way.

  Tolliver and Walter and I swarmed down to the water’s edge along with everyone else, shouting along with everyone else.

  Out deeper, now, heads were turning.

  From where we stood it looked like a tide of luminous crystal saucers sliding toward the swimmers—a crazy image, really, because jellies were the opposite of solid dishware, not hard but soft and viscous, and they wouldn't knock into you, they would deform around you, engulf you, embrace you, encompass you.

  Somebody out there screamed.

  A man with a long wet ponytail dipped his head into the water, his back humping up, and it looked as though he was trying to see what was going on under the water, what was wrapping around his torso and legs, or at least so I thought, imagining trailing tentacles of the oncoming tide embracing bodies. I knew the surprise of being embraced. I remembered tiny comb jellies gloving my body, miraculous in their beauty and then overwhelming in their numbers.

  These jellies, here, had tentacles.

  But their stings were mild, next to nothing on the toxin scale.

  Then why were the swimmers churning up the water, shrieking?

  Okay, they were panicking. Who wouldn’t?

  Brushed by tentacl
es.

  Who wouldn’t freak out?

  And now the heads were lost in a sea of saucers. The bloom of Aurelia was riding the tide out of the channel to sea and the poor swimmers were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  It had gone quiet here, at the little pocket beach.

  Nobody on the beach was screaming a warning anymore. No need.

  Nobody in the water was screaming. No longer any breath to spare, I guessed.

  And then the first swimmer to self-rescue thrashed into shallower water and stumbled up onto the beach. She was a gray-haired woman in a black swimsuit, lean and wiry and fit and she likely swam laps every day, but now she collapsed onto the sand, wheezing and gasping.

  Her arms and chest were crisscrossed with thin red welts. One rash crawled up her neck and slashed across her mouth and wound around her cheek and her mouth was swelling, ballooning into fat lips.

  She grabbed her side, beneath her right arm, lifting her right arm, and I saw that a clump of pale membrane clung there to her skin.

  She tried to pull it off but she was too weak.

  One of the boogie-board teenagers rushed to her. Knelt beside her. Plucked at the clinging membrane—just as Tolliver shouted no!—but it was too late and the teenager recoiled yelping and waving his hand like it was on fire.

  Stung.

  The nematocysts of the jellyfish tentacle still carry a punch, I had read, even when detached from the rest of the body.

  But it should be just a tiny punch. The sting of Aurelia should be hardly noticeable.

  I didn’t get it.

  More swimmers were dragging themselves toward shore.

  Farther out, the ponytailed man floated face down.

  Another swimmer got him around the shoulders, managed to flip him onto his back, managed to hook an arm beneath his chin in a classic lifeguard move and started to tow him toward shore.

  Tolliver was on his cell phone, calling for EMTs.

  The woman in the black swimsuit lay on her back, limbs feebly spasming.