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

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.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    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