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

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.
    “These things smell great,” she said. “Like melon, although I don’t know if that’s where the name comes from. We’ll get an aquarist to take one out for you one day—they look like a little pile of Jell-O when you put them on your palm.”
    I was impatient. “Let’s go see