The Body in Bodega Bay: A Nora Barnes and Toby Sandler Mystery

Chapter 15

199 15 TOBY CAME OUT OF THE HOUSE and walked up beside me as I stood on the curb. “Poor Angie.” “She’ll be okay.” “Are you still up for our treasure hunt after all that?” He pointed to the gardening tools he’d fetched from the garage this morning and had left leaning against the side of the house. “I think so. There’s no reason to put it off.” The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the sky remained threatening. The ground underfoot was soggy, which might even help with the digging. “All right, then,” said Toby, “let’s go.” We loaded everything into the car—Peter’s storyboards, two shovels, a hand fork and spade, and a tarpaulin that Toby had found in the back of the garage. That was optimistic . He was hoping to find the missing panel to wrap up. This time we drove all the way out to the end of Westshore Road and worked our way back toward the marina, using the storyboards as our guide, searching for just the right cluster of trees. According to what Colleen had told me on the golf course, the Brenner house had stood somewhere near today’s entrance to the dormitories for the marine lab 200 employees. It turned out we weren’t far from their driveway when we found the most promising area. In fact, we parked right in front of a sign that said “Restricted Access.” That brought up the question of digging on the marine lab’s land. This was UC–Davis property. It was something we hadn’t considered, but now we realized we’d better ask for permission. We rang Dan again and asked him if he would call the marine lab office and request authorization for us to proceed. He warned us they might require a search warrant, and that could take time. We told him we’d wait to hear back. Meanwhile, we felt safe enough to scout around with the storyboards in hand. There were clumps of Monterey cypresses at the shoreline just opposite the housing entrance, as well as to the right of the entrance and to its left. The ones on the shore were too close together and too small to match those on the storyboards. The cypresses to the right of the entrance were all in a line, following the contours of a ditch. We needed to concentrate on the grove to the left of the entrance. A light fence, made of two thin cables stretching between posts, defined the entrance to the housing area and ran the west length of the road for a quarter of a mile or more. The top wire was chest high. As I waited, I saw that we could do some of our analysis from this side of the fence without ducking under the lower wire. There were fifteen to twenty trees in the shallow grove, about half of them very large and obviously old. The grandfather of them, toward the back of the space, had started to fall apart with age. Its trunk was so thick that it might have started with two or three trunks that had grown together. Half of its crown had fallen in some recent storm. It looked like our landmark tree. I pointed that out to Toby. We took another look at the storyboards and the triangular composition they delineated. “So now we need to look for two cypresses that are up here near the road and are more or less equidistant from the big old guy,” Toby said. And there they were, only two yards in from the fence and about three yards apart from each other. Without crossing the barrier, it was 201 hard to tell if the big tree was set at the correct distance to be the apex of a triangle that was approximately three yards on each side. But it seemed about right. We looked around for other candidates to match the storyboards, but with every passing moment I became more confident. We were anxious to dig, but where exactly to begin? “The area inside the triangle isn’t that huge, but it’s too big to dig the whole thing up,” I said. And something else was nagging at me, too. “How deep do we have to dig before we decide we’re at the wrong spot?” Toby replied, “I thought about that problem...