Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series) (2 page)

“Pretty much of a shock.”

“The shock was the worst part.” She straightened her spine and stared straight ahead. “But I’m over it now.”

Sure she was.

Not knowing what to say, I let some time go by, thinking I was witnessing one of the worst cases of denial I’d seen. I’ve noticed some people cover their sadness with rage, and some, their rage with denial. Marty seemed to be in the latter class, but she’d at least gotten down to rage in one area. She said in a voice loud enough for everyone in Tosca to hear, “He didn’t even tell me who she was!”

“It was someone you knew?”

“My boss.”

Marty had a one-of-a-kind job. The family had moved to Monterey on her account, not Don’s. She might be in marketing—the least piscine of jobs at the aquarium—but she could be in marketing anywhere. She was there because she loved the sea and its wildly teeming life. She was as dedicated to that aquarium as if it were in her living room. You didn’t just walk away from a job like hers. But how could you work with a boss who had committed grand larceny in your bed?

“Sadie Stoop-Low,” said Marty, draining her glass (and listing a little, I thought).

“I beg your pardon?”

“Swedlow. Sadie Swedlow in the phone book. Bitch!”

Her sibilants were getting slushy. Some people feed their denial with alcohol. Starting to worry, I said, “You aren’t driving back tonight, are you?”

“Sure, why not?”

I devoted the next half hour to talking her out of it, five minutes to phoning her sitter, and the hour after that to nursemaid services involving more drinking and more listening. It was almost midnight before I got her bedded down in my living room, an eminently soothing place for a fish-fancier.

She awoke fresh and grateful, but a little sheepish. “Gosh, Rebecca, I don’t usually drink that much.”

“Marty, listen, something awful’s happened to you. You have a right to drown your sorrows.”

“It wasn’t that. I’m coping fine. I should have had more than a salad for dinner, that’s all. I’ve gained two pounds in the last month, and I’ve got to take it off.”

“You’re such a perfectionist. Did it ever occur to you that you’re as human as anyone else? You just lost your husband of fifteen years. You’re allowed to feel terrible about it.”

She looked at her watch and screwed up her lip, irritated, letting me see what she was thinking: How dare I talk to her this way? We weren’t really that close. Even the night before, even in the face of disaster, she hadn’t really unbuttoned, just vented steam about Sadie.

“Well, listen,” she said. “Whatever. The point is, you saved my life and put me up, and I’d love to return the hospitality. You’re the one who’s going through a bad time. Look at you. Your face is so tense it looks like a mask. You need to get out of here for a while. So get your things. We’re going to Monterey.”

I almost smiled she was so transparent—trying to reassure herself by taking control. But she’d hit on something. It was all I could do not to dash for my toothbrush.

I had to be in court or I would have taken her up on the offer right then. The moment she brought up the idea, I knew Monterey was the place I needed to be. If I found my own aquarium healing, what about the biggest one in the world?
I must go down to the sea again
, said some silly imp who lives in my brain, and I actually smiled.

She saw the smile and zeroed in for the kill. “You know what we have in Monterey now? This thing called The American Tin Cannery—outlet heaven.”

Everyone who knows me knows I love to shop and I love a bargain.

Marty said, as if dangling cookies before a kid, “There’s a Joan and David outlet.”

But I wasn’t even slightly moved. It was the aquarium that attracted me, and the bay.

If I couldn’t actually be a hermit crab, at least I could imitate one, and I could look at quite a few. I could watch the kelp forest sway all day if I wanted to, and I could sit in the restaurant at the aquarium and eat delicious seafood and drink the amusingly named house Chardonnay (Great White) and watch the bay. I would see seals and otters, perhaps, and if I didn’t, I could take a cruise on the bay. I could reread
Cannery Row
.

The only things wrong with this picture were Marty and her two kids. Hermit crabs have to have solitude.

But eventually we worked it out. Chris was already prepared to take over my cases if only I’d get out of the office for a while. I’d drive down that night, which was Friday, spend the weekend at Marty’s, and find a nice condo or B&B to move into on Monday—something on the beach, maybe, or at least within walking distance of the aquarium. And I’d stay there a week, two weeks, maybe three. I’d stay there till I felt better.

Cannery Row is a colorful old street, once called Ocean View. To its biographer, John Steinbeck, it was “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

Steinbeck’s book was published in 1945, the best year ever for the sardine catch, and for practical purposes, the last good year. The last cannery, the Hovden (which produced the Portola brand sardine), closed in 1952.

And so nowadays the stink is largely metaphorical, the latter-day fishiness having to do with authenticity or the lack of it, for Cannery Row is now tourist-land, a street of restaurants, hotels, bars, T-shirt shops, and one cultural attraction.

Oddly, the rest of Steinbeck’s description more or less holds true. The row is right on the bay, you can’t change that—and it’s still got its own unique, half-industrial character. The aquarium, tucked in at the end of the row, the old “Portola” sign meticulously preserved on its adjoining warehouse wall, is the one cultural attraction.

As we’d arranged, I phoned Marty when I got into town. She was working late, which seemed odd for a Friday, but she said she was catching up after her two days in San Francisco. She said she’d meet me in the parking lot, where we could leave my car while we had dinner at some splendid fish place. (People who love aquatic animals love them in every way.)

She had me park in the dirt lot on what is still Ocean View Boulevard, but becomes Cannery Row at the Monterey line—weirdly, the aquarium is on the border of Pacific Grove and Monterey. When I got out of the car, she gave me a big hug as if we were best friends instead of fairly distant acquaintances, and I started getting into the holiday aspect of the thing. She led me through the gate to the closer, paved parking lot, both of us chattering as if we hadn’t seen each other in months instead of hours.

She seemed much cheerier than she’d been in the city. That was the way these things went, I remembered from my last breakup. You were morbidly depressed for a while, and then you started having some good days, and eventually most days were pretty good. Don had been gone three months.

“Are the kids coming to dinner with us?” I asked.

“Oh, heavens no. They’re in front of the tube and can’t be pried away. Keil’s twelve, you know, and very responsible. Damn good businessman, too—takes after his mom. He has his own errand-running business, called Trap Door, Ltd. It’s not really a limited partnership, of course.” She sounded like the Stanford M.B.A. she was. “The ‘limited’ part refers to the way he feels, not having a driver’s license—has to work on a bike, poor baby.”

“What does the Trap Door part mean?”

“You don’t get it?”

“Not offhand.”

“He’s got a wild imagination, I guess.” She sighed, as if this were not a good thing. “If you get in a bind, and can’t get your chores done, you can escape via Trap Door.”

“Ah. Pretty clever.”

“He also baby-sits, which is what he’s doing tonight. Of course, he charges more for it than any kid in the neighborhood, but he’s worth it—the first time he sits, he reels off the phone numbers of the police and fire departments, demonstrates the Heimlich maneuver, and assures you he knows CPR in case your kid—in this case, your other kid—has a heart attack. The boy loves his money. Anyway, not everyone wants to babysit Libby. Especially since Don left.”

“Why not?”

“She’s—ah—difficult.”

Terrific. I’d just signed up to spend the weekend with the Bad Seed.

“Rebecca, I’ve got a surprise for you before we eat. Have you ever seen a kelp forest at night?”

“We’re going to look at the aquarium? I thought we were getting your car.”

Marty smiled enigmatically. She wasn’t the sort you usually think of as having a flair for drama. She was short, with dirty-blond hair, brown eyes, and light skin with a dusting of freckles. Her hair was naturally wavy, and though she obviously had it cut professionally, she’d opted for neatness rather than style—if asked how she wore it, I would have had to say “on her head.” Nothing else really came to mind.

Her features were neat and ordinary as well, and so was her businesswoman’s gym-trained figure. The only remarkable thing about Marty seemed to be her love of the ocean. Unless she had her own hidden depths.

“Is this legal? To go in at night?” I said, hoping it wasn’t.

“Oh, perfectly. It’s a great place for night parties. In fact, arranging them is one of the things we do in marketing. There isn’t one tonight, though.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “It’ll be quiet as the grave.”

“That should suit our mood.”

“Oh, cheer up—that’s the point of all this.” She snapped her fingers. “I know what you’ll like. Let’s go see the mola first. It’s in quarantine.”

She turned left, toward an outside shedlike affair. “This is aquarist territory.”

“And aquarists are?”

“The husbandry people. They’re all marine biologists, they’re all divers, and I think all of them at least have their master’s. Very, very well qualified. And they
live
the sea. When they’re not diving they’re sailing, and when they’re not sailing, they’re eating sushi. Look, there are the ‘thermal recovery units.’”

“The what?”

She laughed. “Hot tubs. But they really do need them. It’s sixty degrees in the bay. You can get hypothermia so fast it’s scary.”

The mola, lying on the surface of its tank, had lost its bewildered look, but it was as Frisbee-like as ever. Also known as the ocean sunfish, it must be named for its shape, but the nickname seems far too bright and cheerful for so grotesque a creature. As a matter of fact, I bow to no one in my fanship of molas; they’re utterly fascinating beasts. But the phrase “monster of the deep” does rather come to mind at first sight of one. The mola has the misfortune to look like half a fish. It’s not completely flat, but close enough. It looks something like a frying pan with arms.

“Marty, that thing’s weird.”

“I knew you’d love it. They’re warm-water fish—that’s why we can’t keep them in the tanks. Relatives of the puffer; you probably know that.”

“You mean the dread fugu?”

“Uh-huh. We have a couple of those, too—upstairs in our Sea of Cortez exhibit. Want to see?”

“No, thanks. They give me the creeps.”

When I had admired the evolutionary accident to her satisfaction, Marty took me into the building itself, through a back entrance that seemingly opened into a labyrinth—and we still weren’t even in the aquarium.

“This is the old Hovden warehouse; you know that, right? Its office space connects with the aquarium proper—I’m on the third floor. Here are the aquarists’ offices, and our library, and the volunteer office. We have about five hundred fifty volunteers, can you believe it? Here’s the volunteer and staff lounge, there’s an exhibits area, and here’s a little back room where they do graphics.”

She gave me a proprietary smile. “A lot of people work here. It takes a staff of two hundred seventy full-and part-time people to run this place, in addition to the volunteers. Oh, and another fifty in the restaurant.”

I had a sudden flash of envy—she was so much at home here. “I wish I’d been a marine biologist,” I said. “Instead of a lawyer.”

Marty laughed, secure in her own place, husband-stealing boss or no, and opened a door to the aquarium-behind-the-scenes, a place of wet floors and another kind of labyrinth. “The exhibit area is in the heart of the place, but it’s surrounded by all this.” She gestured. “Actually, there’s almost as much of this space as there is exhibit area. Come on—I’ll show you where the aquarists work, and how they go into the tanks.”

I followed silently.

“They took a lot of care with this building,” she said, “in just about every way you can think of. Because it’s on the site of the old Hovden Cannery, it’s built to resemble the Hovden as much as possible.” She pointed, continuing the tour. “There’s the freight elevator—it goes up to the roof. And here—” she opened a door “—is what we call a service area. This is where the aquarists work.” There were more wet, slippery floors here, and pipes and things you could hit your head on. Fiberglass platforms surrounded the tanks, which were ordinary white vessels on three sides, but windowed on the fourth. Inside were small exhibits. From where we were, you could look down into the tank, and feed the fish if you were an aquarist. The view was ordinary. But from the window out front, it was a stunning vista.

For the first time, I started to understand the showmanship that had gone into the design of the place.

Some of it, indeed, was done with mirrors. Marty pointed one out. “See that? With the cloud of blue rockfish? From the front, it looks like a sand channel, opening back to more and more blue rockfish.

“And these are called ‘inserts,’” she said, noting the lining of one of the tanks. “They’re slabs of fake rock that have been in the bay a while, growing things. Oh, look at this.” She plucked a tiny starfish from behind the insert and put him back on exhibit.

I was staring at pale pink anemones, thinking of the vicious ‘clone wars’ these pretty things fight, when Marty shrieked, “Would you look at the size of this melibe!”

Behind me, I stared into a tank that wasn’t on exhibit. The melibe—or sea slug—was something like a giant, nearly transparent Venus’s-fly-trap, and looked like a parachute. It was about two feet long, which must be long for a melibe.