Don't Turn Your Back on the Ocean

by Janet Dawson

  Twenty-four

  THE CENTRAL COAST LOCALS CALL IT PASO, SHORTHAND for the town’s name, which is Spanish for Pass of the Oaks. The oak trees were indeed in great supply, covering the rolling hills that surrounded Paso Robles, their dark green leaves contrasting with the brown grass under a blue October sun and shading the sidewalks of the town’s residential areas.

  It was blistering hot in the midafternoon sun. One huge tree shaded part of the asphalt lot in front of the veterinary clinic. I left my car under the tree and walked into a reception area with a linoleum floor and chairs against the walls. The air held the mixed scents of wet dog and disinfectant. Next to the counter I saw an elderly woman with an equally geriatric Pomeranian sitting patiently on her lap. Opposite her, a woman my own age sat with a little girl about four, who kept squirming on her chair. On the floor in front of them was a wooden carrier with a handle, containing a calico cat who declaimed, in no uncertain yowl, her utter dismay at being here.

  I gave my name to the receptionist and asked for Susan Dailey. “Oh, yes,” she said, smiling distractedly as the phone rang. “Maya called. Susan’s expecting you.”

  She answered the phone, cutting off the insistent peal, listened briefly, and made an appointment for Yazoo, without indicating whether Yazoo was canine, feline, or something else entirely. I picked up one of the clinic’s cards and examined it. It listed not only the animal hospital but the Daileys’ wildlife rehab center, which must be in a different location, judging from the photographs on the wall behind the receptionist. They showed a building in a wooded setting, and a variety of wild animals, including a raccoon, a badger, and a black bear cub.

  I heard another dog barking somewhere at the back of the clinic. Then the door to one of the examining rooms across the hallway opened and a man came out holding a leash. At the end was a yellow lab puppy with enormous paws. He’d be huge when he grew into them. The pup made a beeline for the cat carrier. The calico hissed and spat in protest. The man stopped at the counter, pulling out his wallet. He tugged on the leash and the puppy galumphed over to snuffle my knees.

  “Susan will see you now.” The receptionist pointed down the hallway. The examination-room doors were closed, but one door was open, leading to an office. A desk with a computer stood against one wall and the rest were full of shelves lined with books. An open back door evidently led out to some dog runs, because the barking and the wet dog smell were prevalent here.

  Susan Dailey was a small woman in her late forties, her short hair completely silver. She wore sensible shoes, khaki pants, a white lab coat over a checked shirt. Her eyes in her sharp-featured face were the same light gray as her hair. At the moment they held a somewhat skeptical expression.

  “I only agreed to see you because Maya called,” Susan Dailey said as she glanced at my business card, exhibiting the same suspicion her friend had. “I didn’t know this Ariel Logan.”

  “But you did talk with her. Three weeks ago, before classes started at Cal Poly.”

  She nodded and waved me to a chair as she sat at the desk. “Yes, mid-September. She had some questions about the seals at Avila.”

  “What happened to the seals? Maya didn’t give me any details.”

  Susan Dailey shrugged. “The oil company happened to the seals. Of course, I can’t prove anything. I’ve been warned I shouldn’t make accusations. But I just don’t care.”

  She didn’t elaborate about who’d been warning her off. But she cared very much about the seals, I thought, seeing fire in the gray eyes. There was much anger there and I was about to hear why.

  “It happened about six years ago, down by Avila and Pismo,” she said, referring to the two south-county beach towns. “Though some of them were reported as far north as Morro Bay. We—I mean, the wildlife center—started getting calls about seals in trouble. I was doing marine mammal rescues then, so off I’d go in my truck, all by myself. I picked up over a hundred animals in a three-month period. All adult females, all with grand mal seizures, on shore or just a few feet into the water.”

  I struggled with the image of this small woman hauling a seal off the beach or out of the water and into the back of her truck. Susan Dailey sighed and ran a hand through her hair.

  “Some recovered,” she continued, “if I got them back to the center fast enough. We’d cool down the body temp, give them something to relieve the seizures, and flush their systems with fluids. But some died, in the back of my truck, before I could get them here.”

  “What caused the seizures?”

  “That’s the part I can’t prove,” she said. “Probably a refined petroleum product, absorbed directly into the system. At the time I talked with several local surfers and fishermen. They said some days the ocean smelled like oil or chemicals. The surfers wouldn’t go into the water. And the fishermen told me that the fish were migrating out of their usual grounds.”

  “How long did this go on?”

  “It was sporadic for about four years. We’d get large numbers of seals, then it would stop, and start up again. The first two years were the worst.”

  “Did anyone do anything about it?” If she couldn’t prove anything I doubted it, and her next words bore me out.

  “Not a damn thing. Some guy from one of the state agencies did tell me I could pay for a toxicology scan to find out what was causing the seizures. A scan’s expensive, about a thousand bucks. You have to specify exactly what toxin you’re looking for, or it’s useless. This same guy told me I’d have to prove the stuff came from the refinery and not some passing barge.” Her laugh was bitter. “Fat chance.”

  “Is this still going on?”

  “I haven’t heard any reports since we had that oil spill two years ago. But by that time I wasn’t doing any marine rescue work anymore.”

  “Why not?” I already knew the answer. The fire left her gray eyes. It had burned out.

  “I couldn’t stand to look at any more dead seals,” Susan Dailey said matter-of-factly. “At the time I made the decision, I figured if I didn’t pick up the animals, the whole coastline would be littered with carcasses. Maybe then someone would get angry and do something about it.”

  She shook her head. “It didn’t work that way. Other people are doing what I don’t have the heart to do anymore. They don’t understand it’s just like cleaning up after a drunk. That allows the drunk to escape the consequences of his actions. The oil companies are just like alkies, Ms. Howard. They don’t accept responsibility for what they dump into the water—or what gets killed because of it. And the good citizens of this county are afraid of scaring off the tourists.”

  After talking with Maya and Susan Dailey, I wanted to haul out a picket sign and send money to some of those organizations that had Ariel Logan on their mailing lists. But Ariel was the reason I was here.

  “Why was Ariel interested in this specific incident? Particularly if you’re not doing rescue work anymore?”

  Susan Dailey opened a desk drawer and took out a sheet of paper. “I took some notes when I talked with her. Today I reread them, to refresh my memory. In August she saw two sea lions in distress. In the water off Point Pinos. She went to call for help, but by the time she returned, the sea lions had disappeared.”

  I nodded. “I know about that. She reported it to the Monterey SPCA.”

  “Marsha Landers is a friend of mine,” Susan Dailey said. “I called her after I talked with Ariel. She told me it appeared to be an isolated incident. Of course, she’s been occupied by those damned pelican mutilations. They started about the same time.”

  I frowned, recalling the horrific pictures Marsha had shown me when I’d visited the Monterey wildlife center. Could one be connected with the other?

  “Ariel had heard about the seals at Avila,” Susan Dailey continued, “from my friend Maya at Coastwatch, and she knew I’d been involved in rescuing them. She described what she’d seen and asked if I had any theories about what caused it. I really couldn’t say, based on her description
, not having seen the sea lions myself.”

  “Did Ariel have any theories?”

  “She wondered if it might be paint or some other chemical. I told her they’d probably gotten into something toxic. She already knew that. If she had any other theories she didn’t share them with me.” Susan Dailey sighed. “I told her it was damn near impossible to pin down what it was or where it came from. Look at what happened to me. All those seals, and I couldn’t prove what it was or where it came from.”

  Susan Dailey kept talking about proof, as though her inability to nail the oil company for the dead and dying seals was eating away at her. What if Ariel had a hunch, I thought, one she’d tried to prove?

  “The bay’s a sanctuary now,” I said, thinking out loud. “Does that mean it’s safe?”

  “Not as far as I’m concerned. Monterey’s unique and fragile. It wouldn’t take much to ruin the whole thing. A little human error goes a long way. Look at what happened up at Dunsmuir,” she said, referring to an incident a couple of years ago in Northern California, when a railroad car dumped a load of herbicide and killed every living organism in a forty-five-mile stretch of the upper Sacramento River.

  “According to the water quality control board,” I said, “there’s a zone of prohibition from the Salinas River to Point Pinos. Nothing goes into the bay inside that zone.”

  Susan Dailey shook her head. “It doesn’t cover the whole bay. And the sanctuary’s bigger than that. A lot of territory to cover. Who knows what gets dumped off a passing boat, where it can wash into the bay. All I know is that the ocean ecosystem wasn’t designed to be a sewer. That’s what we’ve made it. And it’s about to reach the breaking point.”

  Twenty-five

  AFTER BREAKFAST THURSDAY I DROVE NORTH ON Coast Highway 1, past Cambria, nestled in the tree-covered hills above the coast. The next town after that is San Simeon, the name serving both the tiny coastal village and the bay it faces. It’s also the site of a rich man’s indulgence.

  In the nineteenth century George Hearst acquired huge parcels of what was originally mission land. He and his son, newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, added to their ranch until it covered fifty miles of coastline. On the hills above San Simeon, Hearst and architect Julia Morgan built the Casa Encantada—the Enchanted Castle. It’s a vast bizarre palace, a warehouse for Hearst’s collections of art and antiques. After the old man died his family deeded Hearst Castle to the state. Now the huge house is operated as a state historical monument, where visitors on guided tours can stare at the tapestries and the massive furniture. The castle’s popularity among tourists accounts for the strip of motels clustered at the San Simeon turnoff.

  As I passed this intersection I glanced to my right, spotting the castle as it stood bathed in the early-morning sun. Then I looked ahead and concentrated on the road, an absolute necessity if one is going to drive this route.

  Here in northern San Luis Obispo County, the coastline is gentle, almost at sea level, but soon the road gains elevation. Crossing into Monterey County, the road climbs and twists along the dramatic hairpin curve at Salmon Creek, entering an area known as Big Sur. Now the highway becomes a two-lane odyssey of hairpin curves and spectacular vistas, snaking nearly a hundred miles along the ledges carved from the Santa Lucia Mountains. The land plunges steeply into the Pacific Ocean. This is the end of the continent, a fact brought home to the driver who glances to the west and sees not so much as a guardrail, nothing, in fact, but air and water and jumbled rockscape.

  Along the cliffs of Big Sur the Pacific Ocean is anything but peaceful. Riptides and dangerous currents, white foam on blue water, the ocean crashes incessantly against the rocky perimeter of land, carving sheer cliffs, offshore formations called sea stacks, and the occasional inaccessible curve of sandy beach. To the east the Santa Lucias rise steeply and abruptly, their rugged and isolated back country inhabited by mountain lions, wild pigs, forest rangers on horseback, and hardy individuals who choose to hike the trails of the Ventana Wilderness and the Los Padres National Forest.

  I was in no hurry. This is not a road for haste. I drove at a slow steady pace, occasionally using a turnoff to let some idiot speed demon pass, now and then getting stuck behind a tourist in a large camper, moving even slower than I was. Several times that morning I stopped at one of the vista points to sample the breathtaking view, thankful that this stretch of ocean was protected by the sanctuary. Past Nepenthe and Ventana the highway moved inland to the little town of Big Sur. I stopped for lunch, then continued north, past the lighthouse at Point Sur and up the steep ledge of Hurricane Point.

  This was where Gunter and Janine Beckman died eighteen months ago, when Gunter’s car plunged off the cliff to my left. From the top of Hurricane Point I saw the spectacular curve of Bixby Bridge, towering over the steep canyon below. I drove slowly across the span, marveling as I always did, at both the spectacular view and the engineering feat required to construct this bridge.

  Around the next curve was a relatively straight stretch of highway, then another bridge, not quite as high or as long as the one I’d just crossed. This bridge spanned Rocky Creek. I didn’t drive across it. Instead I pulled my Toyota off the highway, onto the dirt verge. I turned off the engine, sitting for a moment as several cars passed. Then I got out of the car and crossed the two-lane strip of asphalt.

  Rocky Creek Bridge has stone walls, about waist-high, with narrow sidewalks on both sides. A short guardrail stands at each of the approaches to the span. I walked about ten feet onto the bridge and peered over the stone wall. Below me a steep cliff plunged some hundred and fifty feet down to a sliver of beach at the mouth of Rocky Creek, visible now that the tide was out I saw the backside of a blue station wagon, its metal skin pierced by rocks, scoured by sand and salt water. The irretrievable remains of an accident, it served as a reminder that when driving the coast road it doesn’t pay to let your attention wander.

  Had Ariel Logan let something distract her as a murderer stood behind her and slashed down at her head with a wrench or a tire iron? I retraced my steps along the bridge and walked past the guardrail to stand on a hump of earth near the south approach. There was nothing here to stop a body’s plunge, just a few puny bushes tossing in the breeze, clinging to the rocky soil.

  Ariel’s body had washed up somewhere on the beach below, after several days in the water. Perhaps it had been caught in the kelp or wedged in the granite and basalt rocks that had long ago broken off these cliffs and were now scattered offshore. I moved a few steps closer to the cliff’s edge, looking at the mute and unforgiving landscape. The tide was coming in now, and water surged forward over the rocks and sand, tasting the crushed metal of the old car wreck, a flavor it had sampled many times before.

  Ariel had left her car at Rocky Point Restaurant. How did she get to this bridge? Had she gone into the water here? Or was she brought to this shore by the current?

  I scanned the beach and the slopes above it, spotting a trail just visible below the private house on a small headland that jutted into the ocean on the north side of Rocky Creek Bridge. There were trails threading the headlands between here and the restaurant, but this was all private property. That made it more likely that Ariel had met someone at Rocky Point, or been killed there, and the body disposed of here or somewhere between. I peered at the surging ocean, hoping that something would leap out at me.

  Instead it was I who jumped, startled by a blaring horn as a red convertible sailed by a few feet from me in the southbound lane of Highway 1. The soles of my sneakers slipped on the gravel. I reached for something to hold on to and grasped the comforting and solid metal side of the guardrail. It wouldn’t take much, I realized, my heart beating rapidly, to tumble over the side and join the corpse of that station wagon.

  There’s a sign posted near a narrow path just below the Rocky Point Restaurant. It reads: CAUTION. HAZARDOUS WAVES. ROCKY POINT IS OCCASIONALLY HIT BY RANDOM WAVES OF GREAT SIZE WHICH CAN CARRY AN ADULT OFF THIS SHORELINE. E
NTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  Don’t turn your back on the ocean. I heard voices off to my left and looked up. This warning hadn’t deterred the three people climbing a rocky outcropping that jutted toward the sea. Farther to the south I saw the bridge I’d just left, floating above Rocky Creek.

  I turned and walked back toward the building. The restaurant and bar were one story, painted gray, the seaward side nearly all glass, to take full advantage of the view. On this end of the building, the bar opened onto an outdoor terrace with chairs. There were two parking lots. The larger, where I’d left my Toyota, was several feet lower than the upper lot, just outside the restaurant’s main entrance. It was the late end of lunch and the dining room with its sweeping vista was half-empty.

  “The police were already here. Several times, in fact.” The manager was a blunt-featured man in his forties, his sandy hair receding. “I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  I looked at him and didn’t say anything, so he decided to fill the silence. “I noticed the car on Tuesday. White Honda Civic, sitting in the far corner of the lower lot. Who knows how long it had been there? When it was still there on Wednesday I called to have it towed. Next thing I know, the sheriff’s department is out here. They said it belonged to some woman who was missing. I hear they pulled her body out of the water the next day, down by Rocky Creek.”

  I removed the photograph from my purse, the snapshot Maggie Lim had given me, which showed a smiling Ariel Logan standing between her parents. “Please take a look at this and tell me if you’ve ever seen the woman in the middle. She may have come in here on Friday or Saturday.”

  The manager’s eyes flicked over the snapshot. “I know that’s her, because the deputy showed me a picture. I never saw her. But Gina says she may have seen her Friday evening.”