“It’ll just have to dribble into five-gallon jugs for a week or two, I’m afraid. But at least we won’t have to juggle them off Ed’s boat.”
“Let me know if you need a hand—with a tank, I mean. I could bring half a dozen guys with muscle up to shift one into place for the price of a six-pack. Each, that is.”
“I’ll be using three interconnected smaller tanks, instead of one big one, so I think I can handle them myself. But thanks, I’ll keep your male harem in mind.”
“Family, mostly—I’ve got dozens of cousins. Most of them male, all of them protective. And three brothers-in-law; the shortest of them is six feet.”
“Say,” Rae said suddenly, her memory jogged by the picture of a gathered multitude. “Do you know if there’s a drum circle somewhere nearby?”
To Rae’s astonishment, Nikki’s pale skin flushed scarlet beneath the freckles, and she mumbled something about um yes, there was a bunch of people, she had heard, who got together with these drums they had made …
“I just wondered. Twice now I’ve heard this noise, both times at the full moon. The first time I thought I was imagining things.”
Nikki looked relieved. “Oh, no, it’s a real group. They meet at the mouth of Roche Harbor, which is probably why you can hear it from here.”
“Sounds fun. I could take my granddaughter, if she’s here on a full-moon night.”
Nikki’s small mouth turned in, a secret smile full of mischief that made her look more than ever like an Irish wood sprite, and that made Rae wonder if any artist had ever used her as a model. “The first part of the night, she might enjoy.”
Which left Rae to speculate about what took place the latter part of the night, and if the activity was the reason for Nikki’s sudden blush.
Picturing the tiny red-haired ranger throwing off her neatly ironed uniform for a pagan fertility ritual in the sand, clothed only in her freckles, Rae hid a smile of her own. Nikki went quickly on.
“Anyway, I won’t keep you away from your work. I’ll be back in a few days with your No Trespassing sign, but at the moment I’m just passing on a message from Jerry Carmichael. He was going to come out himself but he’s a little shorthanded, with one guy out with some kind of skin allergy and another on vacation. Okay; here’s what it is. Jerry had a conversation with your sheriff down in California—Espinosa, was it? Right, Escobar—who wanted you to know that he’d heard a very second-or third-hand rumor from an informant about a couple of lowlifes overheard in a bar down in Bakersfield, bragging about being paid to rough up an old woman in Santa Cruz.”
“What?”
“Rae, this is very, very iffy. Super insubstantial, you know? I told Jerry we really shouldn’t bother you with it, because it’s just going to make you worry unnecessarily. You don’t live in Santa Cruz, you’re not an old woman, and it’s far too shaky a connection. But Jerry promised the sheriff he’d pass on the message, and I was going to be out here today anyway, so I said I’d tell you. The part I liked was, Escobar wanted to recommend that you, and I quote, ‘avoid any deserted roads.’”
The two women looked around at their surroundings: clearing, tent, trees pressing in, boat bobbing gently at the ancient dock. They began to laugh at the same moment—Nikki more easily than Rae, but even Rae had to see the humor in the warning.
“Right,” she said. “I’ll bury myself in the crowds.”
“In a couple of months, that wouldn’t be a problem, but even now you’ll begin to see the boaters growing every day. Anyway, Jerry sent you this, whether you want it or not.” She held out the tubular orange box to Rae.
It contained a flare gun, ugly and orange and very functional-looking. Rae picked it up; it was heavier than it looked. Nikki took the gun, broke it open, and demonstrated how to load it, with cartridges that resembled shotgun shells for an elephant shoot. She ended with “Just point it straight up—although you might check that there’s not anything flammable underneath it. Or a person. And I’d send off two or three flares if you really want a response. They burn for three or four minutes, and you can see ’em for miles, even during the day.”
“Thank you, Nikki. And thank the sheriff. I’m sure I won’t need it, but I do appreciate the thought. I really can’t believe that anyone’s paid some guys to attack me. And even if someone did, they’re not about to come a thousand miles to do it again.” Not even her son-in-law Don would do that. Legal harassment, yes, but criminal? And that was assuming that he could come up with the ready cash to hire a harasser. “They must have been just a couple of hopped-up opportunists, like Sheriff Escobar has said all along.”
“Tell you the truth, Rae,” Nikki said shrewdly, “you don’t sound all that sure.”
“Don’t I? I just—I can’t imagine the other.” Then she went on, reluctantly. “The only thing that gives it even a trace of believability is that the two who attacked me? They didn’t smell like alcohol. It’s funny what sticks in the mind, but that’s always niggled at me, that they just smelled of sweat and cigarettes. No beer, or drugs. It just struck me as odd, considering.”
“Well,” Nikki said after a minute, “I don’t know just what we can do, other than say that if a boatload of strangers puts in at your dock, don’t go down and try to run them off by yourself. Put up a flare and go into the woods.”
“The bat-signal over Gotham City,” Rae said, more sharply than she had intended. Why did I tell Nikki about the smell? Little Ms. Innocence here may well be the worst gossip in the county.
Nikki laughed blithely. “Sheriff Carmichael in his bat-boat. Although Ed’s more likely to see it first.”
This time when Nikki left, Rae did not stand on the bank to see her off. She turned her back on the uniformed ranger and everything she had brought along with her, and returned up the hill to the task at hand.
For the rest of the afternoon she kept her head down, bent over recalcitrant lengths of white plastic pipe, welcoming the hot and distracting pain in her back, refusing to look up when she heard the occasional rustle in the bushes, shoving away her mind’s suggestion of Watchers, balking at the very thought of a plot against her.
Ridiculous.
Her skin crawled and her muscles twitched, but she gritted her teeth and fought against the feelings. She measured her pipes with close deliberation, she sawed with precision, she fitted and glued the joints in place, this slick dead material so unlike her usual wood.
Ridiculous idea. Absurd.
Unthinkable.
Twenty-four
Letter from Rae
to Her Lawyer
May 9
Dear Pam,
I trust you received the signed forms. Ed De la Torre, the boatman, promised to mail them on Tuesday when he got back to Friday Harbor.
Something’s come up here that is very troublesome and very distracting. I heard on Thursday that the police have picked up a (completely unsubstantiated, as well as insubstantial) rumor that someone actually paid those two men to attack me. No proof, no indication of who or why. Maddening.
Still, I think that taken in conjunction with Don’s competency suit, I’m afraid I have to bow to your long-held recommendation and rewrite my will. I’ll say right off, however, that you’re not going to like what I propose.
This is what I want to do—and wait until you read my explanation before you start shouting at me. I want you to get in touch with Hoskins, tell him I want to liquidate one quarter of my holdings. Let him choose, I don’t care in the least so long as it’s not real estate, but one quarter of what he estimates is the whole. And divide that into three, with one part each going to Don, Tamara, and Petra. Petra’s share will have to be a trust, I presume, held until she’s eighteen, but I would like for you to administer it, not her parents, and to let her know privately that you will hand over money if she has a reasonable need for it before then. Just so Don can’t get his hands on it.
The remaining three quarters lets leave as it is now, divided up between my various relatives
and Alan’s family, with percentages and set amounts to assorted charities, but with the following addition: I’d like to add a discretionary fund for Dr. Hunter, to be used for equipment or to cover the costs of some needy loony, mad artist, or the like—word it however you like, to give her the maximum freedom with it. And make it an amount that’s substantial without being too intrusive into the whole. Say $100,000? Maybe $200,000 would be better—she could do something with that.
And now for the explanation.
The issue here, basically, is extortion. Don holds the power over something I value, namely my granddaughter and her mother, and is telling me that unless I fork over some cash, to put it elegantly, I’ll not see them again. Or maybe this is ransom, I don’t know. At any rate, I can’t believe Don really thinks he can get me declared incompetent. I think this is his way of saying that he’s willing to make life very rough for me, and incidentally to block access to his wife and daughter, unless I open up some funds to him. The stick, you could say, to go with the carrot that is Petra.
Why am I bothering to tell you this? You know the whole story— my chronic willingness, as you once put it, to succumb to Dons manipulations. It’s his way of doing business. He sees something he believes he has a right to, convinces himself that its owner is deliberately withholding it from him, and manipulates the situation until it falls into his lap. He did it with Tamara when she was still in high school, whisking her out from under her boyfriend’s nose; he did it with the ranch they own, buying it from a woman who hadn’t any intention of selling it; he did it with the partnership at his real estate firm, somehow getting the senior partner to retire; and he’s done it with me a couple dozen times over the years. To your endless disapproval, I know.
Pam, I don’t care about the money. I know it’s your job to make me care, but the only reason to have money is to buy what you want, and in this case, I want Petra. There’s nothing else that matters anymore. And God damn it, Don knows it.
Call him in, talk with him, make a few of those ladylike threats you do so well, make him see that we know exactly what he’s doing and are only willing to go with it so far. Get him to sign an agreement to back off, if that’s possible. But do not, under any circumstances, bring Tamara into it. She works very hard to keep from seeing Don’s manipulations, but if she’s forced to focus on what’s going on, she will side with him, I promise you, and Petra will be beyond my reach for the next five years.
As you’ve said before, I’m letting my feelings of guilt take over. You’re right, except that my guilt is not a feeling, it is a fact. I failed my daughter, badly, at two key points in her young life. The fact that it was due to an illness beyond my control—depression—does not remove the effects on my daughter and my relationship with her.
And that’s my explanation for asking you to go against your lawyer’s principles.
Fiddle with this and talk to Hoskins, send me a draft if you like. Getting a notarized signature might be a problem out here—could we just have it witnessed, by a government employee? My local park ranger is a bit fey, but terribly upright and responsible.
More than you can say for some of your clients, I know.
I’m doing well here—the life of a hermit seems to suit me.
Yours,
Rae Newborn
P.S. I realize I’ve left dangling the whole question of Don’s possible involvement in my attack, but really, what can I say? The police are looking into it, although I somehow doubt they’ll prove anything. If Don did instigate it, maybe this financial arrangement will buy him off If he did, then it would have been just (!) a harassment that got out of hand. I will admit that I could picture Don sitting in a bar with some good buddy over a lot of beers, bitching about how short of cash he is while his wife’s mother is sitting on a fortune, and then saying to the buddy, Here’s fifty bucks, go make her feel threatened so my wife and I can offer to step in and take over her affairs. And I could well imagine the guy taking the money and bringing in a fiend and the two of them getting carried away, going way further than Don intended. What I can’t visualize is Don, much as I distrust him, actually going so far as to hire two guys to beat up and maybe rape his mother-in-law. He’s manipulative and greedy, but he’s not stupid, and seems (I have no proof, you understand) to have a fair amount of success in hiding his shadier deals. If this bar scenario or something like it turns out to be the case, and if (a big if the police find evidence, then that may well be the end of Don—surely even Tamara wouldn’t stick by him after that. And maybe you can throw in some subtle lawyer’s phrase to our agreement that gives me a way to remove the money from him if he is convicted of a crime.
Anyway, Pam, you deal with it. Frankly, I don’t care, just so I’m left in peace. A year and a half ago, I might have dug in my heels. Now I know that life is too short for the luxury of pride. Let Don tie himself up in knots—I won’t work to do it for him.
Rae
Twenty-five
Rae had not quite finished the water line by Ed’s next visit, but she was close enough to the end that she could continue to work on it without risk of missing his arrival. He gave a brief hoot on the boat’s horn as he came into the cove, startling the juncos and the red squirrel, but she had heard the sound of the motor half a mile off and was on the promontory before he had a chance to get the groceries from his cabin.
Ed handed over the bags and then, balancing a five-gallon water jug on his shoulder, swung a leg over the side of the boat and followed her up to the tent, eyeing the building as he went.
“You haven’t done too much work this week,” he commented with a question in his voice. “I’d’ve thought you’d have some walls up by now.”
Rae laughed, and held out her hands, ingrained with soil and crusted with layers of cement the solvent hadn’t quite taken off. “Plumbing this week, Ed. This is the last jug of water I want you to bring me. If I can’t get the line finished, I’ll just have to go up to the spring with buckets.”
“Water’s a fair distance, then?”
“Clear around where that big forked fir tree is.”
Ed whistled. “Why didn’t your man build his house a little closer to the spring?”
“I guess he liked the site over the convenience.”
“It is pretty,” Ed allowed.
They drank their coffee while he caught her up on all the news, whether she was interested or not: that the two missing sisters in Spokane had turned out to be runaways, and although they were still missing, the younger had written a letter to a friend, mailed in New Orleans ten days after she disappeared; that someone had burned down a barn on Lopez, and was in jail now with his parents screaming false arrest; that the county Board of Commissioners had discussed rationing water during the summer but decided instead to hand out flyers telling tourists not to sluice down their boats with fresh water and to wait until they got back to the mainland to take their half-hour showers.
It all ran over Rae’s hearing like water off a duck’s oily feathers, and she couldn’t have recalled a word of it (other than the change in status of the missing girls) by lunchtime. She gave him her letters, her lists, and her laundry; he went back to his boat. Alone again.
As she waved good-bye to the illustrated philosopher, it occurred to her that, for a hermit, she was well on her way to becoming a member of a community. No man is an island—nor, it would appear, woman.
The rest of her little community arrived on her doorstep, or her dock, the following day. She had spent the remainder of Tuesday pushing to complete the water line, and late at night, working by flashlight, she glued the final joint, and springwater finally trickled from the end of her circuitous snake of plastic tubes. Rae marked the occasion by a cautious victory dance on the rock slope and a ceremonial glass of the water, which tasted of mud from the pond and petroleum by-products from the pipe, both of which would, she prayed, be gone in a few days. She knelt to bathe her sweat-caked face in the trickle, set a five-gallon jug under the end, and wen
t to bed to the sound of an owl duet.
Wednesday morning, the jug was full to overflowing, the water from the pipe dribbling free and clean. She dumped the jug’s murky contents, replaced it under the pipe, and rigged a series of three more jugs, linked together by thin tubes that would allow the water in each jug to settle before moving on to the next. The last one had a spigot at the bottom, to which she attached a common hundred-foot garden hose, which would at least reach the lower tower of the house. Ed would deliver her actual tanks the following week, and civilization would settle over the island.
She was standing at the base of the system, her ears enjoying the musical trickle and her mind turning over the symbolism of water and life and the wellsprings of the island, when a half-familiar and close-by engine intruded itself. She turned around to see the county launch that had rested at her dock on the peculiar morning when the “family” had walked out of the mist. They were here again—minus Caleb this time, to Rae’s mixed relief and disappointment.
Sheriff Carmichael had not gotten any smaller in three and a half weeks, nor had Nikki grown any less ethereal—although being dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt and struggling beneath one end of a large flat object brought even that sprite closer to earth. Rae trotted quickly down to join them, and found herself supporting one end of a large, sternly lettered sign declaring:
NO TRESPASSING!
Nature Preserve Includes Cove
The posts holding the old sign were sturdy enough to hold this one up for a few more years, and the sheriff had brought a portable electric drill, so installing the new declaration was a matter of a few minutes. Since standing back to look at it would have required that they walk on water, they settled for perching with their heels in the water and looking up at the sign outlined against the sky.
As a gateway to a home, it was neither aesthetic nor welcoming. Next year, Rae thought, she would build one of her own that was both. A series of posts, she mused, some natural, others carved, iconic in nature: a modern interpretation of the local totem poles. Like that Brassil installation with the pilings. Not consciously artificial like Nils-Udo or Goldsworthy, or as polished as Murray’s things, but— She caught herself, and began to laugh: First build your house, then think about the gateway.
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