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

wanted me for company. Frankly, I was delighted to be wanted.
    “See you in a minute,” said Marty. “I’ve got to get something out of my office.”
    There was apparently a party that night, and we’d arrived with the caterers. They were busily making a Mexican village out of the first floor of the aquarium, setting up cardboard arches, bringing in cacti, hauling around cases of Corona and Dos Equis. I wondered if mariachis were booked, and if so, how the fish would like the music. Probably they wouldn’t be fazed. Mine had to put up with my piano playing.
    Innocent Libby, of course, had never seen the kelp tank as I’d seen it last. I wasn’t even sure she knew that was where her mom and I found Sadie. So I didn’t want to let on I thought it would be hard to look at it again, hard not to think of the shark caught in Sadie’s pantyhose, the yellow beaks darting ruthlessly toward their prey. But the flashbacks lasted only a moment. The swaying kelp, the insouciant fish swimming so confidently, the gorgeous invertebrates—the starfish, the anemones—worked their usual magic almost immediately. As always, I was mesmerized.
    “Rebecca, look!” Libby was pointing to a sandy area where nothing had been planted.
    I stared, having no idea what I was looking for. There were a million things worth looking at in that tank. What had caught her ten-year-old fancy?
    “Look at what?”
    “Look over there—way in the back of that little sandy patch.”
    Did I see a sand dollar, almost buried? There sure wasn’t anything else, not even a lazy rockfish swimming through.
    “I’m looking, I’m looking.”
    “Don’t you see anything?”
    “What am I looking for?”
    “The pearl! There it is!”
    It was one of those things—whether the eye or the brain plays the trick, I’m not sure, but once I saw the pearl, I couldn’t see how I could have failed to see it before. It looked so natural, so much at home, as if it had rolled out of a cache of pirates’ treasure and settled there in the sand a century ago. I had taken it for a rock.
    Now I saw that it looked a lot like a brain, and at the same time undeniably like a pearl the size of a Ping-Pong ball. I was reminded of Poe’s purloined letter ( as Ricky had said) —unless you knew exactly where to look and what you were looking for, you’d never see it lying right there in plain sight.
    No one would have hidden it there except someone who could easily retrieve it later—someone who was a good diver and had access to the kelp tank. My stomach fluttered.
    “What are we going to do, Rebecca? We can’t tell my mom. She’ll know Esperanza stole it.”
    “I know. We won’t tell her. But it’s okay to tell the police now. They already know about it.”
    She raised her head, searching my face with panicked eyes.
    “It’s okay,” I said. “Esperanza’s not going to get in trouble.”
    “She’s not?”
    “She didn’t tell you about it?”
    She shook her head. “She’s sleeping over tomorrow. We were going to talk then.”
    “I’ll let her tell the details.”
    Her face lit up with an idea. “You mean Julio knows about it now?”
    I nodded.
    “And he’s not mad at her?”
    “Well, not real mad, anyhow.”
    “He could get it out of there. Why don’t we just tell Julio?”
    Her innocence was heart-wrenching. “Sweetheart, it’ll be all right. Believe me. But we really do have to call the police.”
    Her face clouded and pinched up, as she tried to hold back tears of worry for her friend. I felt tears spring to my own eyes—there was something so moving about watching such a small organism trying to muddle its way through life. It was hard enough when you had a couple of degrees and a driver’s license.
    “I’ll go right now, honey. You stay here and wait for your mom.”
    I was about to head toward the phone at the reception desk—the same one Marty had used Friday night—when I heard Marty somewhere up above.
    “Warren Nowell, I’ve got a few things to say to you!”
    She was descending the stairs from the second floor, face contorted. Warren, the object of her anger, was walking toward Libby and me, having apparently just come from the restaurant or the bookstore.
    Marty was waving her desk calendar and another slip of paper at him—the note about her date, I was sure.
    “What was this doing in your desk?”
    “Oh, hi, Marty,” said Warren, as if nothing were wrong. He was adapting beautifully to his new role as a leader of men