Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 13

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.