He said, using his shy voice again, “I'm on my boat.”
She went to his window and peered out at the sea but the fog hung over the water and hid anything that rode it.
She was fully awake now, shivering in her fuzzy robe, and her thoughts turned cold. Whatever he's doing, whatever boat he's on, let him do it. Let him screw it up — she'd lay odds that he would screw it up, whatever it was. Go back to bed, she told herself. She was beat, she hadn't slept well, she'd gone to sleep with the radio on, torturing herself listing to the news reports about the day's craziness, and then there was a tribute to Linda Bannock, a marathon swimmer in her sixties who Sandy couldn't believe was gone from the sting of a moon jellyfish. Next thing she knew she was jolted awake by some crappity late-night loudmouth show and it took her an hour to get back to sleep. She was owed another hour's sleep. Go back to bed, she ordered herself, and when you wake up just go about your business. You'll hear soon enough what Lanny's got into this time.
“Sandy?” His voice rose. “Are you there? I called to tell you I want you not to worry.”
She cursed. Would she never be able to get free? She said, “Listen to me, Lanny. You tell me where you are and what you're doing, and if you don't tell me with your next breath then I'm going to take the Sea Spray out and find you. Little brother.”
He said, with his next breath, “I'll come and get you.”
CHAPTER 36
I woke, startled.
The big alarm clock numerals said 6:20.
I waited five minutes for sleep to resume but it was no use.
Shit.
I got up, used the bathroom, put on my robe and fuzzy socks, headed out to the kitchenette and like it was bred in the bone put the filter in the coffee maker and added water and a lavish measurement of Peet's French Roast and hit the start button.
There was not a sound of life from Walter's room.
There was not a vision of life outside the sliding glass door. Just fog. The curse of the coast.
While waiting for the coffee to brew I looked at the poster hung on the kitchenette walclass="underline" Life in the Kelp Forest. I'd never given it more than a passing glance. Now, stupefied with fatigue but unable to sleep, I counted fish. Putting names to faces I'd seen while diving Cochrane Bank. Senorita wrasse, rock fish, pipefish — yep yep yep. I moved on to the anemones and sponges and tunicates. To the sea urchins. Damned Keaslings. I moved on to the kelp itself. Giant kelp, bull kelp, and there was the damn kelp in which I'd become entangled, feather boa kelp. I paused at elk kelp, Pelagophycus porra. Hadn't seen that one. It was at the bottom of the poster, poking up from the seafloor, a stem-like stalk with long tapering blades.
Looking like a kelp bouquet.
I froze.
Flynn's words flooded into my mind: a bouquet of floats.
Maybe it was the Pelagophycus on the poster or the wake-up aroma of brewing coffee or maybe I'd been wrestling in my dreams with the improbabilities in Oscar Flynn's story and that's what had awakened me with such a jolt — but I knew now.
Flynn didn't tow his bouquet of floats behind a boat.
His red floats lived on the seafloor, attached by ropes to his instrument cage, continuously seeding the water because they stayed in the water. And with their ropes like stems and their bodies like long-petaled flowers they flared like an undersea bouquet.
We had found one plucked bloom from Flynn's red bouquet.
So where were the rest of the red floats?
We had seen the yellow floats, the yellow bouquet.
What if that had been, previously, a mixed bouquet? Painted reds hiding among the unpainted yellows, hiding in plain sight.
The floats sprouted from the cage, their ropes attached by snap hook. Easy on, easy off.
Then one yellow float broke free and Robbie Donie found it.
Then one red float broke free and Joao Silva found it.
Then things got dicey for Oscar Flynn. His experiment was proprietary and he did not want any more of his iron-seeding floats to be found. So he or one of his hirelings went diving and pruned the bouquet — replacing the remaining painted reds with unpainted standard no-puzzle yellow floats.
The coffee was ready.
I poured a mug and looked out at the invisible sea and sipped my coffee and the caffeine did its work and, buzzed, I thought of floats bobbing in the current, rubbing against the rock, and I thought of the first rule of forensic geology — whenever two objects come in contact, there is a transfer of material. The transferred material, down in the sea, might have been washed away.
Or not.
I went to Walter's door and pounded and when at last he peeked out, face bleary and hair all wild-man, I said, “We've got to call Doug, we've got to get out there.”
CHAPTER 37
Sandy waited on the Keasling dock, shivering in her fleece.
She carried a bag with her slicker and gloves and rubber boots because he'd told her she might need them and that had got her curious. But he'd refused to tell her why and that got her mad.
When the boat materialized out of the fog, she cursed. It was the Outcast.
When Lanny pulled Robbie Donie's pathetic old fishing vessel up to her dock, she leapt aboard with another curse.
But the look on her brother's face curdled her fury.
He looked so nervous. And proud. He wore his usual Sea Spray fleece and red beanie but the way he stood the deck of the Outcast was not the usual. He stood like a captain. Exactly the way she stood.
“What is this?” she said. She pointed to his slicker and gloves and boots on top of the gear locker, where she'd tossed her bag. “We going anchovy fishing? Keasling family nostalgia day?”
He gave a nervous grin and shook his head.
In a way, she was sorry.
Lanny piloted the old tub with surprising skill.
Eh, she thought, not so surprising. She'd taught him well, on the Sea Spray. And the Outcast was a simpleton's vessel, the kind of boat made for a fisherman who doesn't want to be bothered with complicated equipment. Who can only afford a second-hand low-tech basic tub. It had suited Robbie Donie to a T, she thought.
And, she thought with a twinge, it suited Lanny to a T.
The Outcast plowed ahead through the fog.
The wheelhouse was bare-bones, just basic nav screens and wheel and pilot's chair. She'd been reading the screens over Lanny's shoulder. She knew where they were, she knew these waters off the Morro Bay coast like she knew the way from her bedroom to her bathroom in the dark. What she didn't know was where they were headed or what 'the mission' was.
Lanny called it The Mission.
He told her he had a job to do and that job would make her proud.
She'd tried blustering, threatening, but he wouldn't explain anything more. He wanted to show her. She'd finally decided it was easier to wait and see. No — the truth was that she'd seen that she couldn't make him tell her. She'd seen that something had changed between them. She no longer had the automatic upper hand. Maybe it was because they were aboard Lanny's boat. Didn't matter that he'd confessed to 'borrowing' it this morning, to using bolt cutters to cut the cable that secured it to the cop storage dock — and where had he learned that trick, she wondered? Didn't matter that he swore he was going to pay for the damaged cable and buy the boat from Robbie's aunt as soon as he could borrow five thousand from Sandy — and where did Lanny get the idea that she had five thousand to toss around? None of that mattered this morning. Lanny had claimed the boat. She saw that, in him. Pride of possession.