Skeleton Sea

by Dwiggins, Toni

By the time I reached the end of the narrow channel, the water was innocent of jellyfish. I left behind the bloom and the docks and the buildings and entered the gentle wilds of the widening bay.

  Way in the distance I thought I saw something riding the water. Something just at the limits of my vision.

  Lanny, I figured, in his kayak.

  I struck out in that direction.

  The bay widened—the far left shore growing bristly with eel grass and the far right shore rounded with rising sand dunes. I paddled harder, suddenly eager to reach Lanny and sweet-talk him or bully him into telling me what the hell was going on.

  There came a snort behind me and water splashed my back and I let out a cry that echoed across the water. My heart slammed. Jumbo squid out hunting? Did they hunt here in the bay? And if not squid, what? I pivoted in my seat to look the monster in the eye. It was a black shiny eye in a long torpedo body but it was not a squid. Just a sea lion.

  I expelled a breath. Go play somewhere else.

  I'd had my fill of sea creatures. Like I was late for dinner I plunged the paddle in the water and took off—no style, no rhythm, just me galumphing across the bay.

  The sea lion watched me go.

  Lanny in the distance watched me come. The bow of his kayak was turned to face me. He was still as the water, his paddle horizontal across his knees.

  He must have heard me cry out. Now, he watched me coming.

  I waved.

  The kayaker dipped his paddle and turned, moving deeper into the bay, and within a few minutes disappeared around a jutting spit of land.

  I found my rhythm and settled into it. I heard a splash, sounding a good distance behind me. I glanced back, saw nothing, smiled. Not going to get spooked, this time. Something unknown in the water and your mind takes off—but there’s always an explanation.

  I refocused on the invisible kayaker ahead.

  Wherever he was going, it was getting lonely out here. To my right the sand dunes grew and to my left, across the widening bay, the only structure along the shoreline was a long building with a lot of glass that shined in the moonlight. And then the leftward shoreline receded into darkness.

  I kept to the dunes side of the bay, following that bone-white shoreline.

  Within another five minutes I too rounded the jutting spit of land.

  And then I saw the figure on the dunes.

  Rising like elephant backs, the dunes up ahead on the right shoreline were white in the moonlight. The figure stood atop the largest of the elephants, a stick-figure silhouette at this distance, but the silhouette wore a pack. On the shore at the foot of the dune, at waterline, was a shape that strongly resembled a beached kayak.

  All right, then.

  I angled my kayak toward the dunes.

  Lanny fled over the top of the elephant.

  As I neared the shore I saw that the beached kayak was a Necky single, like mine, only green. It was stenciled with Captain Kayak’s logo. My craft arrowed onto the wide muddy beach, a couple yards from its green twin. I understood the need for a kayak here. Only a craft with a shallow draft could reach this beach. I assumed Lanny had come by kayak for just that reason. That, and stealthy quiet.

  I secured my paddle, took off my shoes and socks, rolled up the legs of my jeans, swung my legs free, and stepped into the muck to drag my kayak up high on the beach. The last thing I wanted was for it to drift free.

  Now what?

  Well lady, you either sit here and wait for Lanny to return, or you climb up that elephant and see what’s on the other side.

  I climbed, and the sand was soft and cool and slippery under my feet. As the dune steepened I felt the climbing-burn in my thighs. I was glad to reach the summit.

  Over the summit was a shallow descent onto gentle dune waves. In my night-limited vision I could make out the shine of the sea, in the distance, and the spikes of bushy dune vegetation, closer by. Nothing moving. Just me.

  “Lanny?” I said.

  No response.

  I sank to the sand. “Lanny?” I said again. “If you can hear me will you please show yourself? I followed you, I know you’re here, I know why you’re here. You came to bury the diver’s float.” Perhaps he was hiding in those bushes over there. I spoke louder, “I need your help. You helped me once, on the Sea Spray.” I thought I heard him, rustling the bushes. Or perhaps it was the sighing of the sea in the distance. “What’s going on in the ocean, Lanny? You said you broke something. Was it something to do with the float?” I listened for an answer. Silence. “Maybe we can fix it.” Whatever the hell it is. “What would Jock Cousteau do, Lanny?” Or should I have said it with a zzh, Jacques, instead of the hard J? Lanny’s slow but he’s not a moron, he must know the correct pronunciation. He’s just eased it to Jock. So does he think I’m mocking him? Does he even hear me? “Lanny, if something is broken in the ocean, you need to help.”

  There came a sound, a soft soughing noise of feet on shifting sand, only it did not come from the bushes in front of me, it came from behind, near the summit of the dune.

  I sucked in a breath. Heaved onto my hands and knees. Pushed to stand. Croaked, “Who’s there?”

  An eon passed in which nobody responded, and then the soughing started up again and a man topped the summit and came down the little hillock to join me. Black polo shirt, camo cargo pants, barefoot, carrying a pair of white boat shoes in one hand. “Hi there,” Fred Stavis said. Just a touch out of breath. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Remember me? This morning, out at Morro Rock? And here we meet again. You here for the same reason I’m here?”

  There was no answer to that. Questions, yes, but no workable answer.

  “Relax, I’m a good guy.” Stavis smiled to prove it. “And I’m not following you. I’m following Lanny. He up here?”

  I managed to shrug.

  “Good golly, did that sound menacing? Let me explain. I was working late at my dive shop—it’s on the waterfront, just where the channel widens into the bay. And I happened to glance at the water and who do I see out there kayaking? Lanny. Gave me pause, got to admit. You know, considering what happened to Robbie Donie and that diver, I just got concerned about Lanny out there at night by himself. I really did.” He gave a sharp nod, reaffirming his worry. “And then I saw another kayaker following him—you, it turns out, although I didn’t know it at the time. I thought, might as well go out there too, just to be on the safe side. I would have taken my outboard but it’s real low on gas, so I just hopped in my kayak and came along. Didn’t even take time to change clothes.” He lifted his boat shoes. He looked at my rolled jeans. “Looks like you came unprepared, too.”

  I nodded. Looks like Fred Stavis has a real convenient reason not to have done the obvious, take his outboard. If I were Stavis and wanted to stealthily follow somebody on a quiet night across still water, I’d take a kayak, too.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I found the two kayaks beached and thought I’d better climb up here and check things out. Managed to work myself into a bit of a worry. If I’d had my cell phone, I would've called Doug Tolliver and told him to get his patrol boat out here. I was that worried.”

  I found my voice. “But you didn’t have your phone.”

  “Forgot it in the rush.”

  I thought I heard a rustling in the bushes. It took all my will not to turn and look.

  Stavis’s head turtled around. He heard the sound, too. “Lanny. Stop hiding. You got two people up here looking for you and neither one of us bears you any ill will. While I was climbing up the dune I couldn’t help overhearing Miss Oldfield saying she thinks you have some float she wants, thinks you came here to bury it, so maybe you can come out here and put her mind at ease. As for me, you know you can count on me. You got a problem? Let’s put our heads together and solve it.”

  There was no response.

  “Lanny. Miss Oldfield here is shivering. Be a gentleman and come out so we can all go home and warm up.”

  Stavis was right. I’d be
gun to shiver, although the night was still warm. I suddenly wanted to signal to Lanny to stay in the bushes, stay away from smiling Fred Stavis.

  But Lanny was indeed a gentleman and came out of hiding.

  “Good man,” Stavis said.

  Lanny stopped in front of us, staring down at the sand. He wore, I took note, the T-shirt and board shorts he’d worn this afternoon for castle-building—and a good choice, as well, for kayaking. I’d wager that Lanny had left the Keasling hacienda with kayaking in mind. Needed to wait until dark, though. Did whatever he did until then. I considered his pack, and the trowel that snugged into the side mesh pocket. I considered the miles of dunes and the impossibility of my finding the hole he’d dug in the sand to bury the float. I wondered if he intended to retrieve it, at some point. The day he took it he could have thrown it into the garbage, and yet he did not. He kept it hidden somewhere—in his room, at home? And then, this afternoon, after Walter and I came to ask him what he’d taken from the diver’s bag—after we’d showed him the photo of the yellow float from Donie’s shrine—he panicked. And he came here to hide the red float.

  Stavis held out a hand to Lanny. “Shall we go?”

  Lanny looked up. “I’m not ready.”

  “I think it’s best if we all go together.”

  I reached in my pocket and brought out my cell. I said, to Stavis, “Or maybe I should call Doug?”

  Stavis held up his palms. “Nobody needs to call anybody.”

  “Except Jock.” Lanny now looked at me. His face was serious. “You should call Jock. Tell him there’s sick animals in the ocean. Tell him he should come. Tell him we need him.”

  Stavis gave a strangled laugh.

  I said, gently, “I can’t call Jock. He’s dead.”

  “I know that.” Lanny’s face bloomed into a wide smile. “But I got you. Both of you. You should see your faces. You thought I believe in ghosts. You can’t call ghosts on the phone, Cassie.” He turned to Stavis. “You can’t ask ghosts to fix things. You have to do it yourself.”

  CHAPTER 20

  We waited for Doug Tolliver to pick us up for the drive to meet the marine scientist who knew about coral. Tolliver had a few questions of his own about what was going on in his patch of ocean.

  We waited in silence.

  I yawned. Late night, last night. After returning from the dunes I had awakened Walter and told him where I'd been. He reacted poorly. “You went alone.” I shaped the story as spur-of-the-moment necessity and emphasized that we had all returned safely to harbor. No harm, no foul.

  What I couldn't offer was a solid payoff—just a reasoned assumption that Lanny had buried the red float somewhere in the dunes.

  Walter's response to that was, “It's a lot of sand.”

  ***

  I said, “Let's go wait on the beach until Tolliver comes.”

  It was sunny out there and I hoped it would brighten Walter's mood.

  We went out onto our little patio and stepped onto the sand and noticed a small crowd gathered down by the tide pools.

  “Let’s go see what’s up,” Walter said.

  I glimpsed a dark shape on the sand and I thought of the crumpled diver on the Keasling beach. And then as we neared, the shape became recognizable as a sea lion.

  I thought of last night’s sea lion, frolicking in the bay.

  This one wasn’t doing so well. It seemed to have been stranded by the retreating tide. It lay on its side, quite still, unresponsive to the group of people surrounding it. A man filled a bucket with seawater and bathed the creature. It lifted its head then, teeth snapping at the air. The man—and the crowd—backed away.

  And now I thought of the ailing sea life out at Birdshit Rock.

  “We should do something,” Walter said.

  A young woman in the crowd responded. “I already called the Marine Mammal Center. They’re on the way.”

  “Okay then,” I said to Walter. “We should go back and wait for Doug.”

  “He’ll see us from the parking lot.” Walter pointed.

  True enough. The motel parking lot bordered the beach.

  I felt like a gawker at a roadside accident standing here watching the poor animal. Tremors rippled its flanks. But Walter had folded his arms, standing guard, his protective urges in full bloom.

  Five minutes later a van pulled into the motel parking lot and the rescue team emerged: two men and a woman, at this distance notable primarily by their hair, the woman with a thick blond ponytail, one of the men nearly bald, the other with buzz-cut black hair. Buzz-cut guy led, stalking onto the beach. I stared, unwilling to believe that this huge man in black—black jeans, black sneakers, black aviator shades, only his T-shirt in green—was Oscar Flynn but as he neared, scowling, I had to believe.

  The team all wore green shirts with the logo Marine Mammal Research & Rescue.

  The bald man and the blond woman carried a huge mesh net.

  Flynn ignored us. He and his team circled the sea lion.

  And then a third green-shirted man emerged from the van and followed his team and I was once again taken aback. I recognized him before he set foot on the sand, by his spiky green hair. Captain Kayak sauntered down to join the group around the sea lion.

  He gave the blond woman a wink and me and Walter a nod.

  If I had to predict which residents of Morro Bay would join a marine mammal rescue effort, Oscar Flynn and Jake Keasling would be far down my list.

  The sea lion raised its head and made a growling noise.

  The bald man and the blond woman dropped the net to the sand.

  Flynn moved in. He began to speak in a low monotone, indecipherable words addressed to the creature whose head dropped back to the sand as if it had been drugged.

  Walter and I drew closer. I could understand Flynn’s words now.

  Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

  I was more stunned than the sea lion.

  And if that mockingbird won’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.

  The rest of the rescue team stood waiting, unsurprised, as Flynn recited his lullaby. And then the three of them unrolled the net.

  And if that diamond ring turns brass, Papa’s gonna buy you a looking glass. And if that looking glass gets broke, Papa’s gonna buy you a billy goat.

  The monumental absurdity of Oscar Flynn promising a billy goat to a sea lion would have made me laugh, but then the team threw the net over the mammal and it began to thrash, and Flynn raised his voice with more promises until the animal again subsided, and I was left, simply, impressed.

  Flynn turned on us. “What are you doing here?”

  No lullaby for us. We explained.

  He glanced up the beach at the motel, scorn on his face. That’s your lab?

  Jake smirked.

  Walter asked, “What will you do with the animal?”

  Flynn’s look came to Walter. “A truck’s coming. We’ll net it and carry it to the truck. The truck will take it a treatment center.”

  “Treatment for what?” I asked. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s not our job to diagnose.”

  “Oh come on, Oscar,” the bald man said, “we know it’s domoic. What else?”

  I said, “What’s domoic?”

  “See, there’s this thing called a harmful algal bloom out there.” The bald man pointed out to sea. “And that made this sea lion sick.”

  “How? He ate it?”

  “Yeah, the bloom’s full of bacteria. He ate the bacteria and that’s full of domoic acid.”

  “You’re wrong, Roger,” Flynn cut in. “Don’t talk about something when you can’t get the facts right. The algae is a genus of phytoplankton that includes diatoms that produce domoic acid, and domoic acid is a neurotoxin...” Flynn stopped himself.

  “Neurotoxin?” Walter stared at the sea lion. “Is that why it’s trembling?”

  Flynn squatted over the animal. I thought he was going to st
roke it but he was evidently too close to that mouth full of sharp teeth. Instead he resumed the monotone. Easy, boy, easy. Easier, I thought, for Flynn to relate to this sea creature than to his fellows on the beach. And that thought softened my view of Oscar Flynn. Rude to people, kind to animals. There was heart in the man. I thought back to the cave room at Flynn’s house. All that posturing about who did and who did not have a PhD was likely just that—posturing, covering up for social insecurity.

  I squatted beside him. “I think it’s great that you and your team do this work.”

  He looked at me. Black shades reflecting the sun. Mouth a flat line.

  Wrong approach. Too personal. I tried for more comfortable ground—the facts. “There were sick animals out at Birdshit Rock the other day. Do you think this algae...”

  “I think you should leave sick animals to the professionals.”

  “Okay.”

  The sea lion lifted its head, bared its teeth.

  “Get away. You’re scaring him.”

  I scrambled to my feet, getting away from the teeth, from the man.

  Roger, the bald man, jumped in. “It’s okay miss, Oscar just gets intense about this, about the blooms, what they’re doing to the ocean and the sea life and he...” Roger caught Flynn’s baleful stare. He ignored it, plunging ahead. “And he hates wrong facts. Well, that’s not quite right, I mean, can you have wrong facts? If they’re facts, they’re right. Right?” He began to sweat, not daring this time to look at Flynn. “Anyway, I meant to say diatoms, not bacteria. And sea lions get sick by eating the fish that eat the tiny animals that eat the diatoms. Like, a food chain? Anyway, these fish don’t get sick themselves but they concentrate the poison, and so when the sea lion eats them, he gets sick.”

  I asked, “What kind of fish?”

  “Probably anchovies.”

  It took a moment for Walter to turn to me, to lift his eyebrows, to no doubt register what I’d just registered. That of all the fish in the sea—even in the near sea, off Morro Bay—it was the anchovy that kept recurring in our investigation. Robbie Donie made his living fishing for them. The Keasling parents had made their living fishing for them. Lanny Keasling had assisted his dad. Jake Keasling scorned that livelihood. Sandy Keasling was proud of her parents’ livelihood and yet chose a different path. And then a container of toxic anchovies appeared in her beach cave, poisoning the poor diver she was sheltering. Convulsing diver, sea lion wracked with tremors. Neurotoxins. So was it domoic acid that sickened the diver? Not rancid anchovies—anchovies that fed on the harmful algal bloom and concentrated the toxin?