“He's lost his marbles,” Abbey muttered.

“Who-Dad? No way,” I said.

“Then why did he do it?”

“Because Dusty Muleman has been dumping his holding tank into the water,” I said.

Abbey grimaced. “Yuck. From the toilets?”

“Yep. In the middle of the night, when there's nobody around.”

“That is so gross.”

“And totally illegal,” I said. “He only does it to save money.”

According to my father, Dusty Muleman was such a pathetic cheapskate that he wouldn't pay to have the Coral Queen's sewage hauled away. Instead his crew had standing orders to flush the waste into the basin, which was already murky. The tide later carried most of the filth out to open water.

“But why didn't Dad just call the Coast Guard?” my sister asked. “Wouldn't that have been the grown-up thing to do?”

“He told me he tried. He said he called everybody he could think of, but they could never catch Dusty in the act,” I said. “Dad thinks somebody's tipping him off.”

“Oh, please,” Abbey groaned.

Now she was starting to annoy me.

“When the wind and the current are right, the poop from the gambling boat floats out of the basin and down the shoreline,” I said, “straight to Thunder Beach.”

Abbey made a pukey face. “Ugh. So that's why they close the park sometimes.”

“You know how many kids go swimming there? What Dusty's doing can make you real sick at both ends. Hospital-sick, Dad says. So it's not only disgusting, it's dangerous.”

“Yeah, but-”

“I didn't say it was right, Abbey, what Dad did. I'm only telling you why.”

My father hadn't even tried to get away. After swimming back to the dock, he'd sat down in a folding chair, opened a can of root beer, and watched the Coral Queen go down. He was still there at dawn, sleeping, when the police arrived.