The Old Inn at Punta de Sangre

By Theresa Donovan Brown

"Theresa Donovan Brown is a legitimate and entertaining new voice in crime fiction."
— John Lescroart, The New York Times best-selling thriller author

Sara McGrath sucks at sales, but real estate is the only growth market in the depressed California coastal town where she's trying to pull together a life for herself after her ex, a Silicon Valley venture wannabe, dumped her. Sharks hunt the point breaks where her teenager, Marsi, surfs. And even nastier creatures — realtors, developers, and open-space-hungry environmentalists — troll the multiple listings in Half Moon Bay. Sara's first shot at a million-dollar deal looks like the capital kick-start her dream of a seaweed-products business needs until dead bodies complicate escrow on the old Punta de Sangre Inn. As the inspection clock on her deal runs down and the ripples of violent deaths widen toward Marsi and herself, Sara is forced into a partnership of wits with a taciturn sheriff whose fisherman son may have been victim of more than a storm at sea.
Sara finds herself at the impact point of big issues and their backwash: Around Punta de Sangre ("Blood Point"), powerful land preservation interests clash with greedy developers and their plans to turn great swaths of agricultural land into luxury resort and McMansion developments. Meanwhile, land-rich agribusinesses exploit an underground majority of immigrant workers. And the local fishing fleet and tourist-pandering “chummers” clash with the surfing community over shark-baiting. As the wave of chaos and loss builds, Sara heeds the big-wave surfers' mantra: "Eddie would go." Sara goes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theresa Donovan Brown
• Release date: May 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9780985153120

Book preview

Chapter 1

The waves roared and lashed beyond the Half Moon Bay reef, but Sara McGrath figured she’d get away before the tide turned. Intent on her task, she picked her way across a greenish-brown expanse of seaweed and moss-slicked rocks flecked with neon jolts of color, a mother lode of intertidal life. Minus tide was reason enough to ignore the banshee calls of responsibility that plagued every sober hour.

Even in her cumbersome storm gear, she moved toward a sea palm stand as easily as a buoy rides a swell. The arch of her rubber boots connected with small, rocky protuberances, avoiding the infinitesimal worlds of life in the crevices. For balance, she gripped a driftwood pole with bulges like swollen joints. In her other hand, she dragged a bull kelp by its holdfast.

Tall and, according to her ex, rawboned, her nimbus of short, blonde curls fluttered in the sea breeze as she foraged. She squatted to poke an anemone as big as a salad plate. Its fluorescent pink and green tendrils folded inward and pulled on her hand.

The pulsating, squishy muscle felt, pathetically, as close as she’d been to sex in quite a while. She could use all her fingers and toes to count the ways that being thirty-eight and a single parent sucked, but skipping work to spend a late-winter morning on the tide pools wasn’t one of them.

Sara planned her life around the alignments of sun and moon and season, those optimal tidal opportunities to harvest seaweed. Against every shred of practical advice lobbed at her since her husband dumped her three years earlier, she was in the process of building a small seaweed-products business. To support herself and her teenage daughter, she worked as a realtor, real estate being the only growth industry on the San Mateo County coast.

The long, leafy blades of the kelp she hauled snagged on a bed of mussels. Turning to free the fronds, she laughed at what a dork she must look like – long limbs sticking out of a boxy, bright yellow middle, with her slimy tail of seaweed swishing behind – some atavistic proto-mammal trying to find its way home.

She checked her watch. Damn.

The tide had not yet turned, and Sara could get in at least another hour of harvesting before it became dangerous. But for once she had a shot at a multi-million transaction.

New clients had just signed a purchase agreement for the old Punta de Sangre Inn. A ramshackle mess of a property, it commanded a killer view of the Punta de Sangre lighthouse and the Año Nuevo elephant seal breeding grounds.

It was already two o’clock, and she had to get ready for a late-afternoon property viewing. Before the client arrived, she had to line up the inspections and order the title report.

Ugh. Work.

She’d compromise, she decided, and stay out another thirty minutes. She lifted her face to a weak sun shrouded in mist and recalled the red sun earlier that morning. Sailors take warning. She had no choice but to harvest — an incoming storm would mess up tide pool conditions for days. No question, she thought, her priorities were definitely skewed. And she had no intention of changing them.

The rocks where she was working, just outside the marine preserve, made a submerged spit off steep, inaccessible cliffs. At any but minus tides, the waves rebounding off the cliffs made this area one of the most treacherous tidal zones in San Mateo County.

The reef curved inland from the spit, and Sara began to make her way along the curve, still on the far edge of the seaweed field. In one of the furthest pools before the rocks dropped off into deeper water, Sara saw a flash of something light-colored.

With her eye on the middle distance, the lead wave of an incoming set caught her by surprise, overtopping her Wellies. Wet socks. Ick. What a dummy.

She retreated several yards landward until the set ran itself out. She knew the reprieve was temporary. She’d been warned.

Still, the mysterious, submerged brightness beckoned her. It was probably just a snake-lock anemone, but it lacked the animal’s trademark feathery fronds. Perhaps the head of an octopus…

It was a head, of a man. A young man with curly black hair floating back from his upturned face. Not long dead, the eyeballs were still there, rolled up to horrid red pustules, where blood vessels had burst the whites. Striations at the base of his neck looked like whorls on a lurid rocksnail. His skull was crammed, vise-like, into a cranny on the very edge of the rock shelf. The O of his open mouth might have been moaning in awestruck despair, pinned like that to the edge of the continent. His naked body wavered down in the dark, cold water, his arms out at 45-degree angles, a final shavasana.

What to do? She looked up at the horizon and took a deep breath.

This is not an emergency, she told herself. The man is dead. But she had to bring the body in. It would be heavy, she knew, and slippery, if she could even manage to pry the head lose.

As she pondered her dilemma, she realized she was staring not at the horizontal surface of the ocean, but at a forming swell. A wave far bigger than the one that had breached the tops of her boots gained momentum.

Levering herself with her shillelagh, she began to scramble shoreward. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the bull kelp where she had abandoned it.

The ocean rising up behind her had grown so massive that the rogue wave did not even break. Instead, she heard a whump as the swell hit the rock ledge and a rattling hiss as the wall of water rushed across the tide pools.

It slammed her chest-down onto the coarse abrasion of the sandstone. She did not feel the razor-edged barnacles and rough-backed limpets shredding her palms as she frantically felt for a hold.

The force pushed her into the side of a fairly deep tide pool, luckily, because her hands and feet found the walls and she braced herself like St. Clement on his Mariner’s Cross. She had time for a breath before the backwash. The wave had not reached the cliffs, and so was not exploding back upon her. She felt the ocean try to tug her away in its seaward rush as it swirled and scoured in the tide pool.

When she felt the flow lessen the tiniest bit, she took her chance and scrambled further toward the cliffs. The second wave of the set was at least as large as the first, but she found a junior-sized sea stack that broke the onslaught, which was not as bad since she was farther in.

Reaching the temporary safety of the cliff base, she leaned against the land, gasping. As pushed her dripping hair off her face, she noticed the bloody shreds of her palm. It looked like she had run it over the coarse side of a grater, several times.

She didn’t stop to wash her wounds in the iodine rich water, though. She wanted out of there.

She picked her way along the cliffs until she was safe. But she didn’t feel safe. The early March wind was cold, and she began to shiver uncontrollably. Sara had never in her life been so thoroughly caught off guard in a tidal zone. She had grown up next to the ocean and respected its vicissitudes too well.

But the body…oh god, horrible. His eyes. Ex-eyes. Oh…She shook her head hard, like a dog with water in his ears, trying to make the image disappear. She had to tell somebody.

Her feet squelched inside her waterlogged boots. Her toes were so cold, she could barely feel them. She walked up the dirt path to where she had parked her Subaru in the sun and opened the driver-side door.

A blast of hot air collided with the cool ocean breeze. This was a problem, because she had failed to unload this morning’s harvest, and it had ripened. Her car smelled like the inside of a fish fertilizer manufacturing facility, which was not a good thing when you had to use said car to chauffeur around wealthy potential purchasers of coastal property.

She picked up her cell phone, punched 911, and waited. The fumes, heavy as wet noodles, glommed onto her soggy hair and clothes. Nothing. Cell coverage was spotty on the coast, and, as she’d more or less expected, she was sitting in one of the off-spots.

She decided to drive the fifteen minutes to her office at Ballenas Realty. She shivered the whole way, despite the residual warmth inside the car. She kept all the windows down in an attempt more hopeful than effective to air it out. She had to clutch the wheel to keep her fingers from trembling.

Chapter 2

Sara parked on Main Street and dashed into the office. Stuffiness and the smell of stale pastries smacked her in the sinuses as soon as she crossed the threshold. She’d take ripe seaweed any day.

The shabby front room of the two-room setup contained Sara’s cubicle and that of Eric Prudhomme, a balding pudge, as well as the reception area run by Ellen Blotcher. The painted metal room dividers and furniture bore the signature dents and abrasions of Repo Depo floor stock.

Ellen, a chubby thirty-something, was supposed to support the two associate realtors, Sara and Eric, but tended to focus almost exclusively on the needs of Carl Miramontes, the boss. Ellen claimed she had been working toward her real estate certification for the five years she’d been keeping the gate to Carl’s office, but she seemed to be moving at sea-slug speed.

Oh my god, Sara, what have you been doing? Ellen exclaimed, wrinkling her nose.

Eric popped his head over his cubicle, ready to spar. Been showing the cement ship? From under water?

There’s been an accident.

I’ll say, Miss-Never-Turn-Your-Back-On-The-Ocean. What distracted you? Some ‘From-Here-To-Eternity’ kind of action in the surf? Hmmm? Or maybe just a badly timed ‘memory moment?’

Don’t be bitchy, Eric, Ellen said. But, um, Sara, you are kind of dripping all over the place. And what’s that fishy smell? Eeew, what’s that on the rug? Blood?

Sara looked from one to the other. She again felt like an alien, the Creature from the Black Lagoon stumbling upon her first victims, more horrified by them than they could possibly be by her.

What had she been thinking? Eric was right. She was losing it. She held up her mangled palm, turned on her squishy heel, and sloshed back out the door.

Back in her parked car, she discovered she had a cell connection, and dialed the police. The dispatcher told her to stay where she was, in front of the office on Main. A sheriff’s deputy would pick her up and she could take them to the location of the body.

While she waited, she dumped the water out of her boots and tousled her hair with a none-too-clean towel she found under a basket of seaweed in the back of the car. She touched the result with her fingertips. A hopelessly frizzy Jew-fro now quivered around her head. Well, she wasn’t in this, any of this, for her looks.

Within three minutes, a police cruiser, lights flashing, came down Main Street and double-parked next to her. The driver, a young woman, hopped out.

I’m Rosa Perez, deputy sheriff, she announced. Are you okay?

She assessed Sara’s wet, wild, and ripe-smelling affect.

The uniform did nothing to flatter Deputy Perez, who probably outmatched Sara in muscle mass, but stood several inches shorter. Her olive skin startled in its smoothness, emphasized by her straight brown hair pulled back in a taut ponytail. The cop had a hard intelligence in her eyes that Sara liked right away. How nice to see one’s tax dollars applied in such an appropriate way — a smart, no-nonsense female peacekeeper who very likely spoke not only English but Spanish, as did the hidden majority of people on the coast.

It sounds like we’re going to need your help locating the body. Why don’t you ride with us?

I’ll get your car all wet. And I smell like seaweed.

Yeah, you’re right about that.

Perez agreed with such alacrity Sara wondered if eau de old fish were visibly wafting from her.

She noticed another officer riding shotgun, window down. He was a once-handsome guy who still sported a nice mop of grey curls, but he looked a little worse-for-wear what with the five o’clock shadow several hours premature and circles like used teabags under his eyes. He could obviously hear everything they were saying, but said nothing himself, looked neither left or right.

The radio chirruped. And the guy in the car grabbed the mic.

Mitchell here.

Sara knew then. He would be Mike Mitchell, Lieutenant Sheriff in charge of the Coastside Patrol. The big fish in these waters.

We’re on a 901b as in baker. Is SAR on site? Okay. Alert Coast Guard King. Yeah. The tide’ll be flowing. Stand by for 952.

Sara knew SAR meant Search and Rescue. She wondered if it were routine for the ranking officer to go out on a 901b, whatever that meant. Dead body, she guessed.

Sara in her Subaru took the lead. The big cruiser pulled out right on her tail, blue lights blinking.

She glanced in the mirror. A reflexive nervousness washed up from her groin, a fear-gland memory left over from when she was the sixteen-year-old moll of one of the surfing dope peddlers of Half Moon Bay High.

Her boyfriend’s truck had broken down and he had borrowed her car for part of the school day. Apparently, he had stashed half a lid in her glove box, a little surprise.

Driving home alone on a lonely stretch of the Cabrillo Highway that evening, she had seen those pulsing lights in her mirror. When she pulled over and reached for the registration, the young cop had shone his flashlight on the baggie of dope sitting right there on top of the maps.

What’s this, dried seaweed? he’d asked.

She had nodded dumbly, trying to keep from peeing her pants, thinking her college-track career had come to a screeching halt.

You’d better get yourself home. You’ve still got a long ways to go, he’d said, handing back the reg and her newly minted license.

Twenty years ago, and still, whenever she encountered the Coastside Patrol, she felt that ambivalent, resentful gratefulness. Jeez, when do you grow up? And the next random thought was, what had been that nice cop’s name?

She turned west onto the access road that led to her seaweed field, for the second time that day. She hadn’t realized it that morning, but she’d been so carefree, so eager to get her hands wet. Now, she didn’t even want to see the ocean, and it was the first time in her life she’d ever felt that way.

Without knowing why, she stopped abruptly. The screech of brakes behind her, and the annoyed face of Rosa Perez in her rearview yanked Sara back to her dutiful citizen persona. She waved sheepishly at Rosa and jolted ahead.

At the Pillar Point parking lot, an ambulance and a large white utility truck loaded with ocean rescue gear waited. Two hunky young men were already suited up in 4 mm wetsuits with bright orange safety harnesses and yellow nylon ropes coiled tightly against their chests.

In the parking lot, Sara signaled for Perez to pull up alongside. She did so, aligning Mike Mitchell with Sara. She had to speak across him to Perez, which felt more awkward than it should have. Fortunately, she was on their downwind side.

You can get closer down this dirt road.

Deputy Perez indicated to the other drivers to follow out the far side of the parking lot. They bounced over damp, packed dirt and potholes, an awkward, high-tech convoy.

At the edge of the tide pools, the rescue swimmers asked Sara to describe what she’d seen and where. Sara squinted out at the surf, amazed that she had been out there, it now looked so big.

I’m afraid he’s right in the impact zone now, she said. I got caught by the lead wave of a big set myself, before I could do anything.

Do you think it would come unstuck in this?

This was so indelicate a way to discuss the poor dead guy that Sara hesitated.

Lieutenant Mitchell spoke up for the first time.

Go on, he said sharply, as if she were a subordinate.

She took a deep shuddering breath, tamping down the surge of resentment his tone dredged up in her. Since her divorce, she hadn’t had to take that puffed-chest, testosterone-laced, egotistical, impatient, imperious bullshit from any man. But then, she couldn’t really expect the Lieutenant Sheriff to be sentimental about a dead body.

His head was wedged in really hard, from what I could see. But there’s been 25 tons of pneumatic and hydraulic pressure working on him for the past half hour, so your guess is probably better than mine.

Mitchell looked up at the sky and took a deep breath, as if gathering his composure. The two swimmers looked at one another. The pounding surf on the jagged rocks did not look survivable.

Then with a focus as precise as a computerized scope, Mike Mitchell fixed his view on the place where Sara had said the body was. He ordered Rosa Perez to radio the Coast Guard HH65 that they didn’t have land access and to give a report from the air.

Within minutes, the vivid red chopper was buzzing the cliffs from the north. They watched it skim the waves and bank for pass after pass.

Sara walked some distance from the rescue professionals and sat on a rock. She put her face in her hands and realized she was crying. The salt tears stung her sliced hands. She deserved a few tears, she figured.

After a couple of minutes, she heard someone sit down next to her. She looked up at Deputy Perez.

Oh, hey, you’ve got blood on your face. Are you hurt?

Sara put a self-conscious hand to her forehead.

No…oh, my hands. She held them up. That rogue wave did a number on me.

Ouch. Hang on.

Perez went to the EMTs and came back with one of the guys — a well-built blonde surfer-type — who carried a white first-aid box.

Yikes. Been into some heavy petting with the razor backs, huh?

The EMT – Taj according to his shirt – snapped on latex gloves and gingerly examined her hands.

Anywhere else hurting?

Just some bruises. Trademarks.

What were you doing out so far by yourself?

I was harvesting seaweed. I’ve been doing it for years. I know better than to let my guard down. I guess I was a bit upset.

This’ll sting.

He looked up and for the first time regarded her as something other than a body part.

I’ve heard about you. You’re the seaweed lady, aren’t you?

His timing was perfect. Sara had to suck air to avoid screaming in pain from the antiseptic, but his question helped divert her focus from the fire in her palms. She nodded, grateful.

You’ve got a daughter, Marsi.

She gasped audibly. Less at the pain, and more in dismay at having her personal life aired on this sad shore, especially at having Marsi, even in name only, tainted by it.

Sara regarded Taj more closely. He was a bit old, close to twenty-one, she guessed. She’d had four months to get used to the idea that Marsi was sixteen now, but she hadn’t quite fully processed the fact.

How do you know Marsi?

Linda Mar. Pillar Point. She’s a pretty good surfer.

Hmm. Not quite Eddie Haskell, but Taj knew how to soften up a mom.

Maybe too good. She’s still in high school.

Taj chuckled at the obvious parental thrust.

Yeah. She’s a brain. And a nice person, too. She brought those kids she tutors to the beach last week. Cute.

The kids or Marsi? Sara felt too drained to probe further.

When her hands were wrapped in gauze, like soft, white paws, Taj returned to his post, watching the recovery proceedings with the rest of the professionals. Rosa Perez stayed by Sara for a moment.

Sorry this is hard, she said. It’s hard for us, too. I mean, it’s always sad, when the ocean takes somebody’s life. But today, well, everybody’s pretty sure that’s Lieutenant Mitchell’s son you saw.

Sara forgot herself.

Oh no. The news reports this morning, about the local fishing boat they thought was lost?

Rosa nodded and got to her feet. I’ll get you some water, she said.

Dumbfounded, Sara watched Rosa walk back to the cruiser. Now she felt terrible about the show-off pressure remark, which had been in response to what she had assumed was a plain, bad attitude on Mike Mitchell’s part.

They were about to call off the search when the copter radioed that they’d spotted a foreign object floating in the water north of the point. Sara watched the airborne rescuer lower in the basket, slip into the brutally cold water, maneuver and strap into it a form, a body.

She glanced sidelong at Mike Mitchell. Everybody else, she noticed, was careful not to look at him.

His large, lined face sagged. The coarse stubble darkening his shovel of a chin now told her he’d spent the night in uniform, monitoring search efforts. She noticed his hair again. A classic silver fox, she couldn’t help but think, but then saw with a bitter dash of sobriety how the father’s hair curled like those black locks waving in the seaweed.

Chapter 3

Sara remained on her rocky perch and gazed out to sea while the EMTs packed up. She heard two car doors slam and the vroom of the big police cruiser as it took off.

She felt ashamed for her earlier prickliness toward Lieutenant Mitchell, although there was no way she could have known he was a father who had just lost a son, very likely a man split open by pain on the inside. That human dimension beneath the paramilitary discipline helped her remember who he was.

Mike Mitchell had been a star quarterback at Half Moon Bay High back in the day and graduated three years before Sara was a freshman. They’d never actually spoken before, even though his dead wife, Elena Mitchell, had been a friend of a friend. But Sara had never really known Elena either. Poor guy. First the wife to ovarian cancer and now the only child.

She wondered at his rigid bearing, his ability to carry on as unit commander when things were going so horribly wrong for him personally. If anything ever happened to Marsi…but no. Going there was a selfish, maudlin indulgence. She’d won custody, after all, by selling the judge on her upbeat, optimistic plans for Marsi and her life on the coast.

The tide flowed, and its surge, explosion, rush and, strangely most powerful of all, sucking retreat back into the great depth of sea made her ache in her chest, the way it always had. Fear and yearning combined. She was so, so sorry for all the loss, but unable to let go of the hope.

Another strong wave broke on the rocks and pushed a long, thin piece of driftwood that clattered across the pools beyond her perch. Her shillelagh glistened with salt water. It lay close enough to race a wave for — she had a chance to retrieve it before a bigger set tossed it back to sea and sucked it away.

She scrambled down, her bones tired of the hard rock. She saw the next set on its way, judged her time and hustled out toward the impact zone. She used to play this game as a girl — she called it Wipeout — sitting in tide pools where the waves broke