Rae made for the harbor, holding before her the vision of a solitary canvas tent in a silent clearing. Her ears rang with the unceasing beat of human speech, her nerve endings quivered from the repeated goodwill of human intercourse, the back of her neck crawled with the continual presence of strangers behind her, and she felt not far from weeping with exhaustion. Near the harbor entrance she passed a telephone booth, and she had walked nearly a dozen more paces before her sense of responsibility protested loudly enough to bring her to a halt. Reluctantly, she turned back to make the promised call to Tamara. With any luck, the answering machine would pick up again.
The answering machine did not pick up; instead—a gift from the gods that went far to wipe out the effects of the day—Rae heard a beloved voice in her ear.
“Petra!” she cried. “Hello, my love. I thought you’d be out riding.”
“Gran! Where are you? Did you get a phone?”
“No, afraid not—I’m over in Friday Harbor. I had some business to do here, so I thought I’d call and say hi. How are you?”
“We’re all great. Well, I’m not great; I bashed my leg the other day and since I have a test tomorrow and a paper due Monday, I’m home working hard.”
“Sure you are.”
Petra laughed happily at her grandmother’s skepticism. “Did you get my letter?”
“I did, yesterday. That’s great news, that you can come play with me for a while.”
“Dad says it depends on my grades—that’s why I’m home working. I really am. But if they’re okay, I can come, maybe even for two whole weeks!”
“And what else does it depend on? Did you and your father have a fight about this?”
“He’s just so weird these days, Gran!” Petra burst out in a rare flash of petulance. “All I said was how much I missed you and how lonesome you must be, and he just went off about how irresponsible I am and everything, like I’m some kind of stoner flaking off at school. I’m getting mostly As, Gran—what does he want?”
“Petra, sweetheart, calm down. It’s okay.” But Petra would not be calmed. It was difficult to comfort an upset adolescent over the phone while standing on a street corner and with no idea of the scope of the trouble, but Rae did her best. Her comfort consisted largely of listening to Petra’s outpouring of resentment and indignation, grunting the occasional “uh-huh,” and giving an apologetic shake of the head to a couple of people who wanted to use the phone.
At long last, Petra wound down; eventually Rae contributed the only thing she could think of that might help.
“You know, Petra, it sounds to me as if the real problem here isn’t you, it’s something to do with your dad. Like maybe he’s got some hard worries at work, and instead of admitting it and talking about it, he just blows up.”
“Yeah,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Maybe.”
“Honey, you know your dad and I don’t always see eye to eye,” (understatement of the year! Rae thought) “but he loves you, and he works hard for you.” (Give him the benefit of the doubt) “If something’s not going well at work, he wouldn’t want you and your mom to know until he’d fixed it, would he? But it would make him short-tempered as a bear. You think?”
“Yeah. I guess.” This time Petra sounded, not convinced perhaps, but willing to consider it.
Rae’s strong impulse was to urge her granddaughter, “Don’t cross your father, Petra; don’t push him into a corner and make him react.” But she kept her mouth shut. It would only make things worse. Instead, she asked after Petra’s pony and dog, received news of a new kitten, and told Petra in response a few innocuous tidbits about the house. But not about the bones, and definitely not the bullets. They talked for a few more minutes, mostly concerning Petra’s school history project on Folly, before Rae reluctantly said she had to be going, and would write soon. Petra promised the same thing, and added that she’d try her best to be patient with Daddy.
Rae hung up, smiling, if unassuaged. For twenty minutes she had been blissfully unaware of her surroundings, unplagued by itches along her spine. Now, as she set off for the harbor again, a horn blared, practically under her feet. She leapt back for the safety of the curb and knocked hard against a man; the bag in his hands flew into the gutter. He cursed under his breath and irritably refused her help in picking up the spilled contents, so Rae escaped—checking this time to see that there were no cars bearing down on her.
Her heart rose when she recognized Jerry Carmichael standing halfway along the dock. Pleasure, in part, but at this moment mostly relief.
“You look harried,” he commented when she had come to a halt in front of him.
“I feel harried. My granddaughter’s becoming a teenager and many infinitely friendly and helpful individuals have been harrying at my heels most of the day; I feel a powerful impulse to kick someone. Can we go?”
“I thought you were going to do some shopping.”
“I did. Oh God, I left it in that—oh, let Ed bring it when he—oh damn! I said I was going to buy makings for a picnic. Christ. I’m sorry, Jerry, I’ll have to go back up and get something.”
He put out a hand. “Unlike you, I’ve had a nice quiet day, watching other people work. How about I go get your things and pick up our picnic, while you sit on the boat with your feet up and listen to the quiet.”
Had this been an order rather than a suggestion, Rae might well have dug in her heels and turned back to the town. But again, he looked more friendly than commanding, so after a moment she nodded and let him lead her to the boat, then allowed him to walk off.
“To protect and to serve,” she murmured, then went to collapse with her feet up and listen to the quiet. Of which, truth to tell, in the busy harbor there was not much.
Jerry was back in an amazingly short time—either that, or Rae, following her last two disturbed nights, had fallen asleep. He stepped onto the boat as laden with bags as a pack animal, pulled a long-necked bottle of Mexican beer out of one bag, and put the bottle down near Rae’s hand without comment before leaning over to slip the ropes from their ties. When they were free, he kicked them away from the dock and went to the wheel. The engine caught; Friday Harbor fell behind them.
Ten minutes later, he glanced down at where she had been sprawled, unmoving but for the effort of opening and drinking the beer, since he’d walked away at the dock to go fetch her shopping.
“Want another?” he asked her. She shook her head wordlessly. He had opened his mouth to say something else when the radio squawked, its message unintelligible to civilian ears. He took up the handset and identified himself, and listened for a moment. His face went dark, as fearsome as if he was about to hit someone, and he slapped the throttle down to an idle so as to hear more clearly. Rae sat up, watching him. He was turned her way, but his eyes were not seeing her. At last he spoke, two curt phrases. “Hold them all,” he said; then, “Twenty minutes.” He replaced the handset, and his eyes focused on her.
“I’m needed on Lopez,” he told her. “A girl has disappeared.”
“Go,” she urged.
“I can get you a ride,” he started, but she was shaking her head.
“We’ll worry about me later. Go.”
He went. The boat flew over the surface of the water as if jets and not propellers were powering it. Rae jammed her empty bottle down between the cushions to keep it from rolling about, and worked her way over to his side.
“Do you want something to eat?”
“That would be a good idea,” he acknowledged. “God knows when I’ll get a chance later.”
Bracing herself against the wildly bouncing motions, Rae found various containers of food, put together a thick sandwich, and took it, a pasta salad, a plastic clamshell container of deviled eggs, and two bottles of lemonade up to the wheel. He began eating the sandwich one-handed, and the eggs, while Rae dug into the container of salad with a plastic fork. When he had demolished his food, she held up the second fork questioningly, and was amused to s
ee him open his mouth like some enormous fledgling bird. She fed the salad into his mouth, a process that seemed to entertain the recipient as much as it did the server. She went back to the bags for his chosen dessert, which turned out to be some thick and chewy cookies, and carried the box over to him. He ate three, and then they were at Lopez Island.
The sun was low behind them when they approached the ferry landing at the northern tip of the island. One ferry was nestled into the docking pad and another was lying offshore, its engines grumbling quietly. What looked like several hundred people lined the walkway and the upper levels of both boats, and Jerry put in around the corner from the ferry at the dock. He paused, one foot off the boat.
“I’m not sure—”
“Go,” she interrupted. “Do your job.”
He nodded, and strode away.
She followed, slowly, and joined the crowd on the landing. It took her a while to sort out fact from rumor, but one thing was sure: A fourteen-year-old girl named Caitlin Andrews had disappeared from the ferry. The girl and her parents had gotten on in Anacortes, headed for a Memorial Day boating weekend with business associates of the father, and Caitlin had wandered off while Mom and Dad had coffee in the ferry’s dining area. As the boat neared Lopez, its first stop and their destination, her parents looked for her, then searched for her, to her mother’s concern and the father’s mounting fury. All the other Lopez-bound cars off-loaded, and Caitlin did not appear on the car deck. Caitlin was not on any car deck. Caitlin had vanished.
Boats were already searching along the ferry’s wake, but with darkness coming on, they had not much time. Jerry Carmichael was speaking with the ship’s personnel, and seemed to be instigating a thorough search of the ship, control room to lifeboats. After a while his voice came over the loudspeaker, asking the driver of each of the cars still on board—just the driver, please—to go and stand next to his or her vehicle, with the keys.
Time passed. The other ferry gave up and sailed away, continuing on to Shaw, Orcas, and San Juan. The next ferries chugged past without slowing. The small café at the head of the landing did a booming business in coffee and anything edible, and after a while Rae dug back into the picnic bags to make sandwiches for Jerry’s deputies. By nine o’clock the sun was setting and the line of vehicles waiting to get on the ferry extended up the road and around the corner into the woods. Rae bought a cup of coffee and walked slowly past the cars and their variously irate or dozing passengers. She was still bone tired, but the jittery reaction to being around too many people had subsided. Why, she wasn’t sure, because there seemed to be nearly as many people around the ferry dock as she had seen in all of Friday Harbor. Maybe it was because they were all focused on something other than Rae Newborn, woodworker and resident of Folly. Anonymity was a poor substitute for solitude, but it seemed to placate the nerves.
Anonymous she might be on Lopez Island, but hardly invisible. The people who had stuck it out, determined to get on the ferry and off the island, wandered in and out of the parked vehicles, carrying on conversations about everything from the ferry service to the local school board, perched on each other’s fenders and saying “Hello” as she passed, or “How you doin’?” or “Any news?” She nodded, smiled, or shook her head, and walked on, ignoring the feeling of being watched. Of course, she was being watched, but only as a convenient distraction by bored individuals. That she could handle. One woman barking into her cell phone from behind the wheel of her BMW glared furiously at Rae, but then, she was glaring at everything else as well. One young man and his friends had been making inroads into a twelve-pack of beer, so that an impromptu party was starting up around them; Rae gave their truck a wide berth, head down and heart beating swiftly. They did not seem to notice her. In the next few cars, people looked to be sleeping.
The driver of one vehicle, a late-model pickup with a dozen rolls of fiberglass insulation in the back, was slumped into his seat but seemed to be staring at her intently as she strolled up the line of cars. Rae thought the man might say something as she reached his half-open window, but he merely shifted his gaze to the back of the car in front of him—embarrassed at being caught staring? Or had he realized she was not the person he thought? A hasty glance as she went past his window revealed only a bearded face with a network of lines near his eyes and a head of long, wavy hair flowing out from under a baseball cap. She flicked her eyes away before he in turn could catch her looking and continued on up the hill in the growing dusk, sipping her tepid coffee. The guy reminded her of one of her neighbors back home, she reflected idly, a man named Mac something, McArthur maybe, who lived farther up her road. A real mountain man, who did carpentry and yardwork to pay his property taxes but had little more to do with the world. From an MIA/POW sticker on his ancient Ford pickup and a couple of overheard remarks at the local market, she had decided that he was a soldier who had never really come home from the jungles of Vietnam. No doubt there were a fair few of those here on the islands as well. Although this particular man’s pickup indicated a greater degree of affluence than McArthur’s beat-up truck.
Fantasy, all of it, as no doubt was the feeling that he was looking at her retreating form through his rearview mirror, and again that he was watching for her when she reappeared at the top of the hill, headed back toward the water. Maybe she fulfilled some fantasy of his, a fantasy involving a tall gray-haired mountain woman. She smiled to herself, then her attention went up ahead to the beer drinkers. In her absence, however, they had attracted the notice of one of the many law enforcement personnel gathered around the ferry, and the young men stood in abashed silence as their licenses were examined. Rae stood in line to use the hard-pressed portable toilets, then went back to Jerry Carmichael’s boat.
An hour later, dozing among the cushions, she was startled to hear the sudden racket of car engines starting up, one after another, and numerous voices being raised—relieved voices that told her the ferry had at last been cleared for loading. She listened to the thumps of the cars passing over the metal bridge, and went to see what was happening.
“Hey,” she called to a group of boarding foot passengers. “Did they find her?”
“She’s not on the boat,” said a man.
“They’re going to search the island,” said another.
Rae pulled her jacket closer around her chest, and shivered.
Thirty-six
Rae’s Journal
May 26
A house is not always a home, despite the blandishments of real estate ads.
The old saying that home is the place where “When you have to go there, they have to take you in” does not apply to all of us. Maybe it doesn’t apply to most of us in this day and age. I have two houses— three if I count the Boston mansion, those vast cold hallways of my childhood home turned into a halfway house now, tenanted by a constantly shifting band of people working their way from locked ward to the freedom of their own front door keys.
None of the three contain any “they” who are required to let me in. In none of them could I find the sense of loyalty (however grudging) and permanence that is “home.”
A house is just a building until it becomes a home.
But is that really so? A house is a convenient reality, but it is also a metaphor for one’s self. The house stands, it looks out across the view, it runs smoothly, it is strong (or flimsy) and honest and beautiful. We are our house.
A house is a statement of belief in the future. The “House of” someone is not just the bricks and mortar, but the legacy, the inheritance, the impact the family will have on the world. We build a house because we are a family, not the other way around.
And like the human body, a locked house may feel secure, but its walls are no more impregnable than human skin. A house cannot, in the end, protect its human beings from any harm greater than rainfall. The terrible truth of the matter is, as court records and shelters for battered women tell us, for a woman, it is behind those locked doors that the greatest threat ma
y lie.
I wonder if fourteen-year-old Caitlin Andrews heard Watchers in the hallway outside her bedroom door.
Thirty-seven
The last cars loaded onto the ferry. Rae watched their lights dip and rise as they came off the bridge, dip and rise, and made up her mind. There was no reason to delay here. She caught up her bags, leaving the ravaged scraps from the picnic, and stepped onto the dock. Striding toward her was a dark figure that could only be Jerry Carmichael. After another few steps, he saw her.
“I’m going to take the ferry back to Friday Harbor,” she called out. “Ed or somebody will give me a ride to Folly.” More likely she’d end up staying the night and going out in the morning, since it was nearly midnight. No matter.
“I was just coming to tell you that I’m finished here for the time being,” he replied, coming to a halt in front of her. “They’ve decided to hand it over to the big boys, in case a lowly county sheriff messes things up, and I’m making the officer in charge nervous. So I’ve given my deputies their jobs and told them I’d be back in the morning.”
“Which is maybe six hours off. You should catch some sleep.”
“Frankly, I’d rather take you home.”
Rae studied his face in the shifting light. His expression betrayed nothing, although a tautness beneath the watchful calm made her think he might be angry at something. “Okay,” she agreed. “If you’re not just doing it to be gallant.”
“God forbid,” he said, making an effort at lightness. “Sheriffs aren’t allowed to be gallant. The oath of office specifically forbids it.” He took the bags from her hands, and stepped back to allow her to go first. This time she did so without hesitation.
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