Muriel was a retired anthropologist, who studied middens. She knew a lot about garbage. She was also an avid beachcomber and was the person who’d found the severed foot. She prided herself on her finds: bone fish hooks and lures, flint spearheads and arrowheads, and an assortment of stone tools for pounding and cutting. Most were First Nations artifacts, but she also had a collection of old Japanese fishing floats that had detached from nets across the Pacific and washed up on the island’s shore.
