Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 18

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.”