Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 36

I woke, startled.

The big alarm clock numerals said 6:20.

I waited five minutes for sleep to resume but it was no use.

Shit.

I got up, used the bathroom, put on my robe and fuzzy socks, headed out to the kitchenette and like it was bred in the bone put the filter in the coffee maker and added water and a lavish measurement of Peet's French Roast and hit the start button.

There was not a sound of life from Walter's room.

There was not a vision of life outside the sliding glass door. Just fog. The curse of the coast.

While waiting for the coffee to brew I looked at the poster hung on the kitchenette wall: Life in the Kelp Forest. I'd never given it more than a passing glance. Now, stupefied with fatigue but unable to sleep, I counted fish. Putting names to faces I'd seen while diving Cochrane Bank. Senorita wrasse, rock fish, pipefish — yep yep yep. I moved on to the anemones and sponges and tunicates. To the sea urchins. Damned Keaslings. I moved on to the kelp itself. Giant kelp, bull kelp, and there was the damn kelp in which I'd become entangled, feather boa kelp. I paused at elk kelp, Pelagophycus porra. Hadn't seen that one. It was at the bottom of the poster, poking up from the seafloor, a stem-like stalk with long tapering blades.

Looking like a kelp bouquet.

I froze.

Flynn's words flooded into my mind: a bouquet of floats.

Maybe it was the Pelagophycus on the poster or the wake-up aroma of brewing coffee or maybe I'd been wrestling in my dreams with the improbabilities in Oscar Flynn's story and that's what had awakened me with such a jolt — but I knew now.

Flynn didn't tow his bouquet of floats behind a boat.

His red floats lived on the seafloor, attached by ropes to his instrument cage, continuously seeding the water because they stayed in the water. And with their ropes like stems and their bodies like long-petaled flowers they flared like an undersea bouquet.

We had found one plucked bloom from Flynn's red bouquet.

So where were the rest of the red floats?

We had seen the yellow floats, the yellow bouquet.

What if that had been, previously, a mixed bouquet? Painted reds hiding among the unpainted yellows, hiding in plain sight.

The floats sprouted from the cage, their ropes attached by snap hook. Easy on, easy off.

Then one yellow float broke free and Robbie Donie found it.

Then one red float broke free and Joao Silva found it.

Then things got dicey for Oscar Flynn. His experiment was proprietary and he did not want any more of his iron-seeding floats to be found. So he or one of his hirelings went diving and pruned the bouquet — replacing the remaining painted reds with unpainted standard no-puzzle yellow floats.

The coffee was ready.

I poured a mug and looked out at the invisible sea and sipped my coffee and the caffeine did its work and, buzzed, I thought of floats bobbing in the current, rubbing against the rock, and I thought of the first rule of forensic geology — whenever two objects come in contact, there is a transfer of material. The transferred material, down in the sea, might have been washed away.

Or not.

I went to Walter's door and pounded and when at last he peeked out, face bleary and hair all wild-man, I said, “We've got to call Doug, we've got to get out there.”