“And why would you care?”
“Duh. Because I have to sleep here.” Shelly tapped on the plans. “Aren’t you afraid of what’s down there?”
“I doubt there are any graves,” Ivy said, laughing at her sister.
“Bomb shelter? Those were popular during the 1950s.”
“Could be.” Ivy returned to the wall and peeled off a thick piece of paint. Inspecting it, she slid her fingernail under it to separate the pieces. When she’d renovated her condo in Boston, she’d found a lot of older material. “Look, this is paint over fabric backed wallpaper. This material is older than the Cold War era. After the war and in the 1950s, builders started using drywall. It would have been easy to slap that over a frame. I’ll bet this dates back to the 1940s or before. That might correlate with what Bennett told us.”
“About using it for military housing?”
“Maybe. He said Amelia Erickson closed the house right after Pearl Harbor.” Running her hand over the wall, Ivy turned the thought over in her mind. “She was frightened that the war would reach the west coast.”
“The brick wall doesn’t match anything else in the house, and Mrs. Erickson sounds like she had an appreciation for design.”
“They probably would have used lathe and plaster back then.” Ivy ran her hand over the exposed bricks. “But bricks are solid. You’d have to really work to get behind this.”
“We can do that. Give me another hammer.” Shelly flicked on the radio, and Ivy passed a second hammer to her.
Shelly took aim and pummeled the wall. Tiny brick chip projectiles shot back at them.
“Hold up,” Ivy cried.
Shelly stared at the hammer in her hand. “It’s not working.”
“I think we’re going to need a bigger hammer.”
The two women looked at each other and spoke in unison. “Sledgehammer.”
Chapter 13
“LOOK TO STARBOARD at two-o’clock,” Mitch called out, planting his feet on the upper deck of his boat for balance. “We’ve got a friendly fin whale checking us out.” He pointed toward a wave where a giant whale was arching gracefully through the water.
“Wow!” Bennett’s tow-headed nephew, ten-year-old Logan, jumped up and down.
“Hang on, buddy.” Bennett drew his arm around the boy, bracing them against the starboard side of the vessel while they marveled at the magnificent creature. He was pleased that Mitch had found a whale for Logan to see.
Bennett was taking care of Logan while his sister and her husband had a short trip to Phoenix for a golf tournament. After the morning rush at Java Beach, Mitch often took out private charters in the afternoon for whale watching on his vessel, which was a sport fishing boat that he’d equipped with long benches and inside seating to accommodate charters.
“Fin, or finback, whales are the second largest whale in the world,” Mitch said to Logan. “That one’s about 65 or 70 feet.”
“Whoa, for real?” Logan’s big blue eyes widened.
Bennett laughed. “For real.” Being out on the water, feeling the sun on his shoulders, and breathing in the fresh salty air was a balm to his soul. From childhood, his life had been centered on the ocean, and he couldn’t imagine ever living too far away from it.
Mitch eased back on the throttle to get a better view. “There’s another one, just below the birds.” He pointed to a spot beneath a flock of birds that were following the whales.
“Pretty smart birds,” Bennett said to Logan. “They know the whales are in search of plentiful fish, so they follow to scoop up their leftovers.”
“This is awesome,” Logan said.
Bennett tousled his hair. He loved spending time with his nephew and felt as close to him as if he’d been his own son. He and Jackie had been trying to have their first baby when she had become ill. Just as they were becoming excited about the baby, she’d lost the child, and they were plunged into the fight for her life against choricarcinoma, a rare cancer that had developed in the abnormal pregnancy. And then he’d lost Jackie, too.
Logan turned his face up to Bennett’s. “Do you know everything about the ocean, Uncle Bennett?”
“No one does. Did you know marine biologists are still finding new forms of life?”
“That’s cool. I’d like to do that someday.”
“Maybe you will,” Bennett said. “I have a buddy who studies dolphins. That means you have to keep up the grades, buddy.” His child would’ve been about Logan’s age now. He and his sister had been excited that their children would grow up together, but life had a different, devastating plan for him. To compensate, Bennett had been putting money aside to help with Logan’s education, or whatever he wanted to do.
The fin whales crested along beside them, matching their speed and observing them. After a while, the two great mammals disappeared into the blue. As Mitch turned for home, a small pod of dolphins joined them.
“Bottlenose dolphins, port side at nine o’clock,” Mitch pointed out. “Looks like ten, no twenty.”
Logan’s excitement ratcheted up again.
Laughing, Bennett pulled out his phone and snapped a photo for his sister, Kendra, and her husband. They’d love that.
Mitch cruised along while the dolphins kept pace. “Hey Bennett, I met the two sisters who are converting the old Las Brisas estate into a bed-and-breakfast. Didn’t know you’d found a buyer for the place.”
“I didn’t. That’s Jeremy Marin’s widow.”
“Yeah? Which one?”
“Ivy.” As much as he tried, he couldn’t get that woman out of his mind. Maybe it was because she reminded him of a girl he’d once had a crush on so many years ago. Her name was Ivy, too, and she had those same bone-chilling eyes that this Ivy had. Eyes you couldn’t look away from. He guessed that must have been a popular name for green-eyed baby girls. He’d seen that girl on the beach a few times when he’d been surfing, and at a beach bonfire. He’d even written a song about her and played it on his
