Skeleton Sea

by Dwiggins, Toni

  She thought, let him go.

  Staring at his panicked face just above the water she pictured his face in the water another time, five years ago that felt like yesterday, Lanny in the water flailing next to the Sea Spray. He'd driven her boat over a submerged rock and bent the prop and she'd said he was goddamn going to fix it and so when they returned to the dock he'd jumped in the water to see how bad the damage was. She'd been so mad she thought she'd pee her pants and she'd stomped away, up the dock to the cafe to use the bathroom—to get away from him, really, before she exploded—and when she'd come out and started down the dock she'd seen him in the water flailing, he'd got himself tangled up in something and as he thrashed he hit his head on the hull and he rolled over like a swamped boat. She'd stood on the dock watching. Frozen. She'd thought of her lost tug license, her dream and her achievement and her pride gone. She'd thought of her future, dragging Lanny like anchor. And the thought had come, let him go. And then she'd turned—to go back to the cafe? She'd never know, because when she turned she saw Fred Stavis up on the deck of the shopping area above the docks, Fred and a bunch of other people but it was Fred she locked eyes with. And she saw him smile. Like he knew her dark heart. She'd spun back around—to run down the dock and jump in the water and save her brother? The shitty thing was, she'd never know. She'd never know because she saw somebody else had already got there. Oscar Flynn, that strange man who always gave her the creeps when she saw him around town, had jumped in the water and was saving her brother.

  In the days and months and years afterward she'd carefully probed Lanny about The Shitstorm, what he remembered. She'd needed to know if he remembered his sister watching him flail in the water. If he saw her turn her back. He always said he didn't remember anything.

  Fred Stavis did, though. Saw, remembered, and used The Shitstorm to get her to invest in his company, and took Lanny on at shitty wages—holding him hostage she always thought.

  And Oscar Flynn saw, she was certain. She'd gone to Flynn a few weeks after The Shitstorm, carefully probing to find out if he'd seen her turn her back on her brother. Her Keasling shame. Flynn hadn't let on what he saw. What he did say, though, gave her the real creeps—“your brother is in my debt.” She'd offered to pay off that debt. Five hundred bucks she couldn't afford. He'd laughed in her face and said “he pays it off every day” and when she'd freaked and asked what that meant he'd said “karma” and told her not to worry.

  She did worry. For a while. She'd warned Lanny away from Oscar Flynn and her brother had said okay but now looking back she wondered if that's when her brother had learned to lie. And she herself had been eager to move on, get the whole Shitstorm behind them. She'd told herself that Flynn's karma was good karma because in the days and months and years afterward nothing bad happened.

  How blind she'd been. Now she saw. Fred Stavis and—she just bet—Oscar Flynn had gotten Lanny into something ugly. Something that she just bet involved Robbie Donie going missing, something that had sucked in her and Jake and her sad-sack Sea Spray livelihood.

  How many more times could she let this happen?

  Let him go.

  She couldn't look at his face and so she turned away and what did she see? The sad-sack Sea Urchin flag.

  She was going to explode.

  She rushed up the deck to the winch control and—even now—she was torn between free-wheeling and reverse. Her hand wanted to shove the lever to free-wheel, release the net from the drum, from the boat, just let the net go with its hideous cargo and her brother riding the end of the net.

  Into the sea.

  But her hand obeyed some primitive command, some Keasling family wiring, and she shoved the lever into reverse.

  The drum started rolling in the net again.

  The winch started screaming again.

  She rushed back to the stern—leaden with defeat or maybe it was acceptance—and got to her knees and anchored one arm around the side railing and watched Lanny rise, attached to the net like a limpet.

  Following in the water, being reeled in once again, was the heavy catch.

  She was screaming at Lanny to help, to grab hold of her outstretched hand before the catch was winched out of the water behind him, before that lift overloaded the boat, before they got flooded again.

  He reached.

  She managed to yank him aboard and slide him onto the deck and she left him floundering there and rushed to the lever and put the gear back into free-wheeling to unroll the net and let the catch go.

  ***

  They were shivering. Shuddering.

  She had helped Lanny strip off his wet clothes and grabbed his wetsuit from the foredeck locker and wrestled him into the heavy neoprene. Her own pants were wet below the knees and clung to her icy skin.

  She tried the engine again, and again it refused to catch.

  She took out her cell and phoned for help.

  Then she turned to her brother and hugged him. He hugged her back. The two of them shivered together, hugging for warmth.

  CHAPTER 38

  The Sea Spray came out of the fog and pulled up alongside the Outcast.

  Sandy used the boat hook to grab lines from her boat and then secured the lines to cleats on the Outcast. For the first time this morning she was glad of the weather. Fog meant calm seas. The two boats now rode the water side by side, bumping fenders. They were both simpleton boats, both small and low to the water although the Sea Spray was lower.

  Close enough.

  Lanny passed his dive gear across to the Sea Spray.

  Jake caught it, with a grin.

  Jake already had the safety ladder out of the emergency locker. He was a Keasling, he knew what to do. He opened the bag and unrolled the flexible ladder and tossed the bottom across to Sandy and they each secured their ends to cleats. It made for a shaky bridge. Didn't matter. They were all Keaslings. First Lanny and then Sandy crept the short distance across the ladder bridge and stepped onto the Sea Spray deck. It broke her heart to unlatch the ladder and lines from her boat and toss them into the water. That gear cost money.

  Freed then, the Sea Spray drifted off from the Outcast.

  Donie's boat was too big to tow without stressing her boat and she was not going to allow Lanny one more shot at ruining her livelihood. Lanny swore he would come back and reclaim his boat. She said, “Leave it for the Coast Guard.”

  They were both shivering too hard to argue.

  Jake had brought blankets and even a thermos of hot cider and Sandy considered complaining about the time Jake had taken to heat the cider before he drove to the dock and got her boat going, but the drink went down like warm honey.

  When she had drunk her fill she said, “Start the damn engine.” As far as she was concerned they couldn't get away fast enough, away from Robbie Donie's doomed tub, away from that net full of abominations. It was already out of sight, sunk, but she had an unreasonable fear of her boat's propeller getting tangled in that god-awful net.

  She hated to admit it but she was too shaky to take the wheel herself.

  Jake saluted and said, “Where to?”

  “Home,” she said.

  Now, Lanny argued. He had something more to do, another thing to fix.

  She hissed, “Haven't you done enough? Those things.”

  He said, voice rising, “They're all here now, in the net, there's none left where we need to go,” and he started in again about the sea bed and canyons and currents and his wonderful tracker with its satellite brain and then Jake got interested and Lanny told his brother about their adventure, and about his mission, and about how he needed to fix what he'd broken.

  Jake turned to Sandy. “What's wrong with that?”

  All the fight went out of her. Eh, there hadn't been much fight left, after what she'd been through. She was cold. She was tired. And as she watched Jake saunter into the wheelhouse and take her captain's chair, she noticed how wiry and strong her brother was. If it came to a wrestling match, she'd lose.
r />   Jake started the engine and the Sea Spray lurched forward under its acting-captain's hand. Lanny the deckhand stood beside his brother, navigating.

  Strange days, Sandy thought.

  She got a peek at the chartplotter and saw that they were heading for Cochrane Bank. What's there, she wondered—that needs fixing? Hell, whatever was there could not be any worse than what they'd found here.

  She gave a glance back at the abandoned Outcast dead in the water, the wet Sea Urchin flag still hanging from the rail.

  Lanny saw her looking. He gave her his big I'm-sorry smile and then he shouted “Sea Urchins forever!” as her boat plowed through the foggy water.

  Strange, she thought, the three Keaslings together again at sea.

  Jake raised his hand and shook his wrist, fingers splayed.

  She might have made the Sea Urchin high sign herself, just out of habit if nothing else, but when Jake raised his arm his jacket shifted and she saw the gun tucked into his pocket.

  ***

  She pretended she hadn't seen, and Jake pretended he hadn't meant her to see. She told herself he was doing what he'd said he'd do, back in the Keasling game room when he gave her guff about poisoned pizza and showed her their father's gun hidden in the Checkers box. He was keeping it for protection.

  Still, the gun had a power of its own. It gave its owner a lot of elbow room.

  It gave her call to watch her step around her brother.

  ***

  In the end she couldn't stay out of her wheelhouse. She crowded in beside Lanny, watching over Jake's shoulder as they neared Lanny's destination.

  She was the first to point to the radar screen.

  She said, “We got company.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Something dove into the sea.

  I chanced to look up and saw its wake.

  The diver left a sheath of deformed water just below the surface, just outside the algal bloom where the foggy day's light illuminated the sea—on a dive path down toward our reef.

  I hoped it was a diving sea lion.

  I aimed my torch light across the reef but the reef stretched far and my light did not.

  I did a quick scan of the dusky world of Target Red: our reef atop the canyon rim, and then the bowl-like chasm, and then the opposite canyon rim, and then back behind us, the ridge with the tunnel that led to Target Blue. And then, to be thorough, I looked once again where I'd seen the diver's wake.

  Nothing.

  The diver had disappeared into the ghostly kelp forest at the far edge of our reef.

  ***

  We hadn't been expecting company—who's up and on the water and diving here at this ungodly hour?

  Other than us.

  After my bouquet breakthrough, Walter and Tolliver and I had hastily assembled at the police dock at the harbor. There were few people out and about and there were no other boats heading to sea when we left. We'd had an uneventful ride through the fog out to Cochrane Bank.

  Tolliver had anchored the Breaker at the edge of the bloom and we'd suited up with extra large tanks and made our descent angling down to the reef, to Oscar Flynn's instrumentation cage. We had air enough to do a thorough search and time enough to get back to harbor for Tolliver's ten o'clock with Flynn. Should we find what we sought, Tolliver would have something more than paperwork to discuss.

  We'd scoured the instrumentation cage and the surrounding rock walls for red paint. I found a trace on the underside of the temperature gauge, something I hadn't noticed last time. Sometimes you have to look again—and know what you're looking for.

  And now I could not help looking for a diver. As Walter and Tolliver continued to examine the cage, I finned over to the edge of the reef to get a better field of view.

  Nothing.

  I was just turning to return to the cage when something caught my eye.

  It was an abnormality in the reef rock.

  Was that what I thought it was?

  The reef was volcanic—the kind of rock created when erupting lava meets cold water and quickly cools, an extrusive basalt that solidifies so quickly that molecules in the lava do not have time to form visible crystals.

  The abnormal rock was sprinkled with well-defined whitish crystals.

  I flicked my light back and forth, from reef rock to abnormal rock. It was like looking at twins—nonidentical twins whose appearance is quite similar but not exactly the same.

  The color was the same, the fine-grained texture was the same, but those telltale crystals made the difference.

  The abnormal rock was a fake. Somebody had made a fake rock and prettied it up.

  My heartbeat ramped up, equal parts excitement and unease.

  I gave two kicks and anchored directly beside the fake. With one hand I grasped a knob of real basalt and with the other I grasped a knob of the crystalled fakery. It felt wrong. I fisted my hand and knocked on it and it rang hollow. Some kind of plastic. Like a fake boulder in a playground.

  Only this was no playground.

  Tolliver and Walter noticed me, joined me, and I pointed out the abnormality.

  The rock was about the size of a melon and when I laid hands on it I quickly found a small hollow beneath one edge. I crooked three fingers into the hollow and found a lever, and the abnormal rock opened like the top of a hatch.

  We crowded to look underneath.

  There was a thick black cable snaking out of a small fissure and down a hole into the reef.

  We'd found more than we came looking for.

  The fissure clearly ran beneath the reef rock in the direction of the instrument cage. We swam back over there and—knowing what we were looking for—found the cable exiting the fissure and connecting to the Sound Link cylinder at the base of the cage. Connecting to the acoustic modem, the communications link to the surface.

  Tolliver drew his knife.

  And then he hesitated.

  Cable too thick and heavy to cut?

  Bad idea to cut a cable when you don't know what it's going to turn off, or on?

  Walter shook his head.

  Tolliver sheathed his knife.

  Whatever was going on up here on the reef, something more was going on down there, down where cable ran.

  We returned for another look under the open fake-rock hatch cover, where the cable snaked out of the fissure and down into the hole, but there was nothing further to be learned here.

  We hovered a moment, grasping knobs of basalt to hold us in place against the current, the three of us looking at one another, expressions unreadable behind face masks and regulators.

  And then Tolliver made a fist, thumb extended downward. Let's go down.

  We took the obvious route, over the edge of the reef and down, where the reef dropped off into a descending wall. A short distance down the wall, a small ledge jutted out like a pouting lip.

  It was an overhang. Back where it met the wall, there was a tunnel.

  We found handholds to anchor against the upwelling current, at the tunnel mouth.

  Hovering again.

  Considering again.

  I considered the lay of the land. Quite clearly this tunnel ran into the reef beneath the hole up top. Somewhere in there, where the tunnel ran, the cable might exit.

  Connecting to what? For what?

  At the tunnel entrance the open-water light, dim as it was, penetrated. We added our lights, painting the walls. The tunnel was large, tall and wide, and unremarkable until Walter's light caught on something. It looked like a diver, plastered against the wall

  I had seen him before.

  At least I'd seen his wake, that sheath of deformed water, and then he had disappeared and now here he was—a diver, not a sea lion. He must have seen our lights as he dove. He must have made his way in stealth, through the kelp and over the edge and along the wall, keeping an eye out, and then finding shelter in this tunnel. Hiding, still, from us.

  Tolliver drew his knife and reached across to Walter and tapped the knife on Wal
ter's tank.

  The metallic ringing reverberated through the tunnel.

  The diver jerked away from the wall.

  We pinned him with our three lights and he was revealed by the red hood of his wetsuit.

  Red as the red beanie worn by Lanny Keasling in honor of his beanie-wearing hero Jacques Cousteau.

  I glanced at Walter and Tolliver, who had not seen Lanny's entrance into the water and so were no doubt even more shocked than I was.

  Tolliver, ever at home down here, knew what to do. He swept his light across our faces, identifying us, and then he crooked his fingers at Lanny, motioning for him to come forward.

  Lanny shook his head.

  We made no move to go get him. I waited for Tolliver to signal us back to the surface—get to the Breaker and phone for his cop divers and the Coast Guard to come here and take care of whatever was in there, at the end of the tunnel. Take care of Lanny, if he needed taking care of. I thought of his stubborn refusal night before last to admit that he had stolen and then hidden the red float, his refusal to explain the 'devil moons' which the next day turned out to be devils indeed. I thought of his refusal to acknowledge the instrument cage with the yellow floats, the very cage that sat on the reef up above us. I thought of him on the Keasling beach with the poisoned diver, whispering I broke it.

  Damn it Lanny what did you break?

  And why should we follow you into this burrow to find out?

  Lanny turned and fled—but not before our lights caught the writing on his tank, the big black marker letters that read Lancelot Keasling.

  Even as he swam away I stared after him in amazement.

  Lancelot. I had never given a thought to his full name. Sweet slow stubborn Lanny carries a name leaden with myth and knights and quests. Carries it on the quiet. But writes it on his tank.

  It was too heavy a name, I thought. He's just Lanny, who carries fennel seeds for the unprepared and the seasick.

  That was enough.

  CHAPTER 40

  Walter grabbed his slate and wrote something and turned it to show Tolliver and me.