Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 11

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

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

Fennel.

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

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

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

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

Theoretically, it could have originated offshore.

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

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

And so we had to look at context.

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

That, and the fennel in my sample.

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

My seed was green. Fresh.

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

Walter said, “Getting anywhere?”

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

“Thorough.”

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

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

Shape mattered.

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

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

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

He looked up.

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

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

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

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

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

I groaned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s not an ordinary fellow.”