“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 begun 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.