At the beach grasses which had been singed and lain down nearly flat—as if a burning helicopter had set down directly in their midst—and the saltbushes twisted into an insidious vortex. At the mounds and mounds of sand and other sediment which had been dredged up and redeposited—in an approximate circle—by some presently unseen force (a bulldozer, perhaps); or an object from space having made sudden, violent impact.
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“What do you suppose it was?” asked Amelia, poking the ashy dirt with one of her sticks, stirring it around.
“I wouldn’t do that,” I warned. “Could be unexploded ordinance—you never know.”
She gasped and moved back—although not very far—as I studied the point of impact, noting how angular it was, how geometrical (as if a giant arrowhead had been stabbed into the ea
