Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 9

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?