Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 2

“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.”