He wanted to stay and find more. He wanted to move the bodies, comb the wreckage, pick it all apart like a bird on a fish. But the sky was growing dark, threatening rain. I backed away from the water, afraid of the fickle shore and storm-fed tides. Alden was forced to follow. He held his hands to the sky and marked the spot in his memory, tracing the old shoreline pattern on the hill above.

As we walked back to the resort, the bright white beach began to snap under our feet. The water turned red as rust, and the rainbow of stones was buried under stiff dried fish.

He tried to go back the next day, but the skin of his feet had turned the color of the dry tilapia shore, the whites of his eyes the color of the rusted-out campers in the surrounding desert. Whether it was poison from the toxic water, a corpse virus, or a ghost ship curse, he didn’t care. He limped, feet dragging through the fish, till the fever slowed him, then stopped him, and he knelt in the crackling granules of beach.

“Bones,” Alden said, running his hands through the splinters. “Some are fish, some are birds, bet some are from the yachts we never found.”

I knew he said it to scare me.

It worked.

***

The scavengers paid for their rooms at the resort, sometimes in food, sometimes in doubloons, or, when Alden wasn’t looking, with pretty stones or sea glass. They tied their boats at the water’s edge—a long walk, now, from the resort’s door, and getting longer every year. They hiked across the bone beach, inspecting destroyed structures, tiptoeing around the bulbs and fins of unexploded dummy bombs from the naval base on the north shore. They followed old train tracks that lead straight into the water, and tied rags around their faces to keep from breathing in the dust cloud of evaporated pesticides and fertilizers. They dug in the sand and trawled from their boats, and—if they were brave or foolish enough—dove in the water.

They found artifacts of the Salton Sea’s heyday. Speed boat parts, depression glass shards, even a flask engraved with F.S. that the diver swore was Sinatra’s.

Some would ask about the lost Spanish galleon. Others would laugh, and the night would be spent telling tall tales of tall ships.

The diver with pale brown eyes the color of sand drying in the sun was the first to ever ask about a curse. He’d met a fisherman, now working far from here, who spoke of his old seaside town and its flood wrecks and the riches no local would touch, and which no diver could find.

Alden just laughed and shook his head. Don’t scare away the business is the motto of every haunted shore. Stories sell, but paradise sells better.