Folly

by Laurie R. King

  “Thank you,” she said to her two companions.

  The sheriff scooped up the remnants of the old sign and carried them along the promontory to the campsite, where he tossed the boards onto her pile of firewood. He straightened, brushing his hands, and lifted his chin at the building on the hillside.

  “You’ve got a lot done since I was here.”

  “The subfloor’s finished and the water supply’s complete.”

  “Mind if I look?”

  “Help yourself. I was just going to scramble some eggs. The least I can do is give you breakfast. Or lunch.”

  “Why don’t I do that,” Nikki offered. “I saw the subfloor when I was here the other day.”

  “Well,” Rae said, “okay. Eggs are in the cooler; there’s some bacon, too, if you want. Bread in the wooden box.” Nikki, however, already knew where everything was. She even managed to light the stove without an explosive puff, which Rae only did about half the time. Rae gave in and turned to join Sheriff Carmichael.

  As they approached the heap of studs piled by the stone steps, Carmichael stopped. “Those aren’t two-by-fours.”

  “Actually, they are. Full measure two-bys.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Desmond used them. And because they’re sturdy.”

  He said nothing, but once up on the flat, clear floorboards, he bounced, and when his considerable weight caused not the slightest shift, he nodded. “Sturdy’s the word. I helped some friends put up a post-and-beam house a few years ago. It felt like this.”

  “I’d have loved to do this as a timber-frame house, but I just couldn’t.”

  “It does take a fair number of people to get those beams up,” he agreed.

  “That, and I feel that if I’m following in my great-uncle’s footsteps, I have to follow his style of building. And not only because I’m supposed to be restoring the building, but because it needs to be the way Desmond Newborn built it.”

  “You’re a woodworker, I hear. Cabinetmaker, furniture maker, whatever you call it.”

  “Used to be.”

  “So tell me, do all woodworkers wrestle with two-by-fours on their off time?”

  “Like an artist doing housepainting during the holidays, you mean? No, not all. It’s about all I’m good for anymore.” She halted as the words sent an echo through her, and Carmichael paused by her side questioningly. She laughed, a little sour sound. “I told my husband that same thing, when our daughter was small and I couldn’t find the energy for creative work. He gave me a carpenter’s tool belt. As a joke.” And a pair of three-hundred-dollar chisels. As a serious response.

  Carmichael glanced at her, but did not comment. Instead, he went over to each of the stone towers, leaned inside to look up to the circle of open sky, then stepped down from the platform to take a closer look at the impromptu water system behind the house. After a minute, she followed.

  “Things going better now?” he asked as they picked their way back down the steep rock slope. “No more strange footprints?”

  “Things are fine, Sheriff. I—”

  “Call me Jerry. Please.”

  “Jerry. And I’m Rae, with an e. Though you already know that. Yes, things are going well.”

  And they were, she realized. Her nights were invariably broken and her days filled with a thousand startling noises, but she hadn’t had a full-out panic attack in a couple of weeks. Too tired, she guessed, and found herself smiling. “Yes. Very well indeed.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I called Sam Escobar this morning before we came out, but he’s got nothing new. They can’t even find the guy who told his informant he’d heard two people talking about being hired to attack you.”

  “Or somebody who may not have been me.”

  “You’re right. A rumor of a rumor. I’m glad you’re not fretting about it.”

  Back at the campsite, Nikki deftly divided the contents of the pan onto three plates and held one out to Rae, who perched on the cedar tree, leaving the two chairs to her guests, and dug her fork into the soft curds appreciatively. The Irish wood sprite could certainly cook an egg.

  “Is it okay?” Nikki asked.

  Rae looked up questioningly, then realized that manners might be a good idea.

  “It’s great. I was just thinking that it’s been—oh, months since I ate something I didn’t cook myself.” Since her discharge from the hospital, in fact. The dutiful casseroles Tamara had brought were probably still in the deep freeze, and the nurse-cum-baby-sitter Rae had lodged with on her release had been a firm believer in the tough love policy, requiring Rae to forage and clean for herself. Everything else, with the exception of several cups of coffee bought on the drive up from California, had either been eaten straight from a package or peremptorily stirred together by her own hands. The unexpectedness of another person’s simple but utterly different cooking style made the sloppy omelet a feast. She felt as if she should say grace over it.

  “Oh,” said Nikki. “I nearly forgot. Caleb sent you something.” She fished a piece of paper out of her shirt pocket, then handed it to Rae. Rae balanced her half-empty plate on the tree trunk and took the offering. Unfolding it, she found that Caleb had drawn a portrait of her standing in front of her tent. At least she supposed it was she: a tall stick figure in brown with a frizz of gray hair. As flattering a representation as any five-year-old could manage, she figured.

  “What are those around my feet? Rocks?”

  “Crabs. We counted twenty-three the day we were here, and Caleb put in every one.”

  “I see. Tell him thank you,” Rae said, and folded the drawing away. She returned to her meal with a lump in her throat.

  When they had finished all the eggs (Rae’s supply for the week, unfortunately) and half of her bread, Nikki moved to clean up, but Rae took the dishes out of the young woman’s hands and put them in the plastic dishpan. “It’ll make a nice change to wash up an actual pile of dishes,” she told her guests, and herded them down to the boat.

  On the way past the stack of lumber (little diminished, despite the numerous trips she had already taken) she remembered something.

  “I wonder if one of you could do me a favor? I forgot to tell Ed that I need a couple of heavy plastic sheets—they don’t have to be big, twelve by sixteen is fine, but they should be thick. Maybe six mil.”

  “Better ask Nikki,” Jerry Carmichael suggested. “Ed and I don’t exactly see eye to eye.”

  Nikki’s mouth quirked into her elfish smile. “Jerry caught Ed red-handed smuggling a load of Freon a few years back. Ed kind of holds him responsible.”

  “Freon?” Rae asked, thinking she must have misheard.

  “Freon,” Jerry confirmed. “You know, the stuff they use in refrigerators and air conditioners. A canister that costs maybe thirty bucks in Mexico goes for eleven, twelve hundred here, because of the EPA regulations. So old Ed thought he might just as well pay for his winter in Baja by loading up on the stuff and bringing it to Seattle. It was really a Customs problem, but I stumbled across it, so I had to arrest him. Canisters up to the gunwales, and he thought I ought to look the other way.”

  “I see.”

  “Mostly what he didn’t like was when I suggested he might be able to whittle down his sentence if he turned in the guy he was selling to. The arrest itself didn’t bother him, but ever since I asked him to ‘rat out,’ in his words, he looks at me like I’m a cockroach.”

  “He went to jail?”

  “Prison. It was a lot of Freon, and not exactly his first offense.”

  “That explains the big tattoo on his back,” Rae said, half to herself.

  Nikki halted to stare at her. “Ed showed you his tattoos?”

  “That one I saw by accident, more or less. He did show me his arms. They’re amazing.”

  Nikki and Jerry Carmichael looked at each other, but Nikki said only, “Ed is kind of like a cat. He doesn’t take to a lot of people.”

  “Look,” Rae said abruptly. “Shou
ld I be concerned about Ed? I mean, I know he’s a rogue, but can I trust him?”

  “Oh sure,” Nikki answered immediately, as if the idea of Ed De la Torre being cause for worry was laughable.

  Jerry Carmichael, though, took his time in responding. “I’d say Ed has a sharp eye for the quick buck, but he has his own sense of morality. He might sell a little marijuana to his friends, maybe a few mushrooms, but he’d draw the line at anything harder. And he’d never steal from a friend, although it’s not always easy to tell if you’re a true friend or just someone he’s setting up. ‘Rogue’ is a good word for him. But if you’re talking about violence, to my knowledge he’s only aggressive when he’s been drinking. And he’s been off the bottle for years. The one thing I would say you ought to watch for is, he’s got a reputation with single women. Especially women over forty.”

  “But only consensual,” Nikki hastened to add.

  “That’s true. I’ve never heard a whisper of Ed’s forcing himself on anyone. Seduction, that’s Ed’s game.”

  The smile Jerry Carmichael gave Rae had more than a trace of the seductive itself. It startled her, until he then turned it on Nikki as well. Ranger and sheriff climbed onto the boat and cast off. As Jerry steered toward the open water, Nikki leaned into him to say something over the noise of the boat. Rae watched carefully, but she could tell no more about the nature of their relationship from that piece of body language than she had learned from seeing them together. There was depth there, that much was obvious, but in what direction was impossible to tell.

  She shook herself. It was none of her business. Jerry Carmichael was not her concern. So it was that more than a week after trimming the boards from her sub-floor, interrupted by water systems, No Trespassing signs, and visits from her community, Rae was free to return to the actual work of raising her house. First, though, she washed the breakfast dishes and pulled on her swimsuit for a brief (a very brief) dip in the frigid cove. Finally, she strapped on her tool belt and resumed her proper labor.

  With the floor in place, Rae could now reach the first section of stonework without risking her neck on a ladder set on uneven ground. She filled a bucket from the end of the hose beside the house, spread out a plastic tarp to save the floorboards from a drenching, and set to with a heavy brush and soapsuds.

  Desmond’s fireplace and towers had been built out of water-rounded stones ranging from fist-sized in the fireplace to watermelon-sized in the towers. The effort he had gone to was enormous, boggling to contemplate. Furthermore, as the day went on and the stones emerged from their thick layer of moss and char, it became apparent that Desmond had chosen them for more than size.

  At first Rae thought that she would never rescue the stones from their patina, that all the elbow grease and harsh cleansers in the world would never make the fireplace stones anything but black. Then, standing critically back from the fireplace to evaluate her progress, she realized that although the stones themselves were indeed unremittingly dark, the mortar between them was not. As an experiment, she took her bucket and brush over to the adjoining tower, and quickly discovered that the rocks there were considerably lighter. Desmond had selected his stones from the beach below (and, very probably, from a lot of other beaches as well) with an eye to their color. The fireplace was black, the wet stones as glossy as if they had a layer of wet ink over them, but the tower was, for lack of a better word, orange. Translucent agates the size of a teapot, iron-rich metamorphic boulders, mottled sandstone with infinitesimal seashells embedded in it, all of them in shades ranging from yellow to pale brick, giving the overall impression of a warm, glowing orange. New, and in the full sunlight, it must have been an extraordinary sight.

  Unable to resist, she crossed the platform to the other tower, scrubbed for a few minutes, and found there not orange, but greens and even blues. She had never seen anything like it.

  “Uncle Desmond,” she said aloud, “you’re a wonder.”

  She dove back into the work with renewed vigor, scrubbing at the stones, gouging away at the engrimed mortar, starting at the floor and working her way up.

  Late that night she finished the rough scrub of the first dozen feet of the fireplace. She stood across the bare platform where the door would be, trying to imagine coming into a room with that at the end of it. It rose like a living thing, primitive and massive and at the same time sophisticated, with faint traces of pale gray threads here and there in the darkness of the stone that echoed the web of the mortar. She would, she decided, replace all the visible mortar in a dark gray color very like the present stained tone. And to the left she would build a storage wall, more Japanese than Shaker in its simple elegance, of some slightly cool wood, birch perhaps, or spalted maple, to repeat the dark lines, formal against the rising tower of stone, with the least touch of ebony inlay to tie the two shapes together.

  Yes; oh yes.

  The next day, Rae found the bullets.

  She was on the stepladder, scrubbing patiently at an especially ragged bit of mortar when a chunk of the stuff the size of her thumb came away in her hand. She fumbled and caught it, turned it over curiously to see why this particular bit had proven more unstable than the rest, and found embedded in its base an odd gray lump.

  Her first thought was that a stone had slipped past Desmond’s screen when he had prepared the sand for the cement. She pulled off her thick rubber gloves and picked the lump out with a thumbnail, then frowned at the soft, slightly flat object in the palm of her hand. It was like no stone that she had come across; more like a piece of metal. Had Desmond perhaps driven a nail between the stones to hang something on, and it had melted into a lump with the heat of the fire? How hot would a fire have to be, to do that? And why would that careful workman have bashed a hanger into his nice neat stonework a scant two feet from the ceiling? It was as odd as the pair of holes she had discovered in the smooth inner surface of his front door.

  She buttoned the lump into her shirt pocket and went on with her work, thoughtful.

  Rae broke off that afternoon while it was still light and tugged on her damp suit for a swim. The water was not warming up much with the weather, but it seemed that a person could grow accustomed to anything, because after half a dozen such dips she no longer felt as if her heart was about to stop every time she submerged. After all, it seemed wasteful to be the owner of a nice clear bay and not make use of it. And Nikki’s books were proving more interesting than she could have anticipated; Rae now knew the names of all the commonest plants and sea creatures around the cove, from Acorn barnacles to Yellowlegs (greater and lesser) and their habits and characteristics. She did not know why it seemed important to know these things, but it did, as if she was learning the names of neighbors and what they did for a living.

  She pulled herself out at the dock and picked her way barefoot over to the stove, where she set the big pan of water on to heat for a proper shower. Then she took an old narrow-bladed chisel from her toolbox and the big flashlight from beside the bed, and crossed over to the workbench.

  Getting at the underside of the bench through the forest of driftwood legs was no simple matter, but Rae managed to find a slot where she could thread her head in. It was damnably awkward and she only managed to shine the light into one of the holes, but it was enough to confirm that, half an inch beneath the surface of what had once been the inside of Desmond’s front door, not far from the place where the latch had been mounted, there was a spot of gray metal similar to those she’d found in the fireplace. She drew back and, working mostly by touch, gouged and pried at the wood surrounding the holes, only slicing into her fingers two or three times.

  The thing seemed to have gone in at an angle, Rae was thinking when something dropped from the wood into the sandy soil. She retrieved it: a gray, misshapen lump a little bigger than a pencil’s eraser. She placed it on the workbench above her head, and went to work on the other hole. It was higher up on the door, buried at a slightly more oblique angle, and its lump proved to be eve
n more completely preserved, with a rounded head and blunt end.

  Bullets, all of them.

  No doubt about it: Three bullets had gone flying through the air of Desmond’s Folly to lodge in its walls. At least three, she corrected herself, and in two opposite directions.

  She set all three lumps on the workbench while she went to bandage her fingers and make her dinner, but when she glanced over at the three gray objects and noticed how they echoed the three roofing nails that she had driven into the wood, the duplication made her uneasy. She walked across the meadow to retrieve them, and buttoned them into her shirt pocket.

  After dinner, over coffee, she lined the three objects up on a tree-stump table and sat back to contemplate them.

  Bullets didn’t necessarily have to mean that someone got shot. Maybe Desmond just liked to fire his gun. If Sherlock Holmes had enjoyed blazing away at his living room wall until the queen’s initials were pocked out of the plaster, why not Desmond Newborn? Maybe the man had gotten drunk. Maybe he had an attack of the jitters on Christmas Eve and hallucinated German soldiers coming down the chimney.

  On the other hand, she wondered if there was any way of finding out if the three lumps of lead had come from the same gun. It would be something, anyway, to confirm that two different weapons hadn’t blazed across the room at each other. Maybe Jerry Carmichael could submit them to a police lab for her—but surely he would consider it frivolous, a waste of taxpayers’ money.

  She wondered, too, how many more such lumps she would find, were she to pick closely through the great pile of unidentified objects the sieve had separated out for her.

  Oh come on, Rae, she chided herself. Is life so dull you have to manufacture a melodrama, a furious gun battle in a small wooden room? Still… How long after those bullets hit the wall had the place burned? And how long before Great-uncle Desmond disappeared, fleeing the San Juans for the wilds of Arizona?