Bone Deep

by Randy Wayne White

  “Stay here,” Owen said, unbuckling his seat belt. “I know those guys.”

  I replied, “Take your time,” and opened the oversize envelope he had presented me. Inside was a check for ten thousand dollars made out to Sanibel Biological Supply LLC. There were also mining statistics and a stack of vintage photos that tracked the history of Mammoth Ridge Mines. But no list of artifact collectors gleaned from records of the now-defunct company. An innocent oversight—I hoped.

  Down an incline, fifty yards away, Owen was making progress with the drunks. The drunks were laughing, but still in possession of a loaded rifle. I returned my attention to the envelope.

  Fifty pages of stats—I set them aside because the old photos were more fun. I shuffled through several: Leland’s grandfather, circa 1900, shovel in hand, smiling up from a crater—his Albright genetics towering over a team of workers. A one-room store, Hooker’s, in nearby Fort Meade, where a shed of white clapboard was the first Albright home. Photo by photo, shovels gave way to steam engines on rails, then a larger dragline afloat on a canal of its own making.

  The grandfather, Henry Leland Albright, was assembling his dynasty.

  The status of Owen and the drunks de-escalated into a private conversation while I browsed. It was impolite to intrude, so I skipped ahead through the decades, but refocused when, instead of men and mining equipment, I came to a black-and-white photo of an . . . elephant?

  Yes, an elephant. I turned it over. On the back, in elegant script, was written Barnabus, 1938 HLJ.

  HLJ was Henry L. Albright. Barnabus, I decided, was the elephant’s name. But why a photo? Puzzling until I remembered the obvious: Ringling Brothers and other circuses have wintered in Florida for more than a century. The founder of Mammoth Mines had bought Barnabus, a mammoth Indian elephant, as a mascot.

  Correction: Elephants. Henry Albright had owned two . . . no, three elephants. Photos from the 1950s told me the family had accumulated at least five of the animals, including a young male.

  Had the tradition continued? I kept looking. It would explain why Leland had found my question about elephants an amusing understatement the night we’d met.

  Instead of more elephants, a photo of an Egyptian-sized sand dune caught my eye. I was sitting near a dune of similar size. It took a few seconds to factor in erosion and wind-seeded foliage. The Jeep, I realized, was parked where a photographer had stood in 1945. A few photos later, I saw . . . snow skis in Florida . . . ?

  Yes . . . a party of bobby-soxers and GIs on leave had once skied down the sand mountain in front of me. Slalom Beach, written in pencil. After their descent, skiers had cooled themselves in the lake. The lake appeared silver in several photos but was a milky turquoise when I reconfirmed landmarks.

  The Albright family and friends had enjoyed a century of fun on this property, judging from what I saw. An idea popped into my head: Instead of mining for phosphate, why not stock the lake with bass and turn the acreage into a green retreat for tourists? Keep the wooded lanes, restore the creeks, but lose the erosion and exotic plants. Albright was a businessman, though. Because I am not, I got out, found a tree, and contemplated the merits of the idea while I urinated.

  Midstream, I heard Owen holler, “Hey, don’t!” For an absurd moment, I thought he meant me. I was grabbing for my zipper when a bee buzzed overhead in synch with a rifle shot.

  Not a bee . . . a bullet. I’d damn near been shot.

  An awkward moment later, I saw Owen trying to wrestle the rifle away from the drunks. I sprinted downhill, yelling, “Which one of you idiots did that?”

  Surprise. The men didn’t realize the Jeep contained a sizable passenger. No . . . a misread on my part—they’d thought Owen was alone. It was in their cloaked exchange as much as their eager denials. As I drew nearer, apologies replaced the denials, but then beer courage took over.

  “It was an accident,” one of them said—a lean, good-looking blond guy. “Lighten up.”

  “Yeah, man,” the other said. “Get over it.”

  In some, fear sparks anger. Count me among them. Owen had the rifle. I yanked it away from him, popped the magazine and skipped it into the lake. A .22 hollow-point was in the chamber. I cleared the chamber and hurled the rifle into the water, too. It spun like a baton but made a more satisfying splash.

  The drunks managed eye contact when I faced them. “Now I’m over it,” I said.

  “Goddamn, Orville. Who is this jerk?”

  Orville, a variation of the stepson’s first name, Owen. I asked him, “These are friends of yours?”

  I had spooked him also, but he covered it by becoming businesslike. “Doctor Ford is a hired consultant, and I don’t blame him one damn bit. So both of you leave . . . now.”

  When they balked, Owen tried to mediate, saying, “Look, guys . . . we’ll find the rifle—probably won’t even need tanks. Don’t make me call the cops.”

  They were three men, similar age, good teeth and tended hair, Owen, with olive eyes and skin, standing with two upper-class scions, Yankee stock, out for a beery Sunday. The three men were friends, I realized. Proof was provided when the good-looking blond guy said, “Don’t forget what we talked about . . . Owen.”

  A private message had been delivered, that was obvious. The men left, their red truck fishtailing.

  “You trust them as dive buddies?” I asked.

  The stepson, who Leland claimed was starting to come around, replied, “Not anymore.”

  NINE

  Inhabitants of stone . . . Bone fragments everywhere . . .

  I didn’t realize we had been walking and driving over Florida’s petrified dead for nearly an hour. Looking down was all that was required. Soon, it would become obvious . . .

  Right now, though, I was preoccupied with Owen’s uneasiness. I had behaved like a loose cannon—in his mind, at least—and I wanted to make amends. So, once again, I apologized for losing my temper, but this time offered to go back and dive for the rifle. “It’s the least I can do for friends of yours. How deep is the lake?”

  Owen had the Jeep in four-wheel drive. He noticed the photos on the seat and referred to them, saying, “I’m surprised Leland included those. No one’s allowed to dive that lake . . . or any of the others—there are two more.”

  I allowed my attentive silence to ask the obvious.

  “It’s a respect thing. His father drowned here. I’m not sure which lake. That was twenty . . . I can’t remember how many years ago. It was long before he met my mother. People sneak in, of course. Christ, trespassers are our biggest problem.”

  I recalled Albright saying that a drinking problem, coupled with the murder of a security guard, had caused his father to close the mine. Owen knew that, no doubt, but it was not a subject a stranger could broach. So I said, “You invented that story about coming back with tanks.”

  “I had to tell him something.”

  I shrugged. “Then it’s good-bye, rifle.”

  Owen had been stony serious but cracked a smile . . . then couldn’t help laughing. “The look on their faces. My god! Actually, pretty funny, when you think about it.”

  Rather than spoil it by saying the bullet had passed within a foot of my head, I laughed.

  “I didn’t expect that from a biologist.”

  I had to explain it some way. “I have no idea why I did that. Too many movies, I guess.”

  “Shock, probably. Harris, the one with blond hair, he didn’t know you were up there. We graduated South Florida together. Harris was a crazy man back in the day, but he’s calmed down a lot. A damn good diver, he really is. The other one, I don’t know him that well.”

  It was Harris who had warned, Don’t forget what we talked about . . . Owen.

  Another impolitic subject—for now anyway.

  “You do a lot of diving together?”

  “Not lately, Lelan
d keeps me so busy. Harris, his family used to be in phosphate mining. Now they’re partners in a couple of dog tracks. Harris and I used to work at the tracks. We’d drive to the Keys on our days off, Palm Beach sometimes.”

  We talked about diving for a while, then dog-track racing. Owen explained, “We used to hit Vegas once a month, but I finally got smart and stopped the whole gambling thing. Gambling is for losers. No one ever wins.”

  He said the last part by rote, as if he had memorized it to convince himself. Leland had helped Owen out of some legal trouble, I remembered. Gambling, even as a hobby, is expensive. As a habit, it’s a bottomless pit.

  “I bet a couple of trifectas once,” I told him, “but what I really wanted to see was the dogs catch that damn mechanical rabbit.”

  The stepson laughed, starting to feel better. He located a hidden pack of cigarettes under the seat and didn’t seem to mind when I refused one by saying, “As long as the windows are open, your secret’s safe with me.”

  We drove to the back side of the sand pyramid, got out, then viewed another quarry. I opened my LaMotte test kit and took water samples. Used a spectrophotometer and filter flasks to take samples back to the lab. Because he asked, I explained what I was doing: a chromatograph test for volatile organics and pesticide analysis. The spectrophotometer was for inorganic compound identification.

  “Phosphorus flowing into the Glades and the Gulf is the big concern,” I said. “The flasks are for membrane filtration. Get samples under a microscope, I’ll look for fertilizer overload and coliform bacteria.”

  “Coliform?” Owen said. “That comes from human feces. You don’t have to worry about that here.”

  “It can, but I’ll check for all the pathogens—microbes, bacterium—a long list. Pathogenic stuff indicates degraded water quality. You have to ask yourself what happens if this quarry floods into the Peace River or the Myakka? You probably know that a phosphate dike broke a few years back. The runoff damn near killed those rivers, and we still don’t know what damage it did to Charlotte Harbor and the Gulf. Problem is, the sugar industry causes so much pollution, it’s hard to say who’s to blame.”

  Owen handled that okay. Nearby was a ridge that was eroded but provided a vista. He parked the Jeep. I followed him uphill, the crunch of fossils and bone fragments still unnoticed beneath my feet. By then, he was calling me Doc instead of Doctor Ford, which seemed to make it easier for him to recite straight from the phosphate industry manual.

  “Did you know it takes one ton of phosphate to produce enough phosphorus to grow a hundred tons of wheat? Corn, any grain, even pasture grass for cattle. Crops won’t grow unless we keep mining to produce fertilizer. That’s what most people don’t understand. Leland says you’re up on the latest studies, though.”

  My reply had a warning edge: “He’s wrong about that. But I do know that bullshit doesn’t flow uphill, and mining creates a lot of toxic waste. So you can skip the sales pitch. It would help to know what kind of project you have in mind.”

  The stepson didn’t handle that as well but dealt with it. “Did Leland tell you the project is confidential?”

  “They always are,” I said.

  “As long as you understand. The news media hates phosphate mining, so we can’t let it get out until Leland makes his decision. After that, we would hire a PR firm to smooth things over.”

  “Sounds like quite a project.”

  “Not by industry standards. Florida’s two biggest mining companies want to lease this land. With new technology, they think they can make it pay. The lease would run for fifteen years, and that’s the best part, in Leland’s mind. At the end, they would have to do a total land-water reclamation project. Companies are required to by state law. Leland cares—he really does. Sometimes I think he imagines he’s his grandfather. Like a debt he owes the family because his own father didn’t . . . Well, he let the business go to hell, to be honest.”

  The ridge where we stood was as rugged as a moon crater. Brazilian pepper, melaleuca trees, and other exotics had displaced native oaks and cypress. The lakes where I had taken water samples were clear but appeared lifeless, silent as alkaline soup.

  “This is what reclamation looks like?” I asked. “No wonder your stepsisters have a problem with it.”

  Owen had referred to the twins as recovering mall girls, but as a joke. Now he took Leland’s side. “That’s what Esther and Tricia can’t seem to understand. Six hundred and forty acres in this tract, and it hasn’t been touched since the equipment was pulled out more than twenty years ago. Reclamation laws didn’t come along until later. Before that, a mining company could trash a place and just go off and leave it. Things are different now. Leland—his company—would be paid royalties based on production, sure. But this land would be returned to the way it was a hundred years ago. That’s what I meant when I said he cares.”

  In my mind, I was weighing the enormity of such a project against the likelihood of results beyond a cosmetic cover-up.

  I was dubious. Owen sensed it, so he suggested we visit an area under restoration by the phosphate megacompany Mosaic Mining. “Thing is, Leland needs to make up his mind. The adjoining tracts south of here are owned by two other parties, and Mosaic, or the other company, want the whole parcel. The industry has to move south or die.”

  I asked, “Are you and the other owners competing for the same contract?”

  “No, the companies want all three or none—that’s the way they’re playing it now. One section is owned by Harris’s family—not the entire acreage but the mining rights, which comes down to the same thing. The other owner . . . I probably shouldn’t say this, but he’s a lunatic. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Monty Mondurant?”

  I said, “I would’ve remembered a name like that.”

  “Vandar is his actual first name, but he goes by Monty. He’s from Morocco. You’ve really never heard of the guy?”

  The way Owen said it gave me the impression he was eager to discredit the man. “Tell me about him,” I said.

  “Monty is a walking freak show. When he lived in Beverly Hills, he was in the entertainment news a lot. Claims he’s related to the royal family, and he dated a famous singer, plus a bunch of actresses. Huge family money, but Monty can’t stay out of trouble. He had to leave California, then they ran him out of Palm Beach, too, he’s so . . . well, offensive. I’ll put it that way.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “Yeah, and twice was enough. In Palm Beach, the night his mansion burned down, his neighbors were actually chanting ‘Burn, Monty, burn.’ Can you imagine?”

  “You’re saying they torched the guy’s house?”

  “No . . . no one would believe that. Burglars did it, supposedly. But that’s what his neighbors were chanting. There’re about a hundred videos on YouTube.” He gave an odd look. “You don’t have the Internet?”

  “Friends tell me I need to get out more,” I said. “Is Mondurant’s property as big as this one?”

  “No. The mining companies don’t bother with anything less than two square miles, which is twice what we have. Harris’s family has rights to about four hundred acres, and Monty—or his family, more likely—he owns a little over two hundred.” Owen pointed to a corridor of trees. “The property lines join along what used to be a creek that runs to a pond on the south edge of our property. The old Albright family ranch is there—or what’s left of it.”

  “Vandar Mondurant,” I said, making a mental note. “What’s Harris’s last name?”

  “Sanford, but don’t worry about him. The Albrights and the Sanfords go way back. I’ll explain more on the way to the reclamation project. I think you’ll be impressed.”

  I followed Owen down the ridge, the ground beneath my feet oddly resonate. That’s what drew my attention. The sound. Indian shell mounds have a similar resonance. Finally, my eyes began to pay attention. I noticed wha
t was beneath my feet.

  • • •

  MIDWAY DOWN THE HILL, I stopped and knelt. Imbedded in marl was a giant shark tooth similar to those stolen from the late Finn Tovar.

  “Keep it,” Owen said, unconcerned, but then turned. “Wait . . . let me have a look. Those things are everywhere but the quality varies.”

  I handed it over and, for the first time, really focused on what I had believed to be sand and rubble. Rubble took shape and revealed that the ridge was composed of bone fragments. I saw another tooth, and a round white rock that turned out to be a whale vertebra. It weighed a couple of pounds when I hefted the thing. Under my foot was a delicate jaw with teeth. Nearby was a slab of brown, curved, the length of a boat rib. Again, I knelt.

  “That’s a fossilized manatee rib,” Owen said, distracted. “Or could be camel; they’re common. Mammoth bones and giant sloths, too, but those are bigger. Fragments are tough to identify.”

  I kept my response light. “You’re a collector?”

  “I’ve never met anyone in the phosphate business who wasn’t at least interested. Can’t help yourself. When I was in college—this was way before Leland hired me—I’d come here. Now, to help with upkeep, we charge fossil clubs a group rate, but I never leave them alone. A guy told me this little stretch was the bend of a prehistoric river. River bends are always good places for fossils.”

  The curve of the ridge, I noticed, continued across the property lines. There it gathered a bristle of trees and followed the remnants of a creek.

  “Some fossils must be valuable, huh?”

  Owen said, “Hardly ever,” but a little too quickly, and resumed his inspection. “Pretty nice megalodon tooth. Serration’s not bad. The bourlette’s mostly there, but the point’s broken off. The shark probably attacked something when he lost this tooth.”