When the detective phoned to enlist our services he characterized the case as a mystery at sea.

Thirty-eight hours later we got our first look at the ghost boat.

It had been found adrift and deserted.

It looked ghostly enough right now, docked in the fog at the end of the pier.

Fog eclipsed the horizon. Best I could tell, the pier jutted into a channel near the mouth of a harbor. I strained to see farther but I could not find the ocean beyond. Best I could do was taste its salt and smell its kelp and hear its waves.

Walter and I stepped onto the ramp that led down to the pier where a man in a Morro Bay Police Department parka awaited us. He was tall and lean with graphite-gray hair worn in a spiky pompadour. He looked to be in his forties or fifties — younger than Walter's sixties-ish, as Walter liked to phrase it, older than my straight-up thirty — in any case, experienced.

The detective greeted us first. “I'm Doug Tolliver, and if I'm not mistaken you'll be Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws of Sierra Geoforensics.”

I smiled. “You're not mistaken.”

Walter said, “We're pleased to meet you.”

“I'm pleased you two agreed to come on such short notice.”

“You were in luck,” Walter said, “we'd just wrapped up a case.”

“Let's hope that luck holds.” Tolliver gave us a probing look. “Because this one's damn strange.”

Walter's eyebrows lifted and then he smiled, face seaming like a layered seabed.

I shivered.

Wished I'd worn a warm scarf.

Or perhaps it was a shiver of anticipation. I had to admit that the detective had hooked me, too. I felt curiosity kindling, the imperative to find out what happened to that boat, out there at sea.

Tolliver directed us down the pier. “Welcome to my patch of ocean.”

Early this morning we'd left our home base in the California mountain town of Bishop, embarking on the four-hundred-mile drive to the California central coast town of Morro Bay. Bananas and donuts and thermos of coffee on the road for breakfast, In-N-Out burgers for lunch, vowing to eat vegetarian for dinner. We took turns driving and reading aloud — Walter, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; me, Boats for Dummies. We arrived here at the edge of the sea in the early afternoon.

Tired, buzzed on caffeine, happy to stretch our legs, ready to collect the evidence.

As we moved down the pier the fog shifted and the boat gained definition. It was about twenty-five feet long, stacked with a wheelhouse and a mast and antennae and wires and lines that I hadn't yet learned about. The wheelhouse was at the front and on the open deck behind there was a big drum wrapped in netting.

The name painted on the white hull in red block letters was Outcast.

We halted beside the boat.

Tolliver asked, “You want the whole nine yards before we talk evidence?”

Walter nodded. “On the phone, you said the fisherman disappeared.”

“Uh-huh.” Tolliver folded his arms. “Here’s everything we know. It’s not a helluva lot. The Outcast turns up adrift, yesterday morning, not far outside the harbor. Nobody aboard. Had her running lights on, for night fishing. She belongs to an anchovy fisherman named Robbie Donie. No sign of Donie, or his body — the Coast Guard did a tide-currents-wind grid check. We assume he went out fishing the night before, Saturday — it's usually a nighttime job. Nobody saw him leave the harbor on that trip. Donie runs a small-scale operation. The fellow who crews for him is visiting family back in Pennsylvania, and he has an alibi. Nobody home at Donie’s place. He lives alone, divorced. There's an aunt in Bakersfield who never sees him and doesn’t much care. Not many friends. Nobody reported him missing. Hell, just see what he named his boat. Outcast.”

“Are you thinking homicide?” Walter asked.

“I’m looking into it — the logbook’s missing and the GPS is broken. That raises the question. But if we go the homicide route, we need a better motive than somebody thought Donie was disagreeable. I thought so myself.”

“Any prints?”

“Donie’s of course, and half a dozen unidentified sets. One set will be from Jim Horowitz, he’s the crew. We also collected hairs and fibers. Old stuff, new stuff, we’ll have to see.” Tolliver glanced toward the sea. “Other side of the coin is, could be an accident. Fishing is a damn dangerous operation. And if that’s what it was, that’s sorrowful enough, but it happens.”

“Cassie and I will shed some light.”

Tolliver slowly nodded.

I said, “Endeavor to.”

“Endeavor. Please. I've got three things I want you to shed light on. First is this damage on the stern rub rail.”

The boat was angled so that the Outcast's stern butted up to the pier. I'd read the relevant section in Boats for Dummies so I immediately ID'd the rub rail here: a vinyl strip protected the seam where the hull met the deck. There was room for only one of us so I took my hand lens from the field kit and moved in. A long scrape marred the rub rail and it was encrusted with tiny mineral grains. I put my lens to a large-ish grain. It came into twenty-power magnification. Size, somewhere around seventy microns. Shape, angular. Color, reddish. I used tweezers to pluck out the grain. Walter passed me a specimen dish.

Tolliver hovered. “What do you think?”

I said, “An oxide of iron.” I passed the dish to Walter and he grunted in agreement.

Tolliver said, “I thought maybe the boat collided with something, maybe a rusting buoy. Or it got scraped by some kind of debris, tossed up there by turbulence. But it sure doesn't look like an impact gouge.”

“Is the seafloor around here heavy in iron?”

“Despite claims to the contrary from boaters who’ve run aground, the seafloor doesn’t just jump up and hit a boat.”

I smiled. “I was thinking more along the lines of a…sand bar or something.”

Walter said, “You did mention sand evidence, Detective.”

“Make it Doug. Yeah, I did. There was sand in a duffel pack lying on the deck near the drum roller. The drawstring top was wide open. Looked like somebody ransacked the thing. Found what he was after, or it wasn't there to begin with. All we found was a bit of sand.” Tolliver took a zippered baggie from his pocket and held it up.

We peered. Not much sand in there. A pinch.

Enough.

I said, “And the third thing?”

“Over here.” Tolliver led us to a plastic bin, and opened it.

Smelled like brine. Smelled like the sea.

Inside was a rubbery stalk of brownish kelp with leafy fronds and fat bulbs, attached to a tangled root ball.

“We found that entangled in the anchor chain,” Tolliver said. “It's giant kelp, grows in coastal waters. I'm looking at the idea that Donie anchored in a kelp bed night before last. And then pulled up anchor. And then went overboard. And then the boat went adrift.”

Walter said, “Mightn’t he have caught that kelp on a previous trip?”

“Not likely. No experienced fisherman is gonna leave kelp tangled in his anchor chain.”

I said, “And our evidence?”

“In there.” Tolliver indicated the thick tangle of reddish roots at the base of the stalk. “That's the holdfast — a chunk of it, anyway. It anchors the kelp on rocky surfaces. All kinds of critters live in holdfasts — anemones, sponges, crabs, what have you — but you'll be interested in the pebble caught inside. The holdfast has been to the lab and the techs got what they wanted. Thought you’d want to extract the pebble yourselves.”

We both nodded. Grateful for a cop who recognized rocks as evidence, who treated them with the same respect given to fingerprints or cigarette butts or bloodstains or what have you.

“I'll have you sign off on the chain of evidence and you can take this stuff with you. Oh, and, we'll be moving the Outcast to our storage dock so if you need another look, let me know.” Tolliver ran a hand through his hair, spiking it even more. “I'm real eager to know what happened to her out there.”

I peered through the fog, which had thinned enough to reveal the general lay of the land. Of the water. Tolliver's pier stuck out into a narrow channel, which extended southward into the mist. The pier was at the northern end of the channel, which bent westward and opened up into a harbor. At the harbor’s mouth was a mammoth rock, a fog-hung ghost whose shape and height I could not clearly discern. Big. I looked past the ghost rock, out to open sea, just visible now as a gray rolling field beyond the mouth of the harbor. The sea was an inhospitable-looking place. Had been inhospitable, certainly, to the Outcast.

I turned back to Tolliver. “Are you sure Donie was aboard? Could the tie line have come undone and the boat went adrift? Or someone cut the line?”

“Let me show you something that says the Outcast didn’t just goddamn wander off.”

He moved to the ladder that was braced on the pier, rising to the railing at the stern. He looked back at us. “Come on, it's aboard.”

We joined him.

He started up the ladder. “Here's where it gets even stranger.”

At first, as I stepped over the railing, I thought blood has been spilled. And then I saw I was wrong. There were stains sprayed across the deck in thick teardrops like projectile blood spatters. But blood dries brown. These stains were blue-black.

“Feel free,” Tolliver said. “My techs have already sampled.”

Walter approached the nearest stain. Squatted. Took out his hand lens.

Tolliver said, “You need a magnifying glass to tell you that’s ink?”

Walter stood. “I’m not a mariner — much as I might have wished it. I see black viscous stains on a boat and the first thing I think is engine oil.”

“Ink from what?” I asked. “Octopus? All this?”

“Squid,” Tolliver said.

“You said Donie fished for anchovies.”

“That’s right. But he was also doing a little moonlighting, taking sport fishers out. My town’s got two businesses — a working fishing port, and tourists. We get a lot of sport fishers, real hotshots. About a month ago, we got an invasion of squid.”

“Invasion?”

“I’m not talking market squid, the kind on your plate. I’m talking jumbo.” Tolliver lifted his arm above his head, as if holding up a trophy catch. “Man-size.”

I thought, holy shit.

“Invasion from where?” Walter asked.

“From southern waters, coming up from the Humboldt Current. They’re called Humboldt squid.”

“Why are they coming?”

“Hunting — the fish they eat are moving north, something to do with warmer waters moving north.” Tolliver shrugged. “Supposedly.”

I looked again at the deck, at the length and breadth of the spray, the sheer quantity of black teardrops. “You think…”

“I think hunting Humboldts is a whole new ballgame.” Tolliver pointed out a big smear of ink near the stern rail. There was a heel print in the ink. “Rubber boot. Slippery deck.”

“I see why you think he went overboard.”

“It happens.”

“And the sport fisher?”

“We're checking missing persons reports. Still, if Donie was out squid jigging by himself… Risky business.”

Walter cast a glance at the thick net wrapped around the drum roller.

“That’s how you take anchovies,” Tolliver said. “Here’s how you take Humboldts.”

Tolliver led us to an open fiberglass gear locker. We looked inside. Reels of heavy-duty fishing line. Foot-long tubes that looked like glowsticks, ringed by multi-spiked hooks.

“Humboldts hunt in packs, like a damn gang. They often come up at night — and light attracts them. Attach that jig to your line, bait the hooks, put the jig in the water. If they're around, they hit it.”

Walter gestured to the ink. “And get caught.”

“There were no squid in the hold,” Tolliver said. “So I assume the one that got caught was used as chum. Humboldts are cannibalistic.”

I said, “It sounds a little dangerous.”

“Like starting a bar-room brawl.”

“Detective Tolliver was right,” I said. “It is strange.”

Walter looked up from his scope. “Tell me.”

He'd been examining the pebble from the kelp holdfast. I'd been examining the iron oxide scraping from the Outcast rub rail.

I said, “I've got hematite. Just hematite.”

He considered that a moment. “Puzzling, certainly.”

I gazed out the sliding-glass door at the sea. Strange, puzzling, certainly a mystery right now. Something out there had left its hematite mark on the rail — but hematite all on its lonesome was not what I'd expected.

“Perhaps another look?” Walter said.

I shot him a look. Very tactful. He meant, perhaps I'd missed something.

Perhaps I had.

We'd just gotten started.

We'd only just returned from the cafe across the street, our bellies full on Mexican omelets.

Last night — Monday evening, after finishing our evidence collection — we’d set up base at a motel just outside town that Tolliver had arranged. The Shoreline was a sturdy block of beachfront rooms, no frills but well-kept, white paint and blue trim. A nod to the nautical but no plastic seagulls, no kitsch. Practical and no-nonsense. Like Tolliver. There was that handy cafe across the street and, even better, sand and ocean right outside the sliding-glass door. We would not normally have chosen a beachfront place because Walter always kept an accountant’s eye on our travel budget but Tolliver’s cousin owned the motel and cut us a deal.

We had a suite at the end of the block, two rooms with a kitchenette common room in between. We stocked the tiny kitchen with coffee and the bag of leftover donuts and made the common room our lab.

Our portable lab had taken up the cargo section of Walter’s Explorer, and it now filled this room to the walls. White walls, no dings, one large seascape of boats in the sunset. Ikea knock-off dinette set, which served as our workbench.

On my half of the dinette workbench sat a specimen dish of reddish grains and the X-ray diffractometer — a nifty piece of equipment that shows the pattern of atoms and tells you what you have.

I had hematite, no doubt.

But there should be something further.

I put another few grains through the XRD and got the same result.

“Okay,” I said, “Straight hematite. I'm officially calling it strange.”

“Are you officially abandoning the rusty buoy hypothesis?”

“I'm sure not in love with it.” Rust, in a seawater environment, normally consisted of several products — hematite, yes, but also other iron oxides along with trace amounts of metals from the buoy. “Still, given that the transfer occurred up high, on that rub rail, a rusty buoy would be nice.”

“We can't always get what would be nice.” Walter put his eyes back to his scope.

I got up and went to the open door and stared out at the gray sand and gray tide pool boulders and gray sea beyond. Nothing to see out there. No inspiration to be found. Just fog. It was August, for pity’s sake. Summer should be bright. The sand should be gold and the sea blue. In truth, when this case popped up we both had reason to jump at the chance to head for the ocean, to get away from our home town, which had been our home town for only half a year. Our real home town — the one I grew up in, the one Walter settled in as a young man — no longer existed. Obliterated by a volcanic eruption. That, and the death of loved ones, had left us stunned. We'd relocated to another mountain town, nice enough but not home. Maybe someday it would be. Meanwhile, we put our noses to our work and slowly healed. And now we had gotten away. An intriguing case, a mystery at sea. The chance to reset, renew. If only the damn sun would come out.

I headed back to the dinette table to get a start on the sand evidence but I was interrupted by a knock at the door, the door that led to the motel parking lot.

I opened the door and found Doug Tolliver looking grim as the sea.

Tolliver said, “Got a call from Jorge at Morro Marine half an hour ago.”

We invited him inside.

“No time,” he said. “I'd like you to come with me — we've got another one.”

Walter moved to the kitchen counter to pick up the car keys.

“I’ll drive.” Tolliver shot a look at the grease-stained bag sitting near the keys. “Don’t even think about bringing those donuts in my car. Fair warning — I’m a neatnik.”

It was a modest boat with a squat cabin up front and an open deck behind, a boat that sat its passengers down low to the water. Maybe that’s why it was named Sea Spray.

I couldn't get a close look at the stern rub rail but, as Captain Sandy Keasling was saying, the scrapes weren't going anywhere. She was. She had a boatload of paying passengers and should have been at sea five minutes ago.

Tolliver was unmoved. “I understand you found the spots this morning, Sandy.”

“Yep. And then I called Jorge and made an appointment to get a new rail installed. This weekend. Your friends can check it out then.”

“My consultants need to see it sooner.”

“Christ Doug, I’ve got a schedule to keep. How about the end of the day?”

“They’re here now.”

A deckhand on the boat yelled for Keasling. She shouted back, “Two minutes.”

The Sea Spray was docked in the narrow channel we’d seen yesterday afternoon. This morning’s fog was thin enough that I could get the lay of the land. The channel was narrow, littered with boats at anchor, squeezed between the waterfront and the long sandspit across from the docks. Southward, the sandspit grew into giant dunes and the channel swelled into a full-grown bay. Northward, the channel led to the mouth of the harbor and then out to sea.

Captain Keasling looked at her watch.

Walter spoke. “Do you know when the damage occurred?”

“No idea,” she said. “I was tightening a loose screw on the dive platform and saw the spots up on the rail. Wouldn’t have noticed them otherwise.”

I asked, “Have you noticed any unusual…turbulence…out there?”

She yanked down her ball cap, bushing out blond hair that had the orange tint of a bad dye job. Popeye the Sailor Man was stitched on the ball cap. “It’s the ocean.”

Tolliver asked, “You follow the same route every trip, Sandy?”

“More or less. I head for where the whales are reported.”

“Any chance you went out Saturday night?”

“Can’t see whales at night, Doug. It’s a daytime gig.”

“I didn’t ask if you went night whale-watching.”

She held Tolliver’s look. “I don’t go out at night. Period.”

“You and Robbie Donie have any disagreements recently?”

“Not since we were kids.”

“Come on, Sandy.”

“Doug, you’re not seriously asking if I had anything to do with Robbie going missing.”

“I’m asking if you two clashed recently.”

“We don’t socialize.”

“Come on, Sandy. You share the same waterfront. You run across one another.”

“Like ships passing in the night.” She gave Tolliver a dolphin smile.

“Sandy, my folks need to see those spots on your boat.”

She glanced at the boat, at the deckhand glued to the rail, at the passengers shifting, rising. She turned back to Tolliver. “How about this — I got an afternoon trip but I’ll give your folks the two hours in between. That do it?”

Tolliver looked to Walter and me.

We nodded. Good enough.

Tolliver considered. “Sandy, your normal route goes out to Birdshit Rock, that right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So the Outcast and the Sea Spray both got dinged on something and since you say you’ve only been running your normal route, might be worth my geologists’ while to come along and see if there’s something on that shallow reef around Birdshit that’s dinging up boats.”

She stared.

“Since we have a couple of hours to kill,” Tolliver added.

She shrugged. “Twenty bucks a ticket. Your money.” She jerked a thumb at the little kiosk office and went aboard her boat.

“What do you think?” Tolliver asked Walter and me.

Made sense.

We rushed to buy tickets.

So we were going whale watching.

Walter grew a smile.

I got a Dramamine from the heavyset man on the bench seat next to me.

As we waited for Keasling to do whatever she did in the wheelhouse, I glanced at the next dock over, at the rack of bright-colored kayaks. That was my kind of boat.

The kayak shop proprietor — Captain Kayak, as the sign on his little office advertised — was stacking paddles. Despite the chill morning fog, he wore flip-flops and shorts and T-shirt and his arms and legs were sun-browned and lean, muscles corded like ropes. The main event, though, was his hair, which spiked up high and was colored deep green. He caught me staring. He stared back. He stood like a statue, a bronzed waterman with kelp-green hair showing the whale watchers just what he thought of us. Not much, it seemed. And then he scooped up a can that was sitting on top of a bucket and lifted it in a salute. Bud Light.

Nine o’clock in the morning, for crying out loud.

“Welcome aboard!” Captain Keasling came out of the wheelhouse. She had a voice that needed no amplification. “If you’re here to go see whales, be advised we’ve got some bird watchers with us and so we’ll be spending some extra time where the birds like to hang out. The bird watchers are paying the same as you whale people so we’re gonna set a course to satisfy all the paying customers. Any problems with that, talk to the deckhand. My name is Sandy Keasling and I’m your captain and I’ve got a course to steer. That’s why I’m at the pointy end of the boat.”

The German-speaking couple on the bench opposite us spoke to the deckhand.

The deckhand hurried to the captain. She leaned in close to listen. She was taller, big-boned, seaworthy-looking in her black fleece pants and cobalt blue windbreaker. The deckhand, a slight young man, looked as though he’d blow away in a strong wind. But he dressed in seaworthy black-and-blue like his captain and stood the slightly swaying deck with ease. Instead of a Popeye ball cap he wore a red knit beanie.

Captain Keasling straightened and addressed us again. “My associate here implores you all to have faith. Everybody gonna be happy. Birds! Whales! Trip of a lifetime!” She went into the cabin and took her captain’s chair.

The German couple settled back in.

The deckhand cast off the mooring lines.

The engine grumbled and we pulled away from the dock.

The green-haired man on the next dock watched us go.

The Sea Spray chugged out into the channel, threading between pretty boats at anchor and docks jutting from the shop-and-restaurant-lined shore. We passed a large wharf and the boats tied up there were not pretty but big muscular working vessels with winches and nets and cables, full of men and women in slick suits tending to business. The last pier we passed was marked Harbor Patrol.

Robbie Donie’s Outcast no longer sat at the end of the pier.

Tolliver noticed me noticing. “Already moved her.”

The Sea Spray turned left, following the bend in the channel toward the mouth of the harbor, and Captain Keasling’s voice boomed out, “You bird watchers watch for peregrine falcons nesting over there on Morro Rock.”

I saw no falcons but the giant rock held my eye. I’d glimpsed its fog-shrouded shape yesterday from the Harbor Patrol pier. Today, the shroud had thinned to a filmy veil and I could see more of the geology. The Rock hulked up at least five hundred feet like a sentinel guarding the harbor, waves crashing its seaward side. It was as chasmed and weathered as Walter’s face. “Rhyodacite?” I hazarded.

Walter nodded. “Volcanic plug.”

Tolliver said, “Postcard landmark.”

Completing the postcard was a pocket beach at the foot of Morro Rock, on the sheltered harbor side. A hardy swimmer braved the water.

I shivered.

We passed through the channel that squeezed between Morro Rock and the sandspit. The water, which had been nearly flat inside the protected harbor, now showed off its oceanic DNA. It turned blue-gray, undulating in the fog. It swelled and troughed and our captain gunned her engine and the Sea Spray leapt ahead like a child at play.

Tolliver headed to the wheelhouse to check the captain’s GPS track log.

“How’s your stomach?” Walter asked.

I flipped a hand.

Ahead, a flock of soot-black birds took off from the water, long necks stretched like arrows. A tiny gray-haired woman called out “cormorant!” and her companion bent his gray head to mark his notebook. The boat slowed almost to a stop as the cormorants rose in slick formation. And then another bird pierced the fog, gawky, huge pouched beak leading like a probe.

The deckhand pointed. “Pelican!”

“Thanks, hawkeye,” the heavyset man next to me said. He held up his notebook. “Now show me something I haven’t seen.”

I said, “You’re a bird watcher? It’s a bird. It’s endearing. What’s not to like?”

The deckhand cast me a shy smile. He approached, hesitated, then said, “I know a poem.” He cleared his throat. “A wonderful bird is the pelican. His bill will hold more than his belly can. He can take…take…” He halted, glancing uneasily at the heavyset man.

Walter took up the rhyme. “He can take in his beak, food enough for a week, but I’m damned if I see how the hell-he-can.”

The deckhand said, “That’s it! You know it!”

“I know a few poems.” Walter smiled.

I said, “It's a great poem.”

The deckhand beamed. His wide smile and large brown eyes dominated a thin face. He pulled off his red beanie and bobbed his head. His hair was a close-cropped cap, brown and sleek as a seal’s.

“Lanny.” Captain Keasling approached. “I need you on watch. Go find us some whales.”

The deckhand — Lanny — put his beanie back on and whispered to me, “She lets me drive sometimes but now I’m a whale spotter.” He headed for an empty place at the railing.

Keasling eyed us. “My boatman bother you?”

“No,” I said, surprised, “he’s sweet.”

“Candy’s sweet,” she said, and headed back to the pointy end of the boat.

I wasn’t sure I caught her drift. Had I just been reprimanded? For what? Maybe it was some reverse macho thing — female boat captain has to be tough and the last thing she needs is a ‘sweet’ boatman. Or maybe she was still chafed about fitting Walter and me into her schedule. About Tolliver’s questions.

Walter said, “Nothing wrong with candy.”

The birds disappeared and the passengers settled back and the Sea Spray accelerated again.

I stuck my face into the fog, gazing out at the horizonless sea. The water was glassy gray and I watched, like Lanny, for whales, but the longer I looked the more my eyes played tricks on me, conjuring shapes that melted upon a second look. There were shadowy underwater patches several dozen yards away that could have been kelp, swaying in the currents. I had no idea where we were or what was beneath us but if this was the normal course — more or less — then it was not out of the question that Robbie Donie had steered the Outcast along this route, out to the shallow reef Tolliver had in mind. And if this was the route both boats took when they got dinged, the next question was when? Were they both out in the same patch of water, at the same time? Sometime last Saturday night? In which case, Captain Keasling had lied. In which case, maybe she was an accomplice to a hotshot sport fisher. Or, she was out there for some other reason and found Donie in distress and rescued him. In which case, what did she do with him? Or, she was out in that patch of water another time entirely and whatever dinged Donie’s boat dinged hers. In which case, the phenomenon repeated itself.

I felt a little sick.

The fog thickened. I had to wipe drops of condensation from my eyelashes.

I wondered what it was like to come out here at night — in blackness instead of featureless gray — and fish for huge predators with tentacles. I wondered if Robbie Donie was predator, or prey.

“Whale!”

I looked — the entire boatload of heads turned — to Lanny at the railing near the bow. He jabbed his finger like a jackhammer, then turned to the cabin and shouted, “Sandy! Whale!”

The Sea Spray swerved and slowed and then the engine choked off and the boat nosed down into a drift.

I got on my knees on the bench and faced fully to sea. As if I’d purchased it along with my ticket, excitement stirred. Passengers shifted to the whale side to crowd the rail. Even Doug Tolliver came out of the wheelhouse to have a look.

“See it?” Walter whispered, as though afraid to spook it.

I held my breath. A mountain of humped barnacle-dotted whale rode the water, and then it coolly tipped beneath the surface, flipping its wide tail at the sky. It disappeared. I hoped it would resurface.

The boat rocked gently in the water.

Sweat suddenly bloomed on my forehead. I rocked. The remains of breakfast soured my stomach.

And now the whale did resurface, closer, spouting a mix of ocean spray and oily fish-gut breath.

The stench unmoored me. I slumped over the rail and vomited.

Walter patted my shoulder.

I straightened, slightly less nauseated and monumentally embarrassed.

And then Lanny the boatman was at my side, tugging my arm, and when I turned he pulled a sad face. He carried a blue nylon duffel bag with Sea Spray emblazoned across the top. He unzipped the bag, took out a jar, opened it, thrust it at me. The jar held greenish seeds.

“That’s fennel,” he said. “That will help you. You need to chew them up. Do you want to try?”

Anything. I fished out several seeds and put them in my mouth. Chewed. The taste was licorice. It was good on my tongue. It masked the taste of bile and that unfortunate Mexican omelet. Lanny watched me closely. I took more seeds and managed a smile.

“I collect them myself.” His voice was reedy, pleasing. “I always bring fennel because if people get sick I can help them.”

I swallowed. “You helped. Thanks. I’m feeling better.” I was, a little.

He beamed.

“Big whoop folks,” Captain Keasling’s voice bullhorned, “whale’s gone, show’s over. Now we’re gonna hightail it over to a spot where birds like to hang out so our feather watchers can get their money’s worth. A regular bird convention, you all gonna love it. Those of you on board to see the wildlife.”

She was staring across the boat directly at Lanny and me. I thought, she should be grateful not to have me fouling her deck. A good deed was done here. Real sweet. I returned the jar to Lanny and gave a nod to Captain Keasling.

I get it. I’m not on board to see the wildlife. What do you think I’m going to see?

As we motored through the fog toward the bird convention, my gut steadied and I blessed Lanny a thousand times. I found a rhythm. Stare out at the place where the fog shifted from gray to grayer, call it the horizon, and when my inner ear grew unhappy with that view, look in the other direction. Suck in salty air, pick up lingering taste of fennel, swallow. Repeat.

We saw no more whales but we cut across the path of a large ghostly jellyfish, pearly white and striped with deep purple, its tentacles trailing like the train of a tattered wedding dress, ethereal and beautiful, drawing ooohs and ahhhs from whale watchers and bird watchers alike.

My mind drifted, like the jellyfish.

After a time, I became lost in time and space and did not have to think.

After a time, the water changed. The sea lost is glassy sheen. It began to pucker and riffle and agitate.

We heard them before we saw them. Raucous, shrieking, wings pounding like rain.

And then we penetrated a fog curtain and passed from grayer to less gray, and it was like passing from serenity into a place where life boiled up out of the sea and down from the sky and met in anarchy.

A buzz ran through the Sea Spray, a heady feeling like we had entered a secret place.

Looming up from the sea a few dozen yards from us was a large flat-topped rock, its character screened by fog and swirling birds. Birdshit Rock, I gathered. Birds everywhere, over the rock, over the sea. This was surely the bird convention but it was not what I’d expected, it was somehow set apart from the surrounding ocean. It was somehow off.

I said, to Walter, “Is this right?”

He didn’t answer. He was watching the sky.

The sky was ferocious with birds. Birds swarming, near-colliding, like street gangs jostling for turf. Birds in flocks and lone-ranger birds. Big birds and huge birds. A pelican folded its wings and pointed its beak downward and kamikazied into the water. And then another. And other species, spiraling and diving, bellied down upon the creatures in the sea.

The bird watchers shouted out names. Storm petrel! Sooty shearwater! Sabine’s gull! Black-footed albatross!

“Albatross.” Walter smiled. “The bird that made the breeze to blow. A good omen.”

Ah, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Again. I'd almost learned it by heart. Mariner’s ship gets lost, albatross appears in the fog and leads the ship to safety and fair weather, mariner in boredom kills the bird, bringing a curse upon the ship. I scanned the sky until I found the black-footed bird gliding on giant wings, wingspan a good seven feet across. It was, after all, just a bird, but I wouldn’t say no to good omens.

The bird crossed behind the boat and Captain Keasling came into my line of sight, surveying the scene from her raised platform. She eyed the albatross, wearing a ferocious frown. I thought of the ancient mariner with his crossbow.

She turned her frown down to the water.

I followed her look.

The surface of the sea was thick with feathers and birds on the attack and it took me some time to filter out the birds and pay heed to the fish. Small silvery arrows feebly schooling, bigger duller fish in blues and greens, strange fish with blunt heads and big jaws and slim bodies. All of them just hanging out. They didn’t dive deep to hide. They seemed dazed, and I guessed I’d be dazed too under such ferocious attack. But yet, they didn’t follow that primal instinct to escape, survive. They appeared, I thought, depressed. How crazy was this?

And then someone yelped and now the sea came alive from the depths. Huge maroon tube-bodied things shot upward all around our boat, opening their red arms to engulf the dazed fishes, extending their tentacles to hook onto their prey and pull it down to parrot beaks. They struck anything and everything. They snagged small birds. They went after larger birds, which screamed and rose into the sky. They went after birds that were going after them. When a nervy seagull circled back in, a squid swiped its tentacles into the sky and pulled down the gull.

I thought, so that’s what they look like.

Tolliver, at the rail outside the wheelhouse, looked my way and nodded.

A hush fell over the boat.

Captain Keasling broke the quiet. “All right, folks,” she boomed, “just squid feeding. Usually come up at night, but…” Her voice trailed off. She regained it. “Must be the banquet. They’re called Humboldt squid. Jumbo size! Devils of the deep! What a show! Don’t forget that when it comes time to tip.”

Okay, I thought, but what caused the banquet?

I left my spot and went over to join Lanny. The deckhand was glued to the rail, watching the show like everybody else. I moved beside him and asked, “What happened to the fish?”

He turned. Broke into a big smile. “You feel good now?”

“Yes. Thank you. Really.” I nodded at the sea. “But what about them?”

He frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Seasick like me?” I smiled.

“Fish don’t get seasick.”

“Good point.”

“If Jock was alive, he’d know.”

“Who’s Jock?”

“Jock Cousteau.” Lanny touched his beanie. “He took care of the ocean.”

Ah. Jacques Cousteau. I’d seen his films in high school bio class — undersea explorer, early champion of the ocean, had something to do with inventing scuba diving, wore a red beanie. I said, “I’m sure there are people now who take care of the ocean.”

“Not like Jock.”

Doug Tolliver instructed Captain Keasling to bring the Sea Spray in closer to the rock.

Birdshit Rock was well-named, a wave-scoured mesa just poking above the water, a bleak outpost. Right now it was blanketed with birds and sea grass.

Hard to ascertain the geology of the rock through the fog and the birds. Sandstone, most likely. Not out of the question that it included iron oxides, but that would have lent it a reddish tint. This rock looked whitish. Could be due to all that birdshit. In any case, I wondered how a boat would get close enough to scrape against it without getting more seriously damaged. The Sea Spray certainly wasn’t going to be able to get close enough for us to hack off a sample. Indeed, Walter was taking a picture with his telephoto lens, which should at the least allow us to distinguish the rock type.

And then Walter whispered, “Oh dear.”

“What?” I said. “What?”

Before he could answer I heard Captain Keasling mutter “what the fuck?” and then she cleared her throat and muttered “sorry folks, slip of the tongue,” and when I looked at her she was frowning more ferociously than ever. She turned her back to stare at the rock.

Walter passed me the camera at the same time that the boat drifted closer and then I didn’t need the telephoto to see what was going on.

Everybody saw.

Again, a hush fell over the boat.

I could now see the upper slope of the rock rising from the sea, and what I’d taken at foggier distance to be some sort of sea grass I now identified as something else entirely. It was a mass of moving bodies. It was a mass of reddish crabs creeping up the flank and the word that came to my mind was escape. They were escaping the sea. Unlike the dazed and dying fish that littered the water, these creatures were able to climb out.

And the birds made a banquet yet again.

The Sea Spray left the strange zone and headed “back to the barn,” as Captain Keasling put it.

She rebuffed all questions about the ailing sea creatures, about the frenzied crabs. “Go ask a biologist,” she said, and retreated into the wheelhouse.

There were none aboard.

There were only a couple of uneasy jokes. Should’ve brought a net, scoop up dinner. If I were a crab I’d get the hell out of there, too.

And then silence, thick as the fog.

Sometime later, someone shouted “Whale!”

I’d had my fill of sea creatures but I roused myself to turn and look. And I thought no, it’s not a whale, it’s something else. It was black and shiny, just breaking the surface, off in the near distance.

Doug Tolliver went to the rail and stared, and then he dashed to the wheelhouse and spoke to Captain Keasling, and then the Sea Spray abruptly turned course and headed straight for the thing that wasn’t a whale.

And then motored down.

Surprises upon surprises.

A scuba diver floated belly-up out here in the middle of nowhere, no other boat in sight.

A buzz ran through the passengers. Shock. Thrill.

The diver was in full gear. His buoyancy compensator was keeping him afloat, so he must have inflated the air bladder on the BC at some point. And then, it appeared, passed out. The regulator had fallen out of his mouth. He made no movements.

And then the captain and the boatman were in motion. Keasling shouted “get the horseshoe” and Lanny went running and Keasling backed the square end of the boat up to the diver, precise as a surgeon, and then Lanny reappeared wearing a life vest, carrying a harness, and he opened the gate that let onto the ladder and started down.

We ganged the rails to watch.

Lanny was already on the little dive platform just above the water line. He clipped himself to the ladder with a safety line and got on his knees and looped the horseshoe harness over the diver. And then Keasling was there at the gate. Lanny tossed her a coiled yellow rope that attached to the harness. She played out the rope, bellowing, “I need big strong men on the line,” and bird watchers and whale watchers alike scrambled and hauled. Lanny came up first, guiding the rope, bumping the diver aboard.

They stripped him of his BC and tank and laid him out on a bench.

The heavyset man, my neighbor who’d scorned pelicans, pushed his way forward—“I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor”—and he bent over the body.

Captain Keasling and Doug Tolliver herded the rest of us back.

The diver groaned and muttered words I did not understand.

And now the doctor was stripping the remainder of the diver’s gear. Mask, hood, weight belt, dive bag went onto the deck and Lanny edged in and shelved the equipment on the bench, out of the way. The doctor checked the diver’s vitals, flinging words. Alive. Shock. Hypothermia. And then he called Captain Keasling in close and asked her, “Is that from a jellyfish?”

I angled for a view and saw a wicked red blistering welt across the diver’s face.

“That jelly we saw earlier?” somebody said. “With the purple racing stripes?”

The talk on the boat turned to the ghostly jellyfish, although who knew where that had been in relation to where we were now. In any case, surely there was more than one jellyfish in this ocean.

Captain Keasling studied the diver. “Purple-stripe gives a hellacious sting. Not usually lethal.”

Well that was reassuring.

Walter moved close to me. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

I nodded. The missing fisherman, the damaged boats, the strange zone, and now the diver. All in the same patch of ocean. And yet, it’s a big ocean. If we looked in the right places we’d find a dozen calamities, a dozen inexplicable zones. Or more. Or less. I really had no idea because I found this ocean more mysterious than the center of the earth. Still, I did know my carbon-oxygen cycle — I knew that half the breaths I take come courtesy of the sea. And I was growing a little protective of it.

My attention caught on Lanny. He had hold of the diver’s mesh bag, strangling it by the neck, twisting the mesh around something reddish inside, and I wouldn’t have paid it much heed but for the stricken look on Lanny’s face.

I saw Captain Keasling take notice as well, wearing that frown of hers.

I wondered if the boatman was somehow mishandling the diver’s gear. I drifted over to Keasling with the intention of asking if Lanny was okay, putting in a good word for him, in appreciation for the fennel and the poem. I said, “He did a great job. Pulling in the diver.” I added, “You both did.”

She gave a brusque nod. “We train.”

“Ah.”

“My boatman’s a little slow.” She tapped her head.

“I realize that.”

She turned to me now. “Doesn’t mean he needs a special friend.”

Sandy Keasling stood on the dock, frowning.

There was a time, she recalled, when she’d sung out the tides. High, low, spring tide, slack tide, higher-high water and lower-low water. Neap tide, her favorite, because that’s when the tidal range varied least and low water was not so low and a skipper was less likely to run her boat aground.

There was a time when she’d sung out loud in the wheelhouse.

Now she stood on the dock without a song.

The ambulance was here and the paramedics worked on the diver.

Doug Tolliver and the geologist, Walter-something, were examining the dive gear to see if anything else went wrong with the diver. Doug was a diver himself and so he’d know what he was doing, checking the tank and the hoses. She wondered if Walter-something thought he was going to find some sea soil caught in the crevices. She wondered about his eyesight. He looked old, with his thinning hair and weathered skin. Looked like he spent a lot of time outdoors. Still at it, so she guessed he knew what he was doing.

The other geologist, Cassie-something, was working at the spots on the Sea Spray. Young — well, maybe into her thirties. The looks-with-brains type. All bright-eyed and bushy-tailed but those cool gray eyes watching, watching. Sandy wondered if Cassie-something was going to find out how the spots got there.

Eh, she remembered their names well enough. Walter Shaws and Cassie Oldfield. She just didn’t want to know them.

The one she wanted to know was the injured diver.

Lanny was gawking at the diver and she needed to see what he saw.

But she couldn’t shake the damn bird-watching doctor. Badgering her for a refund. He thought he deserved a free trip since he’d done all that doctoring on board. She nodded, looking for her chance with the diver. When the doctor wouldn’t shut up she told him to go to the office and tell them Captain Keasling said give him a refund and two free tickets for another trip. Hell, give him a lifetime pass.

Satisfied, he left.

Doug Tolliver stood up and she caught his eye and nodded at the dive gear and he made the okay sign.

She looked back to the diver. He sure wasn’t okay. Looked unconscious.

She wasn’t the only one watching. Half the passengers crowded around, like this was part of the show. Whales and birds and squid and whacked-out crabs — and a goddamn rescue as a grand finale — wasn’t that enough? Nah, let’s stick around and see if the victim’s gonna croak.

And Lanny was beside himself. Hands clapped over his mouth. The way he looked when he’d done something wrong.

What had he done? She sighed. Had to be something. It was always something. And he was going to get himself in trouble. If he wasn’t there already.

There was a time, Sandy thought, when she knew control, when things went her way, just as easy as putting her hands on the wheel.

But that was over five years ago, before The Shitstorm.

Now, she was drifting sideways toward the rocks.

The paramedics lifted the diver onto a gurney, jacked it up, and rolled it into the back of the ambulance.

She headed over, racking her brain for a way to get a minute alone with the diver. She’d read his name on his tank, written in black marker — John Silva. He’d been babbling in Portuguese when the paramedics offloaded him. The Portuguese for John was Joao. She knew that; read it somewhere. So he’d anglicized the name. So maybe he spoke some English. If she ever got the chance to talk to him.

Lanny saw her coming. He did his herky-jerky thing, arms and legs starting to move before he knew where he wanted to move to. He sure didn’t want to move Sandy’s way, that was clear. Now he decided. Up the dock to shore. He wore his duffel with the sling across his chest and the bag snugged against his hip.

The ambulance door slammed shut.

She broke into a jog and cut Lanny off.

He gave her the big smile.

She gave him her glare and it wiped the smile off his face. Always so easy. Sometimes, that made her heart turn over. Sometimes, that pissed her off. Now, pissed, she said, “Where are you going?”

He looked at the ground. “I don’t know.”

“We’ve got the afternoon trip. You don’t have time to go wandering.”

He nodded.

“Your sandwich is in the office.”

He nodded.

“You know who that diver is?”

He looked up. Wide eyes. “No.”

“You sure you haven’t worked with him? In your dive job.”

“I didn’t dive since two weeks ago.”

“I’m not asking when you last had a dive job, I’m asking if you ever worked with the diver we pulled on board.”

“I never did.”

“Then why did you take something out of his dive bag?”

He pressed his lips together, tight as a seam.

“Lanny.” She waited. “Lanny.”

“I didn’t!” It burst from him.

She was stunned. He never lied to her — never. But she’d seen with her own eyes, him with his hand in the dive bag, something red in there, and then passengers blocked her view, and then when she could see him again he was stuffing something in his duffel bag. And then Cassie-something interrupted and then Lanny got real busy coiling the Lifesling rope. And Sandy hadn’t had a moment alone with him all the way back to the dock. She’d been on the radio calling the ambulance. She’d been steering the boat. She’d been dealing with Doug Tolliver. She’d been dealing with the damn doctor. And now, finally, she was face to face with Lanny. Sandy clenched her hands. She’d never in her life been afraid to face hard facts, even facts she hated. She hated the facts that were now in her face. Lanny stole something, and lied about it. She pointed to his duffel. “Empty it.”

He saw that she was calling his bluff. Tears started in his eyes.

She said, steely, “Show me what’s in your duffel.”

He hugged the bag tighter against his hip. He was breathing hard, snorting through his nose. He unsealed his lips and said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and turned and skedaddled up the dock.

There were bathrooms in the café at the end of the dock. True.

But he could have used the head on board the Sea Spray.

She set off after him. Not running. Trudging, heart heavy as an anchor.

Lanny reached the end of the dock, looked back at her, then dodged into the café.

“Whassup, Sandy?”

She jumped. She’d been so focused on Lanny that she hadn’t noticed Jake coming up on her right. Jake like a crab, always coming at her sideways. She turned to face him full-on. “What?”

“What?” Jake threw up his hands. “That’s what I came over to ask you, Sandy.” He jerked a thumb at the ambulance, the crowd. “You finally gaff one of your paying passengers?”

She gave Jake her glare. Never worked on him, he just threw a shit-eating grin right back at her. She said, “Don’t you have a business to run?”

“Near runs itself,” he said.

She looked past him, at the next dock over, at the racks of kayaks, at the couple and their two kids all puffed up in life vests. Waiting.

He said, “I only have one tandem on dock. Other’s due in soon. If I had the ready cash I’d invest in more boats. Alas.” He lifted his palms.

She stared at Jake, his ridiculous green hair. He’d showed up one morning last month and told everybody on the docks that he was going green. Captain Kayak, eco-friendly boats for rent. And damned if business didn’t pick up. But he didn’t fool her, she knew the only green he cared about was the kind in his wallet.

She said, “Don’t cry to me. I’m out ten thou thanks to you and Robbie Donie.”

“Ah,” he said, “that’s another matter.”

She waited, wondering if he was going to say anything more on that matter.

He didn’t. “So,” he said, “what happened between you and Lucky Lanny?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing sure took off like his butt’s on fire.”

“He had to pee.”

Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Gee, let’s count. First, we’ve got one victim carried off the Sea Spray. Wearing dive gear, which is curious because I swear you took off this morning with a load of lookie-loos, not divers. Second, we’ve got one freaked-out Lanny. Third, we’ve got one upset Captain Keasling.”

“I’m not upset.”

“Then why are your hands behind your back like Captain Bligh?”

She fought the urge to unlace her hands.

“One, two, three,” Jake said. “Adds up to something.” He looked over at the Sea Spray. “Oh, and number four. We’ve got some geeky babe inspecting your boat. What’s going on, Sandy?”

“You tell me, Jake.”

“Tell you what?”

“Somebody goddamn took my boat out and brought it back with some weird scratches. That you, Jake?”

Jake’s eyes widened. His fake-innocent look.

She wasn’t going to let him off the hook. “And Doug Tolliver wants to know if that happened around the time Robbie went missing.”

“Doug’s finally got himself a big case. He’s the man, now, full of questions.”

“You’re dodging the question, Jake. What’s going on?”

“You tell me, Sandy.”

She turned her back on Jake and looked out at the ocean. What’s going on? She’d like to know. Anchovies and sardines and mackerel and sauries treading water like they were drunk, and lanternfish up from the deep and Humboldts following them, and crabs hauling ass out of the water. And a diver with a jelly sting and no boat.

And her own boat scratched up.

What’s going on?

Her brother Lanny was suddenly a thief and a liar.

She faced Jake.

And her brother Jake was, as always, a liar — and looking, as always, for an angle to play.

And fixing the problem was going to fall, big surprise, on big sister Sandy. Her two brothers were, let’s face it, screwups. She had a twenty-seven-year-old child-man and a thirty-two-year-old alcoholic with goddamn green hair and good luck keeping either one of them out of trouble. And herself — she wouldn’t let herself off the hook — a thirty-six-year-old screwup who drove a pathetic whale-watching bird-watching bucket.

Fix the problem? She didn’t know what the problem was, any more than she knew what was going on in the ocean. All she knew was, it smelled like trouble.

We watched the Sea Spray head out for the afternoon trip. Lanny stood at the back of the boat, waving. We waved back.

“He’s a nice young man,” Walter said.

“Yes,” Tolliver said, “everybody likes Lanny.”

Walter, Tolliver, and I sat on one of the long fiberglass lockers outside the Sea Spray office. The three of us in a row, Tolliver in between. Waiting for the Morro Bay Police Department van to come collect the dive gear to take back to the department to store in the evidence lockup. Eating sandwiches from the café at the head of the dock. It felt good to be hungry.

We saw Captain Keasling stick her head out of the wheelhouse, and shout. Lanny went to her.

“As much as Sandy’s a pain in the keister,” Tolliver said, “she’s a good sister to him.”

Walter and I exchanged a look, surprise. Knowledge gained. Now that I knew, I recast Captain Keasling’s churlishness. Overprotective big sister looking after vulnerable younger brother. Was that it? Or was there something more? She hadn’t liked giving us access to her boat — or, it seemed — access to her brother. Perhaps she worried that Lanny would tell us something he shouldn’t. I asked Tolliver, “You think Lanny knows something about what happened to the Sea Spray?”

“Not that he admitted to. With Sandy hovering.”

The police van appeared, driving up the dock, parking near the pile of dive gear. Tolliver was officially using the term 'suspicious circumstances'.

I said, “Lanny didn’t seem to know what was happening out there today.”

“That makes two of us,” Tolliver said.

“So, you’ve never seen fish acting like that? And those crabs…” I shuddered.

“The very deep did rot,” Walter said, in that voice he adopted when quoting poetry. He turned to Tolliver. “A line from a poem about a mariner who, quite stupidly, kills a good-luck albatross, cursing his ship to sail into a strange sea. It’s an allegory about humanity’s relationship with nature.”

“Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Tolliver said.

“Ah, you know it.”

Tolliver nodded. “It crossed my mind, too.”

I tossed the remains of my sandwich into the trash bin. “Allegories aside, maybe we should talk to somebody who knows something.”

“I’ll ask around,” Tolliver said.

The door of the police van opened.

We shifted our attention to the pile of dive gear. We watched the tech open the back of the van. Big-shouldered guy, he picked up the dive tank like it weighed next to nothing. We watched him place it inside the van with a forensic tech's fastidiousness.

Tolliver said, “I’ll be a happy man if my techs can lift any prints from the tank, and if they belong to someone other than the diver. I’ll happier still if the prints are in the database and belong to a perp with a grudge.”

Walter said, “You’re hoping for foul play?”

Tolliver gave a rueful smile. “Not hoping. Considering.”

Walter said, “I was hoping for a grain or two of something interesting caught in the gear. Assuming the diver encountered some subsea geology.”

“We'll know more if the diver's boat is found.”

The Coast Guard had dispatched choppers to hunt for a boat adrift, for any more stranded divers. So far, without success.

What we had, I thought, were two oddly mirrored mysteries. A diver without a boat. A boat without a fisherman.

The tech came back for the wetsuit.

I stared at the diminishing pile of dive gear. Something was bugging me. I wasn't a stranger to diving — Walter and I had both been in the water, learning to dive at a conference in Belize last summer. I knew a buoyancy compensator from a weight belt. I could certainly ID the gear in this pile. I watched the tech pick up the mask and fins. All that remained were the BC and the mesh dive bag. The dive bag was empty. I swore that there had been something in it, something red, when Lanny had held it with that stricken look. I considered what divers normally put in dive bags. Gear. Seashells. When Walter and I dived in Belize we hadn't used dive bags. It was a marine sanctuary — strictly forbidden to collect pretty seashells on the seafloor.

The reddish thing I'd seen in the mesh bag was cylindrical, maybe a couple of feet long. Not a seashell. Or so I thought. It was just a glimpse.

The tech loaded the rest of the gear in the van. Closed the door.

“All right,” Tolliver said, “let's get back to the boats we do have. Can you give me anything on the stuff you took from the Sea Spray scratches? Compared to what you took from the Outcast. Different? Same?”

I said, “I'll give you the quick-and-dirty answer. Under the hand lens it looked like hematite.”

“So, the same?”

“When we get it under the scopes, we'll confirm.”

“All right. Soon as you can. I don't know how you two triage your evidence but I'd also like to get some feedback about the sand from Donie's duffel. Soon as you can.”

Walter said, “There's fast, and there's thorough. They sometimes coincide.”

“Soon as you can.” Tolliver rubbed his face. “Look, I'm sorry. I know the drill, I subscribe to thorough. But something damn strange is going on out there and it's throwing me. That's pretty much my ocean out there, as far as Morro Bay boats go out in it. Not only do I have Robbie missing and the Outcast marked up, now I've got the Sea Spray. And that's got me looking at Sandy as a possible suspect, which I goddamn hate because I goddamn inexplicably like her. And we go out on her boat and I commit her logbook to memory, and then we end up with that hubbub out at Birdshit Rock, and then we find that stranded diver. I want to know what's going on. That's my diving ocean, too, I've dived it since I was a kid. I don't know what happened to that diver or Robbie but if it happened out there in my patch of ocean then I mean to find out.” Tolliver held up his hands. “All right, I'm done. Sorry. Shouldn't have dumped that on you.”

Walter said, “No, I must apologize. At times I get didactic.”

I said, “We all know what it's like to watch out for our home town.”

“All right, then.” Tolliver raked his pompadour. “Appreciate it.”

Walter said, “We have the sand evidence queued up. Once we characterize it, we'll get some ideas of possible sources around here.”

“Doug,” I said, “what would a fisherman keep a duffel on board for? I mean, other than carrying his lunch or something. Some purpose that would place the duffel in a sandy environment. Any ideas?”

“I have an idea right now. While you're here. Might be worthwhile to grab a sample.” Tolliver was looking at the neighboring dock. It was low tide and there was a thin strip of beach visible. “Fellow runs the kayak shop.”

“The green-haired guy?” I said. “I noticed him this morning.”

“Hard to miss.”

“Why is he of interest?” Walter asked.

“He had a run-in with Robbie about a month ago. Longstanding feud. Just like his sister Sandy.” Tolliver, catching our surprise, added, “Yes, another Keasling brother.” He expelled a long breath. “Thank the lord, there aren’t any more of them.”

Jake Keasling lounged in a frayed mesh beach chair, the kind of short-legged chair that sits you low to the sand so you can dig in your feet and wiggle your toes. His chair, however, sat on the end of his dock, putting his hand in easy reach of the green long-necked bottle on the wood decking.

He sat angled so that he could keep watch on the comings and goings in the harbor channel, and at the same time see customers coming down the stairs from the parking lot to rent a kayak.

He saw us coming.

He pinched up a slice of lime from a paper plate next to the bottle. He squeezed the lime onto his free arm, sucked it, then snagged the bottle and drank deeply.

I noted his progress. Started the day with Bud Light and now he’d moved on to Dos Equis.

We went down the stairs to the dock, where racks were hung with kayaks in bright colors. We stopped just short of taking a dive into the water, grouping ourselves like an audience around the beach chair.

Tolliver spread his hands. “Cassie Oldfield, Walter Shaws, meet Jake Keasling.”

He lifted his beer to us. “Saw you this morning. Hear you had quite a trip.”

“That we did,” Walter said.

“So what happened out there?”

“Your sister could explain better than I.” Walter smiled. “I’m not a mariner.”

“Ah, so you know who’s who.” Jake winked. “Then you know what a puppy dog my brother is. I’ll ask him about that diver. He tells me all.”

I glanced at the neighboring dock. The Sea Spray had not yet returned from the afternoon trip. It struck me that whatever was going on out there, all three Keaslings were in good position to know about it, or hear about it. Certainly, a fisher, or a diver, setting off from the waterfront would be observable. It was actually a charming waterfront but for those who had to share this little world there was nowhere to hide.

Tolliver said, “We’re not here about the diver, Jake. We’re here about Robbie Donie and these folks have some expertise to assist in the case.”

Jake took that in. His face was all angles, brown as a nut. It betrayed no expression. “If you’re here about Robbie, you all need a beer.” He gestured to an ice chest in the shade of the kayak racks. He nudged the paper plate of limes our way with his big toe, which hung over the end of his flip-flop.

Tolliver snapped, “I’m on duty.”

Jake squeezed another slice of lime onto his arm and bent his head to lick.

I said, “I get the lime and beer part but what’s the deal with the arm?”

“Sea salt in the air. By the end of the day, on the skin. Why waste it?” Jake took a swig of beer. “My expertise is in the delightful ways to complement the flavor of beer. And yours is?”

“Geology.”

Tolliver said, “They’re going to see if that sand down there,” he indicated the slice of beach below the dock, “matches some sand in Robbie’s duffel pack.”

Jake looked. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why should it?”

“Only reason I can figure is if Robbie came to see you via your little beach, dropped his pack, then came up that ramp to your dock.” Tolliver eyed Jake. “He pay you a visit that way?”

“Not that I know of.” Jake slumped farther into the chair, butt on the edge and long legs stretched to the water, as if preparing to slink on in.

“Jake,” Tolliver said, “I’d appreciate it mightily if you’d sit up straight so I don’t get a crick in my neck trying to talk to you. In fact, why don’t you just stand right up so I can look you directly in the eye.”

Jake set down his beer, pushed himself out of the beach chair, straightened and looked full on at Tolliver. “Better?”

“Much. Jake, the reason I thought of you, in connection to Robbie going missing, is that you two had a set-to in Pedro’s about a month ago. Barman had to break it up.”

“That? Wasn’t the first time.”

“What was it about?”

“Old stuff. Robbie insulted me and I insulted him. Playground-level asshattery.”

“Did it escalate?” Tolliver asked.

“You mean, did I kill him and then steal the Outcast and set it adrift? No, sir, I did not. Although the thought is tempting.”

“I mean the argument — did it escalate and bring Robbie here?” Tolliver jerked a thumb at the beach. “If he was here, my geologists are going to tell me. Be better if you told me first.”

Jake’s eyes narrowed. He had coppery brown eyes, like old pennies. He turned and crossed the dock, over to the edge closest to the beach below. A crumpled tarpaulin covered part of the planking. Jake whisked it aside.

We moved in to look.

There was a fan-shaped stain, tarry-looking, like shined asphalt. I’d seen its like on Donie’s boat, although there it was sprayed into drops, like blood.

Tolliver stared. “What the hell, Jake?”

“What a mess, huh? Didn’t find it until the next morning and it was into the wood by then. I’ll have to sandblast it.”

“I mean what the hell is up with Robbie and you and squid ink?”

“Well, putting two and two together, looks like he came like a sneak, set down his pack, took out a sac of ink…” Jake turned to us. “Don’t know if you know, but squid carry their ink in a pouch called a sac. You can gut the squid and take out the sac intact. So if you were Robbie, you’d slit the sac and toss it up on my dock. Playground asshattery, like I said.”

I was taken aback. Could that be what Donie carried in his duffel? Then again, a person could use a duffel to carry different things, different times.

“Is that Humboldt ink?” Tolliver said.

Jake shrugged.

“It’s common knowledge around the docks that Robbie was chartering for Humboldts.”

“Then that’d be my considered opinion.”

Tolliver said, “And what’s your opinion about why Robbie threw squid ink on your dock?”

“Because he had access to squid. If he’d had a dog, he’d have thrown dog shit on my dock.”

“A continuation of the argument you had in Pedro’s?”

“A continuation of the argument we had since we were kids. Competition. You know what Robbie was like, Doug. An insecure shit who thought he deserved more’n he had. What we Keaslings had.”

Walter spoke. “What did you Keaslings have?”

“Anchovies,” Jake said. “Whoop-de-do. My parents were anchovy fishers — sold the chovies for bait. Steady work, steady income. Robbie’s dad bagged groceries. Robbie had higher aspirations so he asked my dad for a job. He didn’t get it.”

“Why not?”

“Because Dad only hired Keaslings. Well, not me — fishing is work. But he had Sandy and Lanny hauling his net. Which left Robbie out in the cold, him not being a Keasling. Plus, Robbie was pissed that the job went to a half-wit. The half-wit being Lanny.”

I said, “He’s hardly that.”

“Robbie’s words, not mine.” Jake eyed me. “You already grow a soft spot for Lucky Lanny?”

I shrugged. I guessed I had. I’d also grown a couple of questions, like why Sandy wanted to keep me away from him, and what Lanny had been doing with that mesh bag. I said, “So Robbie held a grudge against you all?”

“He ended up getting what he wanted. Grew up to become an anchovy fisher. Take that, Keaslings.” Jake chuckled. “Course by then my parents were dead and we offspring didn’t carry on the family biz. My sister controls the estate and she very generously funded my humble livelihood here. So fine by me if Robbie’s making his living hauling in little fishies that other fishers use to catch bigger fishies.”

Tolliver said, “Then what competition were you were arguing about at Pedro’s?”

“Ah, that. That would be squid chartering. Pays big bucks. Turns out Robbie’s not making much of a living on chovies these days. Little buggers are overfished. And good luck going after the big game fish — they're going going ninety-percent gone.”

I said, in some surprise, “You know the percentage?”

Jake shot me an amused look. “I might look like a hot surfer dude but I know a little bit about this and that. Especially when it comes to figuring how to pull a few dollars out of the sea.” His eyes went flat. “Turns out renting kayaks — glamorous as that is — doesn’t pay all the bills.”

“You can’t hunt Humboldts from a kayak,” Tolliver said.

“I know somebody who’d loan me a boat.”

“Who?”

Jake picked up his beer and a slice of lime. Squeezed the lime, licked his arm, took a long drink. The whole performance. Then he lifted his chin at the next dock over.

Tolliver looked. “Sandy’s boat?”

“Yeah, sis and I were in negotiations. Profit-sharing and all that.”

“How’d Robbie find out?”

Jake sighed. “One too many of Pedro’s beers. On both our parts. Robbie boasts about his charters, so I say been thinking about that myself, so Robbie says he won’t let no damn Keasling horn in on his new gig. So he inks my dock, warning me off. End of big squid war.”

“In one sense,” Walter said. “In another sense, one could say the squid war ended with Mr. Donie missing and his boat adrift.”

Jake shrugged.

“I heard through the grapevine,” Tolliver said, “something about the Sea Spray’s engine getting damaged. About a month ago. Any chance that was Robbie?”

Jake shrugged.

Tolliver locked eyes with Jake. “Here’s a theory. Robbie warned off you and Sandy, made you think twice about using the Sea Spray to compete with the Outcast. So how about you retaliated? How about you got on board his boat this last Saturday night, maybe to dump some ink, maybe do a little damage. And things got out of hand. Or maybe you, or you and Sandy, took the Sea Spray out to intercept him, squid-hunting. And things got out of hand.”

I thought, and both boats encountered that mysterious something that left iron-embedded scrapes on their rub rails.

Jake belched. “Here’s my theory. Hunting Humboldts is dangerous. Robbie thought he was the man — superstitious as hell but thought he could fish anything. The dumbshit probably took a stupid risk out there and that’s how the story ends. Accident.”

“I truly hope so,” Tolliver said.

“We done here? I should be getting to work.” Jake toed a tangled hose. “Coil the hose or something.”

“As soon as my geologists get their samples, we’re done.”

“You don't need a search warrant or something? It's my little beach.”

“Your little beach is public property, Jake.”

Jake shrugged — no big deal — but his coppery eyes fixed on me, piercing.

As Walter and I started down the ramp to the thin beach I thought, Jake Keasling plays the slacker but he sure is interested in what we turn up in the case of Robbie Donie's disappearance.

After a full day of Keaslings yesterday, we turned to the geology.

Tolliver had driven us back to the Shoreline Motel and we’d set to work. Take-out deli sandwiches for dinner, careful not to contaminate the evidence with crumbs. We’d worked until nearly midnight and then started again this morning. Omelets again for breakfast at the place across the street, of which Walter had already grown fond. And then we put our noses back to the scopes and worked into the afternoon, skipping lunch.

As we worked, two things vexed me.

I pushed back from the dinette-table workbench and stared out the sliding glass door.

It was a bright afternoon. The sun was at last blessedly shining and the sand was gold and the water was blue and a brown sea lion frolicked just offshore. It was the view I’d wished for.

And yet I shivered. What was going on out there?

Not knowing, not understanding, vexed me.

I spotted another color in the tide pool, beneath a rock ledge, a red so vibrant I sucked in a breath.

Walter looked up from his microscope. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“I know that sound you make. It’s never nothing.”

“It’s just a color.” I pointed. “That red. It got me thinking but it’s probably nothing.”

Walter looked out the glass door, taking a moment, because at first all you see beneath the rock ledge is that vibrant red and only after examination do you make it out to be the curled-up wedge of a starfish.

“A starfish,” he said.

“Yes but you have to really look. And I didn’t have time to really look, on the Sea Spray yesterday — there was something in the diver's mesh bag. I just glimpsed the color, a starfish red.” As I stared now at the starfish beneath the ledge I could make out its shape, a fat bat-like shape. “The thing in the bag was cylindrical. I think.”

“A pony bottle, perhaps?”

We'd learned about pony bottles in Belize — spare tanks some divers carried in case of emergency. “Could be,” I said. “About the right length, I think. Color was different, like I said. Red, instead of the yellow pony bottles we saw in Belize.” And now my memory morphed the cylinder in the mesh bag to a red pony bottle. “I don't know. What I do know is that the bag was empty on the dock. Whatever was in there had disappeared.”

“Like the diver.”

“Yeah.”

Tolliver had phoned this morning with the news that the diver fled the hospital, without paying or checking out. Tolliver was monumentally pissed, and had an officer looking into it.

Walter said, “Maybe the diver went looking for that missing something — although I can't see how he'd know what happened to his gear, since he was unconscious.”

“It’s not the diver I’m wondering about, to be honest.”

Walter waited.

“Lanny was handling the diver’s gear on the boat.”

Walter’s eyebrows lifted. “Are you suggesting that Lanny took the red something from the dive bag?”

“I don’t know. It was just a glimpse. And everybody was crowding and jostling on the boat.”

“But you wonder what happened out there.”

“Right now,” I said, “there’s a whole lot to wonder about out there.”

We took a break. Walter started another pot of coffee in our kitchenette. I took another look at the photograph of Birdshit Rock.

In the photograph, the crabs did not move.

Yesterday, out at Birdshit, they’d been moving all right. They’d been hauling ass out of the sea.

When Tolliver phoned this morning with the news about the diver, he’d also said he found us a marine scientist. She was based at a college in San Luis Obispo, about a half-hour drive. We decided to pay her a visit when we got the chance, but meanwhile it made no sense to speculate about the strange behavior of the crabs. It made sense to do the geology.

We had done an eyeball ID from the photo and called the whitish rock sandstone.

No discernible reddish iron-oxide tint to it. No obvious explanation there for the hematite particles embedded in the Outcast and the Sea Spray. In any case, if either boat had come close enough to collide with Birdshit Rock, the damage would have been grievous.

We’d nailed the hematite ID of the grains we’d taken from both boats. The grains were a match under the X-ray diffractometer. What we could reasonably say was that both boats acquired their grains in the same manner. Encountering the same phenomenon.

If not at Birdshit, where?

Waiting for the coffee to brew, I moved from the photo to the bathymetric map we’d printed and spread out on the coffee table.

What looked almost featureless beyond our glass door — the flat expanse of blue ocean reaching to the horizon — looked wildly different below the water.

At least, on the map.

It was a rugged world down there.

It was a submerged world of plains and cliffs and basins and pinnacles and canyons, and the part of this undersea world that extended from the shoreline was called the continental shelf. Here, off the central California coast, the shelf was narrow, sloping gently westward until it reached a break, and then dropping abruptly down into deeper waters.

It had not been mapped in the landlubber manner.

It had been mapped by sonar pinging the underwater landscape to show the topography. Backscatter data and sediment samples showed the geologic character of the seafloor.

It was, I thought, deeply cool. I thought of the ancient mariners whose maps marked the edge of the known seas with the caption Here There Be Dragons. I wondered what caption they’d give to the unknown and unknowable seafloor.

No longer unknowable.

Walter joined me. “Ah,” he said, handing me a mug of coffee, “there’s the neighborhood.”

Yup, there it was. About two miles out from shore there was a long chain of plateaus and canyons and reefs and pinnacles. It was named Cochrane Bank.

An ocean bank was different turf from the surrounding seafloor. It had its own geology and with its vertical nature and rocky surfaces it created its own knotty habitat for sea life. It was a high-rise city, more lively than the surrounding sandy silty suburbs.

One high spot on Cochrane Bank actually broke the surface — Birdshit Rock, more politely labeled on the map as Bird Rock — but the remainder of the bank was at depths ranging from ten feet to well below one hundred.

I said, “Good fishing out there in the ‘hood, I’d think.”

Walter nodded. “Robbie Donie evidently thought so.”

I pictured Donie out there in the ‘hood, at night, with gang of jumbo squid and perhaps a companion with lethal intentions. I rather liked one of the Keaslings for it right now. Well, Jake or Sandy. Certainly not Lanny, no matter what he did or did not take from the diver’s mesh bag.

“That is,” Walter said, “if the pebble in the kelp holdfast came from the site where Donie anchored.”

“I’ll buy that.”

According to the aerial survey kelp map we’d downloaded, Cochrane Bank had isolated forests of giant kelp.

Indeed, the bank sported a number of likely sites. Its bedrocks were sandstone and a chaotic mix of rocks known as the Franciscan Complex. Included in that melange were fine-grained volcanic rocks that had been heavily metamorphosed.

According to the ID we’d made of our pebble, it was of volcanic origin, a basalt of the Franciscan Complex. It was a dark gray, very fine-grained with a few microscopic quartz crystals.

It could have originated on one of the many volcanic reefs or pinnacles on Cochrane Bank.

We’d found what looked like the neighborhood. What we needed were samples from the target spots, to analyze trace elements that might differentiate one from another.

Good luck with that.

There were a lot of targets.

I said, “If this was on land we could just traipse from likely prospect to likely prospect and sample and do the geology.”

Walter said, “Sampling these will require diving.”

I nodded. Well, we'd been in the water before.

“Meanwhile,” Walter said, “we have other evidence to analyze.”

I managed a guilty smile of relief. “Time to get beachy.”

Time to get to the evidence Tolliver had gotten antsy about: the sand from Robbie Donie’s duffel pack.

Ten minutes later we could say with certainty that the duffel sand did not come from the tiny beach beneath Captain Kayak’s dock. We’d made quick work of it — the mineralogy was unlike the sand from the duffel.

Another cardinal rule of ours: in forensic comparison, if a possible match can be promptly excluded, by God exclude it.

Which led to the next question.

If the duffel sand didn’t come from Jake Keasling’s beach, where then?

“Gone?” Sandy Keasling pressed her cell phone to her ear, thinking she hadn’t heard right.

“Gone,” the twit on the other end repeated. “Left the building.”

She couldn’t believe this. John Silva had been semi-conscious when they took him to the hospital yesterday. She knew. She’d phoned last night. And if he’d improved this morning, wouldn’t the hospital keep him there awhile longer? Run tests. Run up a bill.

“When was he discharged?” she asked.

Twit asked in turn, “What was your name?”

She stood on her dock, squinting through the bright afternoon sunshine at the passengers boarding the Sea Spray. Wishing Silva back out at sea where he’d come from. Wishing she’d never found him. She said to the twit, “Where’d Mr. Silva go?”

“I can’t give out that information.”

“I’m his aunt.”

Twit said, “Then you should know where he went.”

“I’m from out of town. I just heard.” Sandy decided to put some spin on it. “I left early this morning. I’ve been driving for hours.” Driving, that was true enough — although it was driving the whale-watching bird-watching bucket out to sea and back on its morning run. “Just tell me where my nephew John went. I'm worried. He still living at… Oh for Pete's sake, I’m dead tired and I can’t recall the street name.”

A silence, and then Twit said, “He skipped out. Flew the coop. Delirious when they checked him in, so no records. No insurance. No billing address. How about, Auntie No-name, you come in and arrange for payment of his bill and we’ll see about helping you track him down. Or maybe you should talk to the cops. Or the other ‘relative’ who called. Last night, this morning, he's really worried, too.”

She hung up.

What other relative?

When she returned from the afternoon bucket-run she had an idea where to start looking for John Silva. She'd thought it over, what she knew about him. Name, occupation, and something a whole lot more useful.

It took her awhile to get the location.

A long shot, but not too long of a drive.

She drove her old Dodge pickup along the highway and took the turnoff inland, following the two-lane road through the coastal oaks until she came to the little village in the clearing. Not even that. Couple dozen houses, couple businesses. Mostly bushes and trees. Pretty. Perfect, if you wanted privacy. Perfect, if you spoke Portuguese and had nowhere else to go.

If she was an illegal, she’d be living in the back of nowhere, too.

She parked outside the Café Oporto. She pulled her ball cap low and slumped in the seat. Raised a newspaper to hide her face. Feeling like a damn fool.

A woman was approaching on the sidewalk. Middle-aged, cropped dark hair, jeans and sweatshirt. Sandy was slightly disappointed. But what had she expected — ruffled blouse and peasant skirt, like they wore at the Portuguese Festival? Sandy had been a kid when she went. She'd wanted her own ruffled blouse and peasant skirt, for about a week.

At least she'd learned a few words of Portuguese, in that week.

And the memory had brought her here, now.

The woman peered in the car as she passed. Sandy slumped lower.

Three more people passed by. None of them John Silva. Maybe she’d have to start asking around. Yeah, and people here were going to tell an outsider where John Silva could be found? But ten minutes later she spotted him coming up the sidewalk and she didn’t feel so foolish.

She got out and headed his way.

He was a short wiry man in the jeans/sweatshirt uniform. He had curly blond hair, a lot tamer than her own bushy curls. A lot blonder — from the sun, not the bottle, she guessed. Squarish face, set jaw, hideous red welt crawling up his cheek. He moved slowly but at least he was functioning. He saw her coming. He stopped, deer in the headlights, then turned and headed the other way.

She went after him. “You’re John Silva.”

He picked up his halting pace.

She easily matched him. “Joao?” she tried.

He glanced her way then snapped his look to the sidewalk.

“Do you speak English?”

“No English,” he muttered. He suddenly veered across the street. No crosswalk. No traffic either.

She came along. “I can say a couple things in Portuguese. Learned at the Festival when I was a kid, eating sopas.” Boiled meat and cabbage poured over a slab of bread. “Boa comida.” Good food.

It worked. He smiled.

She seized the chance. “I’m Sandy Keasling. Captain of the Sea Spray. I’m the one who pulled you out of the ocean yesterday.”

He gave a shudder. He said, finally, “Thanks you.”

“No English?”

“Little English.”

They’d nearly stopped. There was a park just ahead, a patch of grass with kiddie swings and picnic tables. She pointed. “Can we sit?” She angled off the sidewalk, onto the park path, throwing him a look. “Please? Por favor?” Shit — that was Spanish.

Well, good enough. He came along with her and sat on the bench opposite her, arms folded on the table. If she was reading his body English right, he thought he owed her for the rescue but he didn’t trust her.

She said, “What happened to you out there?”

He sat silent.

She touched her cheek.

He reddened. The welt itself purpled.

“Jellyfish,” she said. No clue how to say that in Portuguese. She cupped her hands and wiggled her fingers like tentacles.

He nodded. Face suddenly going pale.

“One of those purple-stripe jellies?” she asked.

He stared at her.

She looked around the park. Nothing purple. Not that she expected a purple wildflower here, now.

He said, almost a whisper, “Grande.”

She figured ‘grande’ meant big, just like in Spanish. Purple-stripes were big, all right. She’d seen them with bells up to two feet across. She nodded. “Grande.”

He whispered, “Enorme.”

“You saying enormous? Okay, I got it. Big.” If she had the language — or the mime skills — she’d ask him if he came across any Humboldt squid, or any whacked-out fish, anything like she’d seen yesterday out at Birdshit. On today’s runs, both morning and afternoon, she’d avoided the rock. No reason to rile the passengers. Yesterday’s load had been so freaked they didn’t leave tips. Eh, no reason to think Mr. Joao Silva came anywhere near Birdshit yesterday. But then where did he come from?

She said, “Where? How far away?” She flung her head back, flung out her arms, treading water. Body Portuguese, she hoped, for you were floating in the water half-dead. She straightened. “How far from where I found you?”

He shrugged. Universal body language.

“What happened to your boat?”

He shrugged.

“What were you doing? Why were you diving?”

He smiled, helpless.

“You had a dive bag. You had something in the bag. It was red.” Now she looked around for something colored red to point to but everything in this damn park was brown and green, except the swings and they were kiddie-pool blue. She held out her hands and shaped a bag. Mimed opening it, putting something into it.

“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 splitting 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.”

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.”

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.

The hallway turned left and dead-ended at a steel security door. There was an access-control panel alongside. Flynn flattened his palm onto an optical scanner.

I wondered what he was protecting.

There was a click and the door sucked open and we followed Flynn inside.

No cave here. The room was blinding white. LED cool-white lights on ceiling tracks. Gloss-white paint on the ceiling and walls, white laminate floor, white workbenches. No firehouse toys in here. Cool nerd toys. Microscopes — digital, video, ocular. Spectrophotometer, refractometer, various meters, Bunsen burner. Big freezer. A centrifuge. An autoclave. Glove box and a fume hood. Steel racks lined one wall, stacked with beakers, flasks, tubes, funnels, pipettes, specimen dishes, and on and on.

I blurted, “What do you do?”

Flynn spun on me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” I gestured at the room, “what kind of work?”

“I consult.”

“As do we,” Walter said. “Forensic geology, as my business card says. And you?”

“For corporate,” he said. “For government.”

I asked again, “What kind of work?”

“Work nobody else can do.” He turned and led the way across the lab.

That, frankly, gave me the creeps. As we followed I peeked through a partly open door off the lab onto another room. Band saw, drill press, workbench piled with sheet metal. What, I thought, in hell is it that you do?

We came to the far end of the lab, where the scanning electron microscope reigned.

Flynn took a seat in front of the control console and started up the system.

Walter took our dishes of duffel-pack sand from his field kit and set them on a table. “I’ll prepare the samples myself,” he said. “Chain of evidence.”

Flynn frowned at the sand, like he’d never seen sand before.

“We’ll be looking at the quartz grains.” Walter glued the grains onto the specimen stubs, then put the stubs into the sputter coater, which looked somewhat like a microwave oven with a big jar on top. But the grains would come out cooked with an ultra-thin coating of gold, making them conductive for the electron beam.

When the samples were coated, Walter moved on to the heart of the SEM, the electron column. It was a tall metal cylinder with an electron gun at the top and a specimen chamber at its base. Walter opened the chamber door, placed the stubs on the specimen stage, closed the door.

Flynn watched his every move.

I said, “Don’t worry about your machine. Walter’s done this a thousand times.”

“I’ve done it two thousand,” Flynn said.

Mighty delicate ego you’ve got, Dr. Flynn.

Flynn smoothly took over now, working the dials on the console, pumping air out of the vacuum column. As he waited for the ready light, he asked, “Where’s the sand from?”

Walter and I exchanged a look. How much to reveal? Our working code is don’t reveal details about a case to anyone not authorized, but the corollary is don’t withhold details if that would be counterproductive. I considered Flynn. Stonewall him and he might very well shut off his machine and tell us to go home. Walter gave a brusque nod. Answer the question. Price of admission.

I said, “It came from a duffel bag belonging to the man who disappeared at sea.” I added, “Name of Robbie Donie. Do you know him?”

“I don’t associate with fishermen.”

“Oh? How did you know he’s a fisherman?”

“Tolliver,” Flynn said. “Tolliver told me.”

Walter and I exchanged another look. Made sense, but it wouldn’t hurt to confirm with Tolliver.

Flynn asked, “What good is the sand?”

I said, “It might tell us something about what happened. At the least, about Mr. Donie’s recent whereabouts.”

Flynn turned to Walter. “You have fingerprints? DNA?”

“According to Detective Tolliver, nothing helpful,” Walter said. “Then again, that’s not our bailiwick.”

“Just sand.” Flynn snorted.

Walter smiled. “There’s poetry in sand.”

“Poetry? I don’t know what you mean. I don’t like poetry. Poetry hides things. It’s full of words that don’t mean anything. It’s trying to trick you. If you don’t understand what it means then you’re not in fashion. But you’re supposed to pretend you understand just so they’ll accept you. I don’t use tricky words. If I tell somebody something, it’s certain. I don’t care if I shock them. I don’t hide behind poetry.”

“In this case, Dr. Flynn, poetry is apt. Perhaps you’re familiar with William Blake’s words? They’re quite famous. To see a world in a grain of sand.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“I think,” Walter said, “it means we can find large truths in the tiniest of things.”

“That doesn’t mean anything either.”

“Then let’s put it this way,” I said. “One grain of sand might solve a case.”

Flynn turned to me. Locked eyes with me. I thought, this guy’s not just socially awkward. This guy doesn’t like what we’re doing. Doesn’t want us here. Then why agree? Flynn’s eyes, black as his cave, gave no answer.

Walter said, “Dr. Flynn. The ready light has stopped blinking.”

Flynn spun to the console and began working the knobs.

We waited in silence as the beam traveled down the column through magnetic lenses to focus on the stage, to scan the samples, to compile the electrons into images and send them to the monitor.

And when Flynn brought up the first image onscreen I felt a little thrill.

Always happens. The SEM can magnify a specimen many thousands of times, showing every bump and pit, every twist and turn. Nothing is hidden. You see down to the micro-world and what you see doesn’t look like what you knew. A piece of my shirt would look like a plate of noodles. A salt crystal would look like a Mayan temple. I’ve seen thousands of SEM-scapes and every time it’s like learning a secret.

The quartz grain was a vast landscape of canyons and buttes and peaks.

Walter eyed the image. Grunted.

I knew that grunt. Satisfaction.

Flynn said, “What’s it prove?”

Again, Walter and I silently consulted. We could try to bullshit Flynn with a vague it’s beach sand but the guy had a double PhD from Stanford and a world-class lab. A lab we might need to borrow again. We silently agreed.

Walter explained. “You see how the triangular pits form a pattern of Vs? That likely comes from violent grain-on-grain collision in an aqueous environment.”

“It came from the ocean? That’s what you found out?”

“Oh,” Walter said, “we can say more than that. The abundance of pits tells us these grains were whacked about in a high-energy environment.”

Despite himself, Flynn leaned forward to stare at the image. “You mean waves?”

“Yes. These grains likely came from a beach with high-energy waves.”

“Likely.” Flynn snorted.

“Highly likely.”

“Likely you can find this beach?”

Walter just smiled.

Flynn spun the brightness-control button and the screen went dark.

Like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, I thought. Too late, Mr. Flynn.

We took the waterfront road that paralleled the channel and curved around the north end of the harbor, connecting the mainland to Morro Rock. The Rock stood proud at the mouth of the harbor.

We had the place nearly to ourselves. Walter parked his Explorer beside the only other car in the lot, a red Honda Civic. A blue bicycle was locked in the bike rack.

Owners nowhere in sight.

Probably hiking around the Rock, enjoying this spectacularly sunny morning.

Second sunny morning in a row. This was more like it.

Walter said, “She's a beauty.”

The Rock, not the bright day. Day before yesterday I’d admired this giant from the deck of the Sea Spray but the fog had veiled her.

Today she was naked in the sunlight.

She loomed above us, a five-hundred foot dome, the remains of a twenty-million-year-old volcano whose cone had long since eroded away, leaving behind the rock that crystallized in the volcano’s neck. I looked her over critically. She’d been quarried, marring the symmetry of her shape. Still, the gouges and crannies made pockets for vegetation to take hold on her steep slopes. She was colored in tans and grays, streaked with the rust of iron oxides. She was made of dacite, an igneous volcanic rock composed of potash and calcite and quartz and feldspar.

“Yup,” I agreed, “she’s a beauty.”

She was also, we believed, quite possibly the mother rock to the sand from Robbie Donie's duffel.

We headed for the pocket beach that snugged against Morro Rock.

When we'd passed by on the Sea Spray I'd noticed one hardy swimmer in the sheltered water along this beach. I wondered that nobody was out here on this sunny morning. Well, it was still quite early.

Walter and I headed down to the sand to do a little beach combing.

We grid-sampled and hit the mother lode: grains of glassy quartz and brown hornblende and pale green augite, and long crystals of plagioclase feldspar striped in gray and black like a tabby cat.

This could very well be the place Donie had gotten sand in his duffel.

Or, could be elsewhere along the base of the big rock.

As we shouldered our packs to set off for the next site, I glimpsed someone up on a shelf of boulders at the north end of the Rock, crouching in the chaparral, binoculars raised. Short brown hair, sweatshirt, male. Red-car guy or blue-bike guy, I figured. He pulled up his hood. Two things struck me. First thing: with those binoculars he'd seen us sampling the beach and when I'd looked his way, he'd raised his hood. Second thing: who wears a sweatshirt on a sunny morning like this?

Well, the sea breeze carried a bite.

And this was indeed a binoculars-worthy place.

“Let’s go out on the jetty,” Walter said.

I thought of, and dismissed, mentioning sweatshirt guy. We'd come for the high-energy wave environment. And there it was, at the jetty.

The jetty began at the seaward corner of the Rock and stuck out like an arm into the ocean. Farther south, another jetty projected from the long sandspit that separated the bay from the ocean. The opening between the two jetties was the entrance to the harbor. We ventured a couple yards onto the jetty. Waves rolled in, swelling into beasts that reared up and broke frothing on the jagged rocks.

The sea spray nearly got us. I yelled to Walter, “High-energy enough for you?”

“Out there,” he shouted, pointing to the sea-facing front of the Rock. “The surf will be bigger out there.”

We retreated from the jetty and clambered up onto the broken pieces of boulder that rimmed the base of Morro Rock. We passed a sign that forbade climbing, and I thought so sweatshirt guy's a rebel, and then as we started picking our way along the bouldery fan I thought, there should be a sign saying proceed at your own risk.

Still, this path would take us where we needed to go.

Yesterday, after our analysis with Oscar Flynn's sexy scope, we'd returned to our lab and checked the online Coastal Data Information Program, whose array of floats and sensors could generate a wave-energy spectrum. It gave us a list of likely beach environments along the central coast. That — and the mineral character of Morro Rock — brought us here. That, and the fact that the ocean off Morro Bay was Robbie Donie’s fishing ground.

As we navigated the rough fan rocks I stayed close enough to grab Walter's arm, should he slip. And then I realized I was doing it again, hovering, a bad habit I'd gotten into a couple of years ago when I'd taken notice of his aging, and then again when he'd had health problems, and yet here he was healthy and aging adeptly, mountain-goating his way along the treacherous rocks. I gave him some space and shifted attention to my own footing.

A few slippery yards further, a shower of pebbles rained down from above.

We both looked up.

The flank of Morro Rock here was steep and surely unclimbable without gear. Whoever was up there, dislodging pebbles, must have climbed from the other side, the north side.

And then I saw something skittering up there, from one crevice to the next. Ah. Ground squirrel. Okay.

Walter said, “I thought that might be the hiker I saw earlier. In the sweatshirt.”

So he’d seen sweatshirt guy too.

His eyes were sharp as ever.

We moved on and rounded the base of the rock to arrive at its seaward face and my focus shifted to the big waves breaking onto the fan, wetting the god-awful bouldery footing. We halted.

Walter shot me a grin. “High-energy enough for you?”

I nodded. The waves were blue-green and they rose glassy and then shattered and they thumped and groaned onto the rocks and I looked out toward the horizon where the wave train started, far out to sea with winds upon the water. It was so primal I sank into some kind of sea memory of that dark water we all came from, which left its gill-slit mark on us for a time in the womb.

And then I thought I heard a clattering of pebbles and I turned and scanned up the rock face and saw nothing. I figured, squirrels again. The Rock must be crawling with them.

And then Walter was beside me, pointing out the little beach. It was a few yards farther along, where the jumbled boulders thinned out and then gave way to a slice of sand. We could see the high tide line. We could see where the waves would pound this shore.

Walter said, “Let's go put our eyes on that.”

We clambered over to the little beach. The sand was gold-tan, flecked with dark grains and the fragile bumpy shards of a sea urchin shell.

Flanking the sand were tufts of chaparral and mustard and yellow-green feathery plants that I promptly recognized from my online research as fennel. We didn’t need an immediate source of the seed I’d found in the duffel sand — seeds could be blown on the wind or ferried on bird feathers — but finding the plant right here was a bonus.

We sampled the sand and when we had finished we exchanged grins. Mineral suite, check. High energy waves, check. We'd gloat when we got back to the lab and confirmed the match but meanwhile we turned to the question of motive. If this was indeed the source of the sand in Robbie Donie's duffel, what brought him out here?

Walter said, “It is dramatic.”

I said, “I'd think a fisherman would get enough drama on the water.” Donie sure did, in the end. “What's so special about this place?”

Neither of us could produce an answer so we decided to nose around a little more.

Up from the beach was a vegetated gully that ran into the boulders.

We nosed our way up there, and found a niche between two big boulders. I got out my flashlight and illuminated the niche. Tucked way back in the recess was — the word came to my mind — a shrine. Items were placed in a triangle on the bedrock floor. A piece of fishing net. Chemical light stick. Flotation cushion. Piece of wheel. A glass fishing float. A larger plastic float. An assortment of odds and ends.

“Flotsam,” Walter said. “Someone’s picked it up at sea.”

“Robbie Donie?”

“A workable assumption.”

I approved of picking up floating trash but if it were me I’d throw it in the garbage. The recycling. But Donie brought it here. And then, I supposed, he lit the candle in that brass holder in the center of the triangle. I said, “This is some kind of offering? Donie being superstitious — as Jake Keasling said.”

“Mmmm.” Walter nodded. “Things lost at sea, perhaps from a shipwreck. He’s asking his gods to keep him safe.”

I thought that over. “Let's say he carries his duffel bag when he goes to sea. On the hunt. When he finds an appealing piece of flotsam, he nets it and puts it in his duffel. When he returns to shore, he brings it here. And let’s say he opens his duffel on that little beach and takes out the flotsam and puts it in his shrine. Meanwhile, sand blows into the open duffel. Or he’s sloppy and knocks some in. And next time he goes to sea he brings his duffel aboard, ready for the next piece of flotsam.” I was liking the scenario. “On the final trip, his duffel gets opened and ransacked.”

Walter nodded. “Ransacked, and left empty. As Doug found it. Which implies the ransacker didn't find what he was looking for, or that it wasn't there to begin with.”

“But he expected it to be there,” I said. “Else, why ransack?”

“That presents us with two likely scenarios. The ransacker took the item. Or Donie brought the item here, before he went to sea on his final journey.”

“If it is here,” I said, “I'd sure like to know which piece of flotsam is ransack-worthy.”

We again shined our lights inside the shrine.

Walter said, “Does anything in there strike your fancy?”

I jumped my light from flotsam to flotsam. And when my light hit the plastic float, I froze. The float was yellow as sulfur, a fat cylinder about two feet long. A black nylon rope trailed like a tail from one end.

Something nagged at me.

That now-familiar image came to mind, me on the Sea Spray watching Lanny with the dive gear, strangling the black mesh dive bag. I recalled the shape of the red thing in the bag — cylindrical. We had toyed with the idea that it was a pony bottle, a spare tank. But now, staring at the yellow float, I couldn’t shake the thought that the thing Lanny had taken from the dive bag, the thing he’d hidden in his own pack, was a float like this one. Starfish red instead of sulfur yellow — otherwise, the same.

Two floats, same shapes, different colors, each possibly connected to a mishap at sea.

One float stolen from an injured diver by Lanny Keasling, and taken who-knows-where.

One float acquired who-knows-where by Robbie Donie, and hidden here.

And sought by a ransacker aboard the Outcast on the night Donie disappeared.

I presented the scenario to Walter.

“Entirely plausible.”

I said, “You think Donie's gods would mind if we remove it?”

“I think Detective Tolliver would mind if we didn't.”

We gloved up and set to work. Walter took a plastic garbage bag from our field kit and laid it on the ground. Then he shined the flashlight inside the shrine to illuminate it, and I took several cell phone photos to document the scene. Then Walter removed the float and placed it on the garbage bag. I took two closeups.

The float was molded plastic — the kind of durable material used for everything from auto parts to kiddie pools — and other than a few scuffs this float appeared to have weathered its life in the sea fairly well.

Of more interest was the nylon rope. It was braided and embedded with a few bits of seafloor material.

We got our hand lenses and bent in for examination.

I focused on the mineral grains embedded in the braid. Just eyeballing it, the grains looked volcanic. Perhaps a basalt of the Franciscan Complex. Not out of the question that these grains were similar to our pebble, the pebble caught in the holdfast entangled on the Outcast’s anchor. Way too soon to say. Definitely worth a closer look in our lab.

Walter said, “See those purplish bits? At the end of the rope.”

I looked where he pointed. They were a gaudy pink-purple. I put my lens to them. The hatch marking on the bits looked, if I had to guess, like coral. I said, “Coral?”

“Or perhaps bits of shell.”

I nodded. I was getting very interested.

We moved on to examine the fasteners. The float had a metal eyebolt and the rope connected to it by means of a snap hook. The free end of the rope had another snap hook. It was bent. Twisted.

We looked at one another. The question now became: what had the float's rope been attached to? And how had the snap hook broken?

I said, “You know what would be nice? Getting that red float Lanny took. See what it has to say about what went on out there at sea.”

“The red item you thought you saw in the diver's bag, the item Lanny might have taken.”

“You quibble.”

“Always,” he said.

We turned our attention to the float at hand. The grains were firmly embedded in the rope, which explained how they had survived transport from the source to the shrine, and so Walter used the point of his field knife to pry them loose. I secured the evidence in specimen dishes. Walter wrapped the denuded float in the plastic garbage bag and stowed it in his pack.

We were heading back onto the bouldery fan when we heard the shout. It seemed to come from somewhere on the far side of the rock. We listened. Pounding of the surf. Cry of a seagull. Nothing more.

As we rounded the hip of the Rock and the jetty came into sight, we saw the man in the sweatshirt. He stood in the parking lot, head tipped back, scanning up the flank of Morro Rock.

Sweatshirt guy saw us approaching and came to meet us, hand extended.

He waited until we clambered down off the rocky fan onto the solid ground of the parking lot. “Hi there!” he said. “Name’s Fred Stavis.” Hand still extended.

Walter met him first, shook hands, introduced us.

Stavis turned to me and we shook. He had a strong handshake, vigorous but not crushing. He held my hand long enough to establish that he’s the type who sets others at ease. Hi there — I see from your faces that I’ve surprised you, and there’s nobody else out here but the three of us this early, and I want you to know I’m a friendly sort. That kind of handshake. But not so long as to imply over-familiarity.

And I didn’t know why I was analyzing sweatshirt guy’s handshake. Maybe just because I’d been hallucinating him for the past hour and now I found him perfectly ordinary, in the flesh.

Stavis was a pleasant-looking man, regular features, average height, on the stocky side. Brown hair mussed, like he'd just lowered the sweatshirt hood. The black sweatshirt had a big white logo: DIVE SOLUTIONS. He wore cargo pants in a green-black camo print — one pocket sagging with binoculars — and white sneakers streaked with fresh dirt.

Dressed to hike.

I said, “You know it's forbidden to climb the Rock?” I hadn't meant it to sound so accusing but it rather did. So I smiled to show, no offense.

Stavis smiled in return, no offense taken. “Yes yes, it's forbidden for good reason, it's dangerous, but I've lived here all my life and I'm very careful.”

Walter said, “Were you waiting for us, here?”

“No — did it look like I was? No, I'd just finished what I came for and you happened to show up.”

“Ah,” Walter said. “My mistake. Earlier, you were watching us with binoculars.”

“Well well well, you are observant.” Stavis gave another smile, a touch less friendly. “Actually I was looking for someone — not you — and I made a thorough search. My man likes to come here. I tried calling his cell but he lets his battery get low. I don't suppose you've seen him out here? He’s about five-six, slim, hair about the color of mine, in his twenties but looks like a teenager. Real outgoing but a little…” he tapped his head, “slow.”

Walter and I exchanged a look. Small world. Well, small town. It struck me that Stavis used the same gesture that Captain Keasling had used to explain Lanny’s mental capacity. I said, “Lanny Keasling? The deckhand from the Sea Spray?”

“Yes, Lanny. So you've met him?”

“Whale watching,” Walter said, “day before yesterday. Haven’t seen him since.”

I asked Stavis, “How do you know Lanny? You work on the Sea Spray?”

“Good golly no! I work underwater, not above.” Stavis patted his sweatshirt logo. “And Lanny works for me, when he’s not on the Sea Spray.”

“So he didn't show up to work for you today?”

Stavis cocked his head.

“You said you're out here looking for him.”

“Yes, of course, I am.” Stavis paused. “A silly mix-up. Actually, he was at work this morning and then his sister phoned to ask if he could have the afternoon off — some Keasling get-together — and things are slow at my shop today so I just gave him the whole day off.”

“That was nice.”

“I try to be flexible, especially with Lanny. And, uh, my mistake this morning, I let him head off in possession of a key to a storage cabinet. I knew he was coming here — he likes it out here. He comes to get fennel, his cure for seasickness.” Stavis pointed to the patch of vegetation just beyond the parking lot, at the base of the rock. “That light green stalky plant. Grows here and there, around the rock. Up there, too.” Stavis pointed to the vegetated higher reaches.

“I got the impression,” Walter said, “that Lanny is a rule-obeyer. Why climb up there when he could pick the fennel down below?”

Stavis smiled. “He gets carried away when he's on one of his missions.”

I wondered about his mission this morning. Fennel grew on the seaward side of the Rock, too, right near a micro beach. Right near Robbie Donie's shrine. I said, “Well I sure benefited from his fennel on the Sea Spray.” I glanced at Stavis's sweatshirt logo. “So he works as a deckhand for you, too? On a dive boat?”

“He’s one of my divers.” Stavis chuckled. “I know, I know, what’s a kid like Lanny doing diving? But, you know, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist. Lanny learns mechanical tasks very well — if he takes it step by step. And I tell you, Lanny can name every widget on every piece of dive gear we’ve got.”

Lanny could certainly handle the barrel-lock fastener on a mesh dive bag, I thought. I considered asking Stavis about the float but then I could not say with certainty that what Lanny took — or might have taken — was the same kind of float that we’d just found in Donie’s shrine. Or what that would mean if it was the same. I felt the way I’d felt on the Sea Spray, putting in a good word for Lanny with his captain — only this time I didn’t want to rat him out to his dive boss.

“Diving is dangerous,” Walter said. “Don’t divers need the wit to adapt, in case something goes wrong?”

“Absolutely.” Stavis gave a vigorous nod. “I’ve taught him how to handle the usual mishaps. But I wouldn’t send him down on anything tricky. And never alone — I don’t send any of my divers alone. And I’ll usually check up on the job he does.”

“What kind of job?” Walter asked.

“Commercial diving. We do contract work, up and down the coast. Mooring installation, pier repair, piling wraps, hull cleaning, seawall construction. Offshore, inshore. We're a small outfit but we keep busy. And I gotta say, I only put Lanny on the straightforward jobs.”

“You work with him on those?”

“I’m not currently diving.” Stavis tapped his right ear. “Diving cock-up, ruptured eardrum. Meanwhile, I have a man who works with Lanny.”

“If he needs that much supervision,” I said, “why hire him to begin with?”

“We go way back. Played together, in fact, as kids.”

“And now he works for you and his sister.”

Stavis stared, and I thought I'd said something wrong, touched on some rivalry, maybe something that went back to when they were kids. Like the Jake Keasling Robbie Donie rivalry. Small-town contentiousness.

Stavis seemed to realize his lapse. “Yes, poor Lanny, two masters. Anyway, it works out.”

I wondered. Lanny dives under Stavis's tutelage, Lanny works on his sister's boat and steals a float from a mysterious diver, Lanny hides the float from his sister — or so it seemed to me at the time. Loose connection, but for one thing: Fred Stavis runs a company that hires divers.

I said, “Did you hear about that diver the Sea Spray pulled out of the water?”

“Oh yes. But he wasn’t one of mine.”

“Did you know him? I’d think divers around here would know each other.”

“Was he from around here? Maybe a sport diver? Remember, I’m commercial. Look, I get divers coming around looking for work. I’ve turned away a lot of them, over the years. Not experienced enough, didn’t match the job, that kind of thing.”

“If you get so many divers looking for work, easy to forget one.”

Stavis held up his palms. “Is this an interrogation?”

“Not at all,” Walter said, jumping in. “We simply have a backlog of unanswered questions and when we run across someone with expertise, we tend to ask. We’re working with Doug Tolliver…”

“Doug! Good man. So you two are cops.”

“Forensic geologists,” Walter said.

While Walter explained what it is we do, Stavis nodded, and I figured he must have already heard of us. What we do. Small-town gossip, if nothing else.

“Boy oh boy,” Stavis said, when Walter finished, “sure hope you find out what happened. That’s a real shame about Robbie.”

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“Somebody else I grew up with. Now, we all share the waterfront. Everybody knows everybody.” Stavis checked his watch. “I’d better get back to the shop. If you come across Lanny, tell him I need a key from him, would you?”

Walter said, “I doubt we'll come across him, if he's still up there.”

“He sure could be!” Stavis chuckled. “He's a monkey! He'll climb all over this rock.”

All over to the other side? I wondered. Down to the gully that ran to a little beach that was fringed with fennel? Hunting fennel, following his nose, finding Robbie Donie’s shrine? But Lanny leaves the sulfur-yellow float in place. And yet, on the boat, he steals the starfish-red float from the diver’s mesh bag.

It made no sense.

What made sense, I thought, was to ask him.

Sandy Keasling was ready to scream out the tides.

It was a two-point-five low tide, a higher low tide, and they had less than an hour before it turned. Timing was tight.

“Jake goddamn it,” she yelled, “shovel.”

Jake’s shovel was speared in the sand. He lifted his Bud Light to Sandy in a salute, and drank.

Lanny put down his trowel. “I’ll shovel, Sandy.”

“No Lanny, you keep trenching.”

Sandy was ready to goddamn give it up. This morning she'd been on fire with the idea. She'd taken the day off, handing off the bucket-runs to her assistant. It was Lanny's day working with Fred and she'd arranged with Fred to send Lanny home by three. She'd phoned Jake, who'd said sure, long as his nitwit assistant wasn't going surfing. And Jake was ‘down with that.’ Surf might be up — whaddya gonna do?

Lanny showed up early — turned out Fred gave him the whole damn day off — but Jake hadn't gotten his sorry ass over to the hacienda until nearly four.

And the tides waited for no man. No Keasling. This whole idea was hopeless. The sea snake in her head was already squeezing. This was Sandy Keasling now: a middle-aged woman whose sharpest feeling was pain. Who drove a pathetic whale-watching bucket, who despaired of ever driving a real ship again. Who’d lived in fear for five years that The Shitstorm would blow back in. Who needed to get back in control.

All she needed now was one quick visit to the past.

She watched Jake drain his beer and toss the can and then stretch his arms high over his head. Still wiry but nursing a beer belly that edged over the waistband of his flowered green board shorts. Lanny wore shorts just like Jake’s, only in blue. But Lanny kept his T-shirt on, the one with the Sea Spray logo — he was so damn proud of working that bucket. She watched her little brother on his knees, trenching the bulwark line like his life depended on it.

There was a time, thought Sandy Keasling, when the Sea Urchins thought they ran the sea.

“Sea Urchins!” she bellowed. “Let’s get this thing built!”

Jake belched.

She leveled a glare at him.

He turned and strolled up the beach.

She panicked, then, because there was nothing at that end of this beach but the cliff that held the cave.

Jake never went there anymore because he was too cool for caves. Lanny never went there anymore because she’d told him it was now her place. But back when the three of them were the Sea Urchins who ruled the beach along with the sea, they had their headquarters in the cave. Now, it was her jail. Not that she physically forced Joao Silva to stay there but she’d sure played mind games on him. By moonrise last night the diver was rooted like a crab in its crevice. Nothing was going to pry him out. She fed and watered him, she loaned him her Kindle and her iPod, she even emptied the goddamn porta-potty. She plied him with tales of cops and illegal immigrants. She learned a few more words of Portuguese but he still went stupid when she questioned him, asking what that red thing was he’d had in his dive bag, that thing that was missing — that thing Lanny stole. Silva just shrugged. Nao compreendo. Before bed last night she’d brought him the vinho he’d begged for — cheap rotgut — and it made him weepy instead of confiding. She’d come back this morning to start again but he was sound asleep: in her down sleeping bag, on her air mattress, goddamn drooling onto her down pillow. Water bottles and half-drunk wine and foam food containers scattered about. She’d said his name. Joao, wake up. He snored. Suddenly she'd had enough of him. Ready to strangle him.

Ready to strangle Lanny too, because this was all Lanny’s fault and like always—always—she was the one who had to clean up his mess. So now she had a Lanny problem, and a Joao-nao-compreendo-Silva problem lodged in her cave.

And then, staring at the snoring stranger in her cave, she'd had a brainstorm. Let Silva snore and stew all day and she bet he'd be more talkative when she brought him dinner. Meanwhile, she would tackle the Lanny problem. She knew just how to get Lanny to talk.

Raise the Sea Urchins from the past.

Only now, watching Jake heading up the beach toward the cliff, she saw what a mistake she’d made. Yanking Jake into the past, where going into the cave was as regular as the tides.

She bellowed, “Jake!”

Jake looked back and gave her the Sea Urchin high sign: raised hand, fingers splayed, shake of the wrist.

She didn’t buy it. He might as well have flipped her off. “Get your ass back here!”

Now Lanny was off, running to his big brother, grabbing his arm, yammering, and Jake just stood there laughing.

Sandy wanted to cry.

But then suddenly the two of them were working together, digging through a pile of kelp, coming back with ropes of thick-knobbed bull kelp. They dumped it at her feet.

Lanny said, panting, “For the moat.”

She smiled, weak with relief. “Better than perfect, Lanny.” She turned to Jake. “What did he offer you?”

“Ten bucks,” Jake said.

She met her brother’s greedy eyes. “I’ll pay half on that new tandem kayak you want. But I want to see the bill. Deal’s off if you take Lanny’s ten.”

Jake stroked his chin. “Ooookay, let’s see what we’ve got on the table. Ten bucks, payable soon as Lanny gets his butt up to the house and finds his wallet. Versus half the cost of a tandem, payable only if Sandy approves the bill. What if I choose the pricey Necky model? She gonna haggle? History says, yes she will. Trot out the spreadsheet, bitch about the debit side, moan about the cost of living. Course that’s why the elder Keaslings — may God rest their dear parental souls — made Sandy executor of the estate. Left Lanny and me beggars. Left us to suckle at the teat of big sis.”

Lanny went red.

Sandy hissed, “Knock it off, Jake.”

“Okay.” Jake smiled. “I’ll take your offer.”

She wanted to kill him. She really did.

Jake turned to Lanny. “Go back to trenching, little bro, gotta hold back the tide. And I’ll get my ass in gear and shovel us up a big pile of sand so we can build ourselves a fucking fine castle. And Sandy will start with the corner towers. Just the way we used to do it. All for one and one for all, three for three. Sea Urchins rule.”

Lanny raised his hand and gave the Urchin high sign.

They set to work.

Within fifteen minutes the sand was knee high and the trench was calf deep.

Within half an hour Sandy’s migraine had vanished.

Sun warmed their backs and sand coated their legs and when they licked their lips they tasted the sea. Sandy built the four corner towers, forming first with the bucket and then cutting with the bread knife, carving the tower tops into chiseled battlements. Jake was the excavator, digging the moat over which Sandy built the bridge, packing sand onto a length of bull kelp. Lanny followed, squeezing out handfuls of wet sand so that it dripped onto the towers, onto the bridge, growing drip by drip into fantastical spires.

There was a time, Sandy thought, when this was all that was needed.

Back when Dad ran the fishing boat and Mom kept the books and tracked the market price, and Sandy and Jake and Lanny in their primitive Sea Urchin souls pledged their lives to the sea.

Jake finished the moat and began to sculpt the gargoyle, to guard the castle.

Sandy carved the best staircase of her life, angling down the south tower to meet the interior courtyard.

Lanny ran out of drip sand and Jake left off sculpting to take Lanny’s bucket into the surf, refilling it with sloshy sand.

“Want me to do drips on your gargoyle?” Lanny said.

Jake said, “Want me to do drips on your head, doofus?”

Lanny grinned.

Sandy hadn’t seen Lanny so sunny since before they’d rescued the diver. Just look at him now. She decided to let him build the whirligig tower. She'd planned to build it herself, as she always did — she carried the ball in her pocket to roll down the whirligig ramp — but this time she would entrust it to Lanny. He'd be beside-himself-thrilled. And then, after they finished here, after a reward of grilled cheese sandwiches — what else? — Jake would get bored and go home and she and Lanny would come back and sit on the sand and watch the tide come all the way in. Just like old times — before The Shitstorm, before Lanny took to stealing and lying. Old times, when trust was unbreakable. They’d sit here content and she’d be the sun in Lanny’s sky again. And truths would be told.

And maybe they’d even hold onto this day.

“Sandy!” Lanny pointed. “Tide’s turning.”

She looked. He got that right. “Tide’s turning,” she echoed. She almost sang it out. She went around to the castle’s seafront side to check out Jake’s gargoyle and it was the finest gargoyle he’d ever done. Nothing was going to get past that gargoyle. Not sand crabs, not dogs on the loose, not marauding seagulls. The Sea Urchin castle would stand. Only the sea would be allowed to claim it.

She’d just turned to start carving windows in the towers when she saw them at the cliff top on the public stairway — Walter-Something and Cassie-Something.

We did not know what to do.

Planted on the bluff top, we stared down at the astonishing scene.

Not astonishing, really, to see Lanny Keasling down there working on a sand castle. But gruff Captain Sandy Keasling? The mind boggled. And green-haired Captain Kayak, on his belly in the sand, arm thrust into what looked like a tunnel.

This morning out at Morro Rock Fred Stavis had mentioned a Keasling family get-together but Walter and I had envisioned something like a barbecue.

Well, we'd come in search of Lanny, and here he was.

Maybe he'd dug a hole in the sand and buried the red float.

Very funny. I had floats on the brain. Long day. This morning we'd left Morro Rock and gone by the cop house to update Tolliver and give him the yellow float and then we'd returned to our motel lab and worked the new evidence. The volcanic grains in the braided rope were basalt of the Franciscan Complex, just like the pebble from the holdfast caught in the Outcast anchor, which meant the yellow float might have originated at the same place — somewhere on one of those targets we'd identified on Cochrane Bank. The other grains of evidence from the rope — which indeed turned out to be coral — would, we dearly hoped, narrow the neighborhood.

Walter had said, irritably, “I know next to nothing about coral.”

We'd phoned Tolliver and asked if that marine scientist he'd located might be available.

And then we sat back and talked over what we had.

And we came to the conclusion that the red float — if indeed it was a float, a cousin to the yellow float — might very well have telling grains of evidence caught in its rope. Evidence that might narrow the neighborhood even further.

And that sent us hunting Lanny Keasling.

We got directions from Tolliver and headed out of town, along the highway, onto the windy drive that led to the simply astonishing house on the bluffs. We had swallowed our surprise, and knocked. When nobody answered we had nosed around and spotted the stairway down to the beach.

And now here we stood, gaping.

Walter said. “I believe we’ve been spotted.”

We had. Sandy Keasling’s head tipped back. She wore a ball cap whose bill shadowed her face but there was no doubt where she looked — directly up at us.

Walter waved.

Her hands went to her hips. She stood her ground, watching us descend the stairway.

Now Jake Keasling saw us. He pushed up from his belly and sat cross-legged. Arms folded. Head cocked.

The only welcoming Keasling was the man we’d come to see. Lanny waved both arms over his head like he was guiding a ship into its berth. When our feet hit the sand he was there to meet us and he shepherded us back to the castle, confiding, “We made this.”

“It’s magnificent,” Walter said.

I nodded. It was.

Lanny spread his arms, encompassing the lot of us. “This is Walter and this is Cassie and this is my sister Sandy and this is my brother Jake.”

I realized that Lanny did not know we had already learned they were siblings. Sandy was glaring at Lanny, as if he’d shared too much information. Jake was frankly frowning. It seemed he’d had enough of us day before yesterday taking samples at his beach.

“And I’m Lanny. You can call us all Lanny and Sandy and Jake, and we can call you Cassie and Walter.” Lanny hesitated. “Is that good?”

I gave Lanny a smile. “Certainly. It’s nice to meet the Keasling family all together. Lanny and Sandy and Jake.”

Walter said, “Yes indeed.”

“Yes indeed,” Lanny said, “we’re the Sea Urchins!”

“Lanny.” Sandy’s voice was low and threatening.

Lanny blinked. “But we are.”

“Sea Urchins?” I asked.

“A childhood affectation,” Jake said. “We’re the Keaslings. Salt water runs in our veins.” He uncrossed his legs, bent his knees, leaned back on his elbows, gazing up at Walter and me. “But enough about us. Let’s talk about you. I know you went to sea with my siblings because I saw you on their boat, but I don’t believe they know you’ve met me. Sister dear, brother mine, our visitors are geologists, doing some sleuthing for Doug Tolliver. In the matter of Robbie's disappearance.” Jake shot Sandy a glance. “Silly me, I guess you already know that. Seeing as how they were doing their thing on your boat.”

There was a silence. Lanny lost his smile. Jake found one. Sandy cast a look at the incoming tide. The water lapped up to the long trench in front of the sand castle.

“What do you want?” Sandy said. “We’re busy.”

“Not really,” Jake said. “We’re playing.”

Sandy gave a little jerk, as if she’d been slapped.

Lanny said, “It’s okay. We can finish after. We can talk to them. It’s sad about Robbie. We should help.”

I hoped Lanny would still feel helpful when we explained why we’d come.

I said, “Thanks Lanny. I have something to show you.” I took out my cell phone and displayed the closeup photo of the sulfur-yellow float from the shrine.

Lanny gaped.

I moved to hand the phone to him for a better look.

“I don’t want it,” he said.

Sandy seemed to go on alert. Watching Lanny, then turning to my cell phone. Jutting her head for a look.

Jake got to his feet and came over to see. “It’s a marker float,” he said. “Big wow.”

“What’s it got to do with us?” Sandy demanded.

Walter said, “We found it in a place… We believe it was put there by Robbie Donie.”

“Yeah? So?”

Walter and I had discussed this, the fact that to learn something we were going to have to explain something. He was leaving it to me, now, to explain my logic.

“On the Sea Spray,” I said, “that diver you rescued had a dive bag, and I believe it contained a similar float, only red, and…”

Lanny made a gasping sound.

Sandy abruptly snatched up a trowel and thrust it at Lanny. “Go dig.”

Lanny looked at the trowel. At me. Frozen.

There came a big wave and seawater flooded the trench.

“Goddamn it Lanny protect the castle.”

Lanny was rooted.

I said, “This will just take a minute.”

Sandy whirled on me. “Whatever you think you’re doing, leave Lanny out of it. He has nothing to do with your business.”

Walter stepped in. “He might.”

Sandy slapped the trowel into Lanny’s hand.

“This is getting good,” Jake said. “Anybody bring popcorn?”

Very slowly, Sandy turned to Jake. “Deal’s off, brother,” she said softly. She circled the castle, to the seaward side. She stepped over the trench and stood in front of a creature carved in sand.

Some kind of sea-monster, I thought.

She kicked it and the head came off.

Lanny gasped and dropped the trowel.

She came back to face Walter and me. “You talk to me. Up at the house.”

She stalked off toward the stairway, yelling over her shoulder to tell her brothers to stay put, turning once to see if Walter and I were following.

We were.

Sandy led us from the top of the stairway across the bluff to the seaward side of the house. The place was nothing less than a Spanish-style manor and it spanned a long slice of oceanfront. We crossed a browning lawn that led to a red brick patio whose bricks, here and there, needed resetting. The house, like the grounds, needed tending. Peeling stucco. Wrought-iron trim with patches of rust. I guessed a place like this must be worth a fortune but maybe there wasn’t enough money to keep it up.

We went inside through a sliding glass door that wanted to stick.

Inside was dark planked flooring and white walls and white ceiling with heavy wood beams and sparsely-furnished rooms that led onto rooms as far as I could see in each direction. The room we stood in was furnished in cracked leather couches and a huge oak table, well scuffed.

Walter said, “Your house bests the castle.”

Sandy said, curtly, “It’s inherited.”

“Is that how you were able to fund your brother's business?”

She stopped in her tracks. “Who the hell told you about that?”

“Your brother.”

“Lanny has a big mouth.”

“I was talking about Jake,” Walter said. “The kayak business. But I take it that you also funded some enterprise of Lanny's?”

Her eyes narrowed. “We were talking about Lanny. So why bring up Jake and his business?”

“Keasling businesses appear to be entangled in the case we're working.”

“The hell,” she said.

“Jake told us about the proposed charter business, squid hunting. Using your boat.”

She took a long moment. “So?”

“So, considering the fact that Robbie Donie was doing squid charters, considering the feud he had with Jake — the ink incident — I find squid charters a topic of interest.”

“What are you saying? Spit it out. You saying Jake had something to do with Robbie going missing?”

“I’m simply wondering if Mr. Donie’s animosity extended to you — since it’s your boat that might be used to compete with him. Your investment.”

“You saying I had something to do with Robbie’s death?”

“There's no proof of death, as of now.”

“Too bad.” Her hands went to her hips. “I’ll be the first to send up a cheer when his body is found.”

“Oh?”

Her face hardened. “Robbie’s a punk. He got pissed at Jake, he dumped the ink on Jake’s dock. It’s old news — Robbie getting pissed and throwing a fit.”

I said, “He did more than just throw ink. He sabotaged your boat, or so Doug Tolliver suggests.”

“Doug’s a talker.” She scowled. “Look, I don’t know who sabotaged my boat. And if I could have proved it was Robbie I’d have sued the little shit for compensation. And I've got nothing more to say on the subject.”

“Then let's return to Lanny,” Walter said. “You thought I was referring to you funding his business.”

“He doesn't have a business.”

“He works for you, and for Fred Stavis — we ran into Mr. Stavis this morning and learned about Lanny's employment. Is that what you were referring to? Perhaps subsidizing his work with Stavis?”

“You doing an audit on the Keaslings?” Sandy pulled off her ball cap. Her hair bushed out. Her face hardened. “I make investments. With inherited money. It came from my grandparents, Keasling side. They had this place built. They made their money from real-estate investments. That didn’t stop my folks from earning a living fishing. Doesn’t stop me and my brothers making our own way. We work. We don’t throw our money around. But if there’s a sound investment, I invest. Dive Solutions was a sound investment. Fred agreed to hire Lanny. And Lanny earns his paycheck with Fred. Just like he does with me.”

I said, “That diver you rescued. Did Lanny know him?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Lanny seemed awfully upset.”

She glared at me. “He gets upset if somebody gets seasick.”

“I wondered if Lanny worked with the diver on one of Fred Stavis’s jobs.” Stavis had denied that; but I wondered if Sandy thought that.

“You do a lot wondering.” Sandy Keasling grew that dolphin smile. “But you don't know much, do you?”

I held up my cell phone and clicked on the photo of the yellow float. “Trying to.”

She started across the room. “Let’s finish this in my office.”

We followed her through three more sparsely furnished rooms and then into a small office. Battered wood desk and cheap office-supply chair. Tall filing cabinets, a shelf of books, a shelf of knickknacks. One wall of photos. Family photos, it seemed, and sea scenes. Walter paused to look. He pointed to one, a colorful shot of blue sky and a big blunt-nosed boat with a sun-streaked blonde leaning on the railing, smiling into the camera. She wore a ball cap with Captain stitched over the bill. A younger Captain Sandy Keasling. Walter said, “That’s a tugboat, isn’t it? Your boat?”

She nodded, brusque.

“What caused you to switch to tour boats?”

“None of your goddamn business.” She brushed past Walter to her desk and sat in the chair with her back to the window. The window overlooked the sea. Sun streamed into the room, haloing her hair, highlighting the orange-tinged dye job.

There were no other chairs so we stood facing her, squinting against the sun.

“Talk.” She leaned back in her chair. “Talk fast.”

I said, “Two days ago, on your boat, after you rescued that diver, I thought I saw Lanny take something red out of a black mesh dive bag and put it into his own duffel bag. What I glimpsed looked pretty much like this.” I again held up my cell phone, showing her the photo. “The only difference being the color.”

She was silent. Rigid.

I said, “As Walter explained on the beach, we found the yellow float in a place possibly associated with Robbie Donie.”

She stared at the photo as if trying to commit it to memory.

I said, “We believe Donie collected the yellow float, out at sea.”

She snapped, “People collect things. Including me.” She jerked a thumb at the knickknack shelf.

I noted the glass bowl full of round white disks. Sand dollars, I thought. Even her seashells were money.

She said, “You collect photos of floats, do you?”

“We have a coincidence,” Walter said. “A missing fisherman and an injured diver. Each, possibly, had possession of similar floats. And that’s why we’re interested in the red float from the diver’s bag.”

She said, “I got three things to say to you. Number one, Lanny didn’t take anything from the diver. Number two, I don't see why two floats, in the possession of two watermen, is so surprising. Number three, my family has nothing to do with either one of them.”

I asked, “What about number four?”

“There is no number four.”

“I think there is. We’ve got two watermen with two floats meeting with two traumas in the same general area, more or less, within a few days of one another. The same area, in general, where your boat took us to Birdshit Rock where the fish were half-dead and the crabs were on the run. The same area, in general, where both the Outcast and the Sea Spray encountered something that scraped their rub rails. So, number four.” I squinted past her sun-haloed head, out to sea. “What’s going on out there?”

Captain Keasling said, “The ocean’s the ocean,” and then she rose and shooed us out of her office, so abruptly that we surprised Lanny just outside her door, now pressing himself flat against the wall as if that would render him invisible.

Sandy was ushering us out of the house, out the patio door, when we heard the shouting.

We rushed across the salt-browned lawn to the edge of the bluff where a thigh-high white fence was all that stood between solid ground and thin air.

Up the beach, Jake knelt over the still form of a man in jeans and sweatshirt. For a moment I thought it was Fred Stavis. Then Jake’s green-haired head shifted, to shout again, and I saw that the man’s hair was blond.

Sandy got there first, trailed by Lanny, trailed by Walter and me. She bulldozed Jake aside and knelt beside the unconscious man on the beach.

“He’s breathing, sis,” Jake said. “You can skip the shtick.”

She ignored her brother and cupped the man’s chin, her fingers dancing around the purplish welt that ran from cheekbone to jaw. She tilted the man’s head back, putting her ear to his mouth.

Lanny pressed his hands over his own mouth.

Without consultation, Walter and I flanked Lanny. I supposed he would have been upset about anyone lying in distress on the sand but this wasn’t just anyone — this was the diver stung by the jellyfish, the diver Lanny helped rescue, the diver whose mesh bag Lanny pilfered — and I feared that right now Lanny might fall apart.

I touched his arm. “We phoned 911. Help’s on the way.”

Lanny said, behind his hands, “Where’d he come from?”

Jake edged in. “From the cave, little bro. I saw him stagger out. Think he’s a pirate from the past?”

Lanny turned to Jake and whispered through his fingers, “He’s the diver.”

“That what he is?” Jake looked again at the man on the ground.

“Lanny,” Walter asked, gently, “does he work with you?”

Lanny shook his head. He was shivering now, shaking like he’d taken on a sudden fever, and he said something from behind his hands, his voice muffled and thick so that it was nearly indecipherable but I was certain I’d heard him say, “I broke it.”

Yellow police tape stretched across the open gate in the cliff that led to the cave, although the only people on the beach were the Keaslings, us, the cops, and the paramedics.

Doug Tolliver’s scene techs were processing the cave.

The paramedics were strapping the still-unconscious diver onto a backboard.

Tolliver’s techs had removed and bagged the diver’s dirt-streaked shoes. “All yours,” he told us. He turned to Sandy. “What was this fellow doing in your cave?”

She shrugged.

“He’s the diver you picked up. Joao Silva. Disappeared from the hospital yesterday morning. Now he shows up here. Sandy, he was living in there. You want to wait until we lift the prints from the water bottles? Or the wine bottle or the iPod or the food containers? Whose prints we gonna find, Sandy? Silva’s, and who else’s?”

She folded her arms. “Mine.”

Lanny gaped.

Jake mimed eating popcorn.

Tolliver kept his focus on Sandy. “What's going on?”

“Shit Doug, I was just trying to help him out. Ran into him yesterday at, ah, McDonald’s. He looked a little worse for wear so I asked how’s he doing and he’s not doing so well. He looks scared. So we talk. He’s got some English, I’ve got a little Portuguese. Turns out he’s illegal — you know that?”

Tolliver said, “I do now.”

Sandy glanced at Silva’s still form. “If I’d known he was that sick I’d have driven him right back to the hospital.”

“Hiding an illegal is a criminal offense, Sandy.”

“I didn’t hide him. I offered him the use of the cave. I loaned him a couple things. Brought him food and water, as a kindness.”

Lanny chimed in. “He’s sick. He needs help. Sandy helped him.”

Why? I wondered. What would cause Captain Keasling to help an illegal, putting herself at risk in the process? What would tug an act of kindness from her salt-weathered soul? Well, how about Lanny? Maybe Sandy did indeed see Lanny take the float from the diver’s bag, and she was wondering, as we were, what Lanny had gotten himself into. What Lanny’s connection to the diver was. So she hid the diver, to protect Lanny?

Tolliver appeared to share my doubts. “You’re not known for charitable acts, Sandy.”

“I saved his damn life out there on the water. He’s a waterman trying to earn a living. I can relate to that. I thought, let him recover, let the hoopla die down, then I’d send him on his way and he could take his chances.”

“What hoopla?”

She laughed. “What you’re paying these geologists to find out. What happened to Robbie. What happened to this diver.”

“As far as I know,” Tolliver said, “Joao Silva had a diving accident. Stung by a jellyfish.”

“Then why’d you send your pet geologists here to harass me about the damn float, about something they think they might have seen on my boat? Which it turns out they didn’t.”

I spoke up. “If I’m wrong about what I saw, I’m wondering why you’re so touchy about it?”

She spun on me. “And I wonder how many times you’re gonna chase your own tail.”

“As many times as it takes to find out what I saw. How many times does this diver need to turn up unconscious before you start to wonder?”

“Not my problem,” she snapped.

Doug Tolliver turned to Lanny. “About that float, son….”

“I don’t know.” Lanny stepped back from our little circle, hands splayed as if he wanted to hold us at a distance, or perhaps say goodbye. “I need to go I need to go.” He turned and hurried down the beach, toward the sand castle.

I watched him.

The castle was under assault. Waves hit the shore higher now, flooding the trench, breaching the moat, sending frothy tongues around the castle flanks. I saw Lanny pause a moment, pick up the trowel, and I thought he was going to dig a new defense but he left the eroding castle behind and headed for the stairway. I considered following him to ask about the float — catch him at last without his big sister’s protection — but I heard behind me the unmistakable sounds of retching and I turned back to our circle.

The diver had come alive.

One paramedic frantically loosened the straps on the backboard while the other turned Silva’s head to the side. Silva vomited again, and again. It seemed the man was bringing up his guts.

The paramedic holding Silva’s head gave us a grimace and said, “Bad fish.”

Yup, I caught that smell, along with the vomit smell. It was like the oily smell from the humpback whale’s blow hole.

“Anchovies,” Tolliver said. He’d moved over to Silva and was studying the foul pool in the sand. “He’s been eating anchovies.”

Walter’s eyebrows lifted.

I caught Sandy taking in Walter’s reaction, then glancing at me, then glancing at Jake, who avoided her look. I thought, the anchovy feud was an old thing between the Keaslings and Donie, but what’s the connection here? How does this illegal Portuguese diver fit into the picture?

The second paramedic made a call on his cell and told somebody, “Food poisoning.”

Tolliver turned to Sandy.

“No way,” she said. “No way, Doug. I brought him peanut butter sandwiches, bagels, fruit — stuff that doesn’t go bad easy. I sure in hell didn’t bring him any anchovies. No fish at all. You go look and see.”

“I will,” Tolliver said.

He went up the beach, ducked under the yellow tape, and disappeared into the slot that led to the cave. We all waited, silent. Sandy was stone still, arms folded, staring out to sea as if she had no doubts whatsoever that Tolliver would find only bagel crumbs and apple cores in the cave. Jake, though, was not so sanguine. He struck a waiting pose, hands on the backs of his hips, thumbs tucked into the waistband of his low-slung board shorts, a Captain Kayak pose but for the hiked shoulders and tension in the cords of his neck. He stared down at Silva.

Silva had now gone still, collapsed on the backboard.

And then Tolliver returned. He held a plastic evidence bag containing a clamshell food container. “Sandy,” he said, pulling up to the group, “look at this.”

We all looked. The clamshell was open. There were the oily remains of some fish, bits of flesh and tiny translucent bones. Anchovies, I assumed. If they were rancid, the odor was contained within the plastic bag.

She said, “That’s not mine. I never brought him fish.”

“You bring him any kind of food in one of these clamshells?”

“Peanut butter sandwiches. So sue me, I use environmentally-unfriendly clamshells. Lots of people use them. Check the trash bins around town. Hell, check the parking lots. Check everybody who's got a Costco membership — you can buy them there.”

“I'm interested in the ones you use, Sandy. You mind if we have a look in your kitchen?”

She glared.

“Do I need to get a search warrant, Sandy?”

“Go ahead. I've got nothing to hide. I told you everything I know.”

“No you didn’t. In fact, there are quite a few things you didn’t tell. You didn’t tell me about the diver’s missing float, and…”

“There was no float.”

“…and you didn’t tell me the real reason you were hiding Silva. So who — if not you — brought him a container of anchovies?” Tolliver peered up at the cliff face. “Cave's not a place somebody just stumbles across. Of course, if somebody knows it’s there, that’s a different story.” Tolliver’s focus shifted to Jake.

Jake tried for a grin.

Tolliver lifted the clamshell. “We’ll see what the lab has to say.”

Or Joao Silva, I thought. I watched the paramedics strapping him down again, checking his vitals. Silva’s eyes flickered. Open, shut. He could save us all a lot of trouble if he could talk. Tell us what he was diving for, what happened to him. Tell us what the float meant. Tell us why Sandy was hiding him in her cave. Tell us who fed him bad anchovies. I asked Sandy, “Would Lanny have brought him the container? To help?”

“My brothers never come to the cave.”

“Well thanks for the vote of confidence, sis.” Jake’s stance shifted, from tense back to languid. Recovered now. He said, “Hey Doug, there’s another way into the cave. You can get to it from the bluffs. There's a hole in the cave ceiling. I used to climb in and out that way, when I was a kid. We all did. So somebody could have been hiking the bluffs, heard noises in the cave, gotten curious, had a look. Maybe told somebody else. Word gets around. And somebody else with an interest in the guy in the cave brings him the 'chovies. Somebody other than a Keasling.”

Somebody like Fred Stavis, I suddenly thought. Who runs a dive business and hires divers — although, he insists, not this diver. Whose business was funded by Sandy Keasling, who hid — there’s no other word for it, I thought — this diver in her cave. And then I wondered what Jake thought about Sandy using the family inheritance to fund Dive Solutions. Was that how he got her to go in on the squid charters? I tried to make it all connect. Any of it.

Jake added, “And I can name you two other anchovy fishers on the docks right now. You can buy chovies at any bait shop. Buy them at the market if you’ve got the taste.” He moved to Sandy and draped an arm across her shoulders. “As for us, we got fed way too many chovies by the parental units. Never touch ‘em now.”

Sandy was awkward in her brother’s embrace, as if she’d like to shake him off but didn’t want to risk it.

“Hey,” one of the paramedics said. “He’s awake.”

We all looked.

Joao Silva gazed up at us through reddened eyes. His face was pale, sweaty, and there was a film of dried froth around his mouth. His hands, restrained by the straps, clawed at his stomach. His eyes jumped, like he was searching for someone. Desperation in his eyes. He let out a sound, ahhhhh. His tongue flicked out, licked his lips. “Onde?” he whispered. Breathing fast. “Quem?” Eyes jumping from one of us to the next. “Quem e voce?” Voice like sandpaper.

“Sandy,” Tolliver said, “you got enough Portuguese for that?”

She said, softly, “He doesn’t know where he is. Who we are.”

The paramedic leaned in close. “Who are you, sir? Tell me your name.”

Nothing.

“Sandy?” Tolliver said.

“Nome?” she asked Silva.

He stared at her. Blank.

“Looks like he doesn’t know shit,” Jake said. His stance relaxed even more.

Sandy studied her brother for a moment and then slipped out from beneath his arm. “Looks like.”

We’d run out of coffee.

This day had been a two-carafe day, courtesy of a morning at Morro Rock followed by a session in the lab and then a late afternoon with the Keaslings and a poisoned diver. Courtesy of an evening in our lab, again, establishing that the few grains of soil we’d extracted from the eyelet holes in the diver’s sneakers matched the soil we’d sampled in Sandy’s cave — which told us the diver had been in the cave, something we already knew. Doug Tolliver had hoped that the diver’s sneakers would provide a map of his whereabouts since he’d left the hospital. But his footwear was worn smooth, without any indentations to collect and preserve soil. There was no soil map.

At ten P.M. we called it a night.

But the thought of tomorrow morning without coffee was intolerable.

I volunteered to drive into town to buy the beans.

In town, in line at Peet’s, I glanced out the window and saw Lanny pass by. His hurried pace, and the knapsack on his back, was simply too much to ignore. I abandoned Peet’s to follow Lanny.

By the time I reached the sidewalk he was two blocks ahead of me, heading toward the waterfront. He turned left at the main drag and disappeared from my sight.

I ran.

It was a warm beachy night with a waxing gibbous moon in a clear starry sky and all of Morro Bay seemed to be out enjoying it. The main drag was clogged with people, in and out of shops and restaurants, bunching on the sidewalk, in the street. I wove through the throng. Four blocks south I nearly gave up. The fifth block, I glimpsed in the distance a figure with a pack. I picked up my pace. The figure dodged into a parking lot.

I knew that parking lot. It abutted Captain Kayak’s shop.

I thought, Lanny’s going to visit his brother.

But of course he wasn’t. When I reached the kayak shop I found it closed and dark. There were no lights on the stairway that led down to the dock, no lights on the dock, but by moonlight I saw a slim figure in a kayak push off from the dock. No pack in sight. I guessed he’d stowed it in the cargo compartment.

My mind raced, calculating sizes. The yellow float was about two feet long and, in my estimation, the red object I'd glimpsed in the diver's mesh bag was similar in shape and size. The pack Lanny carried tonight was backpack-style, not the duffel bag he’d had on the boat. Nevertheless, roomy enough to accommodate a two-foot float.

Lanny’s kayak headed up the channel toward the back bay.

So he wasn’t heading out to open sea. I expelled a breath. I’d kayaked before, on lakes and tame rivers, and I figured I could handle a protected bay.

I went down the stairs.

Straps hung free on the kayak rack. I chose the sleek white Necky, thinking the captain has real nice equipment. I lifted it off the rack and set it on the end of the dock, front end hanging over the black water. Now for a paddle. I glanced around. The tall fiberglass gear locker had one door ajar. I opened it and chose my paddle, keeping watch for a pissed green-haired owner. I took a twenty from my wallet and left it in the locker.

Easy as breathing, I was in the Necky paddling up the channel toward the back bay.

I was dressed for a coffee run, not kayaking, in jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt, and I quickly worked up some body heat in the summery night. There was no sound but the suck of my paddle in the glassy water — putting in, pulling free. No light but the glow from the moon. As I glided past the waterfront, on my left, I saw people inside bars and restaurants and if they put their faces to their windows they might glimpse a sleek shape finning among the anchored sailboats. To my right was the sandspit that began back at the mouth of the harbor and rose to giant dunes in the distance, well ahead of me, where the channel widened into the bay.

Right here, within the confines of the narrow channel, I could see anything that was moving on the water, anything beached on the sandspit.

Nobody. Nothing. Just me skimming along like a water bug.

And then suddenly my paddle caught on something, dragged something silvery out of the water. I stared at the thing dangling from the right-hand blade and identified it as a jellyfish. Shit. I’d probably killed it. Carefully I dipped the blade back into the water and set the jelly free. I was leaning over for a closer look, to see if it would swim away, when I realized the water was full of jellyfish. Translucent saucer-shaped jellies and small blue petal-shaped jellies and crazy-looking see-through jellies full of what looked like fried eggs. They were everywhere. I let the kayak drift, balancing the paddle across the cockpit, floating through the swarm. The bloom—I recalled the word, I’d read about this sort of thing, this was a jellyfish bloom. It was a seawater garden and in the silver moonlight it stunned me with its beauty.

Stunned like I’d been stung.

I thought of the huge purple-striped jelly I’d seen in the open ocean, of the red welt on the diver’s face.

Did these jellies, here in the channel, carry a sting in their trailing tentacles?

A line from the Ancient Mariner popped into my brain. Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs, upon the slimy sea. Thank you very much, Walter, for sharing.

This jellyfish bloom was slowing me down.

I was losing Lanny, somewhere up ahead.

If I’d been wrong and all he carried in his pack was a snack and binoculars for star-gazing, then I’d leave him to it. If I was right, though, he carried something that I wanted. Something that had clearly frightened him, and yet it was something worth stealing, worth hiding, worth covering up. Was he frightened of the diver, as well? Frightened, understandably, of what happened to the diver in the ocean, and then later in the Keasling cave. Terrified, I would think, of whoever fed the diver bad anchovies.

Unless, I had to consider, it was Lanny himself who had poisoned the diver. I didn’t really think so. If I thought that, I’d turn my kayak and hightail it back to Jake’s dock.

I started to paddle, cutting my blades into the spaces between the jellyfish. Perhaps it was my imagination but they seemed to get with the program, to give me some room.

And finally, I paddled the Necky out of the bloom.

By the time I reached the end of the narrow channel, the water was innocent of jellyfish. I left behind the bloom and the docks and the buildings and entered the gentle wilds of the widening bay.

Way in the distance I thought I saw something riding the water. Something just at the limits of my vision.

Lanny, I figured, in his kayak.

I struck out in that direction.

The bay widened — the far left shore growing bristly with eel grass and the far right shore rounded with rising sand dunes. I paddled harder, suddenly eager to reach Lanny and sweet-talk him or bully him into telling me what the hell was going on.

There came a snort behind me and water splashed my back and I let out a cry that echoed across the water. My heart slammed. Jumbo squid out hunting? Did they hunt here in the bay? And if not squid, what? I pivoted in my seat to look the monster in the eye. It was a black shiny eye in a long torpedo body but it was not a squid. Just a sea lion.

I expelled a breath. Go play somewhere else.

I'd had my fill of sea creatures. Like I was late for dinner I plunged the paddle in the water and took off — no style, no rhythm, just me galumphing across the bay.

The sea lion watched me go.

Lanny in the distance watched me come. The bow of his kayak was turned to face me. He was still as the water, his paddle horizontal across his knees.

He must have heard me cry out. Now, he watched me coming.

I waved.

The kayaker dipped his paddle and turned, moving deeper into the bay, and within a few minutes disappeared around a jutting spit of land.

I found my rhythm and settled into it. I heard a splash, sounding a good distance behind me. I glanced back, saw nothing, smiled. Not going to get spooked, this time. Something unknown in the water and your mind takes off — but there’s always an explanation.

I refocused on the invisible kayaker ahead.

Wherever he was going, it was getting lonely out here. To my right the sand dunes grew and to my left, across the widening bay, the only structure along the shoreline was a long building with a lot of glass that shined in the moonlight. And then the leftward shoreline receded into darkness.

I kept to the dunes side of the bay, following that bone-white shoreline.

Within another five minutes I too rounded the jutting spit of land.

And then I saw the figure on the dunes.

Rising like elephant backs, the dunes up ahead on the right shoreline were white in the moonlight. The figure stood atop the largest of the elephants, a stick-figure silhouette at this distance, but the silhouette wore a pack. On the shore at the foot of the dune, at waterline, was a shape that strongly resembled a beached kayak.

All right, then.

I angled my kayak toward the dunes.

Lanny fled over the top of the elephant.

As I neared the shore I saw that the beached kayak was a Necky single, like mine, only green. It was stenciled with Captain Kayak’s logo. My craft arrowed onto the wide muddy beach, a couple yards from its green twin. I understood the need for a kayak here. Only a craft with a shallow draft could reach this beach. I assumed Lanny had come by kayak for just that reason. That, and stealthy quiet.

I secured my paddle, took off my shoes and socks, rolled up the legs of my jeans, swung my legs free, and stepped into the muck to drag my kayak up high on the beach. The last thing I wanted was for it to drift free.

Now what?

Well lady, you either sit here and wait for Lanny to return, or you climb up that elephant and see what’s on the other side.

I climbed, and the sand was soft and cool and slippery under my feet. As the dune steepened I felt the climbing-burn in my thighs. I was glad to reach the summit.

Over the summit was a shallow descent onto gentle dune waves. In my night-limited vision I could make out the shine of the sea, in the distance, and the spikes of bushy dune vegetation, closer by. Nothing moving. Just me.

“Lanny?” I said.

No response.

I sank to the sand. “Lanny?” I said again. “If you can hear me will you please show yourself? I followed you, I know you’re here, I know why you’re here. You came to bury the diver’s float.” Perhaps he was hiding in those bushes over there. I spoke louder, “I need your help. You helped me once, on the Sea Spray.” I thought I heard him, rustling the bushes. Or perhaps it was the sighing of the sea in the distance. “What’s going on in the ocean, Lanny? You said you broke something. Was it something to do with the float?” I listened for an answer. Silence. “Maybe we can fix it.” Whatever the hell it is. “What would Jock Cousteau do, Lanny?” Or should I have said it with a zzh, Jacques, instead of the hard J? Lanny’s slow but he’s not a moron, he must know the correct pronunciation. He’s just eased it to Jock. So does he think I’m mocking him? Does he even hear me? “Lanny, if something is broken in the ocean, you need to help.”

There came a sound, a soft soughing noise of feet on shifting sand, only it did not come from the bushes in front of me, it came from behind, near the summit of the dune.

I sucked in a breath. Heaved onto my hands and knees. Pushed to stand. Croaked, “Who’s there?”

An eon passed in which nobody responded, and then the soughing started up again and a man topped the summit and came down the little hillock to join me. Black polo shirt, camo cargo pants, barefoot, carrying a pair of white boat shoes in one hand. “Hi there,” Fred Stavis said. Just a touch out of breath. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Remember me? This morning, out at Morro Rock? And here we meet again. You here for the same reason I’m here?”

There was no answer to that. Questions, yes, but no workable answer.

“Relax, I’m a good guy.” Stavis smiled to prove it. “And I’m not following you. I’m following Lanny. He up here?”

I managed to shrug.

“Good golly, did that sound menacing? Let me explain. I was working late at my dive shop — it’s on the waterfront, just where the channel widens into the bay. And I happened to glance at the water and who do I see out there kayaking? Lanny. Gave me pause, got to admit. You know, considering what happened to Robbie Donie and that diver, I just got concerned about Lanny out there at night by himself. I really did.” He gave a sharp nod, reaffirming his worry. “And then I saw another kayaker following him — you, it turns out, although I didn’t know it at the time. I thought, might as well go out there too, just to be on the safe side. I would have taken my outboard but it’s real low on gas, so I just hopped in my kayak and came along. Didn’t even take time to change clothes.” He lifted his boat shoes. He looked at my rolled jeans. “Looks like you came unprepared, too.”

I nodded. Looks like Fred Stavis has a real convenient reason not to have done the obvious, take his outboard. If I were Stavis and wanted to stealthily follow somebody on a quiet night across still water, I’d take a kayak, too.

“Anyway,” he said, “I found the two kayaks beached and thought I’d better climb up here and check things out. Managed to work myself into a bit of a worry. If I’d had my cell phone, I would've called Doug Tolliver and told him to get his patrol boat out here. I was that worried.”

I found my voice. “But you didn’t have your phone.”

“Forgot it in the rush.”

I thought I heard a rustling in the bushes. It took all my will not to turn and look.

Stavis’s head turtled around. He heard the sound, too. “Lanny. Stop hiding. You got two people up here looking for you and neither one of us bears you any ill will. While I was climbing up the dune I couldn’t help overhearing Miss Oldfield saying she thinks you have some float she wants, thinks you came here to bury it, so maybe you can come out here and put her mind at ease. As for me, you know you can count on me. You got a problem? Let’s put our heads together and solve it.”

There was no response.

“Lanny. Miss Oldfield here is shivering. Be a gentleman and come out so we can all go home and warm up.”

Stavis was right. I’d begun to shiver, although the night was still warm. I suddenly wanted to signal to Lanny to stay in the bushes, stay away from smiling Fred Stavis.

But Lanny was indeed a gentleman and came out of hiding.

“Good man,” Stavis said.

Lanny stopped in front of us, staring down at the sand. He wore, I took note, the T-shirt and board shorts he’d worn this afternoon for castle-building — and a good choice, as well, for kayaking. I’d wager that Lanny had left the Keasling hacienda with kayaking in mind. Needed to wait until dark, though. Did whatever he did until then. I considered his pack, and the trowel that snugged into the side mesh pocket. I considered the miles of dunes and the impossibility of my finding the hole he’d dug in the sand to bury the float. I wondered if he intended to retrieve it, at some point. The day he took it he could have thrown it into the garbage, and yet he did not. He kept it hidden somewhere — in his room, at home? And then, this afternoon, after Walter and I came to ask him what he’d taken from the diver’s bag — after we’d showed him the photo of the yellow float from Donie’s shrine — he panicked. And he came here to hide the red float.

Stavis held out a hand to Lanny. “Shall we go?”

Lanny looked up. “I’m not ready.”

“I think it’s best if we all go together.”

I reached in my pocket and brought out my cell. I said, to Stavis, “Or maybe I should call Doug?”

Stavis held up his palms. “Nobody needs to call anybody.”

“Except Jock.” Lanny now looked at me. His face was serious. “You should call Jock. Tell him there’s sick animals in the ocean. Tell him he should come. Tell him we need him.”

Stavis gave a strangled laugh.

I said, gently, “I can’t call Jock. He’s dead.”

“I know that.” Lanny’s face bloomed into a wide smile. “But I got you. Both of you. You should see your faces. You thought I believe in ghosts. You can’t call ghosts on the phone, Cassie.” He turned to Stavis. “You can’t ask ghosts to fix things. You have to do it yourself.”

We waited for Doug Tolliver to pick us up for the drive to meet the marine scientist who knew about coral. Tolliver had a few questions of his own about what was going on in his patch of ocean.

We waited in silence.

I yawned. Late night, last night. After returning from the dunes I had awakened Walter and told him where I'd been. He reacted poorly. “You went alone.” I shaped the story as spur-of-the-moment necessity and emphasized that we had all returned safely to harbor. No harm, no foul.

What I couldn't offer was a solid payoff — just a reasoned assumption that Lanny had buried the red float somewhere in the dunes.

Walter's response to that was, “It's a lot of sand.”

I said, “Let's go wait on the beach until Tolliver comes.”

It was sunny out there and I hoped it would brighten Walter's mood.

We went out onto our little patio and stepped onto the sand and noticed a small crowd gathered down by the tide pools.

“Let’s go see what’s up,” Walter said.

I glimpsed a dark shape on the sand and I thought of the crumpled diver on the Keasling beach. And then as we neared, the shape became recognizable as a sea lion.

I thought of last night’s sea lion, frolicking in the bay.

This one wasn’t doing so well. It seemed to have been stranded by the retreating tide. It lay on its side, quite still, unresponsive to the group of people surrounding it. A man filled a bucket with seawater and bathed the creature. It lifted its head then, teeth snapping at the air. The man — and the crowd — backed away.

And now I thought of the ailing sea life out at Birdshit Rock.

“We should do something,” Walter said.

A young woman in the crowd responded. “I already called the Marine Mammal Center. They’re on the way.”

“Okay then,” I said to Walter. “We should go back and wait for Doug.”

“He’ll see us from the parking lot.” Walter pointed.

True enough. The motel parking lot bordered the beach.

I felt like a gawker at a roadside accident standing here watching the poor animal. Tremors rippled its flanks. But Walter had folded his arms, standing guard, his protective urges in full bloom.

Five minutes later a van pulled into the motel parking lot and the rescue team emerged: two men and a woman, at this distance notable primarily by their hair, the woman with a thick blond ponytail, one of the men nearly bald, the other with buzz-cut black hair. Buzz-cut guy led, stalking onto the beach. I stared, unwilling to believe that this huge man in black — black jeans, black sneakers, black aviator shades, only his T-shirt in green — was Oscar Flynn but as he neared, scowling, I had to believe.

The team all wore green shirts with the logo Marine Mammal Research & Rescue.

The bald man and the blond woman carried a huge mesh net.

Flynn ignored us. He and his team circled the sea lion.

And then a third green-shirted man emerged from the van and followed his team and I was once again taken aback. I recognized him before he set foot on the sand, by his spiky green hair. Captain Kayak sauntered down to join the group around the sea lion.

He gave the blond woman a wink and me and Walter a nod.

If I had to predict which residents of Morro Bay would join a marine mammal rescue effort, Oscar Flynn and Jake Keasling would be far down my list.

The sea lion raised its head and made a growling noise.

The bald man and the blond woman dropped the net to the sand.

Flynn moved in. He began to speak in a low monotone, indecipherable words addressed to the creature whose head dropped back to the sand as if it had been drugged.

Walter and I drew closer. I could understand Flynn’s words now.

Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

I was more stunned than the sea lion.

And if that mockingbird won’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.

The rest of the rescue team stood waiting, unsurprised, as Flynn recited his lullaby. And then the three of them unrolled the net.

And if that diamond ring turns brass, Papa’s gonna buy you a looking glass. And if that looking glass gets broke, Papa’s gonna buy you a billy goat.

The monumental absurdity of Oscar Flynn promising a billy goat to a sea lion would have made me laugh, but then the team threw the net over the mammal and it began to thrash, and Flynn raised his voice with more promises until the animal again subsided, and I was left, simply, impressed.

Flynn turned on us. “What are you doing here?”

No lullaby for us. We explained.

He glanced up the beach at the motel, scorn on his face. That’s your lab?

Jake smirked.

Walter asked, “What will you do with the animal?”

Flynn’s look came to Walter. “A truck’s coming. We’ll net it and carry it to the truck. The truck will take it a treatment center.”

“Treatment for what?” I asked. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s not our job to diagnose.”

“Oh come on, Oscar,” the bald man said, “we know it’s domoic. What else?”

I said, “What’s domoic?”

“See, there’s this thing called a harmful algal bloom out there.” The bald man pointed out to sea. “And that made this sea lion sick.”

“How? He ate it?”

“Yeah, the bloom’s full of bacteria. He ate the bacteria and that’s full of domoic acid.”

“You’re wrong, Roger,” Flynn cut in. “Don’t talk about something when you can’t get the facts right. The algae is a genus of phytoplankton that includes diatoms that produce domoic acid, and domoic acid is a neurotoxin…” Flynn stopped himself.

“Neurotoxin?” Walter stared at the sea lion. “Is that why it’s trembling?”

Flynn squatted over the animal. I thought he was going to stroke it but he was evidently too close to that mouth full of sharp teeth. Instead he resumed the monotone. Easy, boy, easy. Easier, I thought, for Flynn to relate to this sea creature than to his fellows on the beach. And that thought softened my view of Oscar Flynn. Rude to people, kind to animals. There was heart in the man. I thought back to the cave room at Flynn’s house. All that posturing about who did and who did not have a PhD was likely just that — posturing, covering up for social insecurity.

I squatted beside him. “I think it’s great that you and your team do this work.”

He looked at me. Black shades reflecting the sun. Mouth a flat line.

Wrong approach. Too personal. I tried for more comfortable ground — the facts. “There were sick animals out at Birdshit Rock the other day. Do you think this algae…”

“I think you should leave sick animals to the professionals.”

“Okay.”

The sea lion lifted its head, bared its teeth.

“Get away. You’re scaring him.”

I scrambled to my feet, getting away from the teeth, from the man.

Roger, the bald man, jumped in. “It’s okay miss, Oscar just gets intense about this, about the blooms, what they’re doing to the ocean and the sea life and he…” Roger caught Flynn’s baleful stare. He ignored it, plunging ahead. “And he hates wrong facts. Well, that’s not quite right, I mean, can you have wrong facts? If they’re facts, they’re right. Right?” He began to sweat, not daring this time to look at Flynn. “Anyway, I meant to say diatoms, not bacteria. And sea lions get sick by eating the fish that eat the tiny animals that eat the diatoms. Like, a food chain? Anyway, these fish don’t get sick themselves but they concentrate the poison, and so when the sea lion eats them, he gets sick.”

I asked, “What kind of fish?”

“Probably anchovies.”

It took a moment for Walter to turn to me, to lift his eyebrows, to no doubt register what I’d just registered. That of all the fish in the sea — even in the near sea, off Morro Bay — it was the anchovy that kept recurring in our investigation. Robbie Donie made his living fishing for them. The Keasling parents had made their living fishing for them. Lanny Keasling had assisted his dad. Jake Keasling scorned that livelihood. Sandy Keasling was proud of her parents’ livelihood and yet chose a different path. And then a container of toxic anchovies appeared in her beach cave, poisoning the poor diver she was sheltering. Convulsing diver, sea lion wracked with tremors. Neurotoxins. So was it domoic acid that sickened the diver? Not rancid anchovies — anchovies that fed on the harmful algal bloom and concentrated the toxin?

I caught Jake watching us. Waiting, it seemed, for us to say what the hell, Jake?

When we didn’t speak, Jake wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and gave an exaggerated whew. And then he mimed squeezing a lime on his forearm, licking the salty limey skin, and then lifting a bottle of beer.

I had no idea what to make of that. Of him. Letting us know that he knew the connections we were making — so obvious they could not be ignored. Letting us know that he didn’t give a shit? Or that he figured we could make connections until the cows came home and not lay anything on Jake Keasling.

I glanced at Oscar Flynn. He’d been watching Jake and his pantomime. Flynn was unreadable, behind his shades.

Jake edged up to the blond woman and spoke, and she nodded, and then Jake placed one hand over his heart and blew her a kiss with the other, and she smoothed her T-shirt and gave him a half-smile.

The sea lion groaned.

Flynn turned to the sick animal. Hush-a-bye don't you cry, go to sleep little baby. When you wake you shall have, all the pretty little horses.

I wondered how many lullabies the big man knew, whether he’d recalled them from childhood or learned them from a Mother Goose book. Some research project, perhaps, how to soothe distressed animals. Specifically, poisoned sea lions. He was, after all, a scholar, with a double PhD. And one of those degrees was in microbiology.

And beer-guzzling kayak-renting sand-castle-building flirtatious Jake Keasling? He didn’t need a degree in microbiology. All he needed was to listen to Oscar Flynn pontificate and he’d get quite the lesson in neurotoxicology.

Detective Doug Tolliver’s silver Dodge Charger was frighteningly clean. There were no empty coffee cups in the cup holders. There were no sandy flip-flops on the floor. The windshield was unstreaked and the car body spotless — not easy to maintain in a beach town where salt spray left its mark.

We'd ridden with him once before but this time we came from the beach and he asked us to clean off the sand before getting into his car.

“One of the reasons I'm divorced,” he said. “Ever marry again, my best bet is another neatnik.”

We emptied our shoes and boarded, Walter in the back, me in the front.

“Either of you?” Tolliver asked, sliding behind the wheel. “Married?”

“I'm afraid that ship has sailed,” Walter said.

I shook my head. Not even a ship on the horizon.

Walter changed the subject and began to relate the events on the beach.

As we hit the highway, I gazed out my window.

Highway 1 wound inland from Morro Bay, heading southeast. Up ahead and off to the right I spotted a muscular cone of rock rising high above the surrounding low hills. I knew it from the geological map back in our motel lab. This was Hollister Peak, one of a chain of volcanic plugs that ran from the town of Morro Bay to the town of San Luis Obispo, our destination. The volcanic chain began, actually, well out to sea with an underwater seamount. And then came Morro Rock, with which we’d become well acquainted. This peak up ahead could be the Rock’s twin. I thought about the zone of fissures that once produced an eighteen-mile long line of active volcanoes raining molten rock and fire over this land. And beneath the sea.

“So,” Tolliver said, “Oscar Flynn reciting nursery rhymes. Huh.”

I turned from the reminders of ancient mayhem to face Tolliver. “All The Pretty Little Horses.”

He whistled. “You learn something new every day.”

“If you’re paying attention,” Walter said, from the back seat.

Tolliver’s eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror and then snapped back to the road. “Paying attention comes with the territory, in my job. Same with you two, huh?”

“Yup,” I said.

“Then I figure you noticed how Flynn interacted with Jake Keasling back there on the beach?”

I thought for a moment. “He didn’t.”

“Why do you ask?” Walter said. “Are they friends?”

Tolliver snorted. “I wouldn’t use ‘friend’ and ‘Oscar Flynn’ in the same sentence.”

“Then what are you getting at?”

“I’m just surprised to learn — speaking of learning something new every day — about Jake joining the rescue team. Didn’t expect that.”

I said, “We were surprised to see Jake and Oscar on the team.”

“Flynn’s one of those guys who volunteers. Won’t give you the time of day but damned if he doesn’t pitch in at any event involving animals. The rescue team. Fundraiser for the animal shelter. That kind of thing.”

“How long has he lived in Morro Bay?” Walter asked.

“He came to town about ten years ago. Bought that fancy place up in the hills. Keeps to himself — aside from the volunteer stuff.”

“Yeah,” I said, “he’s not real good with people.”

“So you’d think.”

After a moment Walter said, “I’m paying attention, Doug.”

Tolliver grinned.

I said, “Huh?”

Walter cleared his throat. “Detective Tolliver has a story to tell us about Oscar Flynn. He’s been leading the line of conversation, angling for our take on Flynn — before he will tell us what he has to tell us.”

Well I sure as shit hadn’t been paying enough attention. I said, “I’m listening.”

Tolliver turned his grin my way.

I said, “Does your Oscar story have something to do with Jake?”

“Wrong Keasling.”

I came alert. I heard Walter, in the back seat, shift forward.

“About five years ago Oscar Flynn saved Lanny Keasling’s life.”

If Tolliver had just tossed a half-eaten cheeseburger onto the spotless floor mat I could not have been more surprised.

“It was at the harbor. Lanny was in the water cleaning gunk off the Sea Spray propeller and he managed to hit his head on the hull. He blacked out. He would have drowned if Flynn hadn’t jumped in and saved him. Fully dressed.”

I said, “Wow.” I added, “So okay, Flynn isn’t inhuman, he did what just about anybody would have done in the situation.”

Walter said, “What was Flynn doing there?”

“Passing by.”

“Nobody else around?”

“A lot of people were there to witness it but they were up on the deck of the shopping area that overlooks the harbor. Too far away to get to Lanny in time.”

“Where was Sandy?”

“Visiting the ladies’ room at the cafe at the end of the dock.”

“So if Flynn hadn’t acted,” Walter said, “Lanny would have drowned.”

“That’s right.”

“Admirable. In fact, if you think about it, his valor in the case of Lanny is of a kind with his actions today on the beach with the sea lion.”

“Good point,” Tolliver said. “In fact, if you think about it, Flynn probably viewed Lanny the same way he views hurt animals.”

I nodded. Vulnerable. No threat to Oscar Flynn. Rather, something to be protected.

Walter said, “Still, valor is valor.”

“Still,” Tolliver said, “it surprises you, right?”

I said, “Doug, what are you getting at, with this story?”

“You think you know somebody. Maybe you don’t.”

I spoke, before Walter could bring it up. “Speaking of which, let me fill you in on what happened last night.”

Tolliver glanced at me.

I explained my kayak trip to the dunes.

Tolliver's face tightened.

“Nothing solid, I know, but I thought it warranted a mention.”

“I'll speak to Lanny and Fred.” Tolliver suddenly released the wheel with one hand and raked his pompadour. “You ever get jaded, doing what you do?” His free hand clamped back onto the wheel. “I live in a small town, a town without much serious crime, but I’ll tell you there are days when I see enough mean-spirited ugliness to ruin my lunch. Hell, just look at the feud between Robbie Donie and Jake Keasling. So here I am with the biggest case since I made detective, and I’m doing my job and looking at my fellow citizens with my goddamn jaded eyes and not liking what I’m seeing. And I wonder if I’m jaded or naïve. Some days I want to think everybody in Morro Bay was given a golden pass, living in this paradise by the ocean, and that deep down they’re all good people and whatever happened to Robbie and Joao Silva were accidents. And so I’m flipping back and forth between wearing my rainbow-colored glasses and following my cop radar. Yesterday on the Keasling beach I suspected that the little blonde girl who grew up to become a tugboat captain and then lost her license and grew bitter has grown into somebody capable of attempted murder. Couple days ago on Jake’s dock I suspected that the little blonde boy — he was blonde before he went green — who grew up to become a goof-off has grown into something much uglier, somebody capable of murdering a rival over a goddamn squid-fishing gig. And then I pick you up at the motel and you tell me about Flynn’s expertise with algae blooms and domoic acid, and I'm suspecting that the oddball who nevertheless saved Lanny Keasling’s life — which gives Flynn a pass into heaven, in my book — now I’m suspecting he had something to do with a poisoned diver who ate toxic anchovies. I’m suspecting that Oscar and Jake turning up together at a sea-lion rescue operation is some kind of conspiracy. And now you tell me about Fred and Lanny out at the dunes and I'm suspecting something hinky is going on with those two. I’m suspecting goddamn everybody I come across.” Tolliver scowled at a dirty pickup zipping by in the fast lane. “And I don’t like it.”

After a long moment I said, “Sometimes the job cuts close to the bone.”

Walter, in the back seat, was silent.

We’d each lost loved ones six months ago. We’d each trusted in the humanity of someone who had none.

We all fell silent.

I understood Tolliver’s rant, in spades. I’d grown up in a small town, too. I’d joined Walter in the forensic geology lab but we were based in an idyllic ski town without much serious crime. I'd worn rose-colored glasses about my hometown, just like Doug Tolliver. For the most part, the serious crime that required forensic geologist expertise took place elsewhere. Walter and I would leave the nest to do our job. And then one day everything went bad at home. We lived on a volcano that blew the town to hell, and murder went along with the hellishness. Yeah, I knew the shock of losing faith.

I yanked my thoughts from the small town of Mammoth Lakes back to the small town of Morro Bay.

Back to the town at hand.

Not having grown up in Morro Bay, not having watched these little kids grow up into their destinies, I had no trouble suspecting the Keaslings of foul play or at the least subterfuge. Even Lanny, I was distressed to admit. And Fred Stavis? Oscar Flynn? Wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them.

But mistrust and suspicion were, at best, like cat whiskers. Sensors of something on the wind. Finding and proving that something required another animal. A dog on the hunt.

It was hard evidence that would tell the story.

I turned to Tolliver. “Doug, anything new on the diver's boat?”

“Nothing.” He sighed. “Nobody's reported a boat missing. And no more boats found adrift.”

“What about prints on his dive tank?”

“Nothing. My techs are rushing this case but what we've got is a big fat zero on the entire fingerprint front. No prints on your yellow float — be standard for somebody handling marine gear to wear gloves. No unidentified prints on Robbie Donie's duffel bag. Far as the Outcast prints go, unless we find some record of Robbie's charters we've got no way to find out who might have been on board with him the night he disappeared.” Tolliver drummed the wheel. “And the latest in the department of nothing, we've got zip on the container of anchovies that poisoned Joao Silva. Smart perp. No prints.”

I said, “You've got the anchovies. That's a something.”

Tolliver gave a short laugh. “That it is. The lab's on it.”

Walter said, “Has it been determined that it was domoic acid that poisoned Silva?”

“Looks like it. He's still unconscious but the docs diagnosed him by the symptoms, and the symptoms fit with domoic poisoning.” Tolliver glanced at Walter in the rear view. “I know, small world, what with that sea lion thing you two just saw.”

“Any chance there are toxin-bearing anchovies being caught and distributed?”

“Already on it,” Tolliver said. “I sent my people out to the docks and the bait shops. They didn’t turn up any bad chovies. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any out there — everybody's on alert.”

I asked, “What about the container, itself? Anything more on that?”

“Department of nothing,” Tolliver said. “This particular style is standard. Like Sandy said, used all over town.”

“Sandy seems the CYA-type.” I added, “Cover your ass.”

Tolliver snorted. “I’ve run across plenty of CYA. As for Sandy, she can be a bitch on wheels but she tells it like it is.” Tolliver's hands tightened on the wheel. “At least that's what I always thought.”

I asked, “You mentioned that she lost her tugboat license. How?”

“Accident of some kind. There was a question of negligence. I don’t have the details.”

“But she’s licensed to captain a whale-watching boat?”

“Different license. Her tug master’s license was suspended for eight months. The tug owner wouldn’t rehire her once she was off probation. Word is, he blacklisted her. So she ended up buying the Sea Spray and getting an inspected-vessel license to drive it. Like I said, different license, different gig.”

I recalled Sandy’s bitter silence when Walter asked about the tugboat photo on her office wall. I recalled her obvious disdain at captaining a whale-watching boat. So Sandy Keasling ends up nursing her grievance in her hacienda on the bluff. Still, as best I could see, the loss of her tugboat license had nothing to do with Robbie Donie or John Silva. There was no logical connection.

“Welcome to San Luis Obispo,” Tolliver said, lifting a finger from the wheel to point ahead.

The highway now entered a good-sized town sprawled beneath another towering volcanic plug.

“Up ahead, to the left,” Tolliver said. “There’s the Cal Poly campus. Let’s leave human ugliness aside and go find out what’s happening in my ocean.”

“And get an ID of my coral,” Walter said.

“Think of it as the sucky zone,” Dr. Russell said, gesturing at the undulating red blob on the giant auditorium screen.

She flashed us a movie-star smile.

Violet Russell, Professor of Marine Ecology at Cal Poly State University, had just finished conducting a class and remained on stage for our instruction. She'd promised to get to Walter's coral, once she explained what was going on in Tolliver's patch of ocean.

“Right now we're gasping for breath,” she said. “We're oxygen-starved.”

I bet her delivery went over well with her students. Sure had our attention. The woman could command a room. Professional in her white linen pants and red linen blazer and beige silk tee. Witty in the silver starfish clipped to the silver streak in her Afro. Practical in her leather sneakers, smoothly striding across the stage to the podium.

She tapped a computer keyboard and our blob was now superimposed on a profile of the continental shelf.

We hovered just off the shelf.

“Any idea what causes it?” she asked.

Nobody volunteered.

“I’ll give you a hint. It’s not caused by the zombie apocalypse.”

We dutifully laughed.

“Oookay, bear with me, I’m used to competing with Facebook, or whatever the site-du-jour is with my students. Let me adjust. I’ve got two scientists and a police detective.”

Tolliver found his voice. “I’m not a scientist. Student-level is fine with me.”

Walter nodded. “Cassie and I aren't oceanographers. We’re students here.”

“Then I'll give it to you straight,” she said. “Our sucky zone is caused by oxygen depletion. At the ocean surface, the waters are rich in plankton. When they die and sink and decay, that uses up oxygen in the water column. And for that reason it’s called an oxygen minimum zone. OMZ, for short.” She added, “Not OMG.”

We laughed, again.

Tolliver said, “We've got one of those zones?”

“We do — and there are hundreds more rimming coasts around the world. They're naturally occurring. They’re not new. What’s new is what they’re doing.”

“Which is?” Walter asked.

“Expanding.”

She clicked another slide and the red blob was rising, with red arrows flowing up the continental slope, lapping onto the shelf. “Our OMZs are creeping into shallow waters.”

I said, “I assume that's not good.”

“No,” she said. “It sucks.”

“I’ll bite,” Walter said. “Why are they expanding?”

“Short and sweet? Global warming.”

Tolliver snorted.

“Ah Detective, I sense a skeptic.”

“I just know what I read in the paper.”

“And you scientists?”

Walter said, “The evidence is certainly in.”

“In spades,” I said.

Tolliver folded his arms.

She said, “We can debate the causes until hell freezes over — which it likely won’t, at this rate. But the fact is that the last two decades of the twentieth century were the hottest in four hundred years. And it’s getting hotter.”

Tolliver uncrossed his arms and lifted his hands.

“Surrender, Detective?”

“I just thought the jury was still out.”

“The jury’s in. Sea levels are rising. Ocean acidity is rising. Carbon dioxide is souring the seas.”

“I don’t know about that,” Tolliver said, “but I goddamn do know that what I saw out there in my ocean three days ago isn’t right. And by the way — it was cold and foggy.”

“A cold foggy day means nothing. A cold foggy week means nothing. Those are small-scale fluctuations. The air is warming. The oceans are warming.” Now Russell lifted a hand. “Don’t worry, I’m not ignoring what you saw out there. I’m going to tell you why you saw it.”

“That’s why I came. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. You won’t like what you hear.”

Tolliver once again folded his arms.

“The warmer the water, the less oxygen it absorbs. And so our OMZs expand. And now we come back to our sucky zone out there in your ocean. Wind and current patterns have changed, pushing that oxygen-starved sucker into shelf waters.”

“Caused by global warming?”

“A-plus, Detective.”

“I’ve been a long time out of school. I don’t need a grade.”

Violet Russell was drawn up short. She said, after a moment, “I apologize.”

“I don’t need an apology, either. I just need an answer.”

“And you’re getting a lecture.”

Tolliver shrugged.

There was a sudden vacuum in the large auditorium, the professor onstage at a loss and the audience out here rendered silent. Thing was, everything she was telling us was in way of an answer to Tolliver’s question. What’s going on in his ocean? Scary stuff. But there was no single perpetrator for him to collar, nothing he could accuse and arrest and bring to justice. I sympathized. I too was in the business of identifying the perp and trying to right the wrongs. This time, I too was at a loss.

“I guess it won't goddamn kill me,” Tolliver said, “to learn something new.”

She smiled. Low-wattage, this time.

“Very well,” Walter said. “We have the stage set. So what we saw out at sea — dazed fish, crabs climbing onto the rock — was a response to the hypoxic waters shoaling?”

“It's likely. Organisms that inhabit the shallow banks are, in effect, suffocated. Those that can escape, do so. Those that can’t, sicken and die.”

“Is that how you know there’s an oxygen minimum zone off the coast?”

“I’m afraid I already knew. We have instruments, measurements, reports like yours from the field. All of it pointing to a shoaling OMZ in our waters. It comes in patchy. Tongues of hypoxia here and there, depending on the topography. I hadn’t heard about Birdshit, in particular. Now I know.”

“Just to add to our field report,” I said, “there were some humongous squid going after the dazed fish.”

She tapped a couple of keys on the computer and a new slide appeared on the overhead screen.

“This fellow?” she asked.

It was a huge tube-bodied creature, an angry purplish-red against blue water, its hood spread and its tentacles grasping.

I said, “Yeah.”

“Dosidicus gigas. Humboldt squid. Also known as Diablo Rojo.”

“Red devil,” Tolliver said.

She nodded. “Not all animals suffer in the sucky zone. Dosidicus is well adapted to low-oxygen conditions. He moves in to feast on the poorly adapted.”

We knew. We’d seen.

“And he has company.” She took a moment and found another slide. “Here’s the real master of the hypoxic universe.”

It was a nearly translucent jellyfish, a white lacy bubble, its tentacles as thin as hairs.

“Aurelia aurita. The moon jellyfish. There are several moon species but aurita or labiata is our local variety.”

I’d hooked one on my kayak paddle. Almost flipped it into the boat. “Does it sting?”

“He might give you a mild rash. But that’s not his claim to fame these days.” She clicked to another slide.

There were hundreds of moon jellies. Thousands. Swarming.

I said, “Isn’t that what they do? Bloom? That the right word?”

“That's the word. That's normal jellyfish behavior. But let me use another word. Plague. Jellies are on the rise. Firstly, you've got overfishing that removes their competitors and predators. Then you've got people building more and more marinas and breakwaters and docks and oil platforms — perfect nurseries for jellies. And you've got warming seas, a dream come true for jellies — the polyps produce more little jellyfish when it's warm. And then you've got algal blooms and acidic polluted waters and hypoxia — jellies do just fine. Fish can't survive in low-oxygen waters so they swim away, leaving their larvae behind for adaptable jellies to eat. And they don't just eat the fishes' young, they eat their lunch too — the small crustaceans that forage fish rely on.”

I said, “They’re carnivorous?” I had pictured diaphanous jellyfish grazing delicately on passing… something or the other. Tiny finger sea sandwiches.

“Yes they are,” Russell said, “but they're not picky eaters. If nothing else is available they'll eat bits and pieces of organic matter. Survival rations.”

Walter said, “You mentioned algal blooms.”

“Oh yes, you get something like an algal bloom that feeds a lot of zooplankton — jellies just chow down.”

“This morning,” Walter said, “we witnessed the rescue of a sick sea lion, evidently poisoned by a harmful bloom.”

She nodded. “On the one hand you've got adaptable creatures like jellies and Humboldt squid and on the other you've got losers like sea lions. You could say they're the marine version of canaries in the coal mine.”

Tolliver said, “So now what?”

“Now what, what?”

“Now how do you fix it?”

“It’s not that simple. There are approaches to be taken, ways to mitigate certain aspects.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, we’re having this conversation a little late.”

“Meaning?”

She paused, then said, “What the hell — I'm going to get poetic on you.”

Walter sat up straight.

“You asked about algal blooms. There is a diatom that has caused some nasty blooms here and there. It's adaptable to warming seas. It's called Skeletonema costatum. Under the microscope it looks, well, skeletal.” She shrugged. “After I've had a strong whiskey or two I've been known to employ S. costatum in a metaphorical sense. We're in danger of reducing our oceanic ecosystem to a skeleton of its former self. Oceanus skeletonema.”

After a moment Tolliver said, “Skeleton sea.”

“You got it.”

“I don't want it.” He added, “But I'll take a rain-check on the whiskey.”

We moved on to the skeletal coral.

Dr. Russell led us from the auditorium across the campus to her office. The office was compact and neat. So neat that a neatnik like Doug Tolliver said, “Nice place.”

Necessarily neat, since the office was crowded with a wall of bookshelves, a large roll-top desk and desk chair, a worktable, and a three-tiered bamboo basket filled with seashells.

Russell offered to bring in chairs for us and we offered to stand.

She laid out a bathymetric map on the worktable and put Walter’s coral on the stage of a stereoscopic microscope. She switched on the attached monitor, which showed the coral in magnification.

Deep purple, lacy, and altogether looking like a coral to me.

“Stylaster californicus,” she said. “Otherwise known as purple hydrocoral. Technically, it’s not a true coral — in true corals the living tissue is what has the color and that's why when they die, their skeletons are white. Now, Stylaster's color is contained in its skeleton, so even after it dies the color remains. More skeleton talk for you…” She shot a glance at Tolliver, parked against the wall beside the basket stand. “I’ll spare you the lecture.”

He shot her a grin. “Nah, I’m fine now. We’re talking evidence. I can talk evidence all day long.”

Walter, who could talk evidence all day and all night, said, “And the coral’s range?”

She moved to her desk and consulted the site she’d pulled up on her computer. “San Francisco south to Baja California. Still, it’s not all that common. As to habitat…” She read. “Let’s see, looks like Stylaster prefers the steep sides of offshore banks and ridges, where the currents are strong and turbidity is low.”

Walter rubbed his chin. “We’ve narrowed our area of interest to a number of sites on Cochrane Bank.”

She tapped her keyboard. “Give me a minute.” She took five. She moved back to the map. “All right, those are your best bets.” She pointed out a pinnacle and a stretch of reef.

“There, and not elsewhere?”

“There, and not elsewhere…probably. I’m going by a database of marine species that’s still a work-in-progress. It compiles reports from scientists, divers, what have you. I’ve pulled up references to Stylaster on Cochrane Bank. It’s been reported there, and not elsewhere.” She added, “I realize this is somewhat inexact for your purposes.”

“It’s most helpful,” Walter said. “We work with inexact often enough.”

I said, “Much preferable to no freaking idea whatsoever.”

She laughed, a rich bell-like laugh.

Tolliver said, “What about something to give you geologists a better look at the coral? That scope you needed before, the electron scope?”

Russell said, “We have one here at the university. I could try to get you time on it.”

I said, “Thanks. If we need one, there’s a guy in Morro Bay with a lab and….”

“Oscar Flynn.”

“Oh, you know him?”

“Just in passing. He once consulted me about, actually, the subject we were discussing — algal blooms. He volunteers for an organization that monitors their effects. He wanted to educate himself further on the topic.”

Tolliver and Walter and I exchanged a glance. Small world.

“I wouldn’t rely on him, though. He’s something of a rogue wave.”

“How so?”

She took a moment. “Well, rogue wave is a bit theatrical. My take is he can't stand not being the expert in the room. He's something of a know-it-all.” She gave a brief laugh. “As am I, I'm afraid.”

“Nah,” Tolliver said, “you just really know your stuff.”

“Whassup, Sis?”

Sandy Keasling nearly jumped out of her skin. What she did, instead, was spin around and shoot a killer look at her brother.

Jake sauntered into the game room. “Scare you?”

She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. She did wonder how he’d managed to open the door without her hearing. The hinges squeaked. The game room was a separate building, connected to the main house by a covered walkway, and maintenance was lower priority here than maintenance on the house.

Hell, the whole hacienda was squeaking and flaking and rotting and sinking.

She glared at Jake.

He grinned. “Just wanted to see what you found in the closet before you get the chance to cover it up.”

“None of your business,” she snapped.

It was all she could do not to slam the closet door shut.

Not that she’d found anything worth covering up.

The closet was jammed with games. You could not see the floor, what with the croquet set, Frisbees, horseshoes, every manner of ball from soccer to softball. Bats. Tangled badminton net. Two shelves were stacked with board games. Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, Sorry — Sorrreeee — relics from the past. Checkers, no chess, the Keaslings weren’t a brainy family. Monopoly, now there was a Keasling game. Battleship, even better, stepping it up a notch in their teens. That’s when she’d had to really help Lanny. Jake had accused them both of cheating. Jake cheated, himself. God, they were a gaming family. On the top shelf in the place of honor was Clue, an enduring favorite. Nobody cheated. No need. Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick.

What better place for Lanny to hide a clue?

Although damned if she could figure what the red float was a clue to.

The float wasn’t in the closet, that’s all she knew.

Jake was looking around as if he couldn't believe how shabby the Keasling game room had become.

Sandy couldn’t argue with that. The felt on the billiard table was scabby. The corduroy couch sagged in the middle. The wet bar had a broken faucet and broken tiles. The windows were so dirty you couldn’t see if it was cloudy or sunny outside.

The only time Sandy came here anymore was when Lanny begged her to play a game of darts.

And now, she came when she’d had the brainstorm to look for the float in the closet. Sandy stepped away from the closet, leaving the door open.

Let him look.

He didn’t. “I assume you’re hunting for a certain object that Lanny is purported to have taken? About yea long.” Jake spread his hands, shoulder span. “I’m not a hundred percent sure about the size. Hard to tell from that cell phone photo that hot geologist flashed us. Let’s just call it a marine float.”

So big whoop, Jake knew what she was looking for.

She moved to the wet bar mini-fridge, which still worked. She took out a Coke. She didn’t offer one to her brother. No beer in the fridge, that's all Jake cared about. Sandy didn’t drink alcohol. Sandy didn’t want Lanny to get any ideas.

“No hidden float?” Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Then what’s our next move?”

“Ours?”

“Last I checked I’m still a Keasling.”

She popped the lid on the Coke and pulled a long drink.

“Me, you, and Lanny.”

Sandy sank to the couch and kicked off her flip-flops.

“Sea Urchins forever,” her brother added.

“Cut the crap, Jake. Like you care?”

“Blood ties. If I had my pocket knife handy we could slice our pinkies and mingle blood and swear undying loyalty.” He patted his T-shirt — no pockets. He rested his hand over his heart. “From the bottom of my most important organ, I care.” He added a grin. “Second most important organ.”

She shook her head.

“Come on, Sandy.”

“Come on, Jake.”

They stared at one another.

Sandy drained her Coke.

Jake sauntered to the dart board on the wall beside the couch and removed the four darts. He backed up. Positioned himself facing the board. Facing the couch. He transferred one dart to his right hand. Paused. “You might want to get off the couch. I’ve got a lousy aim.”

“I know,” she said. Unmoving.

“Your funeral.”

“Go ahead.”

He squinted, cocked his arm, and let the dart fly. It hit the wall above the board, bounced, and dropped to the floor.

Jake retrieved it and resumed his position. “Do over?”

She sighed. “What do you want?”

“Practice.”

“I’m not talking darts.”

He said, “I’m not talking darts, either. I’m talking about you and me practicing being family. Team Keasling. So we can figure out what to do next.”

“About what?”

He lifted the dart. “About some scary shit going down?” He aimed. “About your guest getting poisoned yesterday.”

She tensed.

“Your guest being the mysterious diver who Lanny mysteriously supposedly stole a float from.”

She’d been waiting for Jake to bring this up. He’d taken almost a full day to get to it. She assumed he’d been trying figure how he could play it to his advantage. She assumed he had the angle now. She waited for him to name a price.

She said, “What do you want, Jake?”

“Be nice to stop looking over my shoulder. How about you, Sis? You look in the fridge and wonder if the leftover pizza is poisoned?”

“I throw out leftover pizza.”

“Not even a little freaked?”

“Freaked, no. Cautious, yes.”

He threw the dart. It hit the arm of the couch, impaling itself. “Good idea about being cautious.”

She said, “Leave it alone.”

“How am I supposed to get better?”

“I’m not talking darts, Jake.”

“Oh darn. I was, this time.”

“There’s nothing to gain. You might think you can trick me into telling you something. Not gonna happen. Give it up. I don’t know what happened to the diver.”

“Sure you do,” Jake said. “Anchovies! You’re a Keasling. Keaslings do anchovies!”

“Not anymore,” she said.

“It's in the blood!”

“Not poisoned anchovies.” She pushed herself up off the saggy couch, suddenly weary, wondering if she could keep up the effort. Her limbs felt like they were weighted with wet sand. She moved heavily to Jake. She grabbed his left hand and plucked two darts from his grasp. She turned to face the board and threw a dart.

It speared the triple ring, twenty-point section.

“Wow,” Jake said. “You’re in practice.”

She eyed him. “I live here. You don’t, anymore.”

He faced her. His coppery eyes gleamed, and narrowed. “Way to cut to the bone, Sis.”

“You want to move back in? Plenty of room. Rent’s three hundred a week.”

“That what you charge Lanny?”

“I give Lanny a discount.”

“That’s fair.”

“Yes it is. He shouldn’t be living on his own. You know that. He’s been saving up his wages. He wants to buy a boat.”

Jake hooted. “Captain Lanny Keasling.”

“It won’t happen. Doesn’t hurt to let him dream.”

“There’s the bottom line. Let’s all protect Lanny and his dreams. Let’s be sure he gets the biggest slice of the pie, while we’re at it.”

“You got your share.”

“I live in a shitty condo. I pay my own mortgage. I pay all my own bills. Lanny kick in for utilities here? Lanny buy the groceries?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Why Sis, I’m just a little fucking tired of Lanny always sucking up the sun.” Jake spun and threw a dart. It hit the board, the double ring.

Sandy said, softly, “I know you are.”

Jake froze in the process of aiming his last dart. “Say what?”

“I know you’re feeling second rate. I’m sorry. What would you have me do? About Lanny.”

“Stop wiping his ass.”

She suddenly felt close to tears. She would dearly love to stop wiping Lanny’s ass. Stop cleaning up his messes. Stop it all. She said, “Would you like to take over?”

Jake let his throwing arm fall. “Christ Sandy, you really know how to take the righteous out of a guy’s argument.”

She laughed, a short bark.

He tapped his dart hand against his bare thigh. “So. You think he’s in big trouble, this time?”

“Don’t you?”

“How would I know?”

She walked across the room and hitched herself up onto the billiard table. That’s all it was good for anymore. She regarded her brother. He was the best-looking of them all, even with the ridiculous green hair. She’d often thought his good looks were a curse, making life so easy for him he never felt the need to try. Grudgingly, she had to admit that wasn’t the only thing that messed up Jake Keasling. He was second rate, in their parents’ eyes. Didn’t work hard enough, didn’t show proper respect for the right things. Whether that was cause or effect of their parents’ judgment, it shaped him. And when they died, and she took over the estate and had to manage her brothers’ inheritances, she’d treated Jake the same way. As a screwup. And he played the role to a T.

And here he stood playing at darts. Playing at whatever the hell he was playing at.

She said, “You want to know why I brought Joao Silva to the cave, Jake?”

His eyes widened. “Joao. Aren’t we Miss Portuguese Speaker.”

“It’s his name.”

“Get a little intimate, did you?”

“You want the story? Or do you want to play the fool?”

“Whoa, hard choice. Hmmm. The story.”

She nodded. Smart choice. When it came to playing the angles, Jake always made the smart choice. She said, “I wanted to find out if what I thought I saw, I really did see. Which was Lanny taking something red out of Joao’s dive bag, on board my boat that day. When I confronted Lanny, he denied it. And that pissed me off. And worried me.”

Jake nodded. She saw that he got it. Lanny was an innocent. Lanny didn’t tell lies.

Except, he did.

She continued. “So I tracked Silva down and talked him into coming back here. Told him I had his dive gear. Brought him to the cave. Scared him shitless about being an illegal. Fed him, watered him, dumped the porta-potty. Asked him about the red float.”

“And?”

“And he played dumb.”

“So you got pissed and poisoned him.”

She said, carefully, “What would that gain me?”

“A diver who can’t talk. Who can’t report being kidnapped and held hostage by Sandy Keasling.”

“A diver,” she said, “who now can’t tell me what kind of trouble Lanny’s gotten himself into.”

She wanted another Coke. She needed the caffeine. Her headache was starting up. The Shitstorm again. Always. She had to admit she was playing her own angles, juggling The Shitstorm and her tugboat license and her growing fear that Lanny’s latest mess was going to blow back on her. The diver wasn’t the only one playing dumb. She’d been playing dumb for five years. Keeping that secret from Lanny — at least she bloody well hoped it was kept. She was playing dumb now, with Jake. She needed to know what Jake suspected. What Jake knew. What Jake had done.

Maybe if she just told him everything. Honesty. And then he would tell her everything.

She regarded her green-haired resentful brother.

Honesty?

He'd missed that boat.

So play it the way it needed to be played.

She said, “What about you, Jake? Did you find Joao in the cave? Maybe it was you who poisoned him.”

“Me?”

“You’re a Keasling! Keaslings do anchovies!”

“Such a quick wit, Sandy.”

She regarded him. He wore that green T-shirt with the Marine Mammal Research & Rescue logo. “Been out saving the mammals today?”

He glanced down, as if he’d forgotten what he wore. “This morning. Another sea lion.”

She said, “Red tide? Toxic chovies?”

“Those of us in the know call it by its proper name. Harmful algal bloom. You interested in joining us?”

“No.”

“My bad. You don’t do volunteer work.”

“Neither do you,” she said. “Unless there’s an angle. What’s your angle?”

“I like sea lions. And pretty girls. Pretty girls like sea lions.”

“I like connecting the dots,” she said. “Joao Silva gets poisoned from eating anchovies. Sea lion gets poisoned eating toxic chovies. Jake Keasling joins the rescue group and learns all about harmful algal blooms and toxic chovies.”

“Learned about toxic chovies the same way you did, Sandy. Way back when. From Dad.”

“Who called a red tide a red tide.”

“Dad didn’t have the benefit of mammal-rescue training.”

“My point, exactly.”

“You’re missing a dot there, Sis.”

“No I’m not,” she said. “Your group has a research program and they rely on volunteers to collect red tide samples — and animals up the food chain that bioaccumulate the toxins. Quote, unquote. Like anchovies.”

“Whoa. Junior detective Sandy Keasling.”’

“They have a website. I wanted to find out who all can get their hands on toxic chovies.”

“Try the bait shop.”

“One option. Going out there and snooping around red tides is another. You do that, Jake? You on the collection team?”

“I've gone a couple of times. It's an on-call deal. You get called, you go.” He shrugged. “Me and about a hundred other volunteers up and down the coast. You want to grill them all?”

“Just you, Jake. You have access to toxic chovies.”

“Shit Sandy, what would poisoning that diver gain me?”

“Good question.”

“Are you really asking if I'm capable of attempted murder?”

“You asked me. About a minute ago.”

They stared at one another.

Finally Jake said, “So, Keaslings don’t do murder. I’m down with that. You?”

The sea snake in her head stirred. She wanted to walk away from this. The two of them talking murder. Who is and who isn’t capable. She'd heard it said that anybody's capable, if push comes to shove. Jake was waiting for her answer, without his normal smirk. She said, through the pain in her head, “Yeah I'm down with that.”

“Cool.” Jake turned to head for the door.

“Hang on,” she said. “I told you why I brought Joao to the cave. Now you tell me why you took my boat and got it scratched up.”

He stopped. Turned to her. “We talking about what we talked about on the dock last Tuesday?”

“We are. We’re talking about Doug Tolliver and your hot geologist saying the Sea Spray got scratched up the same way the Outcast got scratched up. Same time Robbie went missing.”

“Ah, that.”

“Yeah, that.”

Jake raised his dart hand. “Make you a wager. I miss the board, I tell you what you want to know. I hit the board, you don’t ask me again about it.”

“Deal,” she said, “only make it the bullseye. You hit the bullseye, I won't ask you again.”

“Christ Sandy, I'm a lousy shot. Give me a ballpark chance.”

She got off the billiard table and went to the couch and extracted the dart stuck in the cushion. She took position beside Jake. “Then let’s turn it around. If I hit the bullseye, you tell me what happened.”

“If you miss?”

She wouldn’t miss. “If I miss, you give me a good reason why you don’t know what happened.”

“That's a lose-lose, for me.”

“Think of it as win-win, for Lanny.”

“How so?”

“You and I figure out what he’s gotten himself into. We save his sorry ass, if need be.” She shot Jake a glance. “You down with that?”

“Yeah, shit, why not? Sea Urchins forever and all that. On one condition, though.”

“What condition?”

“You advance me the money for the new double kayak.”

She hesitated, for show. She’d regretted changing her mind about the kayak, yesterday on the beach. Now, she thought, wouldn't hurt to cut him a break.

“Okay, revised stakes.” She aimed. “I hit the bullseye, I buy you a new kayak. You tell me what happened to my boat. Lanny survives. Win-win-win.”

“You're a real hardass, Sis.”

She threw.

It was a bullseye.

“For the win,” she said.

Jake went over to the fridge and got himself a Coke, groaning for show. He took a seat in the stained beanbag chair. He stretched out his legs, crossing them at the ankles. He popped the lid on the can and drank. Made a face. “This stuff’ll rot your teeth.”

Sandy resumed her seat on the billiard table. “Beer rots your brain.”

“Story time!” He belched. “Last Saturday night I was at Pedro’s knocking back some brewskies and I saw a lovely lady go outside to the balcony and so I followed her out, just to be sure she didn’t fall into the water. Turned out she already had company. So I found myself a lonely spot at the rail. While I was brooding on my sorry love life, I saw a boat heading out into the channel. The Outcast. I thought, that little shit Robbie is going out after squid. I thought, he must know where they’re running. So I abandoned all thoughts of beer and chicks and ran to the parking lot and jumped in my Jeep and drove to our docks.”

Sandy said, in some disgust, “You drove drunk.”

“A little buzzed.” He drained his Coke and crushed the can. “I couldn’t follow Robbie in a kayak so I borrowed the Sea Spray.”

“Where’d you get the key?”

“Where you hide the spare. Taped to the underside of your Captain’s chair.”

She resolved to find a new hiding place.

“So I put-putted our boat up the channel and out the harbor, figuring the Outcast had a head start. I couldn’t find her with a visual in the fog so I switched on your radar. Another thing I don’t have on a kayak.” He grinned. “There was only one radar target right where I figured Robbie to be. I followed. When I saw the Outcast blip on my screen stop, I stopped. Shut off the engine. Not close enough to see what Robbie was doing. Couldn’t see shit through the dark.”

“You realize the Outcast would have radar too. Would have known you followed.”

“Do I have idiot written on my forehead?”

She refrained from answering that.

“Yeah Sis, I realized Robbie might have a fix on me. He probably shut off his radar when he stopped — he sure didn't yell who goes there.”

“What was he doing?”

“Squid jigging, I guess. There was some noise. Thrashing around in the water noise.”

“Any voices?”

Jake hesitated. “Maybe. Low voices. Could have been his radio.”

“Then what?”

“Then I sat there freezing my ass off debating if I should go back to harbor and get another beer at Pedro’s or go home and eat leftover pizza.”

“What did you decide?”

He tossed the crumpled Coke can toward the trash basket. Missed.

Normally she'd tell him to pick it up but now she just waited.

He said, “Finally heard the Outcast engine start up. I waited until he left then decided to go see whassup in Squidville.”

“What was up?”

“No more squid.”

“And?”

“And nothing.”

“How’d you scratch my boat?”

“Beats the hell out of me.” He gave her a straight-ahead look. He waited for her to buy it. “There might have been an old buoy in the water. Rusting. I might have bumped into it, looking for squid.”

“Might have?”

“Okay yeah, sure, there was. I didn't see it in time.”

She stared at her brother. She didn't buy it. She didn't not buy it. “What about Robbie's boat?”

“Same place. I assume he was as shitty a driver as I was.”

“Then what?”

“Then I decided on the pizza. Headed for the harbor.”

“No sign of the Outcast, along the way?”

“Nope.”

“Next day when you heard about the Outcast adrift, about Robbie going missing, didn’t you wonder?”

“Yup. Didn’t really give a shit, to be honest. I assumed he went off looking for more squid and tangled with Moby Dick or something.”

“Why didn’t you report what you saw to Doug?”

Jake hesitated. Then said, “I didn’t see anything Doug could use. I didn’t know where the Outcast went after leaving Squidville.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Didn't think you'd approve of my joyride.”

“So you deleted the trip from my GPS track log?”

“Yup.”

“That’s it?”

“You have it all now.” He mimed throwing a dart. “I’ll send you a link to the kayak soon as I get to my computer.”

She nodded. A deal’s a deal. But she thought, he's holding something back. She could keep asking. And he'd keep saying you have it all.

Jake got out of the beanbag chair and went to the closet.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Looking for something.”

She said, “It's not there.”

“The red float's not there.” He waded into the stuff on the floor and picked up the Checkers box. “This is.”

She could not endure another game.

He unhooked the bungee cord that held the box closed and flipped open the lid. There was no board, no game pieces. Instead, inside, swaddled in bubble-wrap, there was a pistol.

She stared. “Where’d you get Dad's gun?”

“In his dresser drawer. After they died. You told me to go through his stuff and take what I wanted. I took. Father-son legacy.”

“Why did you hide it here?”

“I didn't have any use for it.”

Her headache went full sea snake. “And now you do?”

“Uh, once you start wondering if your pizza is poisoned you get a little defensive.”

“Do you know how to shoot?”

He smiled. “Practice.”

Doug Tolliver ushered us on board the police boat.

“Your choice, port or starboard, ocean view from either seat.” Tolliver smiled at his own joke.

Walter took port, I took starboard.

Joining us was Tolliver’s sergeant, a taciturn young woman who headed for the cabin to take the helm. “Faith James.” She gave us a nod. “Yes, Faith’s my real name. No, you don’t need it to ride with me.”

Walter chuckled.

I appreciated the good humor. I had nothing to offer.

Tolliver settled himself on the jump seat at the back railing. He planned to give us diving tips on the way.

The police boat was a thirty-footer painted in crisp blue and white, everything in its place, antennae and nav gear bristling atop the cabin, ropes tightly coiled along the steel rails, bench cushions spotless, deck gleaming, tank rack shipshape, the rest of the dive gear stowed in a locker. The Breaker was a neatnik’s boat.

As we left the harbor Tolliver explained that the boat had been named in a contest at the local middle school.

As we motored into open sea, the Breaker showed its moves.

Brawny and fast, at least with Faith at the helm.

Tolliver beamed, his pompadour quickly destroyed by wind and sea spray.

Walter hooked an arm over the railing and stuck his face into the wind, looking nearly as happy as Tolliver.

I chewed fennel seeds.

It helped that the day was warm and sunny, unlike the chilly fog on our last outing aboard Sandy Keasling’s boat. I preferred seeing where I was going. Today I could see ahead to the far horizon. I turned to check on the view behind us. The coastline was shrinking. The seascape was expanding, boats here and there.

Next time I looked back, the boats were specks and the coastline had shrunk to a thin brownish line.

I watched until the line disappeared.

Blue sky, blue sea, nothing in the world but two blocks of blue.

And us.

“Couldn’t ask for better seas,” Tolliver said.

We had waited two days to make this trip.

Day before yesterday, after leaving the CalPoly campus and the inimitable Violet Russell, Walter and I had returned to our motel lab and put the final pieces of the puzzle together.

We had Franciscan basalt that pointed to several areas on Cochrane Bank, we had Stylaster californicus that narrowed the range to a pinnacle and a reef, and we had Macrocystis pyrifera, giant kelp, that pointed to a small patch of kelp forest spanning the two targets.

Today, the time had come to pay our targets a visit. Faith James had fed the coordinates into the Breaker’s Garmin chart plotter.

Tolliver was talking diving and I was watching the view behind us when another speck of a boat appeared. I waited for it to grow into a recognizable shape. Sailboat, cruiser, harbor patrol, fishing boat, whale-watching boat?

It maintained its pace, at a speck-like distance.

After awhile I said, “Is that boat following us?”

Tolliver went into the cabin and checked the radar display. He came back and took his seat. “Okay, we’ve tagged the target. We’ll watch its direction of travel.”

“A big boat?” Walter asked. “A small boat?”

“Hard to say. The material and shape of the target affects how large the onscreen blip appears. I’ve seen hundred-footers look smaller onscreen than fifty-footers. And then you get into the math, and that’s where I bail.” He shrugged. “Faith will keep an eye on it.”

Sometime later I saw a new speck on the horizon, this time ahead of us.

As we advanced, the speck expanded into a thin line.

It put me in mind of the coastline when it had shrunk to a thin line.

However, this line ahead was a different color, a reddish-orange.

For a moment I thought this must be another piece of land. An island. A bit of shallow reef revealed by the tides.

And then we neared and Tolliver said, “Well how about that.”

The thin line thickened into a large irregular stain on the water. It looked scummy, like a crust. There was the faint odor of rotten eggs.

Walter said, “Is that…”

“Algae bloom,” Tolliver said.

“The harmful sort? The sort that sickens sea life?”

“Right color,” Tolliver said.

Walter said, “How about that.”

The Breaker slowed to a stop. Faith idled the engine. “Here we are.”

Walter and Tolliver and I exchanged a look. Yeah, I thought, how about a harmful algal bloom sitting on top of our target neighborhood? The sort of bloom that produces a poison that bioaccumulates in plankton-eaters like anchovies, which sea lions then consume. That causes a sickened sea lion to beach itself, which brings a rescue team that includes Oscar Flynn and Jake Keasling. How about that for a coincidence?

Tolliver said, “Well, it’s red tide season. This won’t be the only one out here.”

Still, I thought. How about that.

Tolliver studied the bloom. “It's kind of patchy, beginning to break up, but you can see why it's hanging around. See how the water kind of dips, holding the bloom in place? That’s an eddy. You know, the water rotates…” He twirled a finger. “Something to do with currents and what the seafloor underneath looks like.”

Faith called from the wheelhouse, “Where do we anchor, Doug?”

“Hang on.” Tolliver took out his own handheld chartplotter.

Walter and I crowded in for a look. It showed a 3D map of the seafloor and I recognized the contours from our bathymetric map — the target neighborhood. A long ridge extended along Cochrane Bank, and from the crest it sloped down toward the outer continental shelf. The ridge looked something like a caterpillar with smaller jagged ridges and canyons bristling like legs off the central crest. I recognized our two targets. They straddled the caterpillar.

I pointed them out to Tolliver.

He looked from the chartplotter to the sea. “One’s over there.” He pointed to the bloody red patch of ocean. “I’m damned if I’m going to anchor my boat in that mess.”

“Then shall we settle there?” Walter pointed to the pinnacle on the chart.

We looked up from the chart and scanned the sea and saw several dark patches rippling the water — they had to be the kelp beds. The closest dark patch appeared to form a canopy over the pinnacle.

Tolliver called to Faith, “Let’s anchor just shy of that kelp bed.”

We motored over to the dark patch and stopped at the edge. Faith pressed the button to lower the anchor. It clanked and creaked and slap-splashed into the water and then Faith killed the engine.

Here we were.

Our world went silent and still.

No wind, calm seas.

I looked back toward the invisible coast. The boat speck had disappeared.

It was just us now, and the world beneath.

Faith came out of the wheelhouse and we all looked over the side.

Directly below, the water was cobalt blue, clear, unlike the bloody red water of the algal bloom a few dozen yards away.

Directly ahead the water was carpeted by green-gold fronds. Giant kelp, Macrocystis pyrifera. It was hard to think of it as a forest. I was used to looking up through a forest to the treetops. Here, we looked down from above. The canopy was laid out flat along the surface of the sea. The long slender blades were attached to sturdy stalks, swelling into fat gas bladders that held the plants aloft. The blades swayed lazily in time with the gentle currents.

It was mesmerizing.

My stomach surged.

As the blades moved they released a fuzz of tiny bubbles.

I focused on the science, on kelp caught in the act of photosynthesizing, sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turning it into the energy needed to build itself, and in the process releasing oxygen.

I sucked in a huge helping.

“Kelp diving’s an art,” Tolliver said. “You’ll need to follow me.”

I shifted my focus from swaying kelp to solid rock. Through a patchy spot in the canopy, the pinnacle was visible a dozen or so feet below. I stated the obvious. “There it is.”

Walter nodded. “For clarity’s sake, let’s call this Target A. Which makes the reef beneath the algal bloom Target B.”

Tolliver shook his head. “Nah nah, somebody — me probably — is gonna at some point say, now which one was Target A again? How about this, reef over there under the red tide we'll call Target Red and the pinnacle here we'll call Target Blue, for blue water.”

“I can live with that,” Walter said.

“Now that we know where we’re talking about,” Tolliver said, “let’s talk logistics.”

Plan was, we concluded, we would dive down to Target Blue, diving through clear water to the seafloor at the edge of the kelp forest, where we would begin our sampling. Then, into the forest and up the pinnacle, sampling if need be. Then over the top of the caterpillar ridge and down to Target Red to sample there.

We’d be looking for something to tie Robbie Donie to this site.

We posited that he had made two separate trips here.

On trip one, he came here — for whatever reason — and found the yellow float. Perhaps it was some sort of warning buoy, for boaters. The float was perhaps anchored to one of our targets — judging by the mineral and coral grains embedded in its rope — and it broke free due to the faulty snap hook. Donie plucked it out of the water and stashed his prize in his duffel bag. And then upon returning to shore, he took his prize to his shrine at Morro Rock.

On either trip one or trip two the Outcast encountered something that scratched its rub rail and embedded iron particles.

On trip two, Donie returned here — for whatever reason — and anchored at Target Blue or Target Red. In either case, he anchored close enough to the kelp to snag and break off a holdfast harboring a telltale pebble.

On trip two, he disappeared.

If he'd gone overboard here, was he down below? Or what remained of him? Tolliver had explained that cold water at depth would slow decay. That the body would sink and then be subject to the ebb and flow of currents and tides. That it would be at the mercy of marine predators, likely small fish and crabs. That aside from some nibbling and pruning, the body would be in good enough shape for the medical examiner to establish cause of death.

That is, he’d added, if we were able to locate the body.

I cleared my throat and said, “If this is the site where Donie did the squid fishing, what’s the chance we’re going to see some Humboldts?”

“They mainly come up at night,” Tolliver said. “I know, we saw them daytime out near Birdshit. Guess they couldn’t resist all that action. Look, we’re not jigging bait, we don’t look like a meal, so even if there’s Humboldts in the area, no reason they’re gonna bother us.”

Walter and I nodded.

“They’re like rattlesnakes,” Tolliver added.

“Oh?” I said.

“You come from the mountains, you know snakes, right? You see a rattlesnake, what do you do? You leave it alone. Don’t rile it and it won’t pay you any attention. Same idea in the water. You see a Humboldt, you leave it alone, it’ll leave you alone. That make sense?”

“I’m clear on Humboldts,” I said, “but what about jellyfish? Like the kind that stung the diver?”

“Purple stripe, so I understand,” Tolliver said. “Yeah, they live out here. They’re drifters, on the currents. Could be anywhere. We don't know where Silva got stung.”

I rather hoped, not here.

“End of wildlife lesson,” Tolliver said. “Time to dive.”

We stripped down to our swim suits and turned to the job of wrestling into our wetsuits. Walter and I had rented our gear at the local dive shop, under Tolliver's critical eye. Tolliver handed us waterproof slates with attached pencils, for underwater communication.

We finished suiting up.

Shrink-wrapped in thick black neoprene, sporting blue buoyancy compensators, burdened with weight belts and high-volume tanks, we moved to the dive platform.

Faith raised the dive flag and settled into Tolliver’s jump seat.

“Okay, last-minute do's and don'ts. First off, we'll use the anchor line as a guide,” Tolliver said. “Descent and ascent.”

I nodded. We'd learned that in Belize.

“If we get to Target Red and need more bottom time we'll ascend there and Faith will pick us up. But damned if I want to surface in that mess. I'm planning our time so we return to the anchor line.” He tapped the dive computer on his wrist. “You'll notice I’m also carrying a pony bottle.” He patted the bright yellow tank strapped to his flank. “Emergency air. Don’t plan on needing it. Just standard procedure.”

I nodded.

“And this here,” Tolliver patted the reel and line clipped to his harness, “is a guideline. On the off-chance we need to enter an overhead environment, I lay the line. It shows the way out.”

I nodded. The dive master in Belize had carried one.

“Finally,” Tolliver said, “if we do enter an overhead environment we're going to do a gentle frog kick to direct the force of our fins away from the bottom so we don't stir up the sediment. Can't see a damned thing in a silt-out.”

I nodded.

Tolliver glanced at Walter.

Walter's eyebrows lifted. “I believe we've mentioned that we're not new to diving.”

“You're new to me, in my ocean.”

Cold water slapped my face.

This was not Belize. This was not a bathtub tropical sea. Ah hell, this was field work and the fact that the field was underwater was simply a matter of logistics.

Tolliver and then Walter disappeared beneath the surface and then it was my turn on the anchor line. I clamped the regulator in my mouth, sucked in canned air, deflated my buoyancy compensator, and dove.

Down below, I saw Walter’s fins gently kicking.

Good form, partner.

Lessons learned flooded in. Relax, breathe slowly, watch your bubbles. You want a slow trickle. I tipped my head and checked my bubble trail. Too big, too fast. Tolliver had given a tip: hum to yourself to ensure your breathing is slow and easy. I cast about for a tune. What came to mind was the theme music to Jaws.

Never mind.

I concentrated instead on the metallic ring of the regulator exhaust bubbles and found my rhythm.

My bubble trail slowed.

Down the anchor line I went.

A peppy orange fish came by, examined me, flashed his blindingly bright orange self at me, and then dashed into the kelp forest.

We descended just outside the forest, which draped the pinnacle.

Out here, clear of the forest, the visibility was good, the water clear and blue and sunlit down to the seafloor below.

Down below, the base of the pinnacle flared out and tapered into fingers, and between the fingers were sand channels that ran bright and white as sugar. The rocky fingers were haired with kelp — the colonizing outer reach of the forest.

Plan was, we’d descend to the rocky fingers and take our first samples there.

As Tolliver and then Walter neared the bottom I glimpsed a dark triangular shape cruising one of the sand highways, slowly flapping fins that looked more like wings. The bat ray appeared menacing and graceful at the same time.

I saw Tolliver reach bottom and point to the creature.

I saw Walter join Tolliver, and then wave his arms in imitation of the ray.

All's good with you, boys?

When I reached the sandy seafloor the men gave me a nod and then Walter indicated the nearest rocky finger and cocked his head. I nodded in return. Good enough. Tolliver pointed to a nearby stalk of kelp, pointed to himself, and then made a cutting gesture. He was going to take a kelp sample while Walter and I addressed the rock.

I studied the rocky finger. It was a dark volcanic mix, a fine-grained melange, dark gray I thought, although colors underwater were not the same as colors in the lab. Still, I was willing to make a field ID and call the rock a Franciscan basalt.

This could be the source of the pebble lodged in the holdfast caught in the Outcast’s anchor.

Walter took a hammer and chisel from his dive bag and whacked at a fragile-looking knob, careful to avoid the spiky greenish creature parked nearby.

A sea urchin. I thought of the Keaslings. Spiky creatures — two of them, at least.

We took our rock samples and Tolliver rejoined us with a kelp frond sealed in a collection bag.

Tolliver checked his wrist dive computer and held up five fingers. Fifty minutes bottom time remaining.

Walter wrote a word on his slate: coral.

Time to go hunting on the main body of the pinnacle.

Tolliver took the lead and found an opening into the tangle of the kelp forest — a trail of sorts. Walter followed Tolliver. I trailed. Tolliver’s kelp-diving lessons kicked in. Put your hands together in front of you, palms outward, at the ready to sweep the kelp aside as you pass through. Kick gently. Streamline yourself. Be a fish.

I entered the rubbery woods, a big awkward rubber-skinned fish.

The sunlit blue water gave way to the filtered amber light of the kelp forest. It was like moving from a mountain meadow into a thick forest of pines. From the open into the enclosed. From light to shade.

My breathing picked up. Bubbles streamed. I needed to see blue. I rolled my head sideways and back, looking toward the surface, hunting for the sky, but all I saw was the kelp canopy like a large hat blocking out the sky above, shielding the world down below. It seemed a clandestine world down here, a world of shadow and hidden things.

A few spears of light penetrated the canopy, gilding fronds here and there.

Kelp stalks thick as pillars soared all around me.

And then — in the manner in which my eyes would adjust to shade in a terrestrial forest — my vision adjusted to this liquid forest.

It burst into color.

The fronds were muted shades of green and gold and brown.

Big blue fish roamed above. Dozens of silvery needle-nosed fish shot by, like someone had emptied a pincushion. Cigar-shaped black-spotted orange fish converged on a spray of scabbily-encrusted fronds and seemed to scrape them clean.

A golden-shelled red-footed snail inched up a slender stalk.

I glimpsed a pugnacious red crab guarding its patch of kelp, claws clacking, and I wanted to smile but that would mean losing my death grip on the regulator mouthpiece feeding me air.

I had gotten so distracted by the citizens in the kelp forest that I fell behind the others and I had a moment of alarm before I caught sight of Walter’s black fins, just disappearing round a bend ahead.

As if I’d momentarily lost him on a hiking trail.

I kicked harder.

I became a fish, moving like everything else down here in time with the current and the gentle ebb and flow of the surge, fronds and stalks and fish and me all undulating, swaying, in tight synchronization with the heartbeat of the sea. I swam though Tolliver’s narrow trail, through a sudden tunnel of long flat stalks that looked like belts, belts fringed with feathery blades that tickled my face as I swam. The tunnel narrowed. Blades and supple stalks seemed to caress me.

The caresses tightened.

Wrapped me.

I was no longer moving forward.

I kicked furiously.

Not a fish.

Don’t belong.

Breathing hard, bubbles volcanic.

If I had become entangled in brush on a hiking trail on a mountain path the way an air-breather should be hiking I could have calmly worked my way out of trouble and yelled to my hiking companions up ahead to wait.

I couldn’t yell down here or I would drown.

All I could do was hum.

Theme from Jaws.

Bubbles slowed, just at the edge of perception.

Okay lady, you’re caught in the kelp. You got your fins entangled. Stop kicking. Reach down to your leg and draw the dive knife from the sheath. That’s why dive knives were invented.

I bent and twisted and tried to reach my knife but the entanglement went all the way up my calves.

And then my worst nightmare bloomed and I suddenly did not want to look behind me to see what had hold of my legs, because what if it wasn't kelp? It was not out of the question that my legs were entangled in the tentacles of a jumbo Humboldt squid or a purple-stripe jellyfish or some sort of encasing toothy eel.

I froze.

Don’t rile it.

Like starting a bar-room brawl, I recalled Tolliver saying about chumming for Humboldt squid.

I waited for it to bite me, sting me, or release me.

It did nothing.

I came to my senses. First, get that breathing under control. Think of a mountain meadow in the sunshine.

Breathing slowed. Bubbles slowed.

Next, I reached into the mental file drawer where Tolliver’s kelp-diving lessons were stored. Searched for the heading if you’re stupid enough to get entangled. Found it. Draw your knife, cut yourself free. Couldn’t reach the knife. Next? Very steadily, without twisting your torso, pull your knee — or knees, plural, should you be stupid enough to get both legs caught — up toward your chest.

Very steadily, without twisting my torso, I pulled my knees toward my chest. Astonishingly, they came. Along with their wrapping.

Next? Unwrap the kelp from your limbs.

I reached down and grasped the tangle of kelp — snapping stalks and pulling the mess free of my limbs — and when I had finished self-rescuing I streamlined myself into one hell of an agile fish and in short time I caught up with Walter and Tolliver.

It appeared they hadn’t missed me.

Lessons learned.

The kelp trail branched and branched again but Doug Tolliver, along with his wrist compass, led us to the pinnacle.

We had sampled its spreading fingers, outside the forest. Inside the forest, the pinnacle was a thick-bodied pillar of rock, wider at the base and thinning as it rose.

It looked like a Christmas tree.

It was hung with all manner of gaudy decorations. There were anemones the color of strawberries and apricots and limes, some of them large as dinner plates. There were volcano-shaped sponges and spreading sea fans. There were orange and red and purple and rainbow-hued sea stars wrapped around rocky knobs. There were creatures for which I had no names. Huge white stalks topped with carved disks sprouted from the rock like cauliflowers. Squishy things the shape of caterpillars in neon red and yellow crept along the wall. One bright cobalt-blue crawler wore a crown of gold spikes and could audition for a Disney flick. The cracks and fissures of the pinnacle were inhabited by crabs and snails and one tiny red octopus. A thick-lipped thing in a huge scalloped shell hogged an entire ledge to itself.

We ascended the pinnacle, searching for a gaudy purple in the gaudy tapestry.

It was Tolliver who found the hydrocoral, looking like the photo we'd seen in Dr. Russell's office.

Stylaster californicus.

Tolliver pumped his fist.

We were not going to whack at it. The organism took twenty-five years to grow one inch, so I’d read. Taking even a tip would rob it of a few years. Tolliver used his underwater camera to do the sampling.

Walter pried off a pinch of the Franciscan rock near the coral and I marveled that he'd found an unoccupied section of wall to sample.

We’d done well at Target Blue. We’d found a credible source for the kelp and pebble embedded in the holdfast caught in the Outcast anchor. And we had found a credible source of the mineral grains and coral bits embedded in the yellow float's rope. What we had not yet found was any sign of a float anchorage, any reason the float would have been attached to this slice of the pinnacle.

We conferred in sign language.

Consensus: ascend the pinnacle, looking for signs of a float anchorage. Then cross the ridge to Target Red and see what we can find over there.

There was nothing more to be found on the Target Blue pinnacle, other than beauty. When we reached the spot where the pinnacle butted up against the caterpillar ridge, we struck out for Target Red.

And then Tolliver investigated a shortcut, a tunnel through the ridge.

Dim light showed at the other end.

On land, I'd entered tunnels and mines and caves, out of necessity. I wasn't fond of overhead environments but, actually, this one looked navigable.

We all switched on the fat torch lights mounted on our gloves.

The tunnel opening was a toothy triangle that quickly swallowed Tolliver and then Walter and then me.

Finning carefully, silt avoidance technique.

There was life inside the tunnel — some of the same animals clinging to the walls as clung to the pinnacle — but here in the darker realm, in this gullet through the ridge, I did not see beauty. I saw only shadows of life and it wasn’t the shadows per se that unsettled me, it was the imagining of things unseen that tightened my chest.

My bubbles came faster, hit the ceiling of the tunnel, died there.

I angled my torch to illuminate the crowding right-hand wall and calmed myself with a quick and dirty field ID of the rock. Sandstone.

All right, then.

Up ahead, Walter was just exiting the tunnel.

I finned toward the light.

I emerged from the tunnel to find Tolliver and Walter gripping a rock outcrop, bodies drifting in a gentle current.

I too grabbed hold.

My legs trailed.

It wasn’t just the current that had us holding on tight. It was also the scene before us.

I took in this new underwater world.

Was this right?

Target Red was ailing.

Here, just outside the tunnel, the water was edging toward murky.

Farther on, advancing into Target Red, the water degraded like a spreading stain.

Up above, the algal bloom shrouded the surface, a rotten version of a kelp canopy. Down below, the kelp forest was thinned. A forest in distress. Hardly a forest at all.

By the beam of my glove light I saw particulates falling from the plankton bloom above. Dying, decaying, they rained down upon the stunted forest and whatever life lurked unseen and sank to the seafloor below.

Here and there, where the algal bloom had begun to break up, pencils of weak sunlight penetrated the gloom.

As my eyes adjusted to this ghostly undersea world I began to get the lay of the land.

We hung at the mouth of the tunnel. Above us a large overhang jutted out from the ridge crest and below us the ridge sloped down to a steep dropoff. A canyon plummeted who-knew-how-deep into a bowl, a chasm, and above the chasm there rose enclosing canyon walls that seemed to hold this place separate from the main body of Cochrane Bank.

I picked out the rocky reef topping the left-hand canyon wall.

Our target reef.

We needed to swim over there.

But we just hung where we were, grasping rocky knobs, gaping.

I envisioned Violet Russell's slide show, the tongues of hypoxic waters welling up onto the continental shelf, and I wondered if that was going on here, if upwelling low-oxygen high-nutrient waters had spurred the growth of this deadly algal bloom.

Whatever combination of ingredients, it had made this place a toxic cocktail.

I sucked in a deep draft of my own canned air.

Walter jammed an elbow into my arm, and pointed.

It took a moment for my vision to penetrate the cloudy water and scraggly kelp to see what he had seen.

Tolliver was looking now, too.

On our target reef, caught in one of the sunlight pencils, something silver flashed. I could not make out details but I could make out a bare-bones shape.

A metal cage.

We looked at one another and nodded. That's where we needed to go.

Tolliver made one of the hand signals he’d taught us, moving his hand across his torso in a wave motion. Current. And then he pointed to himself and then to us, positioning one hand behind the other.

As ever, he was taking the lead and, as ever, I was glad of it.

We struck out into the bowl framed by the canyon walls.

The current, actually, took us, a rather gentle flow that nevertheless lent a helping hand. It seemed to follow the curve of the bowl. I thought, it's a circular current, it's an eddy, it's the eddy that Tolliver pointed out up top when we first arrived and saw the slight dip in the water that seemed to hold the scummy algal bloom in place.

Holding us in place, in now.

It was a great circling eddy created by seabed topography, by the winds and tides and if I allowed myself to be as poetic as the ancient mariner, by the fickle gods of the sea.

I suddenly wanted to bolt, to strike out perpendicular to this swirling current, to escape.

But Tolliver just rode it like a pro, and so then did we, taking our ride to the left-hand canyon rim and then we flowed up along with the eddying current to skim the jagged reef.

We resumed control, heading for the silver cage at the far edge of the reef. We swam through spindly stalks of the degraded kelp forest, a sad lonely place. The reef was carpeted in dead crabs and shriveled worms. I would have welcomed the company of a grumpy kelp crab. The only life I glimpsed in passing was a nearly translucent snail clinging to a ragged frond, a snail whose shell was pitted as if it had been sandblasted.

I again thought of Violet Russell. Not her slide show this time, but her words. Ocean acidity is rising. Carbon dioxide is souring the seas.

This water was not simply oxygen-starved, it was growing acidic — chemically etching the shell of the snail.

We approached the far edge of the reef.

It was a little better here. The stain was fading here.

I looked up. The algal bloom was fading there, directly above.

We were beneath the outer edge of the bloom.

As we finned toward the cage we saw a blaze of color in this graveyard, a bright sulfur yellow.

It was what we had been hunting.

A bloom of yellow floats was attached to the bottom of the cage. From the tunnel we had glimpsed only the top of the cage. We saw it full-on now. The cage sat down in a hole, perhaps for protection from the currents. It was made of metal pipes, a silvery stainless steel. The frame was open at the top, closed at the bottom, anchored at the corners with heavy-looking metal feet. One of the pipes sprouted the package of yellow floats, like a kelp stalk sprouting gas bladders.

Same size, same shape as the yellow float hidden in Robbie Donie’s shrine at Morro Rock.

I looked at my companions. Cocked my head. This has got to be the source, right?

They nodded their agreement.

The cage was about five feet square — big enough, it struck me, to hold a diver — although the contents were nothing so dramatic. Within the cage, attached to the pipes, were various boxes and canisters and what looked like temperature gauges. Some sort of instrumentation. Attached to the top was a chunky camera. Attached to the base was a squat cylinder with the label Sound Link.

Monitoring the algal bloom? Monitoring the shoaling hypoxic waters? Made sense, I guessed, although wouldn’t Dr. Russell have mentioned it? Well, not necessarily. I suspected that there were many agencies monitoring the condition of the sea, and like a bureaucracy, one department doesn’t know what the other is doing.

I wrote on my slate: NOAA? I’d done a lot of research since we’d begun this case and when it came to all things ocean, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was the top dog. I showed the slate to Tolliver.

He shrugged. Not his bureaucracy.

His patch of ocean, though. He looked from the instrument cage to the bloom overhead and then back at the stain of Target Red and he shook his head.

No dive-signal interpretation needed. This was a bad scene.

I turned back to the scene of the floats. Although the cage was anchored by its metal feet it was clearly meant to rise at some point — else there would be no floats. Some sort of recovery system, I guessed. The six floats were attached to a canister by means of braided nylon rope with snap hook fasteners. Easy on, easy off.

I thought of the bent snap hook on Donie's float. Had it broken free and found its way to the surface? And if so, is that where Donie found it? Or, he might have found it elsewhere, drifting on the currents.

First things first. The geology.

I grabbed the steel pipe and pulled myself closer to the cage to get a good look at the floats. As they bobbed in the current they scuffed against the rocky walls of the hole and I could imagine those braided ropes picking up a grain or two. The rock was Franciscan basalt, I judged, although we’d want to take a sample for confirmation.

And what of the purple hydrocoral? Where was that source?

I scrutinized the wall of the hole, thinking I was hunting for one more lifeless gray animal, and it came as a surprise when I spotted a purple nubbin in a crevice, and then I recalled Russell saying that this hydrocoral retained its color in death. Whether technically dead, it had surely been battered, losing a good quarter-century of growth, and if this had occurred during the installation of this equipment I thought that’s some damned careless work.

I pointed out the nubbin of Stylaster and Tolliver took out his camera and photographed the remains.

Walter set to work chiseling off a sample of the volcanic rock.

I swam over to the nearest stalk of kelp and snapped off a sample. Macrocystis pyrifera, giant kelp, one of the survivors in this ailing forest, still holding fast to the rocky reef.

I thought, a boat could anchor here and snag a bit of holdfast.

It was odd not being able to run through the scenarios as we worked. Hand signals just didn't cut it. Had Robbie Donie anchored here, or at Target Blue? When? Why? Squid-hunting? Float-finding? And then he returned. Squid-fishing again? Success this time? And then what? Overboard? Or pull up anchor and motor someplace else? Overboard there?

Alone? With company?

I swam back to join the others at the cage and gave a thumbs-up.

It's a start. A good day's work.

Tolliver checked his dive computer and gave his own signal: one hand held flat, the other underneath with the tips of the fingers touching the flat hand. Time to head back.

We crossed the reef to the chasm and struck out into the eddy.

A liquid whisper: going my way?

You bet, heading back to the tunnel that would shortcut us through the ridge to the sunny side, to Target Blue, to the anchor line up to Tolliver's boat.

I didn't bother to consult my compass. I assumed Tolliver had consulted his. I assumed Tolliver could find his way around down here with his eyes closed, which was what it was starting to feel like as we rode the back-eddy: swimming with closed eyes. The stain grew thicker, the water murkier.

Ahead, Tolliver and then Walter seemed to slow and I thought, that's strange.

And then I too slowed, no longer certain where I was, where the off-ramp on this eddy was, where we needed to exit in order to find our tunnel.

The murk was thick as soup. The dying plankton, caught in my light beam, fell like stars.

The current whispered me along.

Tolliver and Walter were ghostly shapes, just ahead, riding the current.

Shouldn’t we exit now?

And then something came into my light, something so otherworldly that for a moment I forgot to breathe.

It drifted along with me.

It was the size of my fist and the shape of a walnut and I could see through it.

It was outlined in rows of sparklers.

The rows looked like combs, bent along its curves like curved combs holding up a woman’s hair.

The combs were vibrating, propelling the creature through the water, a gentle assist to the current.

And as I shifted my light the sparklers went out and I realized that my light had diffracted off the combs.

It was the damnedest jellyfish I had ever seen.

The creature was so transparent I could see tiny shrimp inside its body. It was a hunter and I guessed it had hunted out there beyond the stain, out where the upwelling brought food, and then it had got caught in this trickster of an eddy.

Like us.

And as we drifted along, another little jelly jewel appeared.

And then another.

And then either I drifted into their bloom or they bloomed around me.

I thought hey Tolliver maybe we should get the hell out of this current, but Tolliver and Walter were just dark shapes in the jelly soup.

Even then I was entranced, even then I was dazzled by sparklers everywhere as I moved my light to and fro — until the bloom thickened and coated me with little jellies, jellies sparkling on my wetsuit, on my mask, on my face.

On my bare face.

I thrashed.

And even as I brought my gloved hands to my face to wipe it clean of jellyfish I was thinking holy shit it’s too late they’re already stinging.

But there was no sting. There was no pain. There was only tickling as jellies brushed my skin.

I focused in on a jelly right in front of my mask and I took note of the obvious. There were no tentacles.

I was coated with jellyfish that did not sting.

I was the luckiest diver in the world.

And then I saw that I was the only diver in this world because Tolliver and Walter were gone and the thousands of tiny jewel jellies that were my companions were engulfing me, smothering me.

I could not even see my own bubbles.

Sometime later — an eternity, surely — a hand grasped my hand.

I crushed the hand in a death grip.

It tugged me.

It brought me close to Tolliver, who turned his mask my way and then jerked his head in a move-it signal because he had no hands free for hand signals because Walter was holding his other hand.

The three of us kicked as one, moved forward as one, hands locked, finning through the soupy current that wanted to carry us forever.

No way.

We cut out.

We emerged from the soup to the normal murk and it was like going from deepest night to just before dawn.

Straight ahead by the light of our glove torches I could see the mouth of the tunnel.

I would have wept in relief but I was already immersed in water.

Tolliver and then Walter entered the tunnel.

As for me, I could not resist a look back. If I'd had a camera I would have snapped a selfie. Look where I've been.

The jeweled jelly bloom had passed by.

The murk seemed to have thinned or I'd just gotten used to it or perhaps it was a different angle of view.

But I could see farther than I had before.

I could see the canyon arms, the rims reaching out to the edges of Target Red, and as I took in the view I saw at the far reach of the ghostly kelp forest a new shape.

Something different.

Something big.

Or was it just skewed perception?

No, it was big. Huge. It was something altogether mammoth out there at the edge of this world.

I blinked.

It had to be a jellyfish because it trailed long tentacles.

A purple-stripe, I thought. Bigger than the big one I’d seen from the Sea Spray, it was the kind of jellyfish that stung the diver Joao Silva nearly to death.

I blinked again.

The tentacles were stalks of kelp.

Or no.

Not stalks. Tentacles after all.

A Humboldt. The squid that Robbie Donie hunted, the squid that inked the Outcast.

Or no.

It moved.

A shadow.

This murk.

I could not see.

Had I seen something?

Shadows of the mind.

We swam like fish through the tunnel, through the healthy kelp forest to intersect the yellow anchor line.

As we began to ascend I looked up toward the brilliant blue sun-splashed surface and I saw a big shadow.

Two shadows.

One was most certainly the Breaker.

The other was another boat.

We stood dripping aboard the Breaker, facing the boat parked alongside.

It was twice the length of Tolliver’s boat, a sleek cruiser with a jutting flybridge atop the cabin area that gave it the look of a hunting shark. The hull was painted carbon black. The name was in silver, letters steeply slanted forward as if bracing into the wind. It was called Destiny.

I could not have imagined a more fitting boat for Oscar Flynn.

Flynn himself leaned on the flybridge rail, massive forearms crossed, looking down upon us. He was bare-headed and his scalp glistened through his buzz-cut. He wore aviator shades.

Flynn was not alone.

I could not have imagined a more surprising crew member on the stern deck down below — Jake Keasling. Jake too wore aviator shades and leaned coolly on the railing but there was no question which guy was top dog. Green-haired Captain Kayak was looking out of place.

“Howdy Oscar,” Tolliver said. “Howdy Jake.”

The two men aboard the Destiny nodded.

“Give us a moment.”

They nodded again and waited in silence while we removed our tanks and heavy gear. Faith James stacked the gear on the racks and then returned to the jump seat, swiveling it to face the Destiny.

I wondered what words had been exchanged between the two boats before we surfaced. I knew what I would have said. Something along the lines of fancy meeting you here. You been following us?

I wanted to strip off my wetsuit and let the sun warm my skin but I did not want to strip down to my swimsuit in front of Oscar Flynn and Jake Keasling.

Walter and Tolliver seemingly felt the same way.

We lined up like neoprene seals along the starboard bench seat looking across the water to the big black boat.

Tolliver resumed the communication. “What are you doing here?”

Yes, I thought, that’ll do.

When Flynn didn’t answer, Jake spoke up. “We’re eco-warriors.”

Walter snorted.

Flynn’s face was stony.

Tolliver said, “Cut the crap, Jake. What are you doing here?”

Jake pointed to his T-shirt.

Both Jake and Flynn wore the green T-shirts that they’d worn two days ago on the beach outside our lab. Marine Mammal Research & Rescue.

I said, “Haven’t seen a sea lion all day.”

Flynn shot me a look — his eyes were hidden by the shades but his mouth thinned in that stony face — a look like a warning shot from boat to boat.

After another moment waiting for Flynn to speak, Jake picked up a long pole with a scoop on the end and balanced it like a fishing rod over the rail above the teak dive platform. “We're algae collectors! Certified members of the Phytoplankton Monitoring Group of the Marine Mammal Research and Rescue Center. When the algae goes bad and messes up the sea life, who you gonna call? Me ‘n Oscar. Today anyway. You need somebody tomorrow, I’m renting kayaks, so go to the next names on the list. We get assigned our gigs and our partners. I mean, there is a certain lovely blonde I would have preferred to go sailing with but alas she doesn’t own a boat, and so I got slotted with Oscar here. Hot boat, though, right? I’m sure Oscar would have preferred that lovely blonde but he ended up with me. I mean, a volunteer is a volunteer and we show up when and where we’re told. Like today. Today, my friends, we are eco-warriors.” Jake tipped his head to look directly at Faith. “You wanna sign up?”

She said, “Screw off, Jake.”

Jake saluted.

Flynn said, “We're here on business.”

Tolliver said, “Actually, a marine scientist by the name of Violet Russell told us you consulted with her on the subject.”

“So?” Flynn said.

“So now you're here to sample this particular bloom?”

Flynn looked across the water to the spongy red mat that sat over the ailing world down below. “What else?”

“How about some other bloom? This isn’t the only one out here. It’s the season.”

“You state the obvious.”

“Well here’s an obvious for you, Oscar. It’s damned coincidental that you just happened to come upon this bloom. While we’re here.”

“Somebody reported this bloom to our group a few days ago. This is the first day the weather’s been good for collection. We’re not supposed to go out in unfavorable conditions. My boat can handle rough stuff but when I’m representing the Center I go by their rules.”

I wondered. Oscar Flynn seemed a guy who chafed under anybody's rules.

Walter spoke. “Still.” He rubbed his chin, the way he does when he’s considering the plausibility of a theory. “I must agree with Doug’s word choice. Coincidental.”

Jake set down his sampling pole and leaned over his rail and tipped his head to look up at Flynn. “Yo Oscar! We gonna do the job we came to do or we just gonna hang around shooting the shit with these dudes and dudettes?”

If I could see through Jake’s bad-boy persona I wondered what I would find. I didn’t have the benefit of Tolliver’s long view, watching the little blonde boy grow up into a goof-off, into a green-haired faux eco-warrior, but I sure did share Tolliver’s conjecture that Jake’s persona might cover an uglier core, somebody capable of murdering a rival over squid-fishing. Then again, maybe Jake was simply a goof-off. What you see is what you get.

Flynn ignored Jake.

And now I wondered how Oscar Flynn — this self-proclaimed genius with the world-class lab and the startling rapport with sick animals — felt about ending up with Jake Keasling as a partner. Flynn had ignored Jake during the sea lion rescue back on the beach. He appeared to be striving right now to ignore Jake, as if Jake were an inconvenient stowaway.

It struck me that Oscar Flynn and Jake Keasling were overworking the odd-couple angle.

An odd couple, I thought, who both had connections to the source of the toxin that bioaccumulated in the anchovies that poisoned the diver Joao Silva.

Walter stopped rubbing his chin in speculation and asked, bluntly, “Why are you here right now? Let me restate the obvious, Mr. Flynn. It’s a big ocean. There are other algal blooms. And yet you show up here, now. We could calculate the probabilities, if you like. Otherwise, let me point out that our radar indicated a boat following us on the way here. At a distance, perhaps hanging back in indecision. Was that the Destiny? And if so, what prompted you to finally join us?”

Flynn scowled. “It’s Doctor Flynn.”

“Pardon me, Doctor Flynn, of course, double PhD.” Walter smiled. “Here’s my theory. You wanted to know what we’re doing here. Why we came. What we found. You weren’t certain how to proceed but your curiosity finally prevailed.”

Jake was attached to his rail, still watching Flynn.

Flynn snapped, “If I wanted to sneak up on you I would have used my radar jamming. I came openly. I'm here on business. I don't care why you're here.”

Tolliver said, “Well that’s damned odd. Simple human curiosity would make just about anybody ask why we’re here. Haven’t you seen the crowd that gathers when the cops show up at a scene? This is a cop boat, Oscar. You really trying to tell me you’re not curious?”

“I don’t associate with the kind of people who gawk at crime scenes.”

I would have laughed at the pomposity of that but Oscar Flynn was just not laughable. He made me wary, like a large predatory animal encountered in the wild makes me wary.

Jake let go of his railing. He turned to us, fiddling with his aviator shades, resetting them. “Well hell, I gawk. I figure you’re here about Robbie going missing at sea. Since we’re at sea.”

Flynn gave a little jerk. He stared at Jake, stared at us.

Tolliver turned to Faith. “They ask you anything about our mission when they first arrived?”

Faith nodded at the dive flag, which still flew. “They asked who was diving.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said Seal Team Six.”

Tolliver chuckled.

Jake managed a grin. “And then I said, I may not be a Seal but I am a manly kayaker and I asked if she wanted to grab a beer when we all get back to shore.”

Bad-boy Jake hitting on the female, I wondered, or Jake trying desperately for casual?

Flynn spoke. “I asked if we would be interfering with official business if we conducted our business while divers were in the water.”

“And I told them to stand off,” Faith said. “And I told Jake to screw off.”

Jake put his hand over his heart and shook his head. But his attention quickly shifted back to Tolliver. “So, uh, given that you’re not Seal Team Six, we got a detective and two geologists diving out here and so I’m going to jump to the conclusion that you were doing your evidence stuff and that made you think Robbie the little shit came, uh, here.”

Flynn watched us, tapping his fingers on the railing, the impatient captain on his flybridge.

Tolliver raked his hair, which had dried in the sun and the breeze and now sprang up into spikes. “Yup, we’re working the Donie case. That’s what we’re doing out here.”

Jake leaned over the rail and looked down into the water. “Find him?”

I could not resist looking down, as well. Deep blue, and the leading edge of the healthy kelp forest. There was nothing else to see, no indication that this was the watery grave of Robbie Donie. If it was, we hadn't even found anything like a shoe that might have belonged to him.

Tolliver said, “No Jake, we didn’t find him. That surprise you?”

Jake laughed.

“What we did find, though,” Tolliver said, “was an underwater setup with a bunch of instruments. Some kind of monitoring setup, it looked like.”

Jake looked up at Flynn.

Flynn looked at his big silver wristwatch.

Tolliver said, “It had one of those gizmos that sends signals to a vessel overhead. Wireless, even — pretty slick. You know slick technology, Oscar. Hell, you've got radar jamming? Anyway, what do you call that kind of gizmo?”

“Acoustic modem,” Flynn said. “It's standard technology.”

“Well then, it occurs to me that this setup might belong to your group. Your Phytoplankton Monitoring Group, if I've got the name right.”

“Right name. Wrong assumption.”

“So you folks take samples from the surface but you don't monitor the conditions underneath?”

“That's right.”

“So if I were to come aboard your vessel I wouldn't be finding an acoustic modem transmitter….receiver? Other end of the phone line?”

“If you come aboard my vessel you'd better come armed with a search warrant.”

“Something to hide, Oscar?”

“Something to guard. My right to privacy.”

“That's your right.” Tolliver shrugged. “So I guess I'll check with the ocean-research types, see if I can find who's monitoring down there.”

“I don't care who you check with. It's not my business. My business is over there.” Flynn pointed toward the algal bloom. “Are you going to keep looking for that fisherman? I need to know because I need to go get my samples and I can’t do that if you dive again.”

“We’re finished for now, Oscar. You go ahead.” A pause, and then Tolliver added, “But make it quick. I'll be scheduling police department divers to come out here for another look.”

“When?”

“Whenever it's convenient.”

“I need to know the time.” Flynn added, “So I can be sure your divers won't interfere with my work.”

Tolliver said, with an edge, “Whenever I decide to send them. This afternoon, or tomorrow. Maybe both days. Another day, if need be. I don't go by your schedule, Oscar. You go by mine. Are we clear?”

Flynn gave a brusque nod.

Jake spoke up. “Speaking of divers, you hear about that diver?”

“Which diver is that?” Tolliver asked.

“Uh, the dude from my sister's cave. The dude who got poisoned.”

“The last I heard — this morning — Mr. Silva was still unconscious.”

“Update.” Jake drew a finger across his throat.

“Aw shit,” Tolliver said. And then, after a moment, “How do you know?”

“I know a nurse. Asked her to keep me updated, since the man was poisoned on Keasling property. I like to keep track of who croaks.”

Walter said, “That's a shame.” He looked up at Flynn. “A shame about Mr. Silva. Wouldn't you say?”

“I didn't know him,” Flynn said. “Why should I care about somebody I never laid eyes on?”

I had. Laid eyes on him as he was hauled aboard the Sea Spray. Laid eyes on him three days ago on the Keasling beach. It was a shame, although not a surprise that he'd died. He'd certainly been horribly sickened. His mouth frothing. Clutching at his stomach. Still wearing that purple welt on his cheek from the jellyfish sting.

I said, “I owe you one.”

Lanny blinked. “One of what?”

“A thank you. I started to get seasick this morning, and then I used the fennel seeds you gave me.”

He said, cautiously, “That’s good.”

He looked up and down the hallway of the Keasling hacienda and bobbed his head, inviting me into his room. When we were both inside he switched on the light and quietly closed the door. And then he reddened. “Is this good? I can close the door?”

“Sure.”

He extended his hand. “Thank you for coming.”

I thought, he'll regret that, and I regretted taking advantage of this gesture of good will, but I shook his hand with the best of intentions.

He said, “Do you like my room?”

“It’s really nice.”

Lanny’s room was a surprise. I had expected some kind of kitschy nautical theme. A faux porthole. A throw rug with a seashell design. A clock in the shape of a seagull. I had expected, I was ashamed to admit, a childish room. Lanny was not a child. Living at home, sure, in the family hacienda — but then so was big sister Sandy. I wondered what her room looked like. A skull and crossbones Keep Out sign hanging on the wall. An aquarium full of piranha.

Lanny's room was tidy and pleasant. There was the same planked flooring as in the rest of the house, scuffed and scarred but clean. A big window with a wide oak sash overlooked the sea, silvery in the starlight. The walls were pale blue and hung with posters. One poster was of the Sea Spray, the kind you can get enlarged from a photo. The other poster was of a bluesy-looking rock band with the banner headline Blue Fall in a Special Appearance at the Otter Rock Cafe! There was a simple oak dresser and matching bedside table. There was a framed photo on the dresser of three kids, two boys and a girl with their arms looped around each other’s shoulders — the Keasling siblings. The little Sea Urchins.

On the bedside table was a digital alarm clock. Beside the clock was another picture frame, the kind of mirror-finish frame you can buy at the drugstore that includes a stock photo. The young woman in this photo had blonde curls and blue eyes and a warm generic smile.

My heart squeezed.

Lanny said, “You should sit here.” He directed me to a simple oak chair by the window. He sat on a dark wood chest at the end of his bed. It was the only piece of furniture in the room that appeared to have a history. It was banded in iron, dinged and scratched. I figured it dated back to earlier Keaslings.

Lanny clasped his hands in his lap. “Now it’s okay to talk.”

An hour ago, when I had phoned Lanny and asked if we could meet, he’d given me a time and said he would wait for me outside the hacienda.

I'd phoned him from the Shoreline Motel where Walter and I had spent the afternoon and early evening doing the analysis on the samples we'd gathered on the morning's dive. We'd made a late dinner of take-out curry, and chewed over what we'd found at the site, what it all meant.

And then we'd talked floats.

And then I had proposed my plan. Walter said, you know this is a long shot? I knew. Then he asked me to be kind.

And then I phoned Lanny.

At the appointed time I drove to the hacienda on the bluff and parked away from the house, as instructed.

Lanny, true to his word, had met me outside. He led me inside through a side door, asking me to walk on ‘cat feet’ and whisper because Sandy was in her office and he didn’t want her to hear us. He’d explained, apologetically, that Sandy didn’t like me. I’d assured him that I already knew that.

We’d had no trouble navigating the cavernous hacienda without being seen.

And now, facing Lanny in the privacy of his room, I found myself tongue-tied. He looked so eager to please. He wore a white collared long-sleeve shirt, black chino pants, and blue boat shoes. He’d dressed up. Be kind, Walter had told me. I wasn’t certain how to do that, how to raise the question I came to ask, kindly. Hey Lanny, did you steal Joao Silva’s red float and hide it in the dunes and if you did, what are you hiding?

Before I could frame the question Lanny asked one of his own. “Where did you get seasick?”

Okay, I thought. That works. I had meant only to thank him for the fennel, to be friendly, but seasick was a workable lead-in. I said, “Walter and I were with Doug Tolliver on his boat. We had some evidence that led us to a site on Cochrane Bank.”

I had debated giving Lanny that bit of case-related information. I decided that I needed to give something in order to get something.

He sealed his lips. Not giving anything.

I gave a little more. “We believe Robbie Donie anchored there, at some point.”

Lanny’s clasped hands tightened. “Did you find Robbie?”

Same question your brother asked, I thought. I said, “No.”

Lanny broke into a smile. “Oh, that’s good.”

“Is it?”

“That means Robbie’s not dead down there.”

“All it means,” I said, striving for a kindly tone, “is that we didn’t find his body.”

Lanny’s smile died.

I waited for him to ask the next obvious question. He didn't. I answered anyway. “What we did find was a monitoring instrument cage. You know anything about that?”

Lanny shook his head, hard.

“It seems the sort of thing Jacques Cousteau would set up. Keep watch on the ocean.”

Lanny said, “Jock is dead.”

I nodded, in sympathy. “The thing is, that cage is a likely site where the yellow float originated. You know the float I’m talking about? You remember — the other day on your beach I showed you the photo on my cell phone. And Walter explained that we found the float in a hiding place that Donie used.”

Lanny said, “Oh.”

“And then, if you’ll recall, we explained that the diver you and Sandy rescued — Joao Silva — had a dive bag with a similar float, only colored red.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know about it.”

“Well,” I said, “here’s the thing. I think maybe you do know. Because I believe I saw you take the red float from the dive bag and put it in your duffel bag.”

“Don’t call me a thief.”

“I’m not. A thief steals something for gain and I don’t think you were doing that.” That was a hair-splitting definition but I wanted to make the distinction. I added, “I think you’re a good man who was trying to help somebody.” That was true; I did think that. “Maybe protect somebody, like the diver?”

Lanny’s brown eyes moistened.

I thought then of the poisoned sea lion on our beach, eyes so large and brown and full of pain and fear. And Silva the poisoned diver on the Keasling beach, eyes wild and full of pain and fear. And Lanny looked at me now with something in his eyes akin to that. Fear, pain, distress. Guilt? If I were kinder, I would tell him it’s okay, never mind, let’s drop it and you can tell me about that bluesy rock concert.

Instead I said, “That's why Walter and I came to your beach the other day. To ask you about the red float. And then, after the diver got poisoned, you disappeared and we didn’t get the chance.”

Lanny blinked back the tears.

I pressed, “And then that night, at the dunes, I got the chance to find out where you hid the float.”

“No.”

“I think yes.”

“You followed me.”

I said, brusquely, “Look Lanny, when I found you up on that dune you were wearing a pack big enough to hold a two-foot long float. There was a trowel in the pack’s side pocket. Are you going to tell me you didn’t dig a hole somewhere on the dune and bury that float?”

“I’m not telling you anything.”

I nearly laughed. “Well thanks for being honest about it.”

He whispered, “It’s hard.”

“What’s hard, Lanny?”

He shook his head.

“Is it hard keeping a secret because you’re trying to protect somebody? And you don’t like keeping secrets? I don’t blame you. That is hard.”

“I didn’t say any of that.”

“Is it Fred Stavis you’re trying to protect?”

Lanny flinched.

“I mean, Fred showing up at the dunes, saying he followed you because he was worried about you… That sounds like two guys who have each other’s backs.”

“He's my boss.”

“I know.”

“And he’s my friend.”

“Is he?”

“Yes.”

“So what was the trowel for, Lanny?”

“It was just in my pack.”

“Oh, right, from the sand-castle building. Okay, let's brainstorm. You went out to the dunes because it’s pretty at night. And you brought the trowel in case you needed a pit stop.”

Lanny went red.

“Look, I know about bathroom necessities in the outdoors. I hike, I backpack. I use a trowel. Is that why you brought the trowel to the dunes?”

He went redder. “I don't do that.”

“No?”

“You're not supposed to bury…that…in the dunes.”

I waited. I'd shocked him into protesting what he would not bury. I pressed, “Then what did you bury in the dunes?”

“Nothing, I didn’t, you shouldn’t, didn’t you see the fences, don’t you know about not walking on little plants?”

I hadn't seen any fences. But I sure planned to look.

I said, “Did you bury the float in a fenced area, thinking nobody's going to trespass there and find it?”

He shook his head.

“Okay, let's go back to that day on your beach. To the poisoned diver. You got very very upset and you said something. You didn't mean to say it out loud but you let it slip — the way we say things when we’re shocked and not being careful. Do you remember what you said?”

He shook his head.

“You said I broke it.”

He was mute.

“What did you break, Lanny? Something on that instrument cage at Cochrane Bank? Maybe something that released a float? The yellow float that Robbie Donie found? Or maybe there were red floats there, too… Like the red float Joao Silva found?”

“I didn't break any floats.”

“Well then what did you break?”

He sealed his lips.

“Damn it Lanny, you're such a big protector of the dunes, of the sea, you idolize Jacques Cousteau, you’re so proud of your nickname Sea Urchin, you live right here on the ocean’s edge. You worry about that sea, don’t you? Well you should. Because I saw something this morning that sure worried me. Let me tell you what I saw, when Walter and I and Detective Tolliver went diving at that site on Cochrane Bank. I saw a dying kelp forest, I saw a graveyard where sea animals were gray and shriveled, I saw water full of dying plankton that came down from a huge algal bloom on the surface. You know anything about all that?”

He shook his head, hard.

“And I saw a lot of jellyfish.” Saw, hell, I got wrapped in jellyfish.

He was silent.

“They're called comb jellies. I googled them. They thrive in polluted waters.”

“I don't know about jellyfish.”

“Well sure you do. You pulled Joao Silva aboard after he got stung by a purple-stripe.”

“That's all I know about jellyfish.”

I thought, you protest too much. I wondered why. I said, “I've heard that jellyfish are becoming a problem. What do you think?”

“I don't know.”

“That night we went to the dunes, did you see all the jellyfish in the channel?”

He shook his head.

“Really? There were jellies that looked like fried eggs and blue flowers and see-through saucers…”

“Moons,” he said.

“Moons, yeah, that’s what they looked like. Guess that's why they're called moon jellyfish.” Aurelia aurita, on Dr. Russell's slideshow. “It's weird that you didn't see them, there were so many. Pretty, but a little creepy too. You know? Like…”

He whispered something. It sounded like devils.

I paid very close attention. “Devils?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Maybe I misheard. Devils sounds scary.”

He repeated, “I didn't say that.”

“Lanny, what are you afraid of?”

“Nothing.”

“Really? Most of us are afraid of something. Getting lost, unable to find the way home. Death. Illness. Loss of loved ones — there's a common fear.” There was mine — greatest fear, in spades. “I read an article once about phobias and you wouldn’t believe the things people are afraid of. Did you know there's a fear called anthophobia? That means fear of flowers. I mean, who’s afraid of flowers, right?” I thought he might smile. He didn’t. He seemed to have turned inward, drawn by some inward fear. I continued, “But who am I to judge? Why is it more reasonable to fear, say, open spaces — that’s called agoraphobia — than to fear flowers? Outdoor spaces won’t hurt you. And here's one you might have heard of — I don’t recall the name, something-phobia — but it means fear of being in the ocean. That’s certainly not you.”

He shook his head.

I pressed on. “But something scary can happen — say, in the ocean — and we fear the memory.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm thinking about a story Doug Tolliver told, about you. In the channel, which is pretty much part of the ocean. About the time when you were cleaning the propeller on the Sea Spray and you hit your head and blacked out. You almost drowned.”

“I didn't drown.”

I smiled. “Good thing. Still, it must have been terrifying. Even if you don't remember the feeling now, the memory is there somewhere in you.”

After a long moment he said, “Sandy told me.”

“Oh?” I nodded. “That makes sense. She’s your sister, she’d be the one to tell you. She was evidently in the bathroom when it happened. It must have been terrifying for her, as well, coming back to an accident scene. Nearly losing her brother.”

He nodded.

“Anyway, somebody was there, close enough to help you. He jumped right in and saved you. Oscar Flynn.”

Lanny nodded.

“You remember that part?”

Lanny shook his head.

“Well then, I guess Sandy told you who was there and…”

Before I could finish speaking, the door to Lanny's room burst open and banged into the wall and both Lanny and I jumped.

Sandy Keasling stood in the doorway like an angry sea goddess.

She glared at me. “Who in the hell let her in?”

And then she glared at Lanny.

I banged on Walter’s door and called out, “Wake up! We’re going on a treasure hunt!”

It took him a full minute to emerge from his room, venturing into the common room, looking around for the cause of the commotion. He wore his black fleece bathrobe. His face was wet from a pass at his bathroom sink. His thinning hair was wetted down, renegade bits sticking out hither and thither.

He cleared his throat and said, “A what?”

I slid my open laptop across the dinette table to face him.

He said, “Is there coffee?”

Of course there was coffee. I’d been up for an hour already. Last night I'd returned from the Keasling hacienda deeply fatigued — from a morning of diving and an afternoon of lab work and an evening trying to cajole Lanny into telling some truths. Walter had turned in early, leaving a note saying he was getting too old for extreme sports and twelve-hour work days. Old, hell. I was young and I was getting too old for this. I'd crashed right to sleep. And then woke up before dawn and went straight to the French press.

I said, “There is coffee.”

He vacillated between the kitchenette with the French press and the table with my open laptop, angling for a look.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll bring you a cup.”

“You are an angel,” he said. “I’m in your debt.”

“I’m an over-caffeinated enthusiast short on sleep because I woke up thinking about sand dune restoration and I spent the last hour online Google-earthing and I'd like to get going and so I'm more than happy to bring you coffee. No angels or debts in play.” I gave him a little nudge, toward the table. “Just please check out the geography.”

We took the road southward that looped around the bay and turned off onto another road, a narrow winding road that terminated in a parking lot. This early in the morning, even with the sun shining brightly, the lot was empty. We parked and studied the Google map on my tablet and then grabbed our packs.

A decomposed-granite trail led into coastal scrub.

It felt good to hike, feet on solid ground, breathing sweet air without needing to suck on a regulator. Yesterday’s dive had been an otherworldly experience. Today I slipped back into my world.

It was easy walking for a quarter mile and then we left the trail and struck out for the dunes and the bay that lay ahead.

We reached the southern end of the bay, where it pinched off alongside the white rolling dunes. From here northward, the land was a long narrow finger that separated bay from ocean, a stretch of high dune ridges and low rolling sandy humps and hard-pack sandspit.

The finger extended about three miles northward alongside the bay and then the channel and it terminated at the mouth of the harbor.

We weren’t going that far.

Last week I’d kayaked from the channel, following Lanny deep into the back bay, beaching my kayak below an elephantine dune. This morning I’d located that spot on Google Earth. I’d mapped it. I’d studied it. And I’d found what I was looking for.

No need for a kayak, on this trip.

We followed the silty ribbon of beach that bordered the dunes. To our left, the dunes humped up, in places carpeted with green scrubby bushes. To our right, the bay began to widen. The gray-green water was still, placid.

No kayakers.

No dune hikers.

Just us.

In short order we came to a wider flatter stretch of silty beach, below an elephantine dune.

I halted. “We’re here.”

“Are you certain?” Walter eyed the scene. “After all, it was night time.”

There was an edge in his voice, and the unspoken corollary: it had been night time and I was alone and I had on a hunch followed a mysterious kayaker and I was damned lucky that I had not gotten myself into trouble. Now, in the bright light of day, I could see what an excellent landing this place provided. The tide was receding, widening the available space, but even on a high tide there would be plenty of flat land upon which to beach a kayak. And the beach led onto the picture-perfect dune, the mountain of sugary white sand that rose higher than its neighbors. It was the kind of dune that turns you into a kid again, that makes you want to scramble up and then roll down screaming and getting sand in your ears. I wondered if the Sea Urchins had come here as kids. If this white elephant had been their favorite dune.

In any case, last week it had been Lanny Keasling’s favorite dune.

I said, to Walter, “I’m certain.”

The unspoken corollary: I’d been rash, fair enough, but the mysterious kayaker was Lanny and I’d gotten a general idea of what he had done with the red float. I’d had a bit of a scare when Fred Stavis showed up, overly polite but in the end harmless. What I had gotten, at the dune, was a clue. And then last night in the Keasling hacienda Lanny had let slip a more telling clue.

Walter grunted. “Lead on.”

I started up the dune.

Walter followed, grumbling about getting sand in his sneakers.

Huffing, we trudged our way to the summit.

We were met by a welcome cool breeze, scented with salt air.

It was as I remembered: a broad expanse of hummocky mounds and then a shallow descent onto dune waves, with the sea winking in the distance. Of course last time the sea had shone by moonlight, and this morning it shined bright blue in the sun. Excellent visibility.

I rotated slowly, looking along the seaward dunes, then looking along the transverse line of the dunes toward the north, toward the harbor, then looking along the line south in the direction we had come, where the dunes gradually disappeared into bluff tops that overlooked the sea.

This entire sand dune ridge, running south and north, was patched by shrubs and grasses and succulents. It was a fragile construct, stabilized by vegetation against the onslaught of winds and sea spray and rains.

Here and there, it needed a little help.

In particular, a swathe of dune vegetation was undergoing rehabilitation. Don't you know about not walking on little plants? Lanny had said last night. You don’t walk on them, and you don’t dig there.

This morning, with the bird’s-eye view of Google Earth, I had spotted one area marked by thin wire lines.

Now, I put my eyes on the scene and looked for the fence.

Lanny had appeared from that patch of spiky dune bush, just over the summit.

Of course, that did not mean he'd buried the float there. He'd surely been able to hear us, me and Fred Stavis, calling his name. He might very well have zigged and zagged before making his appearance.

Walter unslung his pack and dug out the binoculars.

“Never mind,” I said, “I see it!”

It was several yards to the north, a strand of wire that caught the sunlight, the rest of the fencing hidden from my line of sight by the hillocky nature of the dune crest.

We tramped up and over the offending hillock and came to the fenced-in swathe of baby plants. The fence was an affair of gray wire strung from metal eyebolt post to post, low to the ground, a fence of suggestion: this area is off limits.

I grinned, and shot a glance at Walter. He was frowning.

“What?” I said.

“This is it?”

“Unless there’s another section that’s fenced, that didn’t show up on Google Earth. There could be. It’s a snapshot in time. But this one’s right in front of our noses. And this is a hop, skip, and a jump from the place where Lanny appeared.”

“You're certain?”

I was certain. “Okay, I’m Lanny. I come here to bury the red float. Why here, all the way into the depths of the bay? I could have chosen a dune closer to the channel, to the kayak shop, so I wouldn’t have to paddle so far. But instead I come here. Let's say that’s because I used to come here as a kid, because I know the lay of the land, because it’s night and I seek the familiar. And maybe I come here because I’ve been here recently enough to have seen the vegetation rehab project — to have seen the fencing. And you know what? A fence is a crackerjack landmark in a field of dunes. So I choose the spot to dig in relation to the fence, so that I can return if need be to find the spot again.”

Walter said, “A spot outside the fence, correct?”

“Definitely. I’m deeply sensitive to the environment, I would never set foot inside the protected area. In fact I’m appalled at the suggestion.”

“I wasn’t suggesting you dug inside. I was implying that, if you did indeed choose a spot in relation to the fence—outside—we are talking about a good deal of territory.” Walter put his binoculars to his eyes.

“Well yeah.” I took another long look at the fenced area. It stretched in both directions from the crest, toward the sea and toward the bay. “But I must have chosen a spot near the top. Otherwise why climb up to the ridge? I mean, I was up high enough to overhear voices that night, and I came along the ridge crest, more or less. Surely I wouldn’t have…” I trailed off. I had to admit that even up high it was a lot of territory.

“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.

What 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.”

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 tentacles.

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.

Walter made a move to go to the woman but I grabbed his arm — did you not see what happened to the boogie board guy? — and anyway you don’t know the first thing about treating anaphylactic shock and you don’t have an epi-pen so what are you going to do when you get to her? But Walter being Walter shook me off and went to her anyway and knelt beside her and started talking to her, something soothing certainly, and I felt selfish and stupid and helpless and scared.

The boogie board guy was now doubled over, vomiting onto the sand. His buddy hovered over him, helpless as me, hands over his mouth as though he too might vomit just from sheer panic.

Astonishingly, a man ran over to the vomiting boogie board guy and opened his trunks and peed on the guy’s reddened swollen hand.

Yeah yeah, I’d read about that, urine is supposed to ease the pain of a jellyfish sting but not now, not this one, maybe pee works on the stings of some jellies and not others.

But Aurelia stings should not need treatment by pee or anything else so what the hell was going on?

Swimmers were staggering out of the water. Marked with rashes. Crying softly. Collapsing.

The lifeguard swimmer towing the ponytailed guy reached shore and tried to drag the ponytailed guy onto the sand but the guy looked like dead weight, and then somehow I was there beside them, getting my sandals wet, looking for a clear patch of arm to grab hold of, watching out for bits and pieces of jellyfish, and Tolliver was there too, and the three of us dragged the ponytailed guy up onto dry sand but our rescue was too little too late because the guy was staring dead-eyed at the sky and his red welted chest was rigid as stone.

Tolliver started chest compressions.

The lifeguard swimmer collapsed. His back twitched. Spasms in his back. He yelled ouch ouch ouch oh my god oh my god oh my god. And then he stopped yelling and started gasping and his breathing became shallow and his skin, which had started to dry in the warmth of the sun, turned slick with sweat.

I heard the wail of sirens.

I shot a glance at Walter. He was sitting back on his heels. Slumping. The woman in the black swimsuit was still, gone.

Tolliver sat back on his heels, giving up on the ponytailed guy.

Four dead.

Seven unconscious, being tended by three EMT teams.

Five welted and stung but upright, being tended by another two EMT teams.

The onlookers sat huddled on their beach blankets.

Sand castles had been kicked into oblivion.

In the water, the bloom had thinned to stragglers riding the current out through the mouth of the harbor.

I tried to make sense of it. I couldn't.

Tolliver was working his cell phone, voice like a blade, cutting through whatever confusion was on the other end of the line, demanding information, and then he was on the horn with the Coast Guard talking ocean currents and local tides, and then his sweat-streaked face went gray and he hissed, “Diablo?”

Walter said, “Diablo?”

Tolliver put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Diablo Canyon, the nuclear power plant down the coast a few miles. They ran into some trouble.”

I went cold. Last summer Walter and I had encountered troublesome nuclear material. Again, now? I couldn't understand why a bloom of jellyfish riding the currents — even this extraordinarily toxic bloom — posed a threat to a nuclear power plant.

But, diablo.

Now there was a word that raised an alarm.

I had a little Spanish and I knew that word, the Spanish word for devil.

When Tolliver got off the phone I explained the translation.

He said, grimly, “Let's go have a look.”

We took the Breaker.

It seemed that every official vehicle in Morro Bay was on the move. Coast Guard vessels and helicopters and the lone Morro Bay Police Department chopper all headed southward, following the currents, tracking the bloom, heading for the beaches to the south.

Tolliver had also dispatched one PD boat up the channel to search the back bay, on the lookout for more moon jellies.

We could have taken Tolliver’s car to the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant but the route by road was slower than by sea.

And so we drove to the dock and piled aboard the police boat.

Tolliver took the helm and Walter and I stood gripping the rails and the Breaker charged out of the harbor and headed south.

We skimmed the coastline and passed a gray sand beach that was uninhabited save for a couple of horseback riders. No swimmers in sight. Indeed, the entire stretch of coastline was wild and uninhabited, just bluffs and rocky coves and crashing waves.

Along the way Tolliver explained everything he’d learned.

Trouble, in spades.

Ten minutes later we saw two white reactor containment domes hulking up above a long low-slung building on a bluff at the ocean’s edge, and then Tolliver skewed his boat into a sharp turn and charged into the little cove where the nuke plant sat.

The Breaker idled just offshore of the waterfall of heated water tumbling into the sea.

Tolliver was on his phone again, consulting with plant officials, getting the latest details.

He updated us.

The Diablo Canyon plant cooled its hot fuel rods by sucking in seawater and circulating it through pipes to absorb the heat from the active rods and to cool the spent fuel pools, and then discharged the now-warmed water back into the sea — that pretty waterfall spilling out of a concrete mouth.

Today, the intake system had sucked in moon jellyfish.

As soon as the jellyfish hit the cooling-water intake racks, alarms sounded and operators took one reactor offline and reduced power to the other.

They knew the drill.

It had happened before, gelatinous sea creatures coming in on the tide, plastering themselves against the debris screen, clogging the crucial intake system.

The cleanup had been costly and messy.

Divers had to go down to scrape off the intruders.

The Diablo people knew the drill.

This time — while we were rushing to the Morro Rock beach — divers at the Diablo plant were being sent down to scrape and clean the debris screen.

The two divers had joked about making sushi.

One diver got moon jelly tentacles across the face. The other diver did not, and survived, but he was not making jokes.

I listened to Tolliver relate the story of Diablo Canyon, and I thought about the beach at Morro Rock. In effect, there were two concurrent events involving deadly moon jellyfish. Where the hell were they coming from?

Tolliver was instructed to move to the next cove southward.

The plant facilities sprawled along a sloping terrace, spanning several coves cut into the rugged coastline. The Breaker motored around the corner to the next cove, which was embraced by two brawny breakwater arms.

This was the intake cove, where pipes sucked in cooling seawater.

And jellyfish.

There was nothing to see now, save for another long low-slung building perched on the bluff with a concrete curtain that dropped down into the sea. Some sort of debris shield, I assumed, which could not be expected to screen out slippery gelatinous debris.

Tolliver nosed his boat over to a small dock, cut the engine, tied off the mooring rope.

We disembarked and headed up the dock.

Our way was blocked by a plant official, a guy in a hard hat with a harried expression who pointedly asked how he could be of assistance to the Morro Bay PD.

Tolliver said, “We're following up a lead on a case.”

“Here?” the official said.

I looked around. The water was placid in this sweet little cove. The ambulance and the coroner's van had come and gone for the stung divers. The jellyfish still clogged the intake screens but they were under the water and well out of sight. I wasn't sure where to begin. All I had was Lanny Keasling’s devils, which may or may not have referred to moon jellyfish, which may or may not have referred specifically to moon jellyfish at Diablo Canyon. And if Lanny had been referring to this morning’s event, how could he have predicted that last night?

But diablo meant devil in Spanish.

Tolliver said, “To start with, we're trying to find out where the jellyfish came from.”

The plant official said, “Then you'd better talk to the jellyfish lady.”

We all three came alert.

“From Cal Poly, just down the coast. She consulted last time jellies clogged our pipes. Manager called her this time and she came right away. You wait here. I'll go get her.”

Violet Russell swept down the walkway to the dock.

The stylish professor who had commanded the auditorium stage three days ago now looked like a harried student rushing to class. She wore a blue T-shirt and jeans and sneakers and there was no clever comb in her Afro.

She halted in front of us. “Welcome to the intersection of Weird and Main.”

No movie-star smile, just a coiled intensity that made me nervous.

Tolliver gave her a weary nod.

She said, “How can I help you?”

I explained devil moons with the caveat that I might have misunderstood.

She gave a strained laugh. “Devil moons is good a name as any, for what we have this morning.”

Walter said, “Do you have any ideas about what we have this morning?”

“I can give you theories. Until I get a necropsy done on the jellies I collected, that’s all I’ve got.”

“Shoot,” Walter said.

“Theory A, we’ve got a mutation. In fact, there’s a program right now that monitors sea life in the vicinity of the heated water discharge, to see if that's altering the marine ecosystem.”

Tolliver said, “But if they originated here, how'd they get up to Morro? They were riding the outgoing tide from the back bay.”

“It's doable,” she said. “Aurelia are nearshore creatures. They like to hang in harbors and embayments. In their developmental stage, they're notorious for planting their polyps on nearshore structures like oil rigs and aquafarms and breakwaters and piers….”

I looked down at the dock beneath our feet.

“…so yes, they could have originated here. Or elsewhere, up or down the coast. Currents are changeable, take them south, take them north.”

Walter said, “But if you’re considering mutation due to the warm-water discharge, then you're saying they originated here?”

“I’m saying mutation is a hypothesis, and point source is up for grabs. Aurelia is highly adaptable. Common throughout the world’s seas. Conditions are changing throughout the world’s seas. You get a mutation in, say, Japan and Aurelia can hitch a ride in the ballast of a ship or on floating trash and be transported far and wide.”

“Japan?” Tolliver said. “Are you talking about that nuke plant over there that blew up?”

“Melted down,” she corrected. “I wasn't referring to the Fukushima disaster but yes, a couple of researchers have speculated that sea creatures near the plant might be in danger of genetic mutations — especially soft-bodied creatures like jellyfish.”

“Jesus,” Tolliver said, “some kind of Godzilla thing?”

She said, “Some kind of over-reaction there, Detective.”

“Over-reaction, my ass. I just watched four citizens of my town die.”

She snapped, “I just saw a diver from my town die.”

Walter stepped in. “We're all distressed at what happened today.” He added, “And puzzled.”

Violet Russell took in a long breath. “You got that right. We don't get jellies this toxic here.”

I asked, “Exactly how toxic?”

She frowned, inverse of the movie-star smile. “Again, I'll need to do the necropsy, but I would put today's toxicity in the realm of Chironex fleckeri. You might have heard of him. Box jellyfish.”

I thought, holy shit. I said, “You mean on the Discovery channel's top ten deadly creatures list?”

“That's the one. He's a tropical jelly. We do get his cousin, Carybdea marsupialis, but…”

“Box jellyfish in California?”

“Yes, Carybdea is a cubozoan, like Chironex, but his sting is milder.”

“That's what you said about the moons. Mild sting.”

“That's what's got me worried.”

Tolliver passed a hand across his face. “Sorry — for what I said. I see you're worried. I'm just hoping you can figure out what the hell's going on.”

She said, “Me too.”

“You gave us Theory A,” Walter said. “Do you have a B?”

She nodded. “A new species of Aurelia, which is not out of the question. For instance, there's an invasive species known as the clinging jellyfish in Atlantic waters that's recently become more numerous, and venomous. It’s either new, or the existing species has evolved. With Aurelia, take your pick. Mutation, new species.”

I said, “If it is new, and it originated here, planted its polyps here, are you…”

“I already collected,” she said.

I looked down at the dock again.

“No, not here, I sampled at the breakwater. This dock isn't a good candidate. The pilings have been wrapped in an anti-fouling material, to discourage polyp attachment.”

Walter and I exchanged a look. Small world. Earlier this morning we'd come across anti-fouling paint. And then we'd established that the red float paint was not the anti-fouling variety. Still, small world.

And then a word jumped out at me—pilings—and a comment made last week, something heard and forgotten and now ringing like a bell in my memory. It could be nothing relevant, but added to Lanny’s devils it made me take notice.

I glanced at Walter. He was frowning. Remembering?

Tolliver’s antennae were up. “What?”

“Give me a minute.” I moved to the end of the dock and got down on my hands and knees.

The others followed.

I leaned over the water and saw the pilings reaching down to anchor the dock to the seafloor.

Violet Russell joined me, sinking to her knees, the two of us now staring through the water at the pilings.

I saw what she had been referring to — a slick black material wrapped the concrete pillars. It seemed that the anti-fouling jackets were effective for I saw none of the organisms one sees on submerged surfaces. No sea muck. Certainly, no jellyfish polyps.

It was what Russell had said it was.

And nothing more.

But she was still looking. And then she reached for something in the water, at one of the pilings.

Tolliver said, “Will somebody goddamn clue me in here?”

She said, “There's a rope.”

Tolliver and Walter crowded in beside us.

It was a black nylon rope, and as Russell reeled it in, we saw what was attached to the end: a black rectangular plate. She let it rest just below the surface.

“I'll tell you what,” she said, “that's not right.”

“Looks like a serving tray,” Tolliver said.

The plate was caked with sea scum. There were organisms I could not identify — white daisy-like blooms, toothy-shelled cups, spongy bits and pieces — and then there were clumps of little pale balls.

Walter said, “Is that some sort of collection medium?”

“A recruitment plate,” she said. “Somebody has installed a recruitment plate to collect samples.”

“Collect?” I asked. “Or deploy?”

Tolliver said, “Deploy what?”

Russell looked at Tolliver. “Jellyfish. I'll need to have a look under the microscope to be certain but I'd say those disks are moon jellyfish polyps.”

“You mean, to keep them coming?”

“This would do it,” she said.

“You mean, somebody's creating a goddamn invasion?”

She said, after a long pause, “This would do it.”

Walter said, “Theory C?”

I stared at the pale balls on the black plate and I wondered if somebody was growing a serving of devil moons here.

And then the comment I'd heard and forgotten, the comment I'd been trying to retrieve, resurfaced in full. I asked Russell, “Who did the piling wrap job?”

“I'm afraid I don't know,” she said.

Didn't matter. I knew.

We headed back to Morro Bay and as Tolliver guided the Breaker through the harbor mouth we watched the water.

It was innocent of jellyfish.

We passed the beach, where gawkers were taking photos of the empty water. We turned a right hook into the channel and I spotted a TV news truck driving the waterfront road. We passed Tolliver's favorite cafe and there were gawkers taking photos of the channel water — innocent of jellyfish here too, now. It did not seem to matter. There had been an event, and people came.

When we reached the end of the channel, where it began to widen into the back bay, Tolliver skewed the Breaker toward shore. He parked at a long wide working dock, in front of a barge-like boat bristling with cranes and equipment lockers.

By the time we'd disembarked and clambered up a short stairway onto the dock, Fred Stavis was there waiting.

“Heck of a day,” Stavis said.

“A terrible day,” Tolliver replied.

“Will this take long? Need to tackle that baby.” Stavis jerked a thumb at the dock, where a huge compressed-air tank sat on an equipment rack.

“You'll have time for us.”

Stavis's mouth quirked into a tight smile. “You want to go up to the office?”

The dock gave onto a bulky two-story building sheathed in weathered planks, a workshop-style building.

I studied Fred Stavis. He wore the ubiquitous camo pants, along with a white oil-stained T-shirt. Working clothes, but for the familiar sockless boat shoes. I thought, suddenly, he's going for the Oscar Flynn cool-guy look. Making it his own, with his awkward Stavis style.

“Here's fine,” Tolliver said.

“If it's good for you, it's good for me.”

“This shouldn't take too long. Ms. Oldfield has a question or two for you.”

Stavis turned his tight smile on me. “Haven't seen you since that night at the dunes. Boy oh boy, huh?”

I said, “We've just been at the Diablo nuke plant. That was a real boy-oh-boy.”

“Oh yes. That. It's already on the news.”

“We parked at that dock in the intake cove. You know the dock, right?”

He took a moment. “Why do you ask?”

“We learned about the anti-fouling jacketing of the pilings. And I recalled that you told Walter and me, out at Morro Rock, about the jobs your company does. Like installing piling wraps. So here's my first question — did you do the job at the Diablo dock?”

“We've done that kind of job. Matter of fact, one of my vessels is up the coast at the Cayucos pier right now doing a jacketing.”

“I'm talking about the Diablo dock.”

“Okay, sure. But, uh, why ask about that?”

“Because a marine scientist who was there with us discovered a recruitment plate attached to the dock. It collects samples of the organisms in the water, including polyps of moon jellyfish.”

“Oh yes?”

“Did you install the plate?”

“Good golly, never heard of a recruitment plate. We just did the jacketing.”

“Did Lanny work that job?”

“Um, it was a good while ago.”

“Might we check your records?”

“No need. Now that I think about it, Lanny did work that job.”

“Did he ever refer to moon jellyfish as devil moons? Diablo means devil in Spanish.”

Stavis just stared at me. Then he shifted position, facing the boatyard next door, angling his body away from me and directly facing Tolliver. “Doug? Like I said, I'm busy. I don't know where she's going with this but I answered. Can we wrap this up?”

Tolliver said, “You didn't answer her question about devil moons.”

“That's because it's an absurd question.”

“Answer the damn question, Fred.”

“No. All right? You know how Lanny is. If he was talking about 'devil moons' who knows what he was talking about? I sure don't.”

“Where is he?”

“Home? It's not one of his days with me. And I need to get back to work.”

“Mr. Shaws has a couple of questions for you now.”

Stavis's face pulled into a you're-kidding-me look. He let out a loud sigh and angled slightly to face Walter.

Walter got straight to it. “I presume in your work you have occasion to use buoys and floats?”

“Yes, sure. Obviously.”

Walter opened his cell and tapped the screen to pull up the photo of the red float and passed the phone to Stavis.

Stavis looked, shrugged, returned the phone to Walter.

“This morning, Cassie and I found that float buried in the dunes. More or less where you were last week, as you mentioned.”

“Oh yes?”

“The history of the float is interesting. Joao Silva, the diver Sandy Keasling rescued last week, had the float. Lanny took it from his dive bag. Lanny eventually buried it in the dunes. A puzzle.” Walter rubbed his chin. “Would you have any idea why Lanny would take that float? And then hide it?”

“You got me.”

Walter cocked his head.

“Look, the floats we use are standard polyform. Standard colors — yellow and orange.”

“This float was the standard yellow, but somebody painted it red. Specifically, somebody used a granular pigment — a red iron-oxide pigment. Would you be familiar with that sort of marine paint?”

Stavis appeared to give it some thought. “Sounds like an anti-corrosive.”

“That's what I thought. But the binder in the paint is slowly soluble in water. And let me add that there is no biocide in the mix, so it's not an anti-fouling paint.”

“Well, it wouldn't be. Not without a biocide.”

“So we're left with a red iron-oxide pigment and a temporary adhesive. Does that make sense?”

“Not to me.”

“Would someone ever use such a paint in a marine environment?”

“Can't see why.” His eyes flicked again toward the boatyard.

This time, we all turned to look.

It was a fenced lot with barrels and drums and winches and hoses and ropes and a big overhead crane holding up a cabin cruiser with a crumpled hull. A cinder-block building with a red tile roof had a sign that said Morro Marine. I realized this had to be the place Sandy mentioned in regard to the replacement of the damaged rub rail on the Sea Spray. And now that I was looking, I noticed the Outcast at anchor in front of the boatyard — Tolliver had said that Donie's boat would be moved to a storage dock. Aside from that tingle of recognition, I didn't get what was so interesting to Fred Stavis over there.

Tolliver said, “You seeing ghosts, Fred?”

Stavis gave a little jerk. “What?”

“You keep looking over at the Outcast. Thinking of Robbie?”

“Why would I be thinking of Robbie? I was watching for Jorge. He borrowed a tarp from me and I need it.”

Walter said, “Mr. Stavis, you didn't answer my question. I'll rephrase it. How would my mysterious paint be used in a marine environment?”

Stavis wiped a line of sweat from his forehead. “You know, I'm just wracking my brain but I can't come up with anything helpful.”

Walter said, “That's a shame.”

“Then let's come at it this way,” Tolliver said. “What other things are this red oxide used for?”

“The production of steel,” Walter said.

“And as a pigment in cosmetics,” I said, having read over Walter's shoulder. The female, I thought wryly, being the one to notice it.

“Hey,” Tolliver said, “how about fertilizer? My azaleas were dropping leaves and the nursery said it was iron deficiency. Sold me a special mix.”

Stavis laughed. “I don't have a green thumb and I don't use makeup so all I can suggest is the anti-corrosive. And now I'd like to get back to work.”

Tolliver turned to Walter and me. “Do you have any more questions for Fred?”

“Not unless he can explain devil moons,” I said.

Stavis chose to laugh, again.

We were starting to move toward the Breaker when Tolliver suddenly shouted, “Lanny!”

We looked where Tolliver was looking, at the Outcast.

Lanny Keasling stood at the bow of Robbie Donie's fishing boat, back against the railing, facing the wheelhouse, looking like a captain assessing the state of his ship. An interrupted captain. He was frozen, head swiveled to face us.

“Lanny.” Tolliver started toward Jorge's dock. “What are you doing?”

Lanny dashed past the wheelhouse to the stern of the boat and pointed to the drum roller upon which the net was wound. “It's tangled,” he said, “I'm going to fix it.”

“You can't fix it, the boat doesn't belong to you.”

“I'm going to buy it.”

“That very well may be, and I'll be the first to congratulate you.” Tolliver's tone was calm, without a hint of condescension. “But currently the boat is in police custody. You shouldn't be aboard.”

Lanny stared at Tolliver. His face was pale.

Pale as a moon jelly, I thought.

“Why don't you climb off and come over here,” Tolliver said. “Let's have a chit-chat.”

“I can't, I have to go, I can't have a chit-chat with you and I'm not supposed to talk to Cassie any more and I have to go.”

Lanny nimbly leapt off the boat onto Jorge's dock and dashed up the boatyard and disappeared around the cinder-block building.

I said, “Bless Doug Tolliver and his azaleas.”

Walter went to find his cell phone.

I gazed out the Shoreline Motel's sliding glass door at the golden afternoon. Sunlight angled in and made me squint. Still a gorgeous day.

A long day.

A day of tragedy and a vision of swimmers that I feared was going to revisit me in my dreams.

A day of puzzles.

A day of accomplishment, too, balancing the ledger. It had begun with the discovery out at the dunes and, just now, it became a day of revelation.

“Bless Google search,” Walter said, opening his phone.

Yes, give credit where credit is due.

Still, it was Tolliver's azaleas that had set us on the search path.

I regarded the shining blue sea, flat and calm and vast. Looking utterly untouchable. I squinted, blurring the scene, picturing what lay out there, somewhere between the beach and the horizon.

I supposed one could say that the marine equivalent of Tolliver's azaleas was phytoplankton — if one were to take metaphoric license. I took it.

“Doug!” Walter said, his voice honeyed. “The red float — we've had a breakthrough.”

The azalea breakthrough.

No need to contact Walter's forensic paint analyst.

“What breakthrough?” Tolliver's voice, tinny through the speakerphone, sounded drained as I felt.

Walter's own voice turned brisk. “I believe you'll want to bring Oscar Flynn in for questioning.”

I listened as Walter explained to Tolliver what we had discovered, and I nodded when Tolliver emitted a long low whistle.

“I'll want you here,” Tolliver said. “You need to do the techy talk with him. I'll give you a call when I get hold of him — let you know when to come in.”

It was almost an hour before Tolliver called back.

Walter put him on speaker again.

“Never mind coming in here, I've located Flynn and we're going to go talk to him where he is now. You won't goddamn believe this.”

“What?” Walter asked. “Where?”

“The aquarium.”

“I'm not home!” Lanny's voice blared through the phone.

Sandy Keasling threw back the covers and sat up straight and switched the cell phone to her other ear, the ear that wasn't ringing from Lanny's shout.

“Pipe down,” she muttered into the phone. She was barely awake. What time was it? She glanced at her bedside clock. The glowing numerals said 6:05. Six in the friggin' morning.

Lanny lowered his voice to a whisper.

Wherever he was there was noise in the background and she couldn't make out what he'd whispered. “Where are you?” she said. “What's all that noise?” Engine noise, she thought. “Speak up.”

“I want you not to worry,” he said, in a softer shout.

She shook her head. She was up now, standing barefoot on the cold floor. She glanced out the window. Foggy morning. She shivered. She slept in the buff. Standing here now buck naked. “Hang on,” she said. She set the cell phone on the bed and fumbled into her fuzzy robe. She picked up the phone. “This better be good.”

“I'm going to make you proud.”

Now he was talking in a soft voice, his shy voice, and she could barely make it out but it was better than being shouted at. “Make me proud?” She headed out her door, down the hallway toward his room. “Where are you?”

“I can't tell you.”

She flung open his door. His room was empty. His bed was neatly made.

“I have to go now.”

“Wait.” Now she was shouting. “You can't call me at six in the friggin' morning and tell me don't worry you're going to make me proud and then go on your way. Where the hell are you?”

There was only the engine noise. And his rapid breathing. His upset breathing.

She recognized the engine noise now. Not cars. “Are you on the Sea Spray? Did you take my boat?”

He said, using his shy voice again, “I'm on my boat.”

She went to his window and peered out at the sea but the fog hung over the water and hid anything that rode it.

She was fully awake now, shivering in her fuzzy robe, and her thoughts turned cold. Whatever he's doing, whatever boat he's on, let him do it. Let him screw it up — she'd lay odds that he would screw it up, whatever it was. Go back to bed, she told herself. She was beat, she hadn't slept well, she'd gone to sleep with the radio on, torturing herself listing to the news reports about the day's craziness, and then there was a tribute to Linda Bannock, a marathon swimmer in her sixties who Sandy couldn't believe was gone from the sting of a moon jellyfish. Next thing she knew she was jolted awake by some crappity late-night loudmouth show and it took her an hour to get back to sleep. She was owed another hour's sleep. Go back to bed, she ordered herself, and when you wake up just go about your business. You'll hear soon enough what Lanny's got into this time.

“Sandy?” His voice rose. “Are you there? I called to tell you I want you not to worry.”

She cursed. Would she never be able to get free? She said, “Listen to me, Lanny. You tell me where you are and what you're doing, and if you don't tell me with your next breath then I'm going to take the Sea Spray out and find you. Little brother.”

He said, with his next breath, “I'll come and get you.”

I woke, startled.

The big alarm clock numerals said 6:20.

I waited five minutes for sleep to resume but it was no use.

Shit.

I got up, used the bathroom, put on my robe and fuzzy socks, headed out to the kitchenette and like it was bred in the bone put the filter in the coffee maker and added water and a lavish measurement of Peet's French Roast and hit the start button.

There was not a sound of life from Walter's room.

There was not a vision of life outside the sliding glass door. Just fog. The curse of the coast.

While waiting for the coffee to brew I looked at the poster hung on the kitchenette wall: Life in the Kelp Forest. I'd never given it more than a passing glance. Now, stupefied with fatigue but unable to sleep, I counted fish. Putting names to faces I'd seen while diving Cochrane Bank. Senorita wrasse, rock fish, pipefish — yep yep yep. I moved on to the anemones and sponges and tunicates. To the sea urchins. Damned Keaslings. I moved on to the kelp itself. Giant kelp, bull kelp, and there was the damn kelp in which I'd become entangled, feather boa kelp. I paused at elk kelp, Pelagophycus porra. Hadn't seen that one. It was at the bottom of the poster, poking up from the seafloor, a stem-like stalk with long tapering blades.

Looking like a kelp bouquet.

I froze.

Flynn's words flooded into my mind: a bouquet of floats.

Maybe it was the Pelagophycus on the poster or the wake-up aroma of brewing coffee or maybe I'd been wrestling in my dreams with the improbabilities in Oscar Flynn's story and that's what had awakened me with such a jolt — but I knew now.

Flynn didn't tow his bouquet of floats behind a boat.

His red floats lived on the seafloor, attached by ropes to his instrument cage, continuously seeding the water because they stayed in the water. And with their ropes like stems and their bodies like long-petaled flowers they flared like an undersea bouquet.

We had found one plucked bloom from Flynn's red bouquet.

So where were the rest of the red floats?

We had seen the yellow floats, the yellow bouquet.

What if that had been, previously, a mixed bouquet? Painted reds hiding among the unpainted yellows, hiding in plain sight.

The floats sprouted from the cage, their ropes attached by snap hook. Easy on, easy off.

Then one yellow float broke free and Robbie Donie found it.

Then one red float broke free and Joao Silva found it.

Then things got dicey for Oscar Flynn. His experiment was proprietary and he did not want any more of his iron-seeding floats to be found. So he or one of his hirelings went diving and pruned the bouquet — replacing the remaining painted reds with unpainted standard no-puzzle yellow floats.

The coffee was ready.

I poured a mug and looked out at the invisible sea and sipped my coffee and the caffeine did its work and, buzzed, I thought of floats bobbing in the current, rubbing against the rock, and I thought of the first rule of forensic geology — whenever two objects come in contact, there is a transfer of material. The transferred material, down in the sea, might have been washed away.

Or not.

I went to Walter's door and pounded and when at last he peeked out, face bleary and hair all wild-man, I said, “We've got to call Doug, we've got to get out there.”

Sandy waited on the Keasling dock, shivering in her fleece.

She carried a bag with her slicker and gloves and rubber boots because he'd told her she might need them and that had got her curious. But he'd refused to tell her why and that got her mad.

When the boat materialized out of the fog, she cursed. It was the Outcast.

When Lanny pulled Robbie Donie's pathetic old fishing vessel up to her dock, she leapt aboard with another curse.

But the look on her brother's face curdled her fury.

He looked so nervous. And proud. He wore his usual Sea Spray fleece and red beanie but the way he stood the deck of the Outcast was not the usual. He stood like a captain. Exactly the way she stood.

“What is this?” she said. She pointed to his slicker and gloves and boots on top of the gear locker, where she'd tossed her bag. “We going anchovy fishing? Keasling family nostalgia day?”

He gave a nervous grin and shook his head.

In a way, she was sorry.

Lanny piloted the old tub with surprising skill.

Eh, she thought, not so surprising. She'd taught him well, on the Sea Spray. And the Outcast was a simpleton's vessel, the kind of boat made for a fisherman who doesn't want to be bothered with complicated equipment. Who can only afford a second-hand low-tech basic tub. It had suited Robbie Donie to a T, she thought.

And, she thought with a twinge, it suited Lanny to a T.

The Outcast plowed ahead through the fog.

The wheelhouse was bare-bones, just basic nav screens and wheel and pilot's chair. She'd been reading the screens over Lanny's shoulder. She knew where they were, she knew these waters off the Morro Bay coast like she knew the way from her bedroom to her bathroom in the dark. What she didn't know was where they were headed or what 'the mission' was.

Lanny called it The Mission.

He told her he had a job to do and that job would make her proud.

She'd tried blustering, threatening, but he wouldn't explain anything more. He wanted to show her. She'd finally decided it was easier to wait and see. No — the truth was that she'd seen that she couldn't make him tell her. She'd seen that something had changed between them. She no longer had the automatic upper hand. Maybe it was because they were aboard Lanny's boat. Didn't matter that he'd confessed to 'borrowing' it this morning, to using bolt cutters to cut the cable that secured it to the cop storage dock — and where had he learned that trick, she wondered? Didn't matter that he swore he was going to pay for the damaged cable and buy the boat from Robbie's aunt as soon as he could borrow five thousand from Sandy — and where did Lanny get the idea that she had five thousand to toss around? None of that mattered this morning. Lanny had claimed the boat. She saw that, in him. Pride of possession.

That's what had changed.

That's what made Sandy Keasling a passenger.

She would bide her time.

Meanwhile, she cast a buyer's eye over the vessel. Not that she was planning on financing Lanny's folly — she just couldn't help assessing. The tub showed its age but at least it was operable. She moved to the cabin doorway and examined the afterdeck. The wooden decking was still stained with squid ink. She'd heard about that but this was the first she'd seen it. Sure looked like somebody had hauled a Humboldt aboard. She shook her head. The whole damn deck would need scraping, sanding, re-coating. She moved to look at the anchovy setup. The small drum mounted amid-deck had a net rolled on it, and the winch seemed to have all its parts, and that was just about that. Robbie Donie was a small-time bait fisher making do. No wonder he'd had a go at squid jigging. All in all, the Outcast stank of failure.

And her pathetic brother called himself captain of this tub.

What really got her was the flag tied to the railing, hanging limp and damp in the fog. It was black and red, pirate colors, but instead of the skull and crossbones there was a cartoon in black of a spiky sea urchin with big red eyes.

The Keasling kids flag. They'd had them done at a T-shirt shop. She hadn't known Lanny kept his. She had no idea what happened to hers. She figured Jake had long ago tossed his in the trash.

She knew where she could come up with five thousand. She could cash in a savings bond.

She turned and headed around the cabin to inspect the small foredeck.

There was a pile of dive gear stacked against the cabin wall. For just a moment she thought it must have belonged to Robbie, only why would Robbie have diving gear? And then she saw the name in black marker on the tank: Lancelot Keasling.

She didn't know what made her madder — Lanny bringing dive gear, or seeing that dumb-ass name her father had saddled him with. If she hadn't set Lanny straight as a kid he would have grown up calling himself Lancelot — all the other kids laughing their asses off at her brother. At a Keasling. Every once in a while, though, she found him using it. Like now. Shit. She bet Fred Stavis and his crew had a good laugh, if that was the gear Lanny used on Dive Solutions jobs.

She flushed.

She stomped back to the cabin door and pushed inside. “Why did you bring your dive gear, Lanny?”

He turned. “You're not supposed to ask questions.”

She thought, five thou my ass. She exploded. “The hell I'm not! You steal a boat to go on some secret mission and now I find out it's diving? I don't dive, Lanny. You don't dive alone. You dive with Fred's crew. What the hell are you up to?”

“Nothing that's bad.” He turned his back on her.

She came around beside him and leaned in close. “I'll tell you about bad. My boat got its rub rail dinged up and I don't know how or why. But I did find out who was driving it. Your big brother — the night Robbie disappeared. You know anything about that?”

Lanny ducked his head and stared at his screens. “No.”

“You know what happened to Robbie?”

“No.”

“I call bullshit,” she said. “And here's something else bad, something I know you know about. You stole a red float from that diver we rescued — Joao Silva. The diver who got poisoned. What about that float, Lanny?”

He shook his head.

She thought she was going to scream. “And what about the other float, the yellow float. The one those geologists came asking about on our beach. The one they say Robbie hid.”

Lanny checked some handheld GPS unit and then fiddled with one of the nav screens.

She couldn't get a look at the handheld but she sure recognized the fish finder on the nav screen. She remembered Dad using one to track anchovies, looking for the shadow on the finder that meant a bait ball, back when she gave a shit about finding fish.

She leaned in real close and said, “You tell me what's going on or I call Doug and tell him you stole this boat.”

“Don't.”

She took hold of the wheel. “You're not fit to be a captain. Captains don't lie.”

His mouth hung open. He looked like a gasping fish in a bucket.

She couldn't look at him so she looked at the wheel, their two hands side by side gripping the wheel. She yanked the wheel, hard, and he lost his hold. She snapped, “I'm calling Doug.”

“Don't. If you don't call Doug okay I'll tell you.”

She looked at him now.

He looked a little desperate. “It was a job, with Fred. I messed up.”

“How did you mess up?”

“I broke something.”

“What?”

“Just a… Just a remote controller. Like a TV clicker.”

“That handheld you just checked? The one you put under your shirt?”

“No. I don't have the one I broke.”

“Then what's this handheld for?”

“I'll tell you in five minutes.”

“What happens in five minutes?”

“Maybe a little longer.”

“Damn it Lanny you don't get a little longer — I'm going to call Doug right now.”

“No, don't, okay I'm telling you about the thing I broke. It was a remote and it controlled some switches only that's not what broke the yellow float, that was something else, the yellow float had a bad hook, and I lost it.”

She pressed her fingers to her forehead, where the headache was uncoiling. She dug hard, like she could grab that sea snake and rip it out. Lanny's dodging and weaving was going to kill her someday, just give her a massive stroke.

Lanny said, “Don't be mad.”

“What,” she asked, as calmly as she could manage, “was this job? What kind of switches did your controller control?”

“I can't tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Fred would get mad.”

“Screw Fred. You tell me.”

“I can tell you about the red float, okay?” He put his hand on the wheel again, beside hers. “You wanted to know that. That float came from the job too. I guess it got broken too. When I saw the diver with it… I was afraid, Sandy.”

“Of what? Fred finding out?”

“Jock finding out.”

“Jock?” She rolled her eyes. “You and Jacques Cousteau.”

“He's in heaven. He sees us, when we do bad things to the ocean.”

She went cold. “What bad things did you do?”

He sealed his lips and shook his head.

She put her free hand in her pocket and took out her cell phone.

“Please Sandy. I need to fix it. I need to show you.”

Her heart turned over. And then it hardened. “This thing you broke? This controller? Is this gonna mess me up? Like you messed me up back when you played deckhand on my tug?” She'd been working her dream job at the Port of Los Angeles, the big time for a tugboat master, and Lanny had been living at the hacienda with Jake, and she'd invited Lanny for a visit and Jake had put him on a bus and she would spend the rest of her life regretting that invitation, regretting taking Lanny for a spin on her tugboat, showing off, she'd goddamn showed off for her little brother, and Lanny had fallen in love with her job, and he'd pushed and pushed wanting to learn and she'd given in, just one little lesson, she'd taught him how to throw a line, and he'd 'helped' tying up to a barge and he goddamn screwed up and the line snapped. “The collision with the barge? Cost me my license?”

His face turned red as his beanie. “This won't mess you up.”

She glared at him. “It better not.” She let go of the wheel and moved to the doorway and stared out at the sea.

She'd tried, after her dream went sour. She'd moved back home and ended up a sorry-ass whale-watching driver. She'd tried to forgive Lanny. She'd taken him on and turned him into a competent deckhand. She'd tried to make her peace. She'd really really tried.

And now, what had he screwed up this time?

She had a real bad feeling about this.

She was, she had to admit, a little bit scared.

They drove on through the fog.

She moved back to her spot in the doorway and leaned against the jamb and folded her arms.

She shivered.

The damn fog.

They motored on.

And then Lanny powered the engine down to an idle and she moved behind him and looked over his shoulder and saw him tracing a finger on the screen of the fish finder.

She saw big shadows on the screen. Looked like bait balls, she thought. “Chovies? We hunting chovies after all?”

“I have to catch…” He shook his head.

“Catch what, Lanny?”

He just stared at the screen.

“All right then little brother, you tell me this. You came out here hunting something. How'd you know how to find it?”

“I just know.”

“Oh yeah? Jock tell you?” She spat the name.

“That's not nice.”

“Neither are you,” she said. “Bullshitting me.”

“I'm not. I'm using equipment.” He pulled the handheld out from under his shirt and showed it to her. “I said I'd show you. It tracks things in the ocean, you put a chip in them and then a satellite can watch them and it shows where on my tracker.”

“Fred gave you that? Part of your messed-up job?”

“I borrowed it, he doesn't know but he won't get mad because I'm going to fix everything.”

She peered at the tracker. A little satellite icon in the corner. Blips on the screen. “Can you even read that thing?”

“Yes. And that's not all.” Lanny straightened in his captain's chair. He angled his head to look up at her. “I know things, Sandy. I know how to read charts. I know how the shape of the bottom makes currents go, and I know where there's a canyon that…”

She stabbed a finger at the chartplotter, at the seafloor contours. “There's no canyon down there.”

“It's somewhere else. It makes currents like in a funnel and it funneled things up and so I know where they came from, but they move so I have to use the tracker to find them now.”

“What things?”

“You'll see.”

She wasn't sure she wanted to see.

“It's my fault they escaped,” he said. “I have to catch them and then I have to fix the other thing and we have to hurry.”

She didn't like this. Not one bit.

She geared herself up to start in on him again but he leapt up and brushed past her to the afterdeck, to the winch control panel.

She was right on his heels.

She watched him set the lever to the free-wheeling position. She watched him grab the anchor buoy lead that pulled the bunt end of the net off the drum, that started the net unrolling. She watched him guide the net to the stern and throw the buoy overboard, pulling the net into the sea.

Simple moves, but she held her breath waiting for her brother to screw it up.

He didn't.

Muscle memory, she thought. Drum netting off Dad's boat. It was bred in Lanny's bones.

Hers too.

She moved to help, to guide the unrolling net and keep the small white floats of the float line from tangling.

Lanny turned and gave her a nervous smile and went into the wheelhouse to start the engine up.

She remained at the stern watching the net slide into the water, watching as the Outcast pulled away from the anchor buoy and the net began to spread. The float line laid a nice curve along the surface, and down below the weighted lead line would be pulling the net down like a curtain to encircle the chovies.

Her stomach suddenly went sour.

Not chovies, not today, something else down there.

She stood freezing with her stomach churning until the Outcast completed its circle and came back to the buoy. And then Lanny shut down the engine and came out of the wheelhouse.

Without speaking, they both suited up in their waterproof gear.

And then — bred in the bone — she was helping him. Use the boat hook to bring the net buoy back aboard, bring in the other end of the net, wind the two net lines onto the drum, set the winch control lever to reverse and let the drum start reeling in the lines, pulling the net toward the boat, closing up the bottom.

She moved opposite him and the both of them took hold of the cables to help guide the incoming net back onto the drum.

She said, “How were you going to do all this all by yourself?”

He just looked at her, like it hadn't even crossed his mind.

She thought, that's why he called her this morning. Oh sure, he had big ideas of coming out here and fixing up his mess all by himself but in the end he saw that he needed her.

Like always. It made her mad.

It made her needed.

It made her crazy.

And then she caught the look on Lanny's face — gritting his teeth, his worried look — and it made her anxious. She turned to watch the net coming in through the water, no visible catch yet, the catch was down below being corralled by the tightening net, but right now there was nothing to see but black netting on gray sea.

And then the winch started to creak.

So much for Robbie keeping his gear in shape. She hoped the damn winch wouldn't die before the net got hauled in. Keaslings hadn't hauled in a net by hand for donkey's years.

The winch kept creaking but the net kept rolling in.

And then Lanny let go of his side of the net and moved to the stern and looked into the water.

She dropped her cable and followed him.

The winch screeched. Working its ass off.

The net was coming in.

She thought she felt the stern dip.

She steadied herself.

Lanny let out a sound — croaking like the winch, she thought — and pointed.

She saw.

She wasn't sure what she was seeing.

The gathering net was now close enough to bring its catch up to the shallows. The bag was full. It was a big catch but what the hell was it? It was muck. It wasn't a good catch, it was some kind of seafloor muck caught in the net only she had never seen or heard of such a thing.

The winch screamed.

The net wings continued to roll in across the deck, onto the drum.

The bag of the net in the water tightened, drawing the catch toward the stern, and all of a sudden she could see that the muck wasn't muck. It was pulsating.

They were pulsating.

Jesus. Christ. They were huge, they were bigger than barrels, bigger than she was and she wasn't small, bigger still, big as a nightmare, every one of them big as the double-wide fridge in her kitchen for crying out loud, she couldn't believe them, and they were heavy heavy heavy because as the screaming winch began to haul the net out of the water, the stern of the boat began to dip. The winch couldn't take it. The boat couldn't take it. She couldn't take it, she was screaming at Lanny to get his ass back to the controls and stop the winch—no—put it free-wheeling, let this bag of monsters fall back into the sea.

Lanny was screaming too. “Don't let them get away.”

Now water was coming in over the stern and she gripped the railing to keep from falling and she screamed at him “we're foundering” and she turned to see him at the control levers, frozen, his need to catch this net of giants warring with his need to save his boat.

“Let them go,” she screamed.

He shook his head and sealed his lips but he worked the lever and the drum stopped hauling in the net.

It went into reverse.

Netting rolled off the drum and slithered across the deck toward the stern.

The net bag that had been coming aboard began to settle back down in the sea.

The stern lifted and water sheeted off and the Outcast was no longer foundering.

And then Lanny put the brake on and the drum froze and the net froze and Lanny barreled across the deck toward her, flailing his arms and wailing about doing bad things and these things down in the water were his fault, these things had come because Lanny had messed up and made Jock mad.

She didn't know how it happened, how Lanny lost his footing — maybe it was his flailing — but he fell on his ass and his slicker slipped on the wet deck and shot him into the water.

She froze.

He thrashed around to face the boat, trying to swim, fighting his slicker and his heavy boots, flailing.

She stood frozen, gripping the rail.

He got a hand on the netting hanging over the stern.

He'd lost his glove.

He looked up at her, face pale as death.

She knew how cold the water was. How it froze the muscles. She shivered.

He mouthed help.

He'd lost his red beanie, she saw.

She could not help following the path of the netting — from the partially-wound netting on the drum, to the netting that traveled across the deck, to the netting that hung over the stern, the part that Lanny gripped, and finally to the circle of netting in the water, now neither gathering nor releasing, just floating there with its catch of things she'd never seen, jellyfish the size of refrigerators.

The circle of net in the water was just beyond Lanny.

He saw her looking. He turned his wet head to look, too. He wailed.

They can't get to him, she thought. They're in the net.

But ropes of tentacles were entwined, were sticking through.

He turned back to look up at her and cried out, “Sandy.”

Maybe there are more, she thought. She couldn't see any more of the muck out there but that didn't mean there weren't more. Lanny said they were chipped for the satellite tracking. Did they all have chips? She couldn't tell by looking — tiny microchips would be like a grains of sand on those monsters. Maybe she should dash into the wheelhouse and look at Lanny's tracker and see if any more showed up on the screen. But she shouldn't waste time on that, should she?

Didn't matter, she thought. The cold would get him first.

He really messed up big time here, trying to net monsters, trying to fix whatever the hell else he had done, swamping their boat, probably flooding the engine, stranding them out here, oh yeah he'd outdone himself this time.

She felt like she was going to explode. There was a ticking bomb inside her and it had started ticking way back when she lost her tug license and she'd thought she'd made her peace but she hadn't. The bomb inside her was about to go off.

Lanny yelled, “Sandy!” He'd got his other hand on the net hanging over the stern but he couldn't haul himself up.

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.

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.

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.”

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 Walter'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.

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

Lanny = hireling

We got it. Lanny was a hireling of Fred Stavis, who couldn't dive due to a burst eardrum, whose company Dive Solutions did the grunt work for Oscar Flynn, who had once saved Lanny from drowning, to whom Lanny owed some kind of twisted life-debt.

Flynn or Stavis or the both of them had sent Lanny down here to do a job and that told me all I needed to know — this job was bad news.

We checked our dive time on our wrist computers and Tolliver gave the okay sign. He unclipped the guideline reel from his BC and tied off the line on a knob of rock and then, without dissent, the three of us nosed into the tunnel.

I took note that Lanny hadn't set a line. He surely knew the basics, diving for Stavis's company. He surely knew how to make a safe entrance in an overhead environment. I guessed he hadn't wanted to leave a breadcrumb trail for us to find.

Too late for that.

We swam into the tunnel with controlled frog-kicks. We hardly needed to kick at all, thanks to a mild inflowing current.

The light zone did not penetrate far and so we relied on our torches, sweeping them back and forth to illuminate the way ahead. There were not likely to be more surprises pressed against the walls because the walls were fairly smooth and offered no crevices in which to hide.

Still.

We proceeded with a large dose of caution.

There was no sign of Lanny, up ahead. Either he'd come to a fork in the road or he'd progressed where our lights did not reach.

It was okay. Plenty of dive time. Plenty of room. The tunnel was wide enough for the three of us to fit side by side with room to spare. But damn it was a burrow into the reef and I felt squeezed.

My mouth went cottony. I tried to recall the taste of fennel on my tongue. All I could taste was stale canned air.

My breathing picked up. My bubbles speeded up.

Time to hum. Slow down that breathing. I searched for a tune, anything but the Jaws theme — a lullaby would be nice and I found myself humming All the Pretty Little Horses. Two bars in I realized where I'd gotten that tune, Oscar Flynn singing to the dying sea lion on the beach. I tried to shut it down but it morphed back into Jaws.

I abandoned humming and began to recite the Gettysburg Address.

Fourscore and seven years ago—a score is twenty so fourscore is eighty plus seven equals eighty-seven and it was the math and Abraham Lincoln that calmed me down.

Up ahead, the tunnel was widening.

Lanny was nowhere in sight.

I had my breathing under control but my mind took off on its own. What was ahead of us? What sort of surprise lay in wait? Something beyond our field of view. Something like that huge ghostly shape I had glimpsed two days ago across the chasm in the dying kelp forest. Only down here, the shape would be close. Identifiable.

My mouth went dry as toast.

Which is preferable, lady? Shadows of the mind or reality in your face?

The tunnel flared wider and then opened into nothing.

We found anchorage on a rock wall and played our beams in flashes and slashes, and shadows lived and died, and we found that we were anchored at the mouth of a cavern.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

And then somebody's light caught Lanny hugging the left-hand cavern wall.

He raised a hand and shielded his goggled eyes. His own glove light was off. He switched it on. Behind him on the wall was a recessed area with shelves of equipment. Some sort of control panel. He turned and opened the panel door and his glove light revealed a keypad. He punched a button and the keypad lit up.

And now more light blazed.

A floodlight.

We shielded our eyes.

When my eyes adjusted I saw the breadth of the cavern. It was large enough to moor a fishing boat.

Large and tall and wide but who knew how deep because it was bisected by a fence.

The fence rippled in the gentle current.

What kind of fence ripples?

I painted the fence with my light and saw that it was made of mesh.

Mesh so fine that my light wouldn't penetrate.

The depths beyond were unfathomable.

The fence skeleton, though, was revealed in the floodlight — a fence framed with PVC piping, fitted flush with the ceiling and floor and corner walls, a fully enclosing fence.

I wondered what the hell lay beyond.

There was a gate to the beyond but it was shut.

The gate, too, was fine mesh and it was framed within the fence.

I fixed on that gate. I saw how it worked. It was cabled to the control panel on the left-hand wall. The cable was hard to see — you had to be looking — but I'd become familiar with cables and I spotted it tucked along the frame of the fence, leading to the wall, and from there it snaked to the lighted control panel. And then I spotted the second cable snaking out of the control panel, feeding into a fissure in the wall. I knew that cable, how it snaked up through the hole in the reef up to the fake rock, and from there to the sound link on the cage.

Down here — just like up top — there was a rock-faced door, sparkling with fake crystals. This door stood ajar. Lanny must have opened it to access the control panel.

Oh Lancelot.

What are you doing here?

I went deadly cold.

His job. What else?

Tap a key, throw a switch, turn it on, turn it off, who the hell knew because Lanny sure wasn't talking.

Walter and Tolliver and I still latched onto the wall at the cavern mouth.

Lanny watched us watching him.

The floodlight illuminated us as well as Lanny. All of us revealed. Tolliver letting go of his anchor in preparation to kick off, and Lanny at the wall looking twitchy.

Tolliver made one of his diver signals: flat hand, palm down, moving slowly up and down. Take it easy.

Lanny did not take it easy.

He turned back to the keypad and punched in more numbers.

The gate in the fence slowly swung open.

I flinched.

Lanny lunged toward the gate and ventured inside the fenced-off room.

For a moment I was relieved, I thought if he's going in there that means he knows what's what. He knows it's safe in there. Safe from what, who knows, I didn't really care to know.

But he'd come here to do a job and now the job was taking him in there.

And we'd come to stop him.

We pushed off and swam across the cavern to the gate and paused there and Tolliver gave me a palm-up sign — stay here, stand guard, who knew what I was standing guard against but there was one unbreachable rule down here. Don't get stuck. Don't get on the wrong side of a gate that is wired.

Inside the fence, on the wrong side of the gate, Lanny was suspended, looking around.

Looking lost.

I understood. It was an unsettling room. Hell, the whole cavern was unsettling but this fenced-off room, more so. It was our first clear look inside — our lights did not penetrate the depths and barely pierced the murk up front, by the fence — but it was enough to see that the room was netted like a kids' indoor netted ball pit. The ceiling, the walls, the floor, the entirety of this room was netted with the same mesh that netted the fence and the gate. The mesh rippled slightly.

Up front, near the fence, the murk was pierced by two dim shafts of light.

Lanny was suspended, as if in a trance, in the strange light. He looked up.

We looked up.

The light came from small holes in the ceiling and I figured they must be chimneys that punched through the body of the reef up above, allowing in light from the open sea. Degraded light, filtered light, and along with it came a soft rain of particulates, all of it filtered through mesh.

Lanny came out of his trance and headed for the left-hand wall.

A control panel was mounted there.

I thought, no no no.

Tolliver and Walter ventured into the room.

Lanny reached the wall and yanked open the panel door, revealing a keypad, a twin to the keypad panel on the wall outside the fence. This inner keypad was lighted, already activated.

I saw the power cable running along the wall, linking the inner and the outer panels.

Twin keypads, cabled, yoked. Live.

Walter and Tolliver were taking their damn time, mindful I guessed of spooking Lanny into punching the wrong keys.

Too mindful, too slow, come on come on.

Lanny was fumbling with his BC, taking something out of a pocket.

Walter and Tolliver at last got a move on, and flanked him.

Lanny let go of whatever he'd been fooling with and tried to push them away.

Tolliver escalated, grabbing him by the arm.

Lanny twisted to escape, his free hand reaching for the panel, and now Walter intercepted him. And still Lanny struggled, and for a moment I feared that hoses and regulators were going to get dislodged, that the entangling divers were going to stir up silt and blind us all here in the guts of the reef.

But it was two against one.

Lanny slumped, and the thing he'd been fooling with floated behind him, attached by a lanyard to his BC. I aimed my light at it. It was a slate with a string of numbers neatly written. A password? He'd been trying to enter a password?

Only, Walter and Tolliver interrupted him.

I wondered what the password would have set into motion.

With Lanny secured, my breathing evened out and I took the time to take note of the second cable that exited the control panel. This cable snaked along the wall deeper into the fenced-off room.

I followed it with my light, searching for an explanation.

My light found another puzzle, another gate, a small gate this time, a PVC mesh gate framed into the wall. It led off this unsettling room into another… What?

This new gate was shut.

I looked again at Lanny's slate floating like a bathtub toy. No, not at all a toy. A password to open this new gate, what else?

Walter and Tolliver began to maneuver Lanny away from the panel.

As I waited at the main fence gate — above all else making sure that gate did not close — I noticed a new light.

I froze.

The others noticed it, and froze.

We were no longer alone.

The new light was in the tunnel.

And in short order a diver materialized in the tunnel, silhouetted in the light zone, following his torch light into the floodlighted cavern.

Coming our way.

He swam sleekly and strongly, even his controlled frog-kick a confident thing.

He entered the front room of the cavern and without pause angled himself toward the left-hand wall, toward the panel that Lanny had abandoned when he fled into the fenced-off room.

The diver appeared to give no notice to me at the gate, floodlit.

He studied the keypad a moment.

Then he finned over to the fence and put his torch light against the mesh and it filtered through enough to catch the three men at the inner control panel. Lanny pinioned by Walter and Tolliver.

And then the diver turned back to study me at the open gate.

He was an unnerving sight. Big, a slab of a man. Face a mask. A mask behind the dive mask — slick black Neoprene skin from chin to hood, sealed around the mouth where the regulator fitted, leaving only eyes and nose visible behind the dive mask. His eyes were dark as the abyss and, I swore, steeped in venom.

The eyes, if nothing else, identified him.

He hung there slowly finning, holding himself in place.

My breathing took off. I willed myself to chill and somehow located a nugget of outrage and that steadied me. I grew the nerve to feel affronted that he'd come — why had he sent Lanny down here to do the job, and then come himself? I felt misled.

No no no, you've got that wrong, lady. You and Tolliver and Walter misled yourselves. You wanted to believe that it was going to be just a question of stopping Lanny and hauling his ass out of here.

Not a question of confronting Oscar Flynn.

For a moment I thought, what if it's just the boss coming to check up on the hireling — Flynn sending Lanny to fix what he'd broken and wasn't that a big-hearted gesture to trust in Lanny, to give him the chance to redeem himself? And even to follow him on the chance that he might need some help?

I wanted to buy that.

I didn't want to be here with this masked man between us and the exit to the open sea and so I hoped that he would simply shoo us all away so he could fix whatever still needed fixing.

One giant Lanny-sized blooper took down the acoustic link to remotely operate these keypads. Was that it?

So far, Flynn had made no move to engage with us.

We were free as fish to swim away.

And leave him to do what he came to do.

I just couldn't do that.

I looked into the fenced room and saw Walter and Tolliver struggling to move Lanny toward the gate. Lanny was not on our side. Still the hireling in employ of the boss. Not just the boss — the man who had saved Lanny's life.

I shot another glance at Flynn, still at the fence.

Assessing.

Waiting.

Who knew?

And then something changed.

I felt my legs moving. I had a firm hold on the frame of the gate but my legs floated outward, into the front room. The current had changed. It was no longer inflowing into the cavern as it had been when we entered. It was now outflowing, reversing course. I glanced up at the chimney holes and saw the particulates in the light shafts, flowing outward now. It was a whisper of a current urging the particulates and me and everybody else in here out. It was a sweet current that could carry us out through the tunnel and into the open sea.

That is, once Walter and Tolliver had wrestled Lanny over here to the open gate.

And then we could turn our attention to Oscar Flynn.

But Flynn turned his attention to me, first.

He left the wall and slowly finned my way.

I thought, he's going to try to shove me inside and then he's going to shut the gate, shut us all inside, and I thought the hell, that's the unbreachable rule, don't get stuck on the wrong side of the fence, and I grabbed hold with both hands and braced myself but I was going to need some help and I looked to Walter and Tolliver, to shout hurry up and get here. My kingdom for a voice in this airless world.

But Walter and Tolliver were paying me no attention.

Nor was Lanny. He wasn't even struggling any more.

The three of them had disentangled, linked only by limp handholds, facing into the depths of the fenced room.

Something changed.

I looked to Flynn, who had reached the open gate, who was a lunge away from me, but he too had shifted focus, away from me, staring inside the fenced room.

I turned to see what they were all looking at, back there in the dark reaches of the cavern.

Ghosts.

I found myself clutching the gate with one hand, other hand flung out in front of me, palm up. Stop.

They didn't stop.

They weren't divers and they didn't have eyes and even if they could see I wasn't going to be stopping them.

There were three of them and they came forward out of the depths of the fenced room, a ghostly procession out of the dark, a shadow nightmare ghostly sight that was solid and real coming my way.

Stop, hell, who could stop them?

Not Tolliver nor Walter nor Lanny who had retreated and plastered themselves to the fenced-room wall in order to make room because those oncoming creatures nearly filled the space.

And Oscar Flynn? I didn't know, I couldn't look at him because I was staring at the things coming my way.

They were lit by our torches in flashes and slashes and that was not enough to fully display these things but one thing was clear.

They were enormous.

Bigger than me. Bigger even than Flynn.

They passed now into the shafts of light from the ceiling holes and the degraded light showed flesh-colored things, flesh that never saw the sun.

They came drifting forward on the outflowing current.

They came with their colossal bells pulsing.

One came ahead squeezing past the others as if it wanted to get somewhere first, and the current took it up against the fence, the soft mesh giving, and there it caught a moment until it pulsed away from the impediment and the current urged it to the gate where I clung.

It was going to touch me.

I looked wildly toward Walter, still trapped against the inner wall with Tolliver and Lanny. Tolliver had his dive knife out and Lanny had his hands over his mask to hide his face and Walter flapped his hands at me: go go go.

I looked wildly for Flynn, he'd been right there at the gate with me but now he was gone.

I didn't take the time to hunt him down.

Damn me, I fled. I let go of the gate and fled, kicking like goddamn dolphin but I didn't kick fast enough because the tips of my fins kicked the gelatinous bell. It took in my fins. I screamed. A silent scream that nearly burst my lungs and my heartbeat pulsed along with the bell and then I hissed out a long exhale, a torrent of bubbles.

And then I kicked free.

I jerked my head and found Flynn. He'd backed up against the front room wall, giving the things room.

The guilt at abandoning my friends, trapped in the fenced room, sickened me but only for a moment because they were now in a better place and Flynn and I were in a worse place.

The giants were flowing out through the gate.

The first giant pulsed its way through — the gate itself a good eight-by-eight feet and the creature filled it with little room to spare. It came head-first, bell-first, bulling its way ahead, and behind it trailed strings. Hundreds upon hundreds of thready strings, and they were caught up into bundles but the strings of each bundle entangled with the others to form one spreading undulating mass of thready stringy tentacles.

The stinging cells on the tentacles would be too small to see.

Easy to imagine.

Billions upon billions of nematocysts.

The thing bumped into me.

Holy freaking hell, it pushed me. And the bell where it bumped my shoulder gave to the touch, it was an ethereal gelatinous thing but it carried the weight of water — an iron ghost made of nothing but slime and water. Except for those tentacles, they were made of venom and I desperately kicked again to escape but as I kicked, a clump of tentacles caressed my legs.

It went on its drifting pulsing way and I went on my wildly propelled backwards way trying to escape to the corner of the cavern.

My legs tingled. I was stung. My breathing was out of control. Slow it down, fourscore and seven years ago.…

I wasn't stung.

I blessed the skin of my wetsuit.

When I managed to regain my breath and my senses I saw that the next giant had already flowed out of the gate into the front room.

And then I saw a crazy thing.

Oscar Flynn had left his wall and was swimming toward the giant.

I yanked my gaze to Walter and Tolliver and Lanny and I questioned their sanity as well, for the three of them had left the safety of their wall and were inching toward the gate, Tolliver and Walter flanking Lanny, arms linked, as if they thought their joined mass was a match for these huge beasts. But maybe they weren't crazy, maybe they had glimpsed more giants coming out of the depths, or maybe they just could not bear to remain in that jail of a room any longer.

And now I turned my focus back to the things in front of my nose and I saw that the first giant was drifting-pulsing to the mouth of the tunnel and the second giant was through the gate and following its leader and the third was halfway through the gate.

Oh sweet Jesus they were leaving.

The sweet little current was taking them out of the cavern and it was clearly going to take them out through the tunnel to the open sea.

I got it.

I'd already seen one out there. I'd seen it two days ago on our first dive to Target Red when I'd looked across the chasm and glimpsed the ghostly shape in the murk, the shape I had thought was a Humboldt squid or undulating kelp or a huge purple-stripe jellyfish.

Purple-stripe huge? That wasn't huge, not compared to this giant, this thing. Compared to this, the purple-stripe was a delicate little flower.

The ghost I had seen across the canyon was the same as the colossal bruiser I saw now.

And then I wondered if Joao Silva had met one of these beasts, instead of a purple-stripe, ending up nearly stung to death.

But no, the fence gate was shut when we entered.

Lanny had to open it.

Still, he'd come here to fix what he broke and what if that was the gate, some Lanny blooper had that acoustically opened the gate and let some of these beasts out. And then somehow the glitching signal closed the gate again? However it worked, was it you Lanny?

I stared at him and even now, sandwiched between Walter and Tolliver, he held his hands over his face mask. Couldn't bear to look at what he'd done?

The three men rode the current toward the gate, passing through the chimney-hole light shafts.

I stared at the sifting falling particulates and I got it.

That fenced-off room was an aquarium.

Growing monsters, feeding them on zooplankton falling through the chimney holes, on the nutrients from the upwelling currents that washed into the tunnel and through the mesh of the fence.

I yanked my gaze to Oscar Flynn.

Why?

Flynn was approaching the third beast.

I glanced toward the tunnel. The first two giants had already drifted and pulsed their way into the tunnel and all I saw now were trailing tentacles. Okay okay, they're leaving. The last one, the straggler, was passing by right in front of me.

I held my breath. It's okay. He's leaving too.

For a moment I thought that Flynn was going to leave as well, follow the last one, swim on out the tunnel.

But he wasn't leaving. He was treading water right beside the thing.

That made no sense.

And then I swear he looked across the cavern straight at me and I swear that he smiled although of course I could not make out any expression behind his mask.

Oscar Flynn reached out and patted the bell of the mammoth jellyfish.

Like it was a pet.

A pet with billions upon billions of stinging cells lining the hundreds upon hundreds of tentacles.

Maybe their venom was mild.

Maybe it wasn't.

It wasn't mild, for Joao Silva.

I realized that it didn't matter, to Flynn, because he had no inch of skin exposed. He wore a Neoporene mask. He wore a fucking protective mask to guard against stings. If that tentacle that had brushed my leg had instead brushed my face, the skin there exposed, I guessed I would have found out just how venomous were the stings of Oscar Flynn's pets. I wanted to swim over and rip the regulator out of his mouth and skin the protective mask off his face and shove that giant off its drifting course, right into the face of its master.

I wanted to do crazy things.

Instead I swam the short distance to meet my friends. Walter released Lanny and wrapped his arms around me. Tolliver still held onto Lanny, pulling him close, whether for comfort or even now to prevent Lanny from doing the job he had come to do.

But what more was to be done?

Lanny did not look like he was up to doing any sort of job. His eyes, behind the face mask, were large. I thought I saw fear there.

What I couldn't see — when I looked — was Oscar Flynn.

Flynn had disappeared.

I figured he had followed his pets into the tunnel, out to open sea — and all I could think was good riddance to the lot of you.

And then I turned to look back at the room where the giants had come from and I saw that I was wrong.

Oscar Flynn hadn't escaped into the tunnel.

He had entered the fenced-off room.

I thought, he's crazy.

What if there are more giants back there in the depths?

Yeah, crazy maybe but not suicidal, not Oscar Flynn, not the man with an ego bigger than his colossal pets.

No, he's not worried, he's in there on a mission.

Flynn was swimming toward the control panel where Lanny had tried to do his job. Where the cables ran. And now Flynn was going to finish the job.

The keypad light glowed. All systems go.

For what?

Never mind. You go. Grab Walter and Tolliver and Lanny and go now.

Go where?

To the tunnel of course — as soon as that last monster clears out you all can follow at a respectful distance and when you get out to sea don't stop going until you reach the surface.

Or, instead, go into the fenced room.

Grab Walter and Tolliver and the three of you tackle Oscar Flynn and incapacitate him and hope that Lanny doesn't follow you inside and get into it, hope you don't all end up in some tangled mess of flailing limbs and ripped-out regulators.

I must have flinched, ready to make a move, because Walter's grip on my arm turned to iron.

I looked at him and he nodded toward the control panel out here in the front room, the main power source, the big enchilada. Let's turn off the juice. Cut off Flynn's power. And then Walter let go of me and finned toward the panel.

I wanted to object. You don't know the code.

But Walter knew what to do. He had his dive knife in hand. The hell with keypads. He was going to cut the cable.

How long to cut through that thick band of insulation and wires, that thick snake?

I split my attention between Walter and Flynn, Flynn at the keypad in the fenced room and Walter putting his blade to the cable out here, and I saw Lanny trying to wrestle free of Tolliver and Tolliver trying to hang on to his catch. And I saw Flynn at the keypad punching a button.

I found myself finning through the gate into the fenced room, pulling my dive knife from its sheath.

Flynn flipped a switch

A floodlight blazed in the fenced room.

I kicked harder, skimming the inner fence to the wall where the power cable snaked from outer to inner panels, and I put my own blade to the thick snake but I could barely nick it.

Flynn at the keypad hesitated, and then he nodded and his fingers flew across the number buttons. It looked for all the world like he was keying in a password. I remembered the numbers written on Lanny's slate. Flynn had given Lanny the password but we had interrupted Lanny before he was able to enter it.

Nothing interrupted Oscar Flynn.

We were too late.

Flynn pushed away from the keypad, finning toward the small PVC-framed gate set into the wall.

I had kind of forgotten it.

I remembered it now, with alarm. Password entered, signal sent along the cable to the gate mechanism.

The little gate was swinging open.

I began to retreat.

And while I propelled myself back along the fence line toward the main gate, I could not stop looking where Flynn was looking — at the little gate. The floodlit water rippled, a little current outflowing from the side room.

I thought I saw something riding that little current.

It was so nearly transparent I thought it was a trick of my eyes.

It was so small I would have missed it if I'd blinked.

It was a gossamer beauty.

It was perhaps the size of a thimble, see-through but for the peppering of gold flecks on the bell. The bell had flattened sides and from each corner trailed a long delicate tentacle, a good deal longer than the bell. The bell was remarkable largely because of its shape. Its shape was cube-like.

A word came to me — I actually heard the word, in my memory, in Violet Russell's voice—cubozoan.

Box jellyfish.

No no no. Oh holy shit no.

But wait, she'd said cousin, we get cubozoans here but they're cousins of the highly toxic tropical box jellyfish, the one in the Discovery Channel ten most deadly creatures documentary. Our little boxes are only cousins, gentle creatures with mild stings.

That's what she'd said.

Yeah sure but that's what she'd told us about moon jellyfish stings, before she was gobsmacked by the highly toxic Aurelia that had evolved into something from a bad dream.

The delicate little cubozoan was joined by another.

Holy holy shit.

I flipped and swam for the main gate and Walter met me there and yanked me through. We crowded up against Tolliver and Lanny, Lanny still in Tolliver's grip, Lanny shaking his head so hard he was going to give himself a whiplash.

In the fenced room, another cubozoan drifted out through the little gate.

And then another. And another and another.

And now there was a flushing of box jellyfish out of the side room. They multiplied, they bloomed, they kept coming and it seemed there would be no end to them.

And on they came.

We should go.

Was the tunnel clear?

I whipped around to look and saw the last monster still visible in the tunnel, the one Flynn had patted, his pet, pulsing now like a giant heart, filling the tunnel, the size of it still a shock. Oh lordy what a sight when I'd first seen them coming from the depths, a couldn't-tear-my-eyes-away sight. Didn't give another thought to the little gate into the side room, never dreamed of tiny cubes in there. Who would? With Flynn's aquarium stuffed with the big bruisers, who would dream of looking for anything else? Not with those giants standing guard.

Bodyguards.

I yanked my attention back to the fenced room. Even in the few moments I'd looked away, it had filled with more cubozoans.

Flynn hadn't moved. He hung in place, lazily finning.

I thought, you're crazy. You're going to get swarmed.

And he was.

The big diver all but disappeared in a thicket of delicate jellyfish. He wore them like a gossamer cloak.

I could feel it, I'd worn a cloak like that, I'd been coated with tiny glassy jellyfish, I'd swatted at my wetsuit, get them off, I'd tried to wipe my face clean of them but there were too many. I too had worn a jellyfish cloak and I could feel the panic.

Flynn wasn't panicking. Wasn't wiping his face. No need. His face was fully masked.

He was untouchable.

He turned now and swam toward the fence, toward the open gate. He swam sleekly and strongly, his cloak flowing with him.

Behind him, more box jellyfish swarmed out of the side room and it was a mesmerizing sight, glassy cubes shining in the floodlight, forming haloes in the shafts of light from the chimney holes.

And on they came.

Flynn slowed, careful not to outswim his cloak, gathering the jellyfish to him once again, and he now approached the gate in a more measured pace.

He was going to bring his cloak out to us. And the rest were going to follow.

Lanny lunged, breaking free of Tolliver, aiming himself like a missile at the open gate, latching onto the frame, trying to pull it shut.

The swing arm remained rigid. The gate wouldn't move.

He turned to us, urgent, and I was the closest to him, to the gate, close enough to see his eyes wide behind his face mask, and I knew what he was asking of us. Of me.

Help.

Don't let those things out.

I was frozen. You mean, shut those things in. You mean, shut Oscar Flynn inside because he wore a cloak of box jellyfish.

Lanny made a fist and punched in the direction of Flynn in his cloak. At the oncoming army of cubozoans.

And then Lanny looked at me. You know dive signals?

I knew that one. Tolliver taught us. Danger.

Lanny tugged again at the gate frame, wild with the need to shut it.

I pictured the hacienda where Lanny lived, trying to recall if there was a garage, if it had an automatic door, and if there was I guessed that Lanny had never had to open it during a power outage, because if he had he would surely now be looking for a mechanical release lever, the kind of bypass that disengages the drive motor and allows you to manually operate the gate.

I had.

And I'd been gatekeeper here long enough to recognize the power operator box, at the junction of the gate and the fence.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Flynn regrouping again, waiting for the current to bring the box jellies to him again, to cloak him again.

In his wake followed the entire cubozoan army.

I lunged for the operator box, found the manual release lever, flipped it, felt the tension in the armature ease. Felt control pass to me.

To me and Lanny.

We worked in tandem now, pulling the gate shut.

Slamming the door in Flynn's face.

No no no you won't release your pets into our sea.

An epoch passed.

The epoch that led from innocence to guilt.

Lanny wore his stubborn look, mouth sealed so tight it seemed he was going to swallow his regulator.

Tolliver and Walter were within a quick reach of the lever. Either one of them could disengage the lock and open the gate. It was under manual control.

They did not.

Flynn, on the other side of the gate, gripped the frame.

He was now fully coated. The fence was now fully coated. There were thousands of cubozoans swarming the fence, the front line nearly mashed and it was only the smoothness of the mesh and its gentle give that prevented wholesale slaughter. Hell, it was only the tiny holes of the mesh that prevented wholesale escape.

The four of us hung there on the free side of the fence.

And then Flynn drew his dive knife.

He put the blade to the mesh and the tip poked through one hole but the full blade itself could not fit into the tiny aperture and so he angled it to cut with just the tip, an awkward attack, trying to saw and rend but the strand of mesh under attack just bent around the knife tip, a polyfiber too slippery and too tough to slice.

He let go of the mesh and wiped his face mask. Wiping away the jellyfish.

And now he switched tactics, slashing at the mesh, putting his whole massive body into the fight, and his jellyfish cloak rippled in alarm.

He began to panic.

He jerked his head to look along the fence line. Looking for what? A gap in the mesh?

And then he dropped his knife and put his hands to his neck.

He grasped the neck of his wetsuit. There was a gap, where the wetsuit neck did not quite meet the bottom edge of his sting-guard face mask, there at the base of his neck, a gap that must have opened as he lost control.

A little cube was there waiting.

And then another, and another.

Flynn wrenched and peeled down the neck of his wetsuit.

He wore a necklace of jeweled cubes, a choker of glassy tentacles.

An epoch passed.

The epoch that led from life to death.

His hands clawed his neck and his legs kicked out and his body twisted — violent violent violent — all of it so violent that he flung off jellyfish like a wet dog flinging off drops of water. It looked like he was trying to throw off his wetsuit or maybe even his skin. And then he froze. He went from fight to surrender in a flash, in a millisecond, in a speed that could not be timed. He went rigid. He went into shock. His eyes behind the face mask squeezed shut as though he could not stand the floodlight. As though he could not stand the pain. Shutting it out. Focusing inward. I thought, nothing else exists for him now. No memories, no hopes, no awareness of a mission and certainly no awareness of us out here, beyond the mesh, no knowledge that his audience watched in horror. He was subsumed. And then suddenly he spasmed. It came fast as a snake strike. His hands flew to his chest. His mouth opened wide, so wide that the regulator slipped out but it did not seem to matter because he did not try to find it and put it back. It clearly was of no use. Lungs paralyzed.

His mouth opened wide in a desperate gasp seeking air.

Finding only water.

We four exited the cavern, exited the tunnel, into the open sea, and we swam with the need of survivors upward toward the air.

Tolliver was at the wheel of the Breaker.

Walter and I sat on the starboard bench, flanking Lanny.

Lanny seemed to be trying to shrink himself, take up as little space as possible, his arms drawn into his sides and his feet tucked under the bench.

Walter patted Lanny's arm.

Lanny did not respond.

I turned to look at the sea, at the sky. The fog was trying to lift. The sun was trying to break through. I didn't care — fog, sunlight, anything the sky cared to throw at us — we were back in our element and I relished the wind in my face and the air free for the breathing.

I wished I could forget the face down in the cavern, Flynn's mouth open like he had become a water breather.

We sped across the water, circling the algal bloom. I spotted a big wake of a boat in the distance. I focused on the boats up ahead, at the edge of the bloom.

Walter lifted his hand again, at the ready, offering Lanny the human touch.

Lanny drew himself into an even tighter space.

I wished I had something to offer him.

Tolliver parked the Breaker perpendicular to the Sea Spray, which was roped to the Destiny.

I did not know where to look — at Jake Keasling lounging on the Sea Spray, or at Sandy Keasling standing like a flagpole at the rail of the Destiny.

Sandy settled it, calling out to us, “It's about time.”

Tolliver looked from Sandy to Jake and back to Sandy again. It took him a moment to speak, and then he said, wearily, “You want to explain all this, Sandy?”

The shifting fog had opened above the Destiny and Sandy was sunlit, inflaming her orange-blond hair. But her face was pale as the fog. She gazed from her lofty perch down at us. She said, “Lanny.” She shook her head. “Looks like you landed on your feet. Again.”

Lanny looked up.

“What the hell happened down there?” she demanded.

Tolliver said, “First you tell us what the hell happened up here.”

She looped her arms over the rail. “What happened, Doug, is my brothers and I arrived here to find your boat. With your dive flag up. So I told Lanny looks like the brass has things under control and we can go home, but he said he had a job to do.”

Again, it took Tolliver time to respond. He shook his head. He said, at last, “You arrived here on your boat?” He nodded at the Sea Spray. “You're standing on Oscar Flynn's boat. You want to explain that?”

She glanced at silent Lanny and then at silent Jake. “Eh, what's new, I get to do cleanup. Just so you know, I'm patching some of this together from what Lanny said. From what Oscar Flynn said. So, this morning, he followed Lanny — his boat has some radar-jamming stealth shit. Seems he figured, no surprise, that Lanny might screw up. And Lanny obliged. He detoured to bring me on board and then we detoured and had a little mishap — which reminds me, we were on the Outcast, and Lanny can fill you in on all that. Anyway, I didn't know the Destiny was standing off in the fog during our mishap so I ended up calling Jake for help. And that's why we arrived here on my boat. And then, like I said, Lanny went diving. And then the Destiny sneaked in, surprising the hell out of me.” She paused. “You with me so far, Doug?”

Tolliver just nodded.

“Now, Flynn. He shows up real unhappy about your boat being here, Doug. It seems when he set out this morning he hadn't been expecting you. Seems he picked your boat up on his radar someplace along the way, so when he arrived here he was pissed and suited up to dive.”

Lanny, beside me, flinched.

“Oh, one more thing. Flynn had company on the Destiny—Fred Stavis was also aboard. You just missed him. He's on a Coastie medic boat now.” She waved in the direction of shore. “Got shot.”

We just listened. It was too much. Tolliver opened his mouth to speak and then just shook his head.

“No need to give me that look, Doug. Fred's stable. I got aboard here fast as I could.” Sandy indicated the dive platform and ladder at the stern. “Did first aid, that's all I do, then I phoned the Coasties. And your people. Assume they'll be along soon.”

Tolliver finally spoke. “How did Fred get shot?”

Sandy jerked a thumb at the Sea Spray. “Ask the idiot who shot him.”

The four of us turned to look at Jake. He lounged on the bench at the stern, the bench where Walter and I had sat a week ago preparing to go whale watching, where I'd been sitting when I got my first look at Jake Keasling on the neighboring dock. He looked much the same now, breezy, although his green hair had grown out to show the blond roots.

Jake tipped his head to look up at Sandy. “This idiot saved your life.” Jake shifted to face us. “Never did trust those dudes. Especially after that diver got poisoned — on our beach. I figured if you could prove it was one of the dudes you'd arrest him. Since you didn't I figured it was up to Keaslings to watch out for Keaslings. And that's what this Keasling did. Flynn's on the ladder going down to the dive platform and Sandy's shouting she's gonna call the Coast Guard and then Fred pulls a gun. What else could I do? Self defense.” Jake put his hands in the air. They trembled.

“Jake.” Tolliver struggled to find more words. “Where's the firearm now?”

Jake slowly lowered his hands and picked up a mesh dive bag.

I stared across the water at the mesh bag, sagging with the weight of its cargo. I couldn't tell, from here, that it held a gun. I flashed back to Joao Silva's dive bag on Sandy's boat, a week ago. I hadn't been able to tell, then, what the bag held. Just something colored red. Some kind of weird synchronicity, I thought. Mesh dive bags holding trouble.

I shivered.

Walter was shivering. He said, “I propose that we head back to shore and Doug can continue his questions in a warm office.”

“Works for me.” Jake lifted his hand and splayed his fingers and shook his wrist, giving some sort of okay sign. “You good, Bro?”

Lanny, beside me, was shivering.

I had to speak. “Jake, you're lucky to still have a brother.” It hurt to speak. My throat was raw; breathing canned air; swallowing fear. Swallowing guilt. I looked up at Sandy, still leaning on the Destiny's rail. “And you, Sandy. If you'd shared information instead of building a wall around your castle you might have saved us all a lot of grief.”

Sandy leveled a long look at me, at the four of us on the Breaker, and she said, “I'll live with it.”

We headed back to harbor, Sandy piloting the Destiny and Jake piloting his sister's boat and Tolliver driving the Breaker, throttle opened wide.

Walter and Lanny and I rode in silence, drained to the core.

Back at the pier, as we began to ferry gear off the boat, Lanny asked Tolliver, “Are you going to arrest me?”

We stopped in our tracks.

Lanny clutched his swim fins, one in each hand. His knuckles were white.

Tolliver finally answered. “For what?”

“For helping Mr. Flynn.”

“Son, I'm going to have a lot of questions but now isn't the time to….”

“Yes please I want to say it now.”

Tolliver shrugged, and set down the tank he'd been carrying.

Walter and I set down our gear.

Lanny licked his lips. He faced us all. “I thought the iron seed thing was hurting the ocean so I tried to shut it off and that messed up the big gate in the cavern and then Mr. Flynn told me that a lot of those big jellyfish got out — and I didn't even know about the gates and the jellyfish — so Mr. Flynn told me all about the project and then he said I betrayed him…” Lanny's voice rose, “…and then he said I could fix what I broke and he said the big gate wasn't open that long and it shut again, that's called fail secure, and he said good thing the little gate didn't open and he said he would forgive me if I went back down to put in new numbers to be sure the little gate always stayed closed so the little jellyfish couldn't ever get out. Only Mr. Flynn…” Lanny stopped.

Walter said, very gently, “Mr. Flynn was trying to kill you.”

Lanny said, “I know.”

“You sabotaged his project — and you knew too much — so he sent you to open the gate. You would have been the one to get swarmed.”

“I know.”

I still didn't get it. “What did he tell you about the project?”

“It was going to be good.”

“Good?”

Lanny's eyes pleaded. “Mr. Flynn was going to be a hero and I was going to help him.”

“Didn't you understand what kind of man you were working for?”

He shook his head.

“Lanny.” I had to take in a deep breath. If I'd still been underwater my bubble trail would be off the charts. “Those creatures down there…what part of that was good?”

“That wasn't good.”

“Then what? The devil moons?”

“No that wasn't good, I didn't know that was going to happen, I just knew Mr. Flynn liked to call them devil moons.”

“Then what, Lanny? What could possibly be good about Oscar Flynn's project?”

“He was going to make sick people well.”

Lanny got it half-right. Oscar Flynn was aiming to be a hero.

The other half: he was well on the way to being a devil.

The little cubozoan looked familiar. If I'd run into it in the sea — and I wasn't busy freaking out — I might think I'd encountered it before. But I hadn't. The tank's label said Chironex fleckeri and its occupant bore the reputation of the most lethal jellyfish in the world.

I moved on to the cubozoan in the second tank. It looked so familiar I would swear I'd encountered it before. But I hadn't. The second tank's label said Carybdea marsupialis. Native Californian. Compared to its cousin in the first tank, C. marsupialis was something of a wimp. At least according to Dr. Violet Russell and Wikipedia.

I moved on to the third tank, where the cubozoan I knew floated like a dandelion. It looked a good deal like the little cube in the second tank. It looked exactly like the glassy cubes I'd seen six hours ago in Oscar Flynn's aquarium in the cavern on Cochrane Bank. Here, now, in Flynn's lab, it was confined to a tank as small as a lunch box and thankfully I did not share the same water with it.

I'd hoped to never lay eyes upon such a thing again.

The label on the third tank was a cryptic laboratory notation: CF/CM.3.2. The tank should bear a clearer warning: here is something new, a box jellyfish native to California waters, carrying the enhanced toxin of the most lethal jellyfish in the world. This jellyfish — Oscar Flynn's genetically-tweaked cross between cousins — had cause to usurp C. fleckeri's reputation. Flynn's creation was twice as venomous, at least according to his lab notes. Certainly, according to what we'd witnessed down in the sea.

If I were to slap a warning label on the third tank I'd write: here is something that should not exist.

But it does.

“He was an evil genius.”

I turned to see Violet Russell just behind me, tapping keys on Flynn's laptop.

She added, “And that's about as theatrical a statement as I'm ever likely to make without a strong whiskey or two.”

She looked anything but theatrical. She wore the plain field clothes she'd worn yesterday, at Diablo Canyon. She looked nearly as haggard as we did. Tolliver had phoned her from the pier, urgently requesting that she meet us at Flynn's house on the hillside.

The house was now officially a crime scene and Tolliver's people were examining every corner.

Tolliver himself was on the phone again, slumped in the chair at Flynn's black-laminate desk.

I went over to join Walter, who was bracing himself on the table that held the Aurelia aurita tanks. We were silent, hollowed. We gazed like rubberneckers at the succession of tanks, the moon jellyfish in each tank looking nearly identical. But the labels said otherwise. The label on the fourth tank said CF/AA.2.

Something new, something else that should not exist, a genetic mashup of a box and a moon, Chironex and Aurelia.

“An intermediary,” Russell said, joining us. “Flynn was toying at this point.”

Tolliver came over, shutting his phone. “Toying? Yesterday at the Morro beach wasn't child's play.”

“My bad, Detective. Poor word choice. I'm in somewhat of a daze. As for toying, I'm speaking of the progression in the recombinant venom proteins. The moons were simply one step along the way.” She swept a hand, indicating the entire lab. “He was nothing if not thorough.”

I nodded. His lab was nothing if not premium. This was not the lab we'd seen last week but it was equally impressive. The paint job was glossy and blindingly white and the instruments on the workbenches gleamed stainless steel state-of-the-art, and beyond. The tanks were numerous and spotless, containing jellyfish in stages from polyps to medusae. Specimens at the ready for genetic manipulation in the lab. End products marked for real-world tests in the sea, testing to determine if his cross-bred genetically-manipulated creatures could adapt to these waters.

And adapt, they could.

Tolliver eyed the laptop in Dr. Russell's hand. “Finding documentation in his notes?”

“Chapter and verse, if you like.” She swiped a finger across the screen. “Here's the provisional patent, which references identification, cloning, sequencing, and recombination of venom proteins for pharmaceutical applications. All for the greater good — adapt the jellies' chemical weaponry to combat human diseases. Cancer, chronic pain, heart disease…”

“Uh-huh, right, he was gonna get rich saving lives.” Tolliver flipped a hand. “How about the other? Find anything indictable?”

“Downright evil.” She swiped her finger. “We have pages of correspondence with a certain organization that doesn't adhere to the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. Ongoing funding to adapt the jellies' chemical weaponry for next-generation bioweapons. Already profitable.”

“Already delivered?”

“Contracted for. You'll want to follow up on that, Detective.”

“I'm a small-town cop, Dr. Russell. I'll pass this on to the feds.”

She strode over to the workbench that held stoppered sample bottles of murky water. “Pass this on, as well. Tinkering with domoic acid to develop toxic weaponry.”

I regarded the container labeled DA.2.4. Domoic acid, product of an iron-seeded algal bloom. Poisoner of sea lions and Joao Silva.

“Speaking of harmful algal blooms….” Russell paused. “I fear that when you examine his computer files you'll find articles I sent him, on that subject.”

“Hey, you thought it was part of his work with the rescue group,” Tolliver said. “How could you know what he was up to?”

Russell snapped Flynn's laptop shut. Sound like a gunshot.

Tolliver said, “Hindsight's worth what you pay for it.”

I said, “It wasn't just about the money. I mean, for Oscar Flynn.”

I moved to the biggest tank in the room. The label said Nemopilema nomurai. No laboratory notation for cross breeding. This species, it seemed, stood on its own. There were five jellyfish in this tank and it was beginning to get crowded. They were about the size of basketballs. Just big enough to make an impression. To make me recoil at the memory of a touch, of a monster's shove. I assessed the smaller versions, here. Must be juveniles. That sure explained how Flynn could have ferried the monsters to the cavern. They weren't quite monsters, at that point. They were small enough to transfer, in a big bucket. And then, once situated in their new home in Flynn's aquarium of the deep, they grew to full size. His big boys.

His pets.

I wondered where they were, now. Perhaps still caught in the eddy that swirled around the bowl at Target Red. Eventually, though, they'd get swept away in the complexity of currents. Of course, they could be tracked. Flynn's notes described the implantation of microchips. Fish 'n chips, he'd called it — the only joke he'd ever made, I'd wager.

Walter and Russell and Tolliver joined me.

We all stood enraptured by the juvenile monsters in the tank.

And then Walter cleared his throat. “You mentioned the money.”

I managed a smile. That's Walter. Finance is his middle name. He watches our pennies, he balances our books.

And certainly Flynn had a compelling monetary motive here. If the pharmaceutical toxins panned out, big bucks. Even if they didn't, he'd already enlisted the bioweapon rogues. Bigger bucks.

I said, “The money, sure. But that's not what fed his soul.” At least what passed for a soul. I figured I'd experienced enough of his soul to pass judgment. When I'd helped shut the gate on him, down in the cavern, it was in defense — of us, of the sea. Certainly a final judgment. I wore that responsibility like he wore his cloak of cubozoans. I said, “I think it was about the creation. Something new, that never existed before. Something that nobody would forget. Something terrible — I think that was part of it — something that would set Flynn above the commonplace, wielding these terrible weapons. I mean, he was trying to release his new box jellyfish into our sea.” I shot a look across the room at the Aurelia aurita tank. “And we saw what happened when he released those moons, tweaked to lethal. I think he wanted to see them in action. He wanted to test their stings. I mean, we're talking commonplace moon jellyfish — nobody worries when they hook one on a kayak paddle. Or sees one swimming by, on a day at the beach. They don't carry much of a sting. They're just pretty little moons.” A hard knot formed in my gut. “Except, when they're genetically engineered into pretty little devil moons.”

Russell said, “A rogue wave.”

Yeah. That about summed up Oscar Flynn. He sure had the unpredictability of a rogue wave. The strength. He nearly swept us off our feet, swept us under. Well I had my balance now. Stable enough. In fact, nearly rooted in place. Leaden.

“I don't doubt that motivation,” Walter said. “But let's not forget that putting his moons in action was exquisitely timed. He'd just found us at his site, at Cochrane. He'd heard Doug promise that his divers would return the next day, Monday. So let's calculate the timing and the tides. He visits the new Morro Bay aquarium Sunday night and engineers the release. Aurelia is a nearshore species so he can assume that's where his moon army will deploy. That's where attention will be focused.”

Tolliver snapped, “And it was.”

“I fear that's my bad again,” Russell said, and before Tolliver could argue the point she continued, “when I took that collection plate from the Diablo dock, I should have rushed my analysis. That was his field test. Would his engineered polyps start a new generation? You need to get somebody out there to check the whole inlet. Now. If I'd known yesterday what I was looking at… I should have listened to my gut.”

“With all due respect,” Tolliver said, “your gut-feeling is bullshit. My gut has been all over the map, on this case. We go on facts, not gut feelings.”

She held up the laptop. “All the facts you need, Detective. A to Z.”

“How about how he got the damned things, to start with?”

“To collect the natives, Carybdea and Aurelia, he simply went out on his boat with a scoop and a bucket. As for the foreign species, he obtained the polyps on the black market. You could nail him on the illegal importation of invasive species — if he weren't already nailed.”

Tolliver just nodded.

Russell pointed at the N. nomurai tank. “The young ones hail from China.” She added, “Or perhaps Japan — by way of Fukushima.”

“You're shitting me.”

“No bullshit, Detective.”

“What you said before about radiation effects, the mutation thing…”

“The species was already established in its present enormous form — before the meltdown. One could conjecture that adults drifting past the nuclear facility planted polyps there.” She eyed the tank. “It will be interesting to find out what, if any, mutations have occurred.” She gave Tolliver a strained smile. “Godzilla.”

“I'd take that as a joke if it didn't scare the hell out of me.” Tolliver stepped aside and made his phone calls.

When he finished, he said, “All right, I've got the Coast Guard on the way to Diablo. And my divers out at Cochrane just found some kind of feeding device in the chimney holes — injecting brine shrimp down into the cavern. They removed the feeders but they want to know what to do next.”

“Next?” she asked.

“About the damn box jellyfish down there.”

“Hell Doug, seal off the cavern. Currents are still going to bring in nutrients, and you can't have that. You're going to have to starve them.”

“Can't we just wait for them to die?”

“You're forgetting the next generation. There will be polyps.”

We dragged out of Oscar Flynn's house and squinted at the view from the hillside down to the sea.

The morning's fog had vanished.

The sun was low on the horizon and the ocean was golden.

The dazzling daylight blinded me, for a moment, to the near view. And then I spotted the figure sitting on the carved stone bench at the edge of Flynn's patio.

Lanny Keasling. He wore his blue Sea Spray windbreaker. He held a paper grocery bag on his lap. He waited for us to approach — casting a brief curious look at Violet Russell as she swept by, ducking under the yellow crime scene tape, heading for the stairs down to the driveway.

When we drew up in front of Lanny he handed the bag to Tolliver.

Tolliver opened the top of the bag, where Lanny had crimped it, and looked inside. He took his time. And then he said, “How about that.”

Walter nosed in and had a look.

And then it was my turn.

How about that, indeed.

Half an hour later, after Lanny finished his story, Tolliver offered him a ride back into town. Lanny politely declined, saying he had a ride waiting.

I spotted the figure down below in Flynn's driveway. Her orange-blond hair bushed out from beneath a ball cap and she hunched in a blue windbreaker.

As Walter and Tolliver headed for the steps to the driveway, I turned back to Lanny. With my last shred of stamina, of sociability, I said, “You did good,” and I held out my hand.

He looked at me so intently that I figured he didn't trust what I was offering, and he surely had reason to wonder about anybody's offerings or assurances, but in the end he was polite Lanny Keasling and he bobbed his head and put his hand in mine and we shook.

I was offering respect. I hoped he understood that.

The two paper grocery bags sat on the table in Doug Tolliver's office.

The office was roomy, Formica table and slatted-back chairs at one end and big Formica desk and padded swivel chair at the other. Everything tidy, the office of a neatnik. The room was painted a cheery yellow. It had a big window that overlooked the small grassy entrance to the Morro Bay Police Department. It struck me that Tolliver was the only player on this case who didn't have a view of the sea. Of all people, Doug Tolliver should have had a view of his patch of ocean.

Instead, he had a big poster of the harbor and Morro Rock.

The western-facing window let in the afternoon sun.

Tolliver had placed Fred Stavis in the chair facing the sun.

Stavis squinted.

Walter smiled.

This morning had started out foggy — just like yesterday morning, out at sea — only today I'd slept through a good part of the morning, awakened too early by Walter shouting from the common room, “Eureka!”

I'd come out in my robe, groggy, grumbling, who actually says eureka? When Walter showed me what he'd discovered, I understood.

Walter had phoned Tolliver, who'd said, “That could do it,” who'd phoned us back to say four o'clock sharp, it's all arranged.

And now, four o'clock sharp, here we all sat around Tolliver's table.

Stavis shifted in his chair so that the sun wasn't directly in his face. He looked composed. His right arm was in a sling but he assured us that the arm didn't pain him much. He had dressed for the occasion. For an interview at the cop house. No cargo pants. No boat shoes. Pressed khakis and a white button-down shirt — the right sleeve rolled up to accommodate the sling. And lace-up shoes, with socks.

Tolliver rested a hand on a portable digital recorder. “Fred, I'd like to record this interview, if you'll agree.”

Stavis gave a helpless smile. “What am I agreeing to? You still haven't told me why I'm here — is this about the shooting? If it is, I sure hope you're interviewing Jake. He drew on me first.”

“I'm investigating that. But we're here today on a different matter.”

Stavis eyed the two paper bags.

“All in good time. First….” Tolliver tapped the recorder.

Stavis gave a stiff nod.

Tolliver pressed the record button and began the formalities. “This is Detective Tolliver of the Morro Bay Police Department, badge number 370. Today is Wednesday, August eighteenth….”

I watched Stavis shifting position again, trying to appear relaxed, and when Tolliver asked him to identify himself for the record and give permission to record the interview, he responded calmly enough. He smiled when Walter and I gave our IDs and permissions — all of us formally on board here.

And then Tolliver said, “I'm going to go ahead and read you your constitutional rights. You're not under arrest but I want to advise you…”

I watched Stavis freeze up, at that, and when it was time to affirm his understanding of his right to remain silent, to an attorney, he agreed stiffly.

Tolliver concluded, “Will you waive those rights and answer the questions?”

Stavis took a long moment and then said, “Good golly, I don't need a lawyer and I came here to answer your questions. Nothing to hide. Will that do it?”

“That'll do it. My consultants are going to start us off.”

I lifted a hand to Walter. Your eureka, you take it.

Walter cleared his throat. “Mr. Stavis, do you recall that night you and Cassie followed Lanny to the dunes?”

Stavis flicked a look at me. “Yes yes, of course.”

“Do you recall why Lanny went there?”

Stavis seemed to be searching his memory.

“Let me refresh your memory.”

Walter opened the paper bag we'd brought and carefully lifted out the red float. He set it on the table, situated so that the scratches on the eyebolt end were entirely visible.

Stavis eyed the float like it was a sleeping snake.

Walter smiled in sympathy. “That thing has bedeviled Cassie and me from the start. It wasn't until this morning — trying to figure out the missing pieces in the Robbie Donie mystery — that I took another look and found an answer.”

“I don't see what this has to do with me.”

“Let me set the scene for you. It begins eleven days ago. Friday night, the night before Mr. Donie disappeared.”

Stavis shifted again in his chair.

“We know — from Mr. Flynn himself — that he employed you and Lanny on an iron-seeding project. For the record, one of the seeding floats is on display here.” Walter indicated the red float on the table. “On the night in question, you and Lanny were at the Cochrane Bank site, doing maintenance. Lanny did the diving, because of your eardrum problems. He checked the status of the red floats, and removed a yellow float with a bent snap hook. He was upset. He'd been concerned for some time about the effect of the seeding, and in his agitated state he let the yellow float get loose. When he surfaced, you scolded him for losing it. He said he wanted to quit. You told him he was being childish. He snapped. He tried to stop the project — he got hold of the acoustic remote and shut down the link.”

Stavis blinked. “How do you know all this?”

“I'll jump in here,” Tolliver said. “We three had a chat with Lanny late yesterday afternoon. And he came in here today to repeat his story, on the record.”

“Seriously, Doug? Lanny's unreliable. Sandy forced him on me to begin with, and Oscar insisted I keep him. And yes, I did work for Oscar — and whatever he told you about me, well he had his own agenda.”

“Feel free to offer any corrections.”

Stavis glanced at the recorder.

“To continue,” Walter said, “that Friday night you and Lanny had company. Robbie Donie was out hunting squid and he spotted your boat on his radar and came to investigate. He was an excitable sort and he accused you of poaching. Does this jibe with your memory?”

“More or less. But I don't get where you're going with it.”

“Then stay with me. Donie interrupted you before you had time to retrieve the yellow float Lanny lost. As Donie left, he found it and netted it. Lanny witnessed that — you were in the wheelhouse at that point — and Lanny at that point was upset about all the yelling and decided to keep his head down.”

Pure Lanny, I thought. Already feeling guilty about the sabotage. Ducking.

Walter continued. “The following day, Saturday, Donie hid the yellow float in a niche at Morro Rock. That night, Saturday night, Donie went out squid fishing on the Outcast. He anchored at your iron-seeding site. And then he disappeared.” Walter glanced at the red float. “I have an idea what happened Saturday night but why don't you tell us your version?”

Stavis plucked at the sling holding his arm. He grimaced.

Tolliver said, “You in pain, Fred? Docs assured me your wound is minor.”

“I can handle it.”

“By the way, I'll be asking you to provide fingerprint and hair samples, to check against the UID samples my techs took from the Outcast. Just FYI, as you tell your story.”

“That supposed to make me admit I was aboard? I admit it.” Stavis smiled but there was no warmth in it. “So, sure, Saturday. Robbie sandbags me at my dock, about that yellow float. He's decided Lanny and I were 'up to something' at the site. So sure, I worry that he overheard us arguing — sound carries over water. He tells me he has the float, keeping it as 'evidence' for crying out loud, and he wants me to tell him what we were doing out there.”

“Why didn't you tell him?” Walter asked.

“Because I work for a sonofabitch? A secrets freak who made me sign a confidentiality agreement not to divulge anything about the iron seed project. So now I'm in a pickle. I decide I better find out what Robbie saw or heard or thinks he knows. Good thing is, he's dim and easy to rile up. So I played the squid card. I told him he got it right the first time, that Lanny and I were there hunting squid. I knew he was already in a war with Jake about squid, so the idea of me and another Keasling horning in didn't sit well with him. I challenged him to a duel — let's go back out there and we'll see who bags the biggest squid.”

“You didn't tell Lanny any of this?”

“No, he'd just muck it up.” Stavis gave a pained smile. “So Robbie and I head out, Saturday night. We take the Outcast because she's already set up with the gear, and we actually do run into squid…”

Tolliver put up a hand. “Hold on, Fred. Back up to the gear. Don't leave out the part where you ransack Robbie's duffel, looking for the yellow float.”

“At this point, what's that matter?”

I spoke. “Evidence. It always matters.” I didn't add, especially when it comes to trial.

“Sure, fine, I'll dot your i's and cross your t's for you. I wore gloves but I know you anal tech types might've found a hair or something. Look, Robbie all but threatened me with extortion so you better believe I wanted to find that float.”

“But you didn't. Walter and I found it. Crossing our t's.”

Walter resumed. “Now, you're on the Outcast and you do run into squid.”

“Yes. And Robbie jigs a big one. Then it's my turn. I tell him I want to hunt where I was the night before, tell him I saw squid there. When we arrive I ask him questions, vague but, you know, leading. Trying to find out what he knew. Turns out, he knew zip about the project. So, excellent. That's all I need — I tell him I'm tired, he wins the challenge, but Robbie thinks I'm being condescending. Big word for Robbie. Things get heated. He's going to show me how a real man jigs squid. The one he caught was just a warm-up. He cuts it up, baits the hooks, throws the carcass overboard. That's supposed to attract them — Humboldts are cannibals. Only there's no squid there, they'd moved on, and Robbie's jigging and getting mad and then he gets his line caught in the kelp. He's yanking on it, out of control. Wild. And the deck's slippery with ink from his first catch. And he slips, hits his head. Goes overboard.”

“Did you push him?” Walter asked.

“Good golly no.”

Tolliver leaned forward, forearms resting on the table, hands clasped.

“Doug,” Stavis blurted, “you know me. For chrissake. And there was nothing I could do. He sank fast — you know, wearing those heavy fishing boots.”

Tolliver said, “Why didn't you phone for help?”

“Who's going to get there in time? Seriously, I knew I was in a pickle. I had to think about my own position. If I report it, that brings attention to the site and I don't want to go up against Oscar. Wouldn't help Robbie at that point, anyway. Look, I admit I panicked. I started to motor back to shore but along the way I came up with a solution.” Stavis shifted yet again in his chair. The sun had shifted; it kept getting in his eyes. “I called Joao Silva.”

Walter said, “Your diver.”

“Yes. Yes I know, I told you I didn't know Silva, but I do. He does some work for me. Off the books — he's illegal — he handles the occasional dicey stuff.” Stavis shrugged. “Handled.”

I thought, you callous shit.

“So Joao motors out on one of my vessels and picks me up and I let the Outcast, uh, go on her way. I assumed when she was found it would look like Robbie got lost in a squid jigging accident. Which is what happened.”

“And then where did you go?” Walter asked. “After Mr. Silva picked you up?”

“Back to harbor.”

“Mr. Stavis, you might want to search your memory.”

Stavis stared.

“Then let me help. We know you returned to the site. Where Donie went overboard.”

Stavis turned to Tolliver. “This is going way off course.”

“We're right on course,” Tolliver said. “We can place you there, Fred.”

“What?”

“You returned to take care of Robbie's body,” Tolliver said. “You couldn't dive — with your eardrum trouble — so you had Silva take care of it.”

“No.”

“Mr. Shaws says otherwise.”

Stavis reluctantly returned his attention to Walter.

Walter said, “I've learned a good deal about squid hunting, on this case. Doug showed us the equipment, on the Outcast. Those lures have rows of heavy-duty hooks — and that explains what happened to Donie's jig line.”

“Yes, like I said, it got caught in the kelp.”

“The kelp wasn't the only entanglement. If you'll take notice of those scratches on the float?”

Stavis studiously ignored the red float on the table. “I don't know anything about that.”

“Then let me explain,” Walter said. “The scratches contain residue of stainless steel, a composition that includes ten percent nickel, eighteen percent chromium. Marine grade. At first, Cassie and I thought the source might be a sharp edge on the instrument cage, but when we were diving there yesterday I found no sharp edges. This morning, I thought of another possible source. A eureka moment. I phoned Doug and he was able to supply me with a sample, and I made a match between that and the scratches on the float.”

Stavis just shrugged.

“A squid-jigging hook made those scratches, Mr. Stavis. It caught the eyebolt end of the float, and when Mr. Donie yanked on his line, that pulled the float free of its attachment to the cage. We don't have the jig hook in question but we do have Donie's supply of spare hooks, whose points match the gouges, whose composition matches the residue.”

“I don't know anything about any of that,” Stavis said.

“The evidence suggests that you do.”

“Hey, if you say so, Robbie hooked the float. The point is, his line got tangled and he fought it and he went overboard. End of story.”

“Not quite,” Walter said. “The red float has one more twist to add to the story.”

Stavis just shrugged.

“It left particles of hematite embedded in the rub rail of the Outcast.”

Stavis said, “Okay.”

“Given that you just expressed surprise that Donie hooked the float, we can rule out the possibility that he hauled his entangled line — with the float — all the way up to the rub rail. You were the only other person on board. Ergo, you hauled up the line.”

Stavis was silent.

“The question is why. So let's walk it through. Donie, trying to free his line, goes overboard. He gets entangled in the line and probably the kelp. The problem, for you, was that the lure had an LED flasher inside — the lights attract the squid. You couldn't simply leave a flashing lure there — someone might come along and see it. Get nosy. You needed to get that lure out of the water. And so you got hold of the entangled line — using the Outcast boat hook, perhaps. And you tried to haul the line aboard, to reach the lighted lure. The lure was hooked to the float, so you ended up raising the float, as well. Impacting the rub rail. But you didn't manage to retrieve the lure.”

“How could you know anything like that?”

“Because Jake Keasling tried, as well.”

“What?”

“You didn't realize Jake was out there, that night? He was. He heard you and Robbie arguing. And then, after you 'motored away' Jake motored in to find out what was going on. He spotted the lighted lure. Wanted to find out if it was a squid jig. He tried to haul it up — just as you had — and he dragged the float across the rub rail of his sister's boat.”

“Jake? Good golly.”

Tolliver put in, “I had a chat with Jake today. On the record.”

“Look,” Stavis appealed to Tolliver, to the recorder, “if I'd known Jake was in the area I would have called on him for help.”

“Missed opportunity,” Walter said. “Jake went back to harbor, not knowing what he'd done to Sandy's boat. Not knowing what happened to Donie. Not knowing where you went. But of course, you explained that — Silva picked you up. And then you returned to the site.”

“I didn't say anything about returning.”

“The evidence says that.”

Stavis shook his head.

“How else would Joao Silva's path intersect with the red float?”

“I don't know anything about any of that.”

“Ah, but we know. We know that you sent Silva diving to take care of the problem.”

Stavis just shook his head.

“Not just to retrieve the lure. You also had him disentangle Donie's body and remove it.”

“This is wild speculation.”

Tolliver said, “We'll continue the search, Fred. I'm assuming you instructed Silva to move the body to the dropoff at the shelf break, so the currents could take it away.”

“Assume all you want. For heaven's sake.”

Walter said, “Let me ask you something. Why did Silva return two days later — sometime early on Tuesday — to retrieve the float?”

“How would I know?”

“Think it through. He cuts the body free of the entanglement and he retrieves the lighted lure for you, but he leaves the float behind — perhaps for the simple reason that the float would have prevented the body from sinking. But in the following two days, as attention focuses on the mystery of Donie's disappearance, Silva understandably gets worried. What if the authorities find the site, and the red float? What if they learn that his boss — you, Mr. Stavis — worked on a job that used red floats at the site of that accident. Given his illegal status, he risked discovery, or jail, or deportation. And so Joao Silva did the only thing he could do to protect himself — he returned to remove evidence of his participation.”

Stavis was silent.

“And so early Tuesday morning Mr. Silva retrieves the float. He bags it. And that would have been that, had he not had his encounter with a jellyfish. Had he not been stung. And the current then took him on a course that intersected Sandy Keasling's whale-watching trip. And we had a mystery. An unconscious diver adrift with a red float in his dive bag.”

Stavis remained silent.

“A mystery now ninety-nine percent solved.”

Stavis finally spoke. “Just ninety-nine?”

“There remains the mystery of how Silva got to the site. We never found a boat.”

“I can help you with that.”

Walter paused. Looked at Tolliver and me — what's this? Tolliver shrugged, eyes narrowing. I shrugged. I had no idea where Stavis was heading.

Stavis smiled. “It wasn't exactly a secret, that you found my diver at sea. Like I told you earlier, I was in a pickle. Worried about the site being found. When Joao was found I couldn't keep it from Oscar any longer. And he wasn't a happy camper.” Stavis gave a brief laugh. “After he took my head off, we shifted into damage control. We went out to the site Tuesday night on Oscar's boat. He dove and replaced the iron-seeding floats with the standards, the yellows. I picked up my vessel — Joao had taken it without my permission.”

After a moment, Walter said, “Thank you, for clarifying that one percent.”

“You're welcome. And I'll confirm your ninety-nine. Can't argue with the evidence.”

“That's refreshing,” Tolliver said.

“I made a mistake. I was just trying to handle things. So yes, I admit that I had Joao move the body. And yes, I agree that he must have panicked and returned for the float. But none of that changes the fact that Robbie's death was an accident.”

Walter scratched his ear. “Mr. Stavis, I'm not implying that the red float proves you killed Robbie Donie.”

“Then what in hell is the point of it?”

“It proves motive.”

“For what?”

Walter indicated the unopened paper bag. “For this.”

Stavis turned to Tolliver. “Did we not just finish with Robbie?”

“We did,” Tolliver said. “Now we're discussing your Joao Silva problem.”

Stavis lifted his palms.

“You were afraid Silva was going to talk.” Tolliver's voice was tight; he was making the effort to remain composed. “After he fled the hospital, you and Oscar were, as you put it, in a pickle. It took you until the next day to figure out that Sandy was hiding Silva. You knew that cave, you'd played there with Sandy and the boys, as kids. So you waited for your moment and paid Silva a visit. He was still suffering from the jellyfish sting and was rattled by Sandy's interest.” Tolliver paused. “Yes, Fred, I had a chat with Sandy today too. On the record.”

“She lies,” Stavis said.

“I don't think so. I think you, the big boss, told Silva to keep his mouth shut and then you told him chin up, playing the good guy. You'd brought him a treat. His favorite? But the anchovies were contaminated with domoic acid. Your boss had a supply in his lab.”

“I don't know anything about that.”

Tolliver opened the bag and removed the stack of clamshell food containers and slid them across the table toward Stavis.

Stavis gave a little jerk. And then laughed. “What's this?”

“This is courtesy of Lanny. He's a loyal young man. It took him a long while to even consider your role. He had a rough day yesterday — we all did. He had a big shock. And it shocked him out of his misplaced loyalty.” Tolliver showed a grim smile. “He went by your warehouse yesterday and got these. He knew where you kept them.”

“So? Yes, I keep picnic supplies on hand.”

“Don't have many picnics, though? Too busy? And those supplies last forever, right? At least, your foam trays have — they're way out of date. That model was discontinued five years ago. You can find a similar model at Costco — not all that different, just a modification of the fastener. I wouldn't have noticed but my techs are eagle-eyed. Bottom line, Fred, your discontinued-model foam tray was used to serve Joao Silva poisoned anchovies.”

“No.”

“Frederick Stavis, you're under arrest for the murder of Joao Silva, and for obstruction of justice in the concealment of Robert Donie's body.”

“No. No.”

“And I'll advise you that a reckless endangerment charge is pending for your role in the development of venomous jellyfish at the Diablo Canyon dock.”

“Doug.” Stavis shook his head. “This isn't right. You know me. You've known me all my life.”

Very deliberately, Tolliver snapped off the recorder. “I knew Robbie Donie. Didn't like him but he was a citizen of my town. I knew and liked the citizens of my town who went for a swim. You, Fred? I don't want to know you.”

After Stavis had been removed, the four of us sat around Tolliver's table.

Drained.

Satisfied, that feeling of achievement that wells up upon solving a case, no matter the circumstances.

Adrift. Looking at one another. It's all over.

Walter cleared his throat. “What about the Keaslings, Doug? The legal ramifications.”

Tolliver let out a long sigh. “At the least, I have Sandy on harboring an illegal, I have Jake on the possession and discharge of an unlicensed firearm, I have Lanny on the theft of a boat.”

I said, “They all cooperated, in the end.”

“That they did. I could reasonably make a case for sentences of community service.” He looked up at his poster of the harbor, of Morro Rock. “Not sure the community can weather being served by the Keaslings.”

We rose early.

We needed to pack our equipment and drop by the market to pick up fruit and something chewy, yet to be negotiated, and then drop by Peet's to fill our thermos for the trip back home to the mountains.

But outside it was sunny.

Walter said, “What do you say to a quick walk on the beach? Stretch our legs before the long drive?”

“I say yes.”

Walter opened the sliding glass door and we went out to the golden sand and the blue sky and the sea sparkling like mica.

Keep this up and we'd find an excuse to extend our stay.

We had the strand nearly to ourselves.

It was low tide — incoming — so we took off our flip-flops and edged down to the wet sand and headed south, for no reason other than that direction gave us a splendid view of Morro Rock.

The sand molded to our feet and the sun warmed our backs.

We came to the eroded remains of a sand castle and, beside it, a child's orange plastic shovel. Walter picked up the shovel and tossed it to higher ground.

He didn't say it and I didn't bring it up but I was abruptly yanked back to a vision of the showy sand castle on the Keasling beach. If we reversed course and headed north we would in time come to the bluffs and the Keasling turf. I recalled Lanny's pride in the sand castle, and his boasting of the Keasling childhood nickname. Suitable name, I thought — the Sea Urchins. Prickly, brightly colored, eye-catching. But you wouldn't want to pick one up.

We remained on our southerly course.

Up ahead, a small group was gathered around something in the sand.

We drew up and I nearly shouted stand back but there was no urgent need of the warning.

The group gave the jellyfish some space.

It was about the size of a fist, flattened in the sand. Translucent — grains of sand visible right through it. It was hardly recognizable as Aurelia aurita, but for the clover-leaf pattern in the center of its bell. So pretty, even in death. A harmless-looking saucer.

“Over there, like, here comes another one!” A teenage girl in the group pointed down the beach.

We looked.

A small wave sent a lip of water onto the sand and deposited another gelatinous disk.

The little group started for the newcomer.

I said, “Stay back.”

Walter was already on the phone with Tolliver, and then he was on hold, and then when Tolliver came back on the line Walter put the phone on speaker.

Tolliver was saying, “I'm getting other reports. She says looks like they're all dying. She says their stingers can still hold venom — I'll be sending my people to collect them but meanwhile keep everybody away. She says Flynn engineered a fast-growth gene, he was hurrying up the moons, he wanted to see the effects in action — the sonofabitch — but she says his notes say the side effect is likely sterility so those polyps at Diablo might be the last generation. We can only goddamn hope.”

Walter said, “By 'she' I assume you mean Dr. Russell.”

“That's right, Violet Russell, she's here with me now.”

“Here, where?” I asked.

After a moment he answered, “Fresco Cafe.” And then in the background he was speaking to a waiter, “We'll take it with us,” and then he came back to us to say, “Every time I order olallieberry pie these goddamn jellyfish interfere.”

I said, “You and Violet Russell and olallieberry pie for breakfast? Romantic.”

He didn't respond to that. I figured he blushed. I figured he deserved a happy morning.

And then we heard Dr. Russell, in the background, “We'll have the pie now, Doug. Your people can collect the specimens and I'll get to them this afternoon. More will probably be coming in. No need to dash off right now.” There was the clink of dishes being set down, and then Russell, once more, “We're in it for the long haul.”

I wondered if she was referring to herself and Tolliver — the romantic breakfast being just the start.

I feared she was referring to the sea. To the changes, where the ecosystem is flipping. To the new normal out there, where jellyfish are on the rise.

As for me, I wondered if Oscar Flynn's big bad boys were going to stay put in our patch of ocean, for the long haul. Sure, they were chipped and could be tracked. But then what? According to Russell, if they're threatened as they die, they release billions of reproductive seeds which produce more polyps, and grow into more big boys.

I shivered.

Walter and I moved up to the dry sand and sank down, wriggling our toes into the warmth. Keeping an eye on the people drawn to the little saucers coming in on the tide. Waiting for Tolliver's people to come collect them.

Looked like we weren't going to be getting on the road any time soon.

After a time baking in the sun, I asked, “No wisdom from the ancient mariner?”

Walter took his own sun-warmed time to reply. “Best not commit a crime against nature.”

I nodded. “Food for thought.”

We fell silent.

After another pensive pause, he said, “Here's more food for thought. We could pick up an olallieberry pie, for the road.”

I nodded.

Now that gave me a measure of comfort. Some things just never change.

I had some help identifying the wrong words:

I want to thank the following science experts in their fields for information, education, reading the book, giving me terrific suggestions and support: Guy Cochrane, G. Nelson Eby, Raymond C. Murray, Jenny Purcell.

Thanks to Russell Dwiggins for the diving tutorial.

If there are factual or technical errors in Skeleton Sea, they are mine alone.

Thanks to the following for reading and commenting on the book: Wanda Sue Downs, Don Dwiggins, Russell Dwiggins, Quinn Richardson, Catherine Thomas-Nobles, Emily Williams, J.T. Yeager.

An added note of appreciation goes to Emily Williams for consulting on beer, teenage slang, and professorial style;)

To Chuck Williams, for the support, reality checks, patience, wisdom — thank you. Seven houses full.

A big thanks and a margarita toast go to the Cayucos gang.

I have one final thank you, to an amazing man who wanted to read this book, who died before I completed the manuscript.

I first met him as a reader who wrote to tell me how much he enjoyed my series. From there, we struck up a friendship, talking about writing and music (he was a talented musician) and travel and family and the odds and ends that find their way into correspondence. We talked about his illness and — I hope and believe — that gave him a small measure of support. We exchanged some laughs. I smile now, remembering him.

To a smart, funny, talented, deeply kind man: Michael D. MacDonald.