Some kind of sea-monster, I thought.
She kicked it and the head came off.
Lanny gasped and dropped the trowel.
She came back to face Walter and me. “You talk to me. Up at the house.”
She stalked off toward the stairway, yelling over her shoulder to tell her brothers to stay put, turning once to see if Walter and I were following.
We were.
CHAPTER 17
Sandy led us from the top of the stairway across the bluff to the seaward side of the house. The place was nothing less than a Spanish-style manor and it spanned a long slice of oceanfront. We crossed a browning lawn that led to a red brick patio whose bricks, here and there, needed resetting. The house, like the grounds, needed tending. Peeling stucco. Wrought-iron trim with patches of rust. I guessed a place like this must be worth a fortune but maybe there wasn’t enough money to keep it up.
We went inside through a sliding glass door that wanted to stick.
Inside was dark planked flooring and white walls and white ceiling with heavy wood beams and sparsely-furnished rooms that led onto rooms as far as I could see in each direction. The room we stood in was furnished in cracked leather couches and a huge oak table, well scuffed.
Walter said, “Your house bests the castle.”
Sandy said, curtly, “It’s inherited.”
“Is that how you were able to fund your brother's business?”
She stopped in her tracks. “Who the hell told you about that?”
“Your brother.”
“Lanny has a big mouth.”
“I was talking about Jake,” Walter said. “The kayak business. But I take it that you also funded some enterprise of Lanny's?”
Her eyes narrowed. “We were talking about Lanny. So why bring up Jake and his business?”
“Keasling businesses appear to be entangled in the case we're working.”
“The hell,” she said.
“Jake told us about the proposed charter business, squid hunting. Using your boat.”
She took a long moment. “So?”
“So, considering the fact that Robbie Donie was doing squid charters, considering the feud he had with Jake — the ink incident — I find squid charters a topic of interest.”
“What are you saying? Spit it out. You saying Jake had something to do with Robbie going missing?”
“I’m simply wondering if Mr. Donie’s animosity extended to you — since it’s your boat that might be used to compete with him. Your investment.”
“You saying I had something to do with Robbie’s death?”
“There's no proof of death, as of now.”
“Too bad.” Her hands went to her hips. “I’ll be the first to send up a cheer when his body is found.”
“Oh?”
Her face hardened. “Robbie’s a punk. He got pissed at Jake, he dumped the ink on Jake’s dock. It’s old news — Robbie getting pissed and throwing a fit.”
I said, “He did more than just throw ink. He sabotaged your boat, or so Doug Tolliver suggests.”
“Doug’s a talker.” She scowled. “Look, I don’t know who sabotaged my boat. And if I could have proved it was Robbie I’d have sued the little shit for compensation. And I've got nothing more to say on the subject.”
“Then let's return to Lanny,” Walter said. “You thought I was referring to you funding his business.”
“He doesn't have a business.”
“He works for you, and for Fred Stavis — we ran into Mr. Stavis this morning and learned about Lanny's employment. Is that what you were referring to? Perhaps subsidizing his work with Stavis?”
“You doing an audit on the Keaslings?” Sandy pulled off her ball cap. Her hair bushed out. Her face hardened. “I make investments. With inherited money. It came from my grandparents, Keasling side. They had this place built. They made their money from real-estate investments. That didn’t stop my folks from earning a living fishing. Doesn’t stop me and my brothers making our own way. We work. We don’t throw our money around. But if there’s a sound investment, I invest. Dive Solutions was a sound investment. Fred agreed to hire Lanny. And Lanny earns his paycheck with Fred. Just like he does with me.”
I said, “That diver you rescued. Did Lanny know him?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Lanny seemed awfully upset.”
She glared at me. “He gets upset if somebody gets seasick.”
“I wondered if Lanny worked with the diver on one of Fred Stavis’s jobs.” Stavis had denied that; but I wondered if Sandy thought that.
“You do a lot wondering.” Sandy Keasling grew that dolphin smile. “But you don't know much, do you?”
I held up my cell phone and clicked on the photo of the yellow float. “Trying to.”
She started across the room. “Let’s finish this in my office.”
We followed her through three more sparsely furnished rooms and then into a small office. Battered wood desk and cheap office-supply chair. Tall filing cabinets, a shelf of books, a shelf of knickknacks. One wall of photos. Family photos, it seemed, and sea scenes. Walter paused to look. He pointed to one, a colorful shot of blue sky and a big blunt-nosed boat with a sun-streaked blonde leaning on the railing, smiling into the camera. She wore a ball cap with Captain stitched over the bill. A younger Captain Sandy Keasling. Walter said, “That’s a tugboat, isn’t it? Your boat?”
She nodded, brusque.
“What caused you to switch to tour boats?”
“None of your goddamn business.” She brushed past Walter to her desk and sat in the chair with her back to the window. The window overlooked the sea. Sun streamed into the room, haloing her hair, highlighting the orange-tinged dye job.
There were no other chairs so we stood facing her, squinting against the sun.
“Talk.” She leaned back in her chair. “Talk fast.”
I said, “Two days ago, on your boat, after you rescued that diver, I thought I saw Lanny take something red out of a black mesh dive bag and put it into his own duffel bag. What I glimpsed looked pretty much like this.” I again held up my cell phone, showing her the photo. “The only difference being the color.”
She was silent. Rigid.
I said, “As Walter explained on the beach, we found the yellow float in a place possibly associated with Robbie Donie.”
She stared at the photo as if trying to commit it to memory.
I said, “We believe Donie collected the yellow float, out at sea.”
She snapped, “People collect things. Including me.” She jerked a thumb at the knickknack shelf.
I noted the glass bowl full of round white disks. Sand dollars, I thought. Even her seashells were money.
She said, “You collect photos of floats, do you?”
“We have a coincidence,” Walter said. “A missing fisherman and an injured diver. Each, possibly, had possession of similar floats. And that’s why we’re interested in the red float from the diver’s bag.”
She said, “I got three things to say to you. Number one, Lanny didn’t take anything from the diver. Number two, I don't see why two floats, in the possession of two watermen, is so surprising. Number three, my family has nothing to do with either one of them.”
I asked, “What about number four?”
“There is no number four.”
“I think there is. We’ve got two watermen with two floats meeting with two traumas in the same general area, more or less, within a few days of one another. The same area, in general, where your boat took us to Birdshit Rock where the fish were half-dead and the crabs were on the run. The same area, in general, where both the Outcast and the Sea Spray encountered something that scraped their rub rails. So, number four.” I squinted past her sun-haloed head, out to sea. “What’s going on out there?”