For a week, Rae pondered these things. While she finished cleaning and mortaring the stones of the black fireplace, then moved her plastic sheets over to the orange tower and cleaned that, and finally set to work on the blue tower, she turned the implications of the three bullets over and over in her mind. The moon went dark and was reborn. Pleasure boats drifted past. Nikki stopped by to say hello, Ed came and went, leaving behind some heavy tarps and three green plastic water tanks, and Rae said nothing about gun battles to either of them. She was still wondering about the three bullets when she finished with the higher reaches of the stones, cleared away the protective plastic from the floorboards, and carried the last of the wall studs for the first floor up to the site.
On Thursday, Rae framed out the wall to the left of the fireplace, vaguely recalling Desmond’s peculiar doubled supports at the spot. She secured the two-bys with a temporary brace, turned the corner, and fastened down the top plate. That night, she retrieved the problematic chunk of Desmond’s wall from the dump pile and carried it over to the lamp by the fire.
Sill plate along the bottom, upright 2×4 studs, held together by a couple feet of scorched, half-rotten, still-attached siding. For two weeks now she’d been convinced that there was a purpose to Desmond’s doubled studs, that the wall above had been breached by a door or window. She had no way of knowing how wide the opening had been—if there had been a second support, it was not in the eighteen-inch-square segment of Desmond’s wall she possessed.
She turned the problem over in her mind as she lay listening to the noises of the night, the owls and the bats, her resident raccoon, a plane and a ferry and the tide going out. At the tide’s lowest mark, a quiet engine puttered by and, looking at the lightening canvas, Rae decided that it was close enough to dawn to justify rising. She made coffee, drew on her belt, and in the pearly light of a misty dawn walked the beaten path up to the house. She set her mug down on the floorboards in front of the fireplace and went over to the section of wall where Desmond’s doubled support had been, adjacent to the fireplace. There she leaned out between her fresh new studs to look down at the sharp slope of the rock face into which the house was nestled.
There was a lot of soil out there, rock and debris under heavy vegetation, as would be expected when the burning house collapsed, some of it falling outside the foundation. However, there should have been little woodwork on this side, other than the roof overhang, since the chimney and tower together made up more than half the wall—and yet the level of accumulated soil appeared more or less continuous. During the night it had occurred to her that some wooden extension of the house might have rested on the stones behind the fireplace. If so, and considering the location of the doubled 2×4, Desmond’s framed hole might well have been for access to a wood box, a place to store firewood that was convenient to the fireplace and avoided the debris inevitably left behind when wood is carried through living quarters. And although getting at such a woodbin from the outside and filling it with logs would be a job—one that in her opinion would benefit from climbing ropes to help the householder work his or her way around the steep west wall—the idea might be worth adapting with, say, an exterior set of steps.
Rae eased herself out between her studs and onto the treacherous surface of the rock face. She had not cleared any of the debris here, since her policy was to create a secure footing before venturing into hazard. This was the closest she had been to danger her entire time on the island, and she was all too aware that if she fell, Ed would not find her for four days.
She tugged cautiously at the ancient burned fragments of wood, which crumbled in her hands, and at the vigorous tangle of blackberry vine that covered the back of the fireplace. She shoved and yanked and fought to keep her footing, she sweated and burrowed into the unexplored wasteland behind the tower wall, she cursed and thought of turning back, after just a bit farther.
In no time at all, she found Desmond Newborn.
Twenty-six
Desmond Newborn’s
Journal
April 30, 1925
Ten thousand miles and eight years separate me from the trenches, but the ghosts visit me still, dart away from the corners of my eyes, moan beneath the sound of the wind, reach out from the stench of a rotting seal carcass on my shore. Yesterday I looked up from my work on the rear tower and there was Harper standing among the trees. “You left me to drown in the mud,” he told me. And indeed, I did so. He was alive when the wiring party crawled past him, buried past his waist in the eternal muck, and he was dead, toppled forward until only the back of his head was to be seen, when we came back fourteen hours later. We had spent the day ourselves in a shell-hole only marginally drier than his, pinned down by a Maxim gun. “We had orders,” I told his ghost. “No stopping to rescue the wounded. We tried to pull you, and five of us couldn’t break the mud’s hold. Digging would have meant the wire didn’t get laid. Going back for reinforcements would’ve meant a bullet from the Sergeant. You know that.” “It is an evil way to die, alone and drowning in the cold mud.” “I am sorry,” I told him. “I am sorry.”
He faded away after a while, leaving me with a half set bucket of mortar at my feet. A stuff, incidentally, that brickmasons call “mud.”
We’re all mad, I believe, all of us who came out of the trenches. A twenty-three-hour stretch of earth-quaking, bone-rattling, sky-splitting hell from the big guns, and even the most solid nerves dissolved. And that was only one bombardment. Georgie Abbot, a cattle farmer, a man who went out to pull a friend back from no-man’s-land under a murderous line of fire, a man who made a game out of how many rats he could impale in a day on his trench knife, a man who was always one of the first up the ladders, singing under his breath a rude version of a hymn called “Onward Christian Soldiers”—this same stolid farmer broke under one prolonged shelling. He began to giggle, helpless as a tickled child, then he shed his helmet, dropped his rifle into the mud, and before anyone could stop him, over the top he went. He walked out into no-man’s-land with his arms outstretched as if to greet a loved one, striding as strongly as he was able over the pitted ground. He made it nearly to the wire before the disbelieving Germans had to dispatch him.
I saw Georgie, too, one day last month, flickering through the bushes down near the water. He looked happy.
The ghosts are not threatening. Now that I have come to accept their presence around me, they even make for a peculiar sort of companionship. I find myself talking to the aptly named Mason, the cleverest trench builder I ever saw, who made his living laying dry-stone walls in Yorkshire and who is as helpful with my own tower as ever he was with sandbags in the French soil. And evenings I often call to mind Jimmy Hurlstone, older than any soldier in the company but with a younger man’s face that got him past the enlistment sergeant. Jimmy was a slow and deliberate teller of deliciously ridiculous stories, who would keep us entertained on the most miserable of nights. I would never mention it to another soul, but in truth, some of the tales Jimmy tells me here on my island I would swear that I have never before heard.
They keep me company, my ghosts do. And I think perhaps they need me as well, to help them live out their days. I do not mind sharing my life with them; for every ghostly wail that comes to me out of a storm, jerking me straight back to the night after a battle with the piteous, hoarse screams of dying men reaching out of the dark, there are ten hearty, crude, cheerful, courageous men, lending me their memories.
One thing can be said for an experience like the Western Front: There’s little to be dreaded about death afterward. I do not fear death, although I will regret if I be alone when it comes for me, and I can only pray that it be not an unquiet end, that my shade does not have to travel the earth in search of a vessel to help it live out the fullness of its days.
All I ask is a continuation of the peace I have found here.
There was an unexpectedly intense pleasure to be had in delaying revenge, he reflected; anticipation of The Thief’s face, on realizin
g that the time of reckoning was suddenly at hand. All alone in the middle of the deep blue sea, mad Thief and cool Victim meet, and balance would be restored.
Twenty-seven
As far as Rae could figure, the heap of rotted wood and ash behind the house meant that Desmond had possessed a fairly well-stocked woodshed behind his house, in the L-shaped structure that filled the gap between the back wall and the rock face, wrapping around the fireplace to the rear tower. The rotted material would need rakes and buckets to remove, which Rae had planned to do once she had a second story on which she could fix a boom-and-pulley system—a minor building project that would save her hours of scrambling, to say nothing of twisted ankles and imperiled bones.
Now, however, she was concerned only with tracing the outlines of this peculiarly Desmond-esque wood storage box, to see if she could understand why he had gone to the effort of building an elaborately enclosed space when a six-by-six-foot lean-to would have done. She stepped down gingerly from the rock face to the soft soil, hoping to avoid the worst of the buried nails, and found the surface firm enough that her boots only sank in a couple of inches. She pushed with the head of the hammer against the nearest brambles, and when they were bent she systematically crushed them flat under her boots before tackling the next patch.
The narrow space ended in a dank corner where the moss-covered orange stones of the rear tower joined the rock face to Rae’s left and the black fireplace to her right. Approaching the end, hedged around by rock walls both natural and man-made, Rae felt as if she were wading into the bottom of a well.
Although the soil had looked uniform in depth and quality, she found that the farther back into the well she pushed, the shallower the layer of organic matter grew. Low light and solid rock at their roots made the plants thin and lank. The L-shaped woodbin must have been more fully loaded just behind the access door, which made sense—who would need a filled bin the width of the house? Maybe Desmond had envisioned an East Coast blizzard out here, Rae speculated sourly as she peeled the claws of a Nootka rose out of her jeans. Arctic snowfall that would have buried him inside for weeks, forcing him to tunnel through the access door into the depths of the—
Wait a minute. What was that?
Her tugging at the spindly bramble had loosed a small rockfall from the hill above, scarcely an arm’s length from the corner of chimney and tower, but instead of tumbling down to bury the toe of her boot, the scree had simply vanished. She scraped at the rock face with the side of the hammer’s head, then shifted it around and drove its strong, straight claws into the soil, and pulled. A bushel or two of rock and dank soil came down across her feet, but Rae did not notice.
There was a hole, into the rock.
Scraping with the hammer could only do so much. Rae, suddenly impatient to find what Desmond had been hiding behind his woodpile, waded back over crushed vegetation, broken rock, and black humus and through the newly framed wall. She dropped her tool belt and went to fetch a shovel, a couple of buckets, and the big flashlight.
She shoveled at the place where the rockfall had disappeared, and in the end did not bother with the buckets, simply heaving several cubic yards of greenery and soil away from the tower and concentrating on the hole. For hole it was. More than that, a small cave—or at any rate, a cave with a small entrance.
When she had scraped the vegetation and soil clear, Rae was standing in front of a neat hole in the rock face slightly more than two feet in height, somewhat less in width. A chisel had bitten into the stone all around the edges—a heavier tool than anything Rae used, but its mark instantly recognizable. She picked up the flashlight and went down on her knees.
The beam shone back into the hill, Rae was not surprised to see. Indeed, it extended so far that the back wall was only palely illuminated. She hesitated, but could think of no reason not to go inside. If the cave’s roof hadn’t collapsed by now, odds were pretty good it would go another day—if she avoided bumping into anything she shouldn’t, or making a loud noise.
Rae took a breath, and crawled forward into the belly of the island.
This was, she realized, the same stratum of sandstone that dove and warped its way through the harder stone of the island. Elsewhere it carried water; here it carried … what?
Air, perhaps, though stale and utterly without motion, even three feet inside the opening. And water somewhere, since the air felt moist and every few seconds she heard a plunk of falling drips. The floor and walls here were dry and smooth, and she inched forward down the uneven tunnel, looking for the source of that noise.
She did not find it, not that day. What her flashlight beam found instead, tumbled together at the end of a short side passage that came in from the left, was a heap of dust-colored clothing draped across a collection of pale bones: long shins, curling rib cage, naked wrist, grinning skull.
The next twenty seconds decided the question of the cave’s stability against loud noises and sharp jolts. For three of those seconds, Rae froze there on her hands and knees, gaping back at the naked skull, and then all the hair on her body rose up and she shrieked, dropped the flashlight, and scrabbled her way to the entrance, tumbling out into the soft pit she had dug and clawing her way between rock and fireplace, through the studs as if they had been a doorway, sending her abandoned coffee mug flying as she leapt across the floorboards and down the hill to the safety of her workbench. She slapped her hand on the surface with the gesture of a medieval felon claiming sanctuary at an altar, leaping around to its far side and gaping at the house as if awaiting pursuit. She gulped three enormous breaths; then she clapped her hand across her mouth and started to laugh, halfway to hysteria.
The emotional storm blew through, leaving her light-headed and trembling, and she tottered across to the canvas chair to sit before her legs gave out on her. First, though, she turned the chair so that she had a clear view up the hillside.
She lowered her head nearly to her knees and waited for the world to stop swimming, glancing up at the two towers every few seconds. Nothing moved. The adrenaline faded, and she began to feel distinctly queasy. After a while, she stood up on a pair of legs that didn’t feel like hers to make herself a cup of tea (no milk, it being Friday). She drank it, and began to feel less shaky.
Well, she told herself, at least she no longer had to feel haunted by the vision of poor Great-uncle Desmond lying in an unmarked and cactus-covered grave in Arizona.
But what the hell had happened to the man?
For the first time since moving to the island, Rae wished she had a phone. A seventy-year-old skeleton hardly seemed to justify emergency flares shot into the sky, but she knew that even a skeleton long stripped and dry had to require some kind of official treatment. Maybe not paramedics and one of those black, zippered body bags so beloved of television programs, but surely somebody with a truly authoritative clipboard and maybe a video camera would want to come out and put the bones in a box, to send them off to a nice sterile lab somewhere to be poked about and stared at for a while.
She looked up at her waiting house and thought, This might be as good a time as any to break for lunch. She dug out a can of tuna and made herself a couple of sandwiches, and took herself down to the water for a while to think.
What she found herself thinking was Myself, I’d hate to end up in a nice sterile lab somewhere.
After a while, Rae forced herself back up to the building site to work on the walls. It wasn’t as hard as she anticipated. She cut and nailed studs, laying headers over the window and door holes, waiting for the symptoms of added stress—the jumpiness and sudden shortness of breath, the shadowy hearing and seeing of things that were not there, the brutal dive of a panic attack swooping out of the blue—but they all failed to arrive. Twitchy, yes, and she did keep a very close eye on the wall beside the fireplace, but her breath, once it had returned to normal, remained there; the breeze through the fragrant blossoms of the madrone was just the sky’s breath; the constant gentle motion of the wavelets rema
ined a reassuring tempo and not a continual corner-of-the-eye threat.
She got through the rest of the day; she ate her evening meal; she slept—not a lot, and the gentle rainfall that started around midnight brought disturbing possibilities of restless skeletons outside the canvas walls, but in fact her sleeplessness was due more to the intensity of her contemplation than to any real fear. The more she thought it over, the less she liked the idea of just turning over Desmond Newborn’s mortal remains to the unheeding hands of the law, to be bundled up willy-nilly into a box. She was quite certain they would not allow her to just leave him where he was; nor was she sure she would want that, if for no other reason than he would always be in the back of her mind, unfinished business, an unrecognized death. Even the long-imagined unmarked grave in an arid cemetery would have been recognition that someone, however nameless, had passed on. She could perhaps ask that the bones be brought back here for a proper burial—or was there some law about consecrated ground? If so, she would have what was left of him cremated, and bring his ashes back to the island to join those of Alan and Bella. In either case, she couldn’t help thinking it a jarring way to treat the old gent, jerked from his peaceful rest like that.
No, she would not leave him in his natural tomb; she would send word to Jerry Carmichael and allow the law to have its way with Desmond. First, however, she would go to him herself, and break it to him gently.
It would not, after all, be the first conversation she’d had with the dead.
The rain cleared by mid-morning. When the sun was as close to upright in the sky as it would get and the shadows behind the house were at their narrowest, Rae took up the smaller of her two kerosene lamps, along with a set of spare batteries and a bulb for the flashlight, and returned to the cave. The heap of thrown-about dirt behind the house was muddy; the plants were wilted; the hole was still there.
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