Don't Turn Your Back on the Ocean Read online

  “Or it could be more serious than that. My friend Marsha at the SPCA has been getting anonymous calls about the pelicans, too. With much the same message.”

  I sat up straight. “Implicating Bobby in the pelican mutilations? I can’t believe that. Not Bobby. He’s a fisherman. He loves the sea—and everything about it.”

  “You and I know that. The fishermen watch the seabirds to find out where the fish are. During the last run of the pelican mutilations several years ago, the fishermen formed a coalition to find out who was doing it. They didn’t want to be tarred by that brush. Trouble is, when something like this happens people are quick to point the finger at the fleet.” Donna shook her head.

  “Now and then we have an incident, someone shooting at sea lions and otters. Fishermen know the animals are protected but they can get exemptions from the Marine Mammals Protection Act. If a sea lion is after a fisherman’s catch, he’s allowed to use reasonable means to protect it. I don’t know that anyone has defined reasonable means. Depending on the circumstances, the fisherman can shoot at a sea lion.”

  “Bobby wouldn’t do that,” I repeated. “I’ve been aboard the boat. He uses those noisemakers, those sea-lion bombs, to scare the critters off.”

  “Right. But he also has a thirty-caliber rifle aboard, just in case.” Donna sat beside me on the bench.

  I stared out at the water, thinking about my cousin Bobby. He didn’t strike me as a guy with a mean streak. He was rowdy, but he had charm and kindness and his grin was quick and ever-present. On the job he was serious and capable. Alcohol was the kicker here, the drug that could change a human being into a monster. His misadventures with alcohol seemed confined to weekends, that period from Friday night to Sunday, when Bobby wasn’t out fishing, when he was likely to hoist a few with the guys. It occurred to me now that it had been a while since I’d seen my cousin. I didn’t know whether he was caught in the grip of alcoholism, or just a guy who had too many beers on a Saturday night. When does a person cross that boundary?

  “There’s a line between shooting at a sea lion to scare it away from the catch and someone catching and mutilating pelicans. It takes planning and deliberate cruelty to catch a seabird and cut off its beak. I can’t believe Bobby would do that.”

  Donna shook her head. “Neither can I. Even at his worst. It’s just these damned anonymous calls about the pelicans and now Ariel. I don’t know what to think, Jeri.”

  “I think someone’s making a big effort to get Cousin Bobby in trouble. When was Ariel reported missing? By whom?”

  “Her parents filed the report. They’d been in Europe, didn’t get home till Sunday evening. The sheriff’s department put out an APB for her car. They found it yesterday, in the parking lot of the Rocky Point Restaurant, down on Highway One.”

  I watched the couple on the beach below us toss bread crusts to the seagulls. One big white gull caught a crust and took to the air, with his compatriots in pursuit. “You say Ariel’s a student at Cal Poly. It’s the last week in September. Surely the fall term has started.”

  Donna nodded. “She should have been in class Friday. Ariel’s college roommate says she left San Luis Obispo early Friday morning. The roommate’s the one who alerted the Logans that Ariel wasn’t where she was supposed to be.”

  “She cut classes to come up to Monterey,” I said, “to see Bobby or for something else. I wonder if she left here on Sunday, on her way back to school. Maybe she was taking the scenic route.”

  There are two ways to drive from Monterey to San Luis Obispo, a central coast city a hundred and fifty miles farther south, known to its residents as “SLO,” an accurate description of the pleasant, unhurried pace of life. If Ariel Logan had been returning to her classes at California Polytechnic University, the faster route would have been to take California 68 northeast from Monterey to Salinas. There she could connect with U.S. 101, a four-lane freeway that ran the length of California, approximating the route of El Camino Real, the King’s Highway of the days when California was an outpost of Spain. Depending on how lead-footed she was, and how many stops she made on her way south, Ariel Logan could have made the trip in three hours or less.

  The scenic route was down Highway 1, also known as the Coast or Cabrillo Highway. The two-lane road hugged the rocky cliffs and headlands where California crashed into the Pacific Ocean, past some of the most spectacular scenery found anywhere in the world. It was a beautiful drive, good for the soul, a drive a young woman might want to take if she’d had a quarrel with the man in her life. But it was much slower. The narrow two-lane road is popular with tourists in all but winter months, so traffic on Highway 1 usually moves at a glacial pace, which is wise, given the curves. Again, depending on the number of pit stops, Ariel Logan could have made it to SLO in five or six hours. But she never got there.

  “What was she doing at the Rocky Point Restaurant?” I wondered aloud. The site where Ariel’s car had been found was about ten or eleven miles south of Carmel. The restaurant itself was about half a mile off the road, down a drive leading to the edge of the headland.

  “I don’t know,” Donna said. “Maybe Ariel wasn’t on her way back to SLO, Jeri. Which means she could have driven down to Rocky Point anytime after she left Bobby on Alvarado Street.”

  “Maybe she just needed to stare at the ocean for a while, to sort out that argument with Bobby. There’s a beautiful view from the bar, or anywhere on the point. Would she have gone walking on those headlands?”

  “I hope not.” Donna looked grim. “It’s dangerous on this coast. You just don’t turn your back on the ocean, not around here. Even when you think you’re a safe distance away, one of those waves can suddenly leap up and snatch you right off the face of the earth.”

  I nodded, recalling something that happened several years ago, when two local women went walking on the ocean’s edge, accompanied by a dog. A wave must have swept them out into the Pacific, which doesn’t often live up to its name. The dog—or what was left of it—washed ashore several weeks later. I don’t think anyone ever found the remains of the women.

  Sometimes the ocean lulls you into a false sense of security, even on a broad sandy sweep, like Monastery Beach just south of Carmel. The locals call it Mortuary Beach, with good reason. Here on the Pacific side, the continent ends abruptly. The ocean floor doesn’t deepen gradually, like it does on Atlantic beaches. Just under the surface of all that lovely blue-green water is a vicious undertow and an undersea cliff that plunges suddenly deep. Mortuary Beach has claimed its share of victims.

  “I hate talking about Ariel in the past tense,” Donna said, her voice quiet. “But I’m afraid she went into the water.”

  “What if she was meeting someone at Rocky Point? Does anyone at the restaurant recall seeing her?”

  “I would hope that the sheriff’s department has asked that question. Whether they’ve gotten any answers, I don’t know.”

  “I assume you have a reason for telling me all this. What do you want me to do?”

  Donna fixed me with a gaze from her blue eyes. “Talk to Bobby. After my friend at the sheriff’s department called yesterday, I went to see Bobby. He seemed surprised, shocked, upset. He didn’t know Ariel was missing. He’d tried to call her at her parents’ house several times over the weekend and kept getting the answering machine. So he figured she’d gone back to school. He tried to reach her at her apartment down there, with no luck. Couldn’t even get Ariel’s roommate. Bobby says he hadn’t seen or talked with Ariel since Friday, when they had the argument. But he wouldn’t say what they were arguing about.”

  “You and Bobby have always been close. If he won’t tell you, what makes you think he’ll tell me?”

  “I figure if we both work on him, maybe one of us will get him to talk.” Donna shrugged. “You know how stubborn he can be. Tuesday it was just Ariel missing. But those phone calls give me a bad feeling. Anyone could have seen Bobby and Ariel arguing at the Rose and Crown. Obviously whoever is making
those anonymous calls did.”

  I got to my feet and stepped back onto the Rec Trail. “Okay, I’ll talk to him. Is he likely to be at Ravella’s this afternoon?”

  “Why do you think I suggested a late lunch there?” Donna said as she joined me on the path.

  I grinned. “I thought it was a sudden urge for squid and chips.”

  “Nick and Tina don’t know anything about this,” she warned as we walked toward Fisherman’s Wharf. “At least not yet. But they will soon. The rumor mill is already working overtime. You can’t keep a secret in a small town. And despite the population figures and the big-city pretensions, Monterey’s a small town.”

  Three

  AT ONE TIME, THE BUILDINGS ON FISHERMAN’S Wharf were a jumble of restaurants, warehouses, supply shops, most of these one- and two-story wooden structures weathered to a soft silvery gray. The restaurants and fish markets are still there, purveyors of the freshest seafood from Monterey Bay. But the warehouses and supply shops have been replaced by souvenir emporiums full of T-shirts and seashells, decorative spoons and pottery mugs, racks of film for the visitors’ cameras and postcards, in case those pictures don’t turn out. On Fisherman’s Wharf, the catch of the day is tourists.

  An organ grinder and his monkey held court at the entrance to the wharf, drawing a crowd of adults and children. To our right were the Old Custom House and the new maritime museum, the municipal parking lot, and beyond that, the two-story harbormaster’s office. In front of us, between the two wharves, was a marina, where pleasure craft were interspersed with larger boats fitted for commercial fishing.

  I listened to the giggles of the children next to me as they watched the organ grinder’s monkey, my eyes taking pleasure in familiar sights. My nose caught the salt tang from the bay, but this was quickly overwhelmed by other smells. As Donna and I headed up the wharf I identified the mix of odors. We passed a restaurant and I caught the smell of grease from french fries, then an outdoor stand provided the warm lure of popcorn and fat soft pretzels with mustard. Farther on, my nostrils were tickled by the sweet spun sugar of pink cotton candy.

  Toward the end the wharf is shaped like a stubby H, with a crossbar leading to two shorter piers to the east. Just past the crossbar and to our left was the entrance to Ravella’s. It’s a deli and a fish market, the front open to the wharf, the back a small dining room with big picture windows looking down at the sheltered portion of the harbor Donna and I had passed on our walk from the Coast Guard jetty.

  The fish-market counter was spread with chipped ice. Fish and crabs, both whole and in sections, reposed on the ice and behind the counter was a huge steamer and a rack spread with smoked salmon. Presiding over the fish market was a dark-haired man dressed in khaki pants and short-sleeved white shirt. Over this he wore a sky-blue apron with RAVELLA’S embroidered in red script. He’d just wrapped a fish for a customer and now he stepped over to the cash register at the deli counter to ring up the woman’s purchase. She handed him a twenty and he made change. Then he looked up and grinned.

  “Hey, Jeri, I heard you were here.”

  “Hi, Nick.”

  The customer departed with her fish. Nick Ravella wiped his hands on his apron and put his arms around Donna and me, hugging us both in a warm, fish-scented embrace. Just then his wife Tina returned from the dining room, where she’d delivered some sandwiches to a quartet of customers. She wore the same sky-blue apron, only hers was cleaner than Nick’s. Before she resumed her station behind the deli counter, she joined in the familial hug.

  Nick and Tina were a matched set, both short, their dark hair now gone salt-and-pepper gray, smiling faces showing the lines of nearly sixty years of living. Nick walked with a slight hitch in his left hip, the legacy of a back injury incurred during his years as a fisherman. He’s my mother’s cousin and contemporary. If I traced Tina’s lineage she’d turn out to be related as well, since her family, like the Ravellas, originated in Sicily. All the old fishing families are intertwined.

  “You had lunch?” Tina asked us.

  “I feel the urgent call of squid and chips,” Donna said, not even bothering to look at the menu items chalked on the board behind Tina. “What about you, Jeri?”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the salmon on the smoker. “I can’t resist that smoked salmon.”

  “You want cream cheese on it?” Tina asked, reaching for a sourdough roll. I nodded. She picked up a serrated knife and deftly sliced the roll lengthwise, then, without missing a beat, turned to the fryer and lowered the squid and the french fries into their respective pools of hot oil.

  “Cholesterol,” I said.

  Donna gave me the evil eye. “Cream cheese?” She pointed across the deli counter as Tina spread a thick layer on the roll.

  “What’ll you have to drink?” Nick moved behind the deli counter and opened a refrigerated case.

  “Got any mineral water?” He nodded and handed me a cold bottle of Calistoga. Donna opted for the same. Nick helped himself to a can of diet root beer, popped it open, and gulped down a couple of swallows.

  “How are Uncle Dom and Aunt Teresa?” I asked, unscrewing the top of my Calistoga. Nick’s father was Granny Doyle’s younger brother, now in his eighties, the Ravella family patriarch. His wife Teresa was a few years younger and they were both still vigorous and active, powers to be reckoned with in Monterey’s large Italian-American community.

  “Pop’s great,” Nick said. “He’s probably over at the customhouse plaza right now, playing bocce and solving the problems of the world. Mom was real disappointed you didn’t make it down for our picnic on Labor Day. We had Ravellas and Doyles and all the other branches of the family, more’n you could shake a stick at.”

  I’d been sorry to miss the family get-together, too. But at the time I was embroiled in the Raynor case, something that began as a divorce matter and wound up in murder. Private investigators don’t normally get involved in homicides, but lately I’d had more encounters with death than usual. That’s why I was looking forward to a week in Monterey with nothing more pressing than visiting relatives and friends. I planned to take a lot of long walks on the Rec Trail interspersed with equally long periods of staring at the ocean, working my way through the stack of paperbacks I’d brought with me. Of course, now that I’d agreed to meet Donna at the SPCA later today, it looked as though I’d do a bit of investigating.

  “When did you get in?” Tina asked.

  “Yesterday.” I’d risen early the day before, Wednesday, and packed my bag under the disapproving eye of my cat Abigail, who didn’t like to be left alone. My friend Cassie had an extra key to my Oakland apartment and she would stop each day on her way home from work to feed the cat and take in my mail. It was about a two-hour drive from Oakland to Monterey. I timed my departure after the morning rush hour, hoping to avoid the worst of the traffic, especially through San Jose. Of course, the only time I’ve never seen traffic in San Jose is at two A.M. The greater San Francisco Bay Area has grown so much that I didn’t leave urban sprawl until I got through San Jose and past Morgan Hill and Gilroy. As I drove south on 101, I listened to the radio, flipping stations. An extraterrestrial studying the American airwaves would no doubt be astounded by the time, energy, and money devoted to extolling the merits of diet cola. I know I was.

  Tina finished making my sandwich and set the plate on the counter. She turned and piled another plate high with hot squid and chips. “You want anything else?” she asked. “How about some fries?”

  “I’ll help myself to Donna’s.”

  “The hell you will.” Donna picked up her plate and a plastic bottle of ketchup, crossing one arm over her lunch in mock defense.

  “This looks like more than enough food,” I said, taking my wallet from my jeans. “How much?”

  “You’re family.” Tina waved away my money.

  “Half the people in Monterey are family. You’ll go broke if you treat them all.” I consulted the prices on the menu board and laid sever
al bills on the counter. “Besides, I’d promised to buy Donna lunch.”

  “All right.” Tina shrugged, took the cash, and made change.

  “Thanks,” Donna said. “I guess I’ll let you have a couple of fries after all.” She led the way to the first table in the dining room, close enough to the deli counter so we could continue talking with Nick and Tina. Donna tucked a paper napkin into the collar of her shirt, doused her french fries with ketchup, and picked up a morsel of squid. I bit into my sandwich, savoring the flavor of salmon mixed with cream cheese.

  Nick went off to wait on a customer at the fish-market counter while Tina gave us a report on the Ravella offspring. Elena, the youngest daughter who lived with her husband in Santa Cruz, was pregnant again, which would increase her brood to three and bring the total grandchild count to six. Bobby and his ex-wife Linda had one son, Nicky. Sally was the oldest daughter, Donna’s age. She and her husband lived right here in Monterey with their two kids. Angie, the daughter who was my age, thirty-three, had no children. She and her husband Stan lived in Morro Bay, near San Luis Obispo, where Angie taught at a community college and Stan worked at the Pacific Gas & Electric plant.

  “How’s business?” I swallowed a mouthful of salmon and took a hit from my bottle of mineral water.

  “Pretty good,” Tina said. “Especially during tourist season. All the businesses here on the wharf do well. We’re not as fancy as your mom’s place, but we do all right.”

  I filched a couple of Donna’s french fries and took another mouthful of my sandwich. My mother’s place was an upscale restaurant in downtown Monterey, called Café Marie. She’d opened it six years ago, after she and my father were divorced, using her portion of the settlement for starter capital. It was rather late in life for someone to decide to be a gourmet chef, but she’d always had a talent for cooking. Before the divorce she’d done some catering, then she’d spent sixteen months and a large sum of money attending the extensive course at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. From all reports Mother and Café Marie were doing well. The cafe was now the kind of place that gets four stars from fussy restaurant reviewers who pick apart ambience and service as well as the menu. As a result on weekends and throughout the tourist season, she had plenty of reservations.