Ironic, considering all the men who have dominated my life, that both my children and my only grandchild have been girls. And that both surviving members are in fact lying there, with me on one side and Don Collins on the other.
Twenty-three
Hanging pipes under the joists took the better part of a day: water pipes and a waste outlet for the shower and sink. She had approval to mount a shed at the side of the cabin for a composting toilet, a complicated mechanism that nonetheless simplified the other septic demands considerably.
Framing and building the access door for the crawl space took a morning. Then she was ready for her first inspection, after which she could begin to lay the subfloor.
The county building inspector came on Monday morning, in accordance with the letter she had sent with Ed the week before. There was something infinitely comforting about a man with a clipboard, the threat he carried both tangible and universal, and therefore welcome. Rae quite looked forward to doing battle with him, and was disconcerted when he proved a jovial balding man on the edge of retirement, who was just terribly interested in everything but in too much of a hurry to do more than a quick run-through today, maybe coffee next time, Ms. Newborn. Even his clipboard was unthreatening, a bright blue plastic affair with a butterfly sticker on the back (his small daughter’s addition, he told Rae without embarrassment). Vaguely disappointed, she held her signed permit and watched his boat pull away. Then she went back to her officially sanctioned foundation and let herself down between the floor joists to check on the two carved figures of herself and Great-uncle Desmond. She blew gently to free them of a light drift of sawdust, then pulled herself back up to staple fiberglass batting over their heads.
More boards to haul, this time 1×8s with shiplap edges for the subfloor. They were also mostly warped and knotty, which offended the precise woodworker in Rae even though she knew full well that using clean, close-fitting, kiln-dried boards for the purpose would be a waste both of money and of resources.
Still, her boards would be true, whether they started out warped or not. It pained her to use even a cheap screwdriver as a brute lever to force the boards into alignment before hammering them into place, but she did it, and her floorboards were tight enough to qualify as a finished floor, though they were rough and fastened with common box nails.
Rae drove the last nail in on Tuesday morning, and was trimming the overhang when the familiar cadence of Ed’s boat engine reached her ears. As he was easing up to her dock, she sawed through the last few feet, and then she walked across the fresh new floor of her house and stood where her front door would be, taking in the change of perspective that the combined elevations of foundation and floor provided.
The view was good.
Ed threw his rope around the stanchion and looked around for her. She waved broadly to catch his attention, and was amused to see the energy of his return wave. She trotted down her front steps and across the clearing to help him unload.
“Hey, there,” he called when she was within earshot. “You got yourself a floor!”
“That I do, Ed. Want to see it?”
He all but ran up the hill, his stocky figure bowling along, mustaches flying. Rae tucked the canvas-back camp chair under her arm and followed. When she joined him on the platform, she set the chair down in front of the fireplace and gestured to it with a ceremonial flourish.
“Please have a seat, Mr. De la Torre. You’re my first visitor.”
“I am honored, Mizz Newborn.” He lowered his backside with an air of ceremony, and tugged at his mustaches in pleasure.
“Call me Rae,” she told him, as she’d told him on each of his four previous visits. He merely looked out over the scenery and beamed, as proud as if he’d done it himself.
She was pleased to have him here, an actual visitor without a clipboard, someone with whom she could share her achievement. Ed was growing on her, this genial aging hippie boatman who smelled of marijuana and engine oil, who acted like a resident of Margaritaville, yet in whom she suspected a number of dark corners. She wasn’t at all sure how she’d feel if he arrived on the island in the dead of night, but during the daylight hours, he was a welcome if perplexing visitor.
“You oughta have a porch out front,” he told her. “With a rocker on it.”
“Granny Newborn,” she remarked. Ed’s suntanned features twisted up and he hastened to assure her that he didn’t mean it that way, that he’d never thought of her as— She laughed. “Never mind, Ed. I am a grandmother, after all. And you’re right, it does need a viewing point. The only problem is, the original didn’t have a porch, and I’m supposed to be restoring a—Hey, wait a minute.” Rae squatted down on the front steps to take a closer look at the troublesome lip. As it stood, it was an oddity that threatened the house’s fabric, but with Ed’s words in mind, she began to smile and shake her head admiringly. “Desmond was going to put a porch on; he just never got around to it,” she said. The lip that threatened to direct rain to the sill would be a perfect ledge on which to rest a porch. And—damn! That also explained why the door was hinged as it had been: Standing on a porch, a door opening outward would not be awkward.
She realized that Ed had said something to her.
“Sorry?”
“Who’s Desmond?” he repeated.
“Oh. Desmond Newborn, my great-uncle, who built the place in the Twenties. None of the family knows much about him, but I keep finding out things, like this. The only reason to make a foundation this way is if you want to add a porch in the future.” Another thought suddenly struck her, and she turned to look at the empty space to the left of the fireplace. Her grin widened. The peculiar framing she had uncovered there would be no accident, either. For whatever reason, Desmond had built a narrow door smack against the stones of the fireplace. Or a window, but why build a window that looked directly into a rock wall? She couldn’t wait to tell Petra, her partner in—what? forensic anthropology? analytical architecture?
“Want some coffee, Ed?” she called over her shoulder, but she knew his answer, and was already moving down the steps.
She put on the kettle and helped Ed unload her usual selection of basic groceries, the propane canisters, water jugs, sack of clean laundry, and assorted building materials that she had ordered. The plastic joints for the water line had come, stapled into a heavy-weight plastic bag. Seven weeks, and Petra (assuming she came) would have her shower. Out in the trees, true, but there would be water, and it would be hot.
She gave Ed her laundry sack and shopping list, and then his cup of coffee. She watched, amused, as he settled into his chair for his weekly gossip as if he’d been doing it all his life. Rae had no real desire to know what was going on in the outer world, and it was an interruption, but Ed did usually keep his stay down to a half hour or so, and it seemed to make him happy. If thirty minutes a week would buy her a contented deliveryman, it might prove a good investment, if she ever needed something above and beyond his call of duty.
So she told herself. The truth of the matter was, solitary she might be, but she was discovering that she was not by nature a complete hermit. Part of her enjoyed the human contact with the earthy rogue Ed De la Torre and the otherworldly busybody Nikki Walls. She might not want to see too much of her neighbors, but it was nice to know she had them.
And beyond mere human contact, Rae was coming to have an intrinsic interest in Ed himself.
On his second delivery run, Rae had caught the first hint that the man was more than just a seagoing jack-of-all-trades. She had been relieved to see the wariness fade quickly from his eyes when she met him with a nice, normal greeting, her hammer left behind on the workbench. They unloaded the boat, coffee was offered and accepted, and then Ed tugged his heavy corduroy shirt down over the tattoos on his wrists and asked her, “Do you know anything about Kant?”
Rae nearly choked on her coffee. “Kant? You mean the philosopher?”
“Yeah. Immanuel Kant. I’ve been reading my way through
him and ran up against a couple of things I don’t understand. Whenever that happens I just sort of ask around until I find someone who knows the answer. You’d be amazed, the kinds of things people in these islands know.”
She blinked. “You don’t say.”
“Really. There’s a guy over in Deer Harbor, wrote a book on Thomas Aquinas. He came in handy, I tell you, whenever I got stuck with the Summa theologica. But he’s not much help with Kant.”
“Well, I’m awfully sorry, Ed, but the last philosophy I read was in a class when I was eighteen. It made my head hurt.”
“It does that, all right,” he agreed cheerfully.
The weathered features of a sixty-year-old boatman-philosopher crinkled up in a rueful smile, and Rae was blinded by the sudden, sure knowledge that Alan would have loved to meet this man, would have sat forward in his chair to pry out more of his unlikely incongruities, delighted at the discovery of a diamond in the rough. She had had to go and busy herself with the coffeepot to hide her face from Ed.
Now, three weeks later, she handed him his mug and asked him how Kant was coming along.
“Finished him Friday.”
“And did you solve the problems you were having?”
“Not really, but I wrote them down to think about. Someday I’ll find someone who can answer them. Now I’m working on Confucius.”
“That’s quite a shift.”
“I don’t like to get stuck in one place. But Confucius … I don’t know. Feels to me like a person really has to know Mandarin Chinese to see what the guy’s getting at. I know a little Cantonese—enough to order a meal or give directions to a taxi driver, but I can’t read it.”
“Ed, you are a constant surprise. Where did you learn to speak Chinese?”
“Lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years. Want to see?”
Before Rae could ask what he meant by this cryptic offer, he stood and began to unbutton his corduroy shirt. The T-shirt he wore underneath it concealed his torso, but when the long sleeves came off, Rae could finally see what she had glimpsed at its beginnings: Ed’s skin was a solid tapestry of color, starting at the wrists with a pair of similar but not identical bracelets in an African sort of design, and moving up his arms. He pushed up the right sleeve of the T-shirt to reveal a dragon, the tip of its tail just below the elbow, its body a sinuous curve up toward the shoulder, its head doubled around to breathe fire down the back of the arm.
“Hong Kong,” he said.
“You mean you had that done in Hong Kong?”
“That one I did, yeah, although most of them I have done by a guy in Vancouver. He’s been working on me for thirty-five years now. I give him a design, he figures out how to fit it in. It’s my life, all the important things, beginning with these.” He clasped his left wrist with his right hand, then the right with the left. “Two years with the Peace Corps in Kenya—I came home and wanted to make sure I’d never forget it. So we started with them, and added on. We figure that unless I get real busy, we won’t get to my ankles until I’m ninety-five or so.”
His was a truly magnificent epidermis, peculiarly sensuous, a solid plane of shifting, intertwined, richly colored images, indigo and emerald and maroon, with not a scrap of flesh tone to be seen. It was difficult to resist caressing it, so velvety warm did the surface appear. Ed pointed out a leaping salmon along the left biceps (commemorating two seasons on a fishing boat) and a standing grizzly bear on the right (an encounter while working the Alaska pipeline), a whirl of purples and blues (a Caribbean hurricane he’d been through), and a brightly striped balloon (summer employment in the Napa Valley). The shapes were as intricately fitted as a jigsaw, but one shape she puzzled over.
“What’s that?” she asked. It looked like a bottle with lines in front of it.
“Ah,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I did six months for drunk and disorderly, punching some guy in a bar. He turned out to be a cop.”
It was a bottle, with cell bars overlaid.
She sat back, sure that if she expressed an interest, he would happily strip off his shirt and show her how far they had gotten. And perhaps more than his shirt. For today, however, she’d had enough revelation.
“So, Ed,” she said. “What’s new in the outside world?”
What’s new in the world was an unending source of interest for Ed, as compelling and instructive as Kant or Aquinas. What’s new was also, for Ed, almost exclusively local; his world stretched from the northern end of Vancouver Island to the southern tip of Puget Sound, only occasionally extending to the rest of Washington State. The lawmakers in Washington, D.C., might as well have been on another planet—ironic, she thought, for a man so thoroughly traveled. Today’s news bulletins were typical, beginning with the recent near-trauma of a rumored buyout of the local market by a huge mainland chain, a narrowly averted catastrophe that would have brought the islands arugula and fresh mozzarella at the cost of a local institution, and continuing on to a scandal involving a high school teacher on San Juan Island, a dead orca found near Shaw (one with a letter and number designation rather than a name, which meant it was not one of the more prominent island residents, though nonetheless mourned), and finally some complicated fracas on a private beach on Lopez that had Sheriff Carmichael diving into the water, fully clothed, to rescue a drunk girl. Rae listened with half an ear, distracted by the play of Ed’s tattoos. A slim rattlesnake had been slipped in between a brown football with a black squiggle on it (a signature, blurred by age?) and a squarish object that looked like a sandwich. What would it be like to go to bed with that skin? she speculated. She had absolutely no interest in Ed, but the skin he wore was another matter.
She realized that her guest was sitting forward, hunkering toward her as if they were in danger of being overheard by the blue jays. Rae tore her attention from his skin to listen, and found herself leaning forward as well.
“You heard about them girls disappearing on the mainland?” he repeated.
“Um, there was a girl in the papers, but that was weeks ago. Rugeley, the name was; Joanna Rugeley. When I first got here.” A newspaper story from which she had torn her eyes, crumpling it up for firestarter, but not before the name and photograph had imprinted themselves on her memory. “In Spokane, wasn’t it? Has there been another one?”
“Her sister,” Ed said, relishing his role as bearer of grim news—even if the news was from the far distant edges of his recognized world.
“The paper seemed to think the girl had run away,” Rae remembered. “There was some kind of school the father was going to send her to, wasn’t there?”
“Yeah, some reform school in Tahiti or something. Wish someone’d send meto the South Pacific to go to school.”
“And now her sister’s disappeared?”
“Yep. Ellie, they call her. Fourteen years old—walked off to the school bus and just vanished into thin air. They think either some freak’s out there, or else the first girl came back for her sister.”
“Either way, it’s hard on the parents.”
“Mother’s dead, it’s just the father. And yeah, he was on the news, all cryin’ and stuff. They had an interview with one of his friends, called him a God-fearing man.”
The only God-fearing people Rae had known were, in her opinion, self-righteous, judgmental individuals with good reason to fear divine disapproval. But Rae had not forgotten the scene with Tamara on the ferry, hearing of the growing antagonism between Petra and Don, and Don’s consequent investigations of schools for troubled youth. The narrative, typical of Tamara, had been disjointed, leaving Rae to guess what lay between the lines. At the time, she had assumed Tamara was exaggerating, that this was just the latest in a long series of messages, ultimately from Don, asking Rae to contribute yet again to the Collins family finances— surely Don would not seriously consider farming his daughter out just to extract some cash from his mother-in-law. Still, she hadn’t been able to call his bluff, not then, probably not ever. Instead, she did as she had for
years, more times than she could count—namely, sat and written Tamara a check, this one ostensibly for the child’s therapy. But the memory niggled in Rae’s mind, and made her answer sharply.
“I’ve heard about those schools, Ed. Tropical boot camps, all drills and structure and a fair amount of abuse. There’s good reason they don’t have them in this country—our laws would never stand for some of the things they do to those kids to keep them in order. If I were a teenager, I’d probably be tempted to run away, too.”
Rae’s vehemence had Ed raising an eyebrow over his coffee mug, but it was a question that made her very nervous. How long would Don be satisfied with the last check? There was no knowing, with him. Should she have paid more attention to what Tamara was saying about the schools? Rae could only hope to God that Petra would back away from open confrontation with her father.
“Hey,” said Ed suddenly. “Jeez, I nearly forgot. I got a call from some lawyer down in California, said she’d sent you a letter and would I please wait for you to look it over. She needs something signed, said you’d want me to take it back and overnight it to her so she wouldn’t have to wait till next week. It’s in that fancy envelope,” he said, as Rae picked up the canvas pouch that Ed always brought her mail in. The bag was heavier than usual, due in part to a packet from Petra—the photos, no doubt. She laid that to one side and pulled out the express packet. It was an immensely thick bunch of documents from her lawyer, Pam Church, nearly an inch of paper; when Rae read the cover letter, her heart sank.
“Oh, shit,” she said in disgust.
“Problems?” Ed asked, trying not to sound too inquisitive.
“Legal problems,” she said vaguely.
“Legal things are a plague,” Ed said darkly, grim personal experience clear in his voice. “It’s like that story by Dickens—court case goes on and on, people die off but the case lives forever. You ever read that?”
Folly Page 20