Folly

by Laurie R. King

  I shall name my island Sanctuary.

  The money was sent. Months, happy years of entries followed, details of the water system that set Rae to smiling, valuable descriptions of the building process, the sources for his varicolored rock, his happiness with the quality of the cement he bought from Roche Harbor. There was even a mention of the front porch he proposed to add, come the following spring.

  For six years, following two and a half years of trench warfare and four more years of battles in the mind, Desmond Newborn had peace. From June 1921 until the summer of 1927, he built his house, he shaped his world, he brushed up against his neighbors in friendly distance. For six years this solitary man lived his life, held conversations with his ghosts, and only occasionally dipped into the fringes of melancholia.

  Then suddenly, out of the blue, he received a letter from his brother. In the middle of August 1927, Desmond wrote in his diary:

  W. writes to extend a hand of friendship. After years of silence, my brother wishes to be reconciled, and posthaste, as he is on his way west on business. I am to respond to his hotel in Chicago, to say if I am willing or no, and to suggest how he may reach me.

  The temptation is great, to act as if his missive never reached me. But truth to tell, I desire greatly to tell the family that I have made something for myself, will leave something behind, even if it only be a lowly abode of wood and stone. No, I will put temptation behind me, and write to say he is welcome. Then I shall have to break off the work on the tower windows to build another chair on which my guest may rest his city suit.

  Desmond’s calm acceptance of the visit swiftly darkened, however, with irritation and querulous remarks about his brother that did little to hide the growing tension he was feeling. Late in the journal, three pages from his last entry, came a final list—of things needed in Roche Harbor, true, but why inscribe a shopping list in a leather journal if not for the sense of order and control it bestows on the writer?

  In the middle of September, Desmond Newborn wrote what was to be his final entry:

  My brother comes tomorrow, to talk me out of my folly. Let him try. Although I freely admit, to myself if none other, that the thought of seeing his face fills me with a terrible dread.

  Nothing more, just an illegible scrawl that looked as if the ink had smeared. The nearest Rae could come to deciphering it was:

  I have a—

  Terrible dread-—yes, “dread” was the word. William had inspired it in his brother at the age of—what?—forty-five, just as he had inspired it in his granddaughter until the day of his death at the age of ninety-four, following on the heels of Rae’s second breakdown. He had dominated his son, crushing him into insignificance by his indifference; he had cowed his wife, Lacy, into the pale shadow Rae had known as a child; he had given Rae’s mother a life of unremitting criticism until she died young to get away from it; he had bullied Rae, scorned her gender and railed against her instability. The only way Rae could escape him was to marry the first man who asked her, and move from the Boston mansion into graduate housing in California.

  Everyone else had had to die to get away from William’s devastating disapproval and impossible standards—Rae’s mother when Rae was five, Lacy the following year, his two sisters (one never married; one had a son and fled to England, there to die in the Blitz during the Second World War).

  All dead. Rae’s father, William’s only child, had lived for seventeen years after the old man finally expired, looking over his shoulder and preparing to cringe every hour of the day. Even after William was gone, Rae’s father had never let up, never allowed anyone a glimpse inside. In all his life, the sole moment of tenderness Rae had ever seen him allow himself came bare weeks before his death, when four-year-old Bella had cajoled him into reading her a story, then fallen asleep in his lap halfway through it. Rae had happened to pass by the room, glanced in, and saw her father sitting on the sofa with his arms around his granddaughter, his lips in her curly hair, weeping. He must have been a lonely man.

  When Rae had nightmares, they felt like William.

  She felt now as if she was walking into one of those nightmares, as if her grandfather was sitting in his straight-backed chair behind his vast mahogany desk, his icy blue gaze fixed on her as she walked down the dark road on San Juan Island, the curl of chronic disappointment on his lips.

  Terrible dread.

  He was a hateful old man, yet Rae had never been able to hate him. He poisoned everything he touched other than money, but he carried with him the tragedy of Midas, who loved only one thing besides gold, and ended up killing her. Rae hated thinking of William’s blood in her veins, saw every flicker of selfishness or impatience as a danger sign, wondered often if William, too, had been mad but controlled it with sheer willpower, but she could not hate him.

  Every psychiatrist Rae had ever been to sooner or later focused on the “unresolved conflict” with William, but to none of them, no matter how much she loved them, could she say, “Yes, I hate my grandfather.”

  But dread? Oh yes. And terror and guilt and the shame of failure and …

  Rae stumbled as her feet left the asphalt and hit rocky sand, and she continued up the dark beach, Desmond’s last words in her ears and the past few days twitching like a swarm of insects beneath her skin. As she walked, the loud crunch of stones underfoot scraped at raw nerves until the edginess threatened to flower up into full-blown panic. When she finally perched on a driftwood log, her fingers plucked at her lips and her shirt buttons, her nails dug at the spongy wood and into her palms.

  Terrible dread, the waves whispered to her.

  Dread. Dread.

  Terrible. Dread.

  My brother comes (terrible dread) I admit my brother my folly talk me out of my terrible dread

  Desmond’s words and Desmond’s bones and Desmond’s bullet, Desmond’s bad left arm and William’s face (dread oh terrible dread) as the brothers rowed over the calm water to Folly, then the gouts of fire spewing from the stone towers and the fiery shock of electroconvulsive therapy and the deep urge of the fingers to draw up a list of events so as to rationalize the terrible dreadful events and yet the fingers’ inability to be still enough to hold a pen, all welled up like water in the sculptor’s pools, welled up in Rae’s bones and spilled over and filled her until her thoughts were ratcheting wildly around inside her skull to escape, inside her grinning skull with her fingers digging into the skin as if fingers had any power at all against the infection of dread the dreadful infection of terror the—

  A heavy foot hit the pebbles of the beach behind her, and Rae’s mind exploded.

  She ran blindly for the water, aware only of something big and heavy and fast and male gaining rapidly, splashing and catching at her arm until she hit out and connected with something that felt like a tree. She lunged again toward the open water and the hands were on her again, the attacker avoiding her teeth and, less successfully, her kicking shoes, until after forever she finally heard what her ears were telling her, that her assailant was repeating her name, over and over, in a loud, firm voice.

  “Ms. Newborn, Rae, it’s Sheriff Carmichael. Rae, it’s Jerry, calm down, it’s only me.”

  Rae went abruptly still and would have fallen into the water had his powerful hands not been holding her upright. “Jerry?”

  “Yes, it’s Jerry. I frightened you. I’m sorry.”

  “Jerry? Oh God, Jerry?” she said again, and she let herself lean forward against his chest, the only stable thing in the universe, and felt herself being wrapped in the security of muscle and bone, the smell of his masculinity, the solid thud of his heart. She drizzled tears in a disgusting manner all over his nice clean shirt, and allowed herself to be led back up the crunchy beach like a rag doll, or a child. He peeled off her jacket, replaced it with a blanket he took out of the cruiser’s trunk, and sat her in the front seat with the engine on and the heater going full blast. He got in beside her, and she felt his concerned eyes on the side of her face.<
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  “I’m really, really sorry,” she told him. Her throat felt hoarse; had she been screaming? “I just don’t seem to have any control these days. Other people get a little nervous—I go into full-blown panic. System failure. The hard drive crashes. A short circuit in the mechanism, whatever you want to call it. I heard you coming down the beach, and I just lost it. I hope I didn’t hurt you any.”

  “You’ve got a powerful right hook, but no teeth lost. It’s not your fault. If anything, it was my own stupidity—anyone who’s been attacked once is bound to be a little touchy. I thought you heard me coming.”

  “So did Ed, until I nearly brained him with my hammer.” Maybe I should get Petra to make me a T-shirt with a warning sign that says, BEWARE, JUMPY WOMAN, Rae thought muzzily. The heater in the car was very efficient, and the counterreaction was setting in.

  “Is it just… what you found in the cave that’s bothering you?” Jerry asked.

  “Oh no, that’s nothing. Not nothing, I mean, but… Look. Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

  Even Rae heard the flat exhaustion in her voice. Jerry responded by reaching for his seat belt. He drove her back to the inn, the blowing heater drowning out words if not thoughts, and went with her to the front door, then waited until she had fumbled the key from her pocket and turned it in the lock. Once inside, she paused with her hand on the door.

  “Why did you come back?”

  “That can wait till tomorrow, too. I was just passing on a message, and Elaine told me you’d gone out for a walk. Figured that meant the beach, and there you were. Sleep well.”

  True? Or had Elaine reported her late-night excursion to him? Was Rae like some foreign irritation infecting an organism, her path easily tracked by the close-knit natives? Or was Jerry watching her closely for reasons of his own?

  Or was she just too damned paranoid to be set loose on society? She shook her head in confusion, and told her escort, “Good night, Jerry.”

  Rae dropped her soggy clothes in a heap by the bed, and crept between the crisp sheets, naked and sandy.

  Thirty-four

  Letter from Rae to

  Dr. Roberta Hunt

  May 25

  Dear Roberta,

  One unfortunate side effect of a spell in what you will not allow me to call the loony bin is that every time something odd happens, the ex-patient immediately sees it as portentous. Strange things must happen all the time to “normal” people, just like they happened to me before I had my psychic skin rubbed raw and became so painfully sensitive to life’s careless wounds and strangeness.

  Having been mentally ill, and knowing that I am, I suppose, mentally susceptible, nothing comes past me anymore that is not weighted with significance. My great-uncle Desmond’s bones have turned up on the island; he too was wounded by life; does his fate have to resonate so deeply with me? Two teenage sisters disappear on the other side of the state; my granddaughter Petra wants to come to the islands; if I permit it, will she too disappear? I can make no decision without looking at it a thousand times, doubting the ability of my eyes to see hidden meanings.

  It’s really tiresome.

  Rae

  Thirty-five

  The following morning, when Rae woke for the fourth or fifth time, she smelled bacon, and wondered for an instant if she had begun to suffer Desmond’s hallucinations. Then she realized that she was lying between fragrant sheets on a soft mattress, and she decided the smell was no fantasy.

  A rumble of voices and motion suggested that the inn’s breakfast was under way. First, though, she would enjoy a true, civilized shower.

  A beautiful, long, fragrant, hot shower it was, too, removing sand and salt and some of the cobwebs from her brain. She felt, as always after an episode such as that of the night before, cleansed, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw little sign of her father looking back at her. He only showed himself in her mirror when she was tired, when the slight sag of his left eyelid appeared over her own eye and the color of her irises darkened toward his true brown. Today, however, Rae saw only herself in the glass.

  She dressed in work jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and went down the stairs in her stockinged feet with her poor, water-stained, once-good shoes in her hand. She ducked outside to prop the damp objects in a sunny corner, then returned to the aromas of bacon and coffee.

  And to Jerry Carmichael, freshly uniformed, polished of shoe and face, looking up from a half-demolished plate of food and beaming at the newcomer.

  “I told Elaine that if you weren’t down by the time I finished, I was taking yours as seconds.”

  “Thirds,” a voice from the kitchen corrected. The other guests, young newlyweds, looked up from their self-absorption and smiled at Rae. She helped herself to coffee and went to sit across from Jerry, not as hungry now as she’d thought she was.

  “Good morning, Sheriff,” she said. He raised an eyebrow at the title, and she blushed. “Jerry.”

  “Mornin’ yourself, Ms. Newborn. Rae. I hope you slept well.”

  “I … Yes. Thank you.” Was she thanking him for asking, or for what he’d done the night before? And what had he done, after all, but give her a ride up from the beach after scaring her to death? Had two months of solitude made her incapable of normal, good-mannered conversation? She started again. “I slept all right, thank you, although the mattress was far too comfortable after my cot and sleeping bag.” And why the hell did she feel as if she was making suggestive remarks to the man? Grow up, Rae! “And you?”

  “I always sleep well. Not enough imagination to have insomnia, my mother used to say.”

  “Good. I mean, I’m glad you’re rested.” Before Rae could reconsider the overtones of that statement, too, her plate was set down in front of her, containing nearly as much as Carmichael’s had held. She welcomed the diversion, and took up her fork.

  Breakfast conversation was kept simple, since the young couple, honeymooners from Los Angeles, had also just begun their waffles. Once they had gotten past the presence of a large uniform at their table, they began to ask for suggestions of things to see, and escaped twenty minutes later with an island itinerary that would keep them busy for a week. Then Jerry took out his pen and while Rae was mopping up the last of the syrup, he wrote down the essentials of her statement. She signed it, and he suggested that they adjourn outside, to a pair of wooden chairs set on the lawn. Away from curious ears.

  Rae sat down and studied a hole in the toe of her sock. “About last night,” she began.

  “We both said we were sorry. Maybe we should let it go at that.”

  “It didn’t mean anything, my … I don’t know what to call it. Tantrum? Fit?”

  “Okay. But it also didn’t mean nothing at all. Finding those bones would be enough to make anyone a little upset.”

  “Upset,” Rae repeated dryly. “Right. Do you know how he died yet?”

  “That bullet in his shoulder blade wasn’t what killed him.”

  “I didn’t think it was,” Rae said.

  The sheriff pounced on this admission. “But you did disturb the body. What did you take off it?”

  If he was expecting Rae to start guiltily and turn red, he was disappointed. Rae had lied to far more subtle truth-seekers than a county sheriff; besides, she’d been expecting the question.

  “I didn’t take anything.” She met his sharp gaze with a bland one.

  “You don’t deny you touched the body.”

  “I lifted the shirt to look at the bones.”

  “Why?”

  “I really don’t know.” She changed her expression to one of puzzlement. “It just seemed necessary. To see his remains, I mean.”

  “And you claim you didn’t take anything?”

  “What was there to take? Bones and old clothes?”

  After a minute he subsided, apparently satisfied.

  “You sound like you’re treating this as a suspicious death,” she said.

  “We have to.”

  �
�You don’t think he was … murdered?” Rae was rather proud of the little squeak she gave the word.

  “Any death is treated as suspicious at the beginning. But if you found a knife sticking out from between his ribs and took it away, I’d like to know.”

  “No knife, sorry. Say: If you’re treating it like a crime scene—God, that sounds like something from television—does that mean you’ve got yellow tape all over and I can’t go back to work?”

  “Oh, no. Not much point in that.”

  “That’s good. I’ve got family coming and lots to do. But look, Jerry: If it is Desmond, and if somebody did kill him, what on earth could you do about it? I know there’s no statute of limitations on murder, but everyone from those days must be dead by now. Other than the satisfaction of figuring out a puzzle, is there anything you could actually do?”

  Jerry sat back in his chair to think over her question.

  “Only thing that comes to mind, offhand,” he said eventually, “is if there was an inheritance involved. I don’t know about the law back then, but these days, a person’s not allowed to benefit from a crime. Which means if a boy kills his father, say, the father’s estate goes to the other siblings.”

  “Desmond didn’t have any children.”

  “So there are no survivors around to argue with your ownership of Folly.”

  “I guess not.”

  “You want to tell me what it is you’re keeping to yourself?”

  Rae frowned. There was no apparent reason why she should not tell him about the bullets, but… “There’s nothing much. A few ideas I had, but I need to talk to my lawyer first. I think I should know the whole picture before I burden you with it.”