Folly

by Laurie R. King

  “Burden me.” The sheriff appeared caught between official disapproval and amusement, but came down on the side of humor. Rae smiled crookedly in agreement.

  “I know. But you might feel like you need to do something about Desmond, even if you don’t want to.”

  “Did you kill Desmond Newborn?” Jerry asked suddenly.

  Rae’s head snapped around so quickly she nearly bit her tongue. “Me? Of course not, you saw—”

  “Then there’s no reason to worry, is there? About ‘burdening’ me.”

  Rae began to protest, and then looked more closely and saw that the man was making a joke. She dutifully chuckled until, still smiling, he added, “Just don’t work yourself into interfering in an investigation.”

  “So it is an investigation.”

  “Damned if I know. Depends on what the bone woman at the university says, if she can tell what killed him.”

  “Fine. Let me know when you hear. Now look, Jerry, you had something to say last night, too.”

  The big man sat forward in the creaking chair, and for a moment Rae feared he was about to reach for her hand. He did not, but at his serious expression, the breakfast began to congeal in her stomach.

  “I had a call from Sam Escobar. I’m afraid your house has been broken into. On Saturday or Sunday, he’s not sure which.”

  “Oh, God. Did they …” she started, then broke off. What was she going to ask? Did they trash it? Did they steal anything? Did she care? That would have been more to the point. Another world, another life.

  “It doesn’t sound like there was too much damage. The lock on the back door, a collection of glass things on a shelf.” Rae found herself wincing: She did care. “The insurance man is going to go in and have a look, check your inventory and see what’s missing. Did you have many valuables?”

  “Art, mostly. If it’s the glass I think it was, my husband had it insured for something like a quarter of a million.” She glanced up at his stifled oath, and explained. “We didn’t actually buy most of it, maybe three or four pieces out of the two dozen, but we traded, the artists and I, or I was given pieces, before they became well known. The same way with the paintings, or a lot of them, anyway. Are those all right?”

  “Escobar didn’t say anything about paintings. If you phone your house around ten-thirty this morning, he said he’d probably be there by then. He’s going, not one of his deputies—wanted to see the damage for himself.”

  Rae wasn’t listening. One of those glass sculptures had been a gift from Alan, bought during a trip down south to see his son, and although Alan had seen instantly that Rae was not as entranced by the frozen glass jellyfish as he was, he had continued to collect art glass for himself, and she for him. She was caught up in the vision of all those luminous, ephemeral glass shapes reduced to shards, and yes: It hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” Jerry said, seeing her expression.

  “Do all sheriffs tell people that as often as you do?” she inquired with an effort.

  “Only when—” He stopped, and it was his turn to look flustered. “Just part of the service, ma’am. Well,” he said, getting to his feet. “Back to work.”

  “To protect and to serve,” she remarked, craning her neck to look up at him. “Which reminds me: I hope your people have been keeping out of my things. One invaded house in a week is enough. Even if the other house is a tent.”

  “I checked last night, and I’m on my way out there now. Everything’s just like you left it.”

  “When will they be finished?”

  “The lab people should be through this afternoon. My people will wait there until they’ve gone.”

  “Good. I’ll call Ed and ask him if he could take me back.”

  “How ’bout if I run you over? I’ll have to make sure they haven’t left anything behind, anyway. Might as well save Ed a trip.”

  “You sure? Thanks. What—four o’clock? five?”

  “Five’d be better.”

  “I’ll pick up something at the market, we can have a third-rate picnic to pay you back for the first-rate dinner last night. Unless you have other plans?”

  “A picnic would be great. Five o’clock down at the harbor.”

  “See you then.”

  He left, and Rae went inside the inn to make her phone calls.

  Her lawyer was not in the office. She was, in fact, already on her way out to Rae’s house to meet the insurance agent. Her secretary told Rae that Pam had received the mysterious package and already arranged to messenger it to the private lab that had been recommended to her, with an ASAP request.

  Rae then phoned Tamara, got the machine, and left a message saying that she just happened to be in Friday Harbor for the day and would try to call back before leaving for Folly in the afternoon.

  She phoned her own number, which rang twice and then kicked into the mechanical voice of the machine, and she hung up. Try again in an hour.

  Then she took a deep breath, eyeing the phone. The letter she’d had yesterday from the owner of the New York gallery was the third Gloriana had sent her in the last two months. Rae owed the woman a call. She picked up the phone and, before she could stop to reconsider, hit the numbers. Gloriana herself answered, and gushed and flustered and was so thrilled, absolutely thrilled to hear from her that Rae seriously considered hanging up.

  “G.,” she said into the spate. “G., stop, you’re giving me a complex.”

  “Darling, never. Seriously, Rae my sweetheart, I am so very glad to hear your voice.”

  “You’re not going to be as happy to hear what I have to say.”

  “Oh no. Don’t tell me you’re not working.”

  “Oh, I’m working all right, just not on anything that would interest you.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  So Rae told her, about the island and the process of rebuilding the house, and although Gloriana’s first reaction was predictable—intense disappointment that Rae would be giving the gallery nothing for many, many months into the future—her mood shifted to wistful optimism when she cornered Rae into admitting that perhaps, next year, when the house was less urgent …

  Rae liked Gloriana, respected her, and knew that the gush was partly an act but also the way she presented her honest concern for Rae’s well-being. And because she liked the woman, because Gloriana had encouraged and stood by her for so many years, Rae went on to tell her about the driftwood workbench. After a dubious hesitation (“I mean, my dear, kitsch has been in and out so many times I’m quite tired of it”) Gloriana started hearing Rae’s genuine interest in the piece.

  When Rae finished, Gloriana was silent. Rae knew she was still on the line, because she could hear her breathing over the gallery’s background music.

  “What’s wrong, G.? Has somebody just come in to hold the place up?”

  “Would it photograph?”

  “Would what photograph?”

  “Your driftwood bench. Would it photograph well?”

  “I suppose, if I cleared it off.”

  “Oh my God. You’re not actually using the thing?”

  “G., it’s a workbench.”

  “Rae, you are hopeless, you really are. You’d sit in a Wright chair.”

  “I do, when all the comfortable chairs are taken.”

  “Stop, please. And stop using your workbench until we can get a picture of it.”

  “I have a picture of it. Why do you want it? I’m not going to take the bench off and ship it to you—it’d fall apart without the tree.”

  “Oh, would it? How glorious. It’s symbolic, too.”

  “G., I’m going to hang up if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “A book.”

  “A book. About my bench?”

  “About the whole concept of Folly, my dear, from conception to completion. A great, gorgeous, limited-edition book with some stunning cover, solid wood maybe, and that luscious thick paper, the sort of book only collectors and university art departments can afford. P
lus limited-edition photographs in the gallery for sale, of course, and a few small pieces if you feel up to it. With a cheaper version of the book for hoi polloi,” she added, chortling with pleasure.

  “G., I’m hanging up now,” Rae warned her.

  “But I must come and see your fabulous island, while it’s still pristine. I’ll get a photographer. We’ll be there ASAP. How do we reach you?”

  “The island is hardly pristine. There’s a lot of bare soil and a huge ugly blue tarpaulin that dominates the clearing; you have to take a tattooed man’s smelly boat across; and once you’re on Folly there’s a shower made from a bucket hanging from a tree branch and a toilet over a hole I dug myself.”

  A long silence followed, during which Rae wished she could have seen Gloriana’s face, and eventually came the answer, coolly polite: “Oh, well, that’s all right then, my dear. You let me know when you get the hot tub in.”

  Rae finally extricated herself from the conversation, hung up, and sat looking at Elaine’s collection of porcelain dogs, thinking about how she felt. Not too bad, she decided. The conversation hadn’t actually been as painful as she had anticipated, considering it was her first overture into the world of her chosen profession since the accident. The longer the wait, the bigger the step. So, the first small step had been ventured, without blood having been shed on either side. Not allowing herself to think about the book proposal just yet, but smiling to herself at the thought of Gloriana’s Italian sandals stepping up to the Folly privy, Rae went upstairs to brush her teeth and push the sandy clothes back into her bag. She paid Elaine for the night’s room and board with crisp bills from the ATM machine, then went back to the phone, dialed the endless string of numbers required to bill her calling card, and heard her own phone ringing again.

  This time, it was picked up. Sheriff Escobar answered, asked her politely how she was, then handed the receiver over to the insurance agent, who sounded stricken—more, Rae soon decided, because of the money his company would have to fork over for a heap of useless broken glass than because the damage was so extensive. Rae breathed a sigh of relief that the paintings were intact, and a sigh of dismay at the general bashing and throwing around in her workshop, and a sigh of impatience at the mess waiting for her in the study, where, according to the agent, every file—correspondence, reviews, bills, catalogues, you name it—had been upturned, either in a search or just to make the greatest possible mess.

  “Well,” she cut him off, “there’s not much I can do from here. Is my lawyer there yet?”

  “Sure, she’s right here.”

  There was a muffled conversation and the sounds of the phone changing hands, then a familiar voice said, “Rae?”

  “Hello, Pam. I’m really sorry to drag you into this. Is it as bad as the insurance guy says?”

  “It’s a mess, but other than the glass there’s not a lot of damage. But I’m canceling all your credit cards—you should have new ones in a week or so. And because your computer looked like it was turned on when they smashed it, you should assume that you have no secrets.”

  Rae didn’t know that she had secrets anyway, but promised to think about what other problems might come from having her hard drive ransacked. Pam’s secretary would be given the job of contacting everyone on Rae’s mailing list, to see if some electronic thief was making the rounds. Pam ended by telling Rae bluntly that she’d been damned lucky it wasn’t any worse, then said more immediately that the contractor would replace the locks and a security team Pam worked with was coming the next day, to look into a better alarm system.

  Rae thanked her meekly, then had to ask what was chief on her mind.

  “Have you heard anything from Don’s lawyers?”

  “Oddly enough, no. I responded to their document, of course. We’ll just have to wait and see if the court wants to take it further. If it does, you might have to come down.”

  “So they can see I’m not raving and covered in sores?”

  “Rae,” Pam chided.

  “Well, that’s what they’re after, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but you don’t have to be so graphic.”

  At that Rae could chuckle. She asked Pam to give the insurance agent an address to send his pictures and forms, told the lawyer with false regret that she could not get free just now, and hung up with the feeling that she’d gotten off light.

  She then set off for the metropolis of Friday Harbor, to buy some jeans.

  Jeans she found, and socks and a pair of work boots whose leather tops were not threatening to part company with their soles, and a sleeveless fleece vest, warmly red and without the glue spatters and burn holes that decorated her other vest. She had her hair cut short again, and at one o’clock she ate a sandwich in a place near the harbor and arranged to stash her bulky parcels beneath their register until five.

  The historical museum was due to be open, but on her way there her eye was caught by a gallery window display of several wood pieces, bowls and a table. She paused to admire the professional use of the grain and the balance of textures, although she cast a more critical eye on the quality of the table’s inlay (osage orange, redheart, and ebony, garish and lamentably clumsy), and walked on down the block. She slowed, then turned and went back. The man who was sitting the gallery that dull afternoon glanced up as she came in the door, did a double take, and shot to his feet, a look of utter amazement spreading over his clean-shaven features.

  “Aren’t you—omigod, you’re Rae Newborn!” he declared, voice rising in disbelief. When she nodded, he sidled over to a curtained-off back room, ducked in reluctantly as if fearing to take his eyes off her, shuffled around, slammed a drawer shut, and came back into the gallery with a magazine in his hand. He thrust it at her.

  “I was just reading this,” he told her. “Somebody was talking about you the other day, and so I dug this out to show them and to reread it. How amazing.”

  Nikki Walls, Rae would have bet. The man was probably one of the infernal woman’s “dozens of cousins.” She took the magazine politely, glancing through the advertisements for chisels and plans for Shaker armoires until she lit on the photograph of herself, four years and a whole lot of wear and tear younger, standing next to a piece she’d won a best of show with in New York. Frankly, she couldn’t imagine how this young man had recognized her. She gave him back the magazine, and he laid out the double-page spread of her workshop, all the chisels in place, works in progress arranged artfully if inconveniently across the floor, and he looked from it to her, beaming. Rae smiled back, feeling the nearly forgotten stir of being a Name. It was a small pond, but once she had enjoyed being one of its larger fish.

  She let him talk about her pieces for a while, answered a couple of technical questions, and then turned the conversation to his own work. The pieces in the window were his, he admitted, and Rae went to look at them with her fingers. The man’s work showed a rare sensitivity and respect for wood, and if his eye for design was untutored, that could be taught; the other was a gift. He nearly choked when she told him that she wanted to buy the applewood bowl in the window.

  “Oh hey, please, I’d love to give it to you.”

  “Absolutely not. It’s a beautiful piece, you could get three times that in San Francisco. The only thing is, I’d like you to hang on to it for me until I get a roof up. I’m living in a tent, and it would not do the bowl any good to get leaked on.”

  From the man’s reaction, Rae knew that half the people who came in the gallery would hear the tale behind the Sold sticker the piece wore, but she found she didn’t much mind.

  As he was (reluctantly) making out the sales slip, he asked if, since she was here for a while, she had any plans to teach, either one-on-one or workshops.

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” she told him, the simple truth. Teaching woodworking was far down on her list of priorities these days.

  “Well, if you ever do, you’d be welcome to use my place. You could even do a residential thing—the people next d
oor have a bunch of vacation cabins they rent out, right down on the water. And there’s people all over who would kill for the chance—Anacortes, Seattle even.”

  She told him the same thing she’d told Gloriana in New York. “I’ll think about it. No, honestly, I will. I used to enjoy teaching.”

  “Oh man, that’d be so awesome. I met someone who took a class with you three, four years ago. You haven’t been teaching a lot lately, though, have you?”

  Rae looked into his earnest and unlined young face, seeing that the news of her last two years had not penetrated the fringes of her chosen world. For which she was profoundly grateful.

  “No, I’ve been a little out of things for a couple of years,” she told him.

  He nodded sagely. “Sometimes you gotta do that. Return to the well-springs, like they say.”

  “Right. I’ll let you know about the workshop. It wouldn’t be this year—my plate’s pretty full. But once I get my house up, who knows?”

  When she had left the gallery, Rae had to sit down for a while and think about the conversation—which, taken in conjunction with her earlier phone conversation with Gloriana, a radically different breed of gallery owner, made it appear that Rae intended to take up her chisels again, and not just to build herself a place to store books and dinner plates. This reawakened interest in her profession had taken her by surprise; she had not even suspected it was coming. Up to now, she had been going through the motions; today, for the first time, she was aware of the juices stirring again.

  Life, she reflected, had a way of sneaking up on you.

  Even when you didn’t want it.

  After a while she gathered up her scattered wits and continued on to the museum, where the woman was friendly and knowledgeable until she heard that Rae was interested in anything the museum had on Folly, at which point she put two and two together and became positively effusive and encyclopedic.

  Very fortunately, Rae had a ready excuse, or the museum would have been spread in front of her feet until midnight, along with its entire staff of volunteers and their spouses and children. At twenty to five, more than two hours after she had walked in, she rose desperately to her feet, thanked the four enthusiastic amateurs who had appeared, apparently, out of the wallpaper, and bolted for the street.