Rae cast off. Carmichael reversed away from the dock, where the long-delayed ferry was also being freed from its connection with the dry land, and he took their launch in a wide circle around the churning water that the big engines were turning up.
In the darkness, and with the first urgency gone, Jerry’s speed barely kept them ahead of the ferry. The night was clear and the air, even moving, no longer seemed cold. Rae sat next to where he stood peering out at the placid water.
“Can you tell me what happened?” she asked him.
“A girl by the name of Caitlin Andrews just disappeared from the boat. By the time the family realized she was missing, all the Lopez passengers were already off. It’ll take a day or two to hunt them all down, see if any of them noticed anything. But she’s definitely not on the boat now.”
“I saw her family,” Rae commented. Jerry grunted, but said nothing, and she leaned forward in an attempt to read his expression. It was too dark. “What do you mean by ‘huh’? You think the family—what, they threw her off the boat? They had her in the trunk of the car? What?”
“There’s nothing to think. The state guys haven’t even done an interview yet, beyond the initial statement. I just didn’t trust the father’s attitude.”
“Like he’s hiding something?”
“Like he doesn’t have a thing in the world to hide, all honest and up front about what a difficult child Caitlin is, how they were looking forward to a quote ‘family bonding time’ unquote this weekend. But he looked to me like a very worried man. Like a salesman trying to convince the world that his company’s not about to fold. And he said at least three times that his daughter was a liar and a hussy.”
“A hussy?”
“Sorry—my word, not his. What he said was that Caitlin is, in his word, ‘impossible’ and that she always wears heavy makeup and shows a lot of skin.”
“Other than the skin, it sounds like my granddaughter. What did the mother have to say?”
“Not a thing. She let Dad do all the talking. However, she kept one eye on him the whole time, and she always positioned herself just behind his line of vision.”
“All of which means what?”
“She’s afraid of him,” he said baldly. “She’s more afraid of her husband than she is worried about her daughter. I think they might well find that the girl’s run away from an abusive father, that the mother’s terrified he’ll take it out on her, and that the father’s scared that the girl will talk before he can get her back under his control. That’s just my take on it. I don’t know what the real cops’ll make of it.”
“But why run away here? And Lopez is the first stop—how’d she get off the boat? Dive off and swim?”
“Hitched a ride with someone driving off, maybe? Hiding in the trunk? Kids that age, they don’t tend to plan very thoroughly. Maybe she just couldn’t take the idea of a weekend of ‘bonding’ under the eye of Daddy’s boss, and met some other kids who agreed what a bummer it all was, then saw a chance to split with them. Who knows? If my suspicions are correct, then she’d have been better off going to the authorities back in Seattle where they live, but what fourteen-year-old believes that an adult in the school administration or social services is going to take her side and keep her father from punishing her for telling? I’ve seen it before. Even here on the islands.”
By the grimness in his voice, the experience was close to home, more personal than professional.
They traveled on down the passage between Lopez and Shaw Islands, both of them retreating into their own thoughts. When the lights on the shores began to fall away, the sheriff spoke abruptly.
“Are you in a particular hurry to get home? I mean, I’m happy to take you now, but I was thinking of spending the night on the water and watching the sun come up. Dropping anchor off the tip of San Juan. You’re welcome to join me. If you’d like.”
Rae watched the light on the end of a dock go by, trying to judge her reaction. She had been thirsting for solitude, craving it as an insomniac desires the refuge of sleep, but for some reason his offer did not cause her to cringe. The presence of Jerry Carmichael, large as it was, did not demand her attention in the way others’ did. He was comfortable without being dull, attentive without becoming pushy, and although she felt no particularly urgent attraction for the man, the thought of spending a night on his boat was not in the least threatening.
“Sure,” she said.
Sunrise was grand, and the strong coffee Carmichael came up with even better, cupped between her hands with the fragrant steam brushing across her face. She wouldn’t say that she had slept, exactly, what with the lumpy cushions and the constant shift and creak of the boat, but it had been a comforting sort of wakefulness, like being rocked in a pair of immensely strong if rather distracted arms.
They drank their coffee, and then Jerry pulled anchor and turned north for Folly.
He, at any rate, had slept well, as Rae could testify by the hours she had spent listening to his deep, slow breathing. He needed a shave and his uniform was crumpled, but inwardly he seemed calm again.
Halfway up the western length of San Juan he called in on the radio receiver. Nothing seemed to have happened during the night, the quartering of Lopez was about to begin, and his presence was not immediately required. He told the dispatcher where he was going, and hung up the radio.
“I admit I am surprised,” Rae said. “I’d have thought you would want to be in the middle of the search.”
“I do. It’s driving me nuts, keeping my hands off it. But there are times when old rivalries and resentments get in the way, and this is one of them. I’m better off letting … a certain cop get things going to his own satisfaction before I move back in. He’s good. It’s not at all jeopardizing the girl.”
Jerry Carmichael was, Rae decided, a big man in more ways than the obvious.
They flew over the calm sea with the sun at their backs, water slapping rhythmically against their hull, the wave of their passing rising high on either side. Rae was just thinking that a boat would be a fine thing to have, that there was no need to let her fear of driving a car interfere with all mechanical pleasures, when the roar of the engine cut abruptly away. The front of the boat slewed around, the prow flinging itself skyward before it dropped back down in the water. Rae grabbed at the window to keep from tumbling overboard; the launch rocked back and forth in protest.
“What—?” she started to ask; Jerry’s arm came up, his finger pointing in the direction that they had been heading, now at right angles to the boat. With the engine off the only sounds were the pats of the bow wave on their sides, which quickly passed away. Rae stared in obedient befuddlement at an empty sea.
And then she saw it: a sleek dark line the height of a man, rising up from the flat waters. Its appearance was followed seconds later by a loud, sharp exhalation of air, a general impression of something massive and swift breaking the surface of the water, and a wide tail fin snapping into the air; then fin and fluke slipped back into the calm sea. It was gone, as if it had never been.
“Orca,” she breathed. Jerry nodded, his eyes on the water. Thirty seconds later, the whale came up again, blew out its great explosive breath, then slipped away once more. Three times, four, closer and closer each time, and only when it surfaced and sank a bare fifty feet from their fiberglass sides did it occur to Rae that their fragile craft was directly in the way of an aquatic freight train with teeth.
No such thought occurred to Jerry. Instead, he placed his hands on her shoulders and urged her forward until her knees were touching the side wall of the boat, and then she was staring as intently as he into the gray water below. In a moment, they were visited by the fleeting passage of a huge and mysterious manifestation of the deep, a dark-and-light mass flashing through the world beneath their feet. The two humans hurried across the boat deck; Rae counted to five, and the orca rose and blew again. Then it vanished, to pass on toward the open sea.
The splendor of the creature’s
visitation, the power and the magic of it, left Rae speechless; she could only laugh with delight. Jerry, though, had a pronouncement: “‘So is this the great and wide sea. There is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein.’”
He grinned at her, started the engine, and turned the boat back north.
Rae’s cove was as still as glass when they entered its green waters, the clearing beyond as calm and empty as it ever had been, with no sign of importunate uniformed invaders. And yet something was missing. Its absence left a wide beaten-down rectangle and a peculiarly raw gap in her landscape where there had been a blue monolith. She opened her mouth, but Jerry got in first.
“Oh man, I am sorry, Rae. I told them to put everything back. Looks like they forgot.” He sounded not the least bit sorry as he concentrated on bringing the boat up to the dock, and Rae for a moment thought he was serious, until she caught the tiny quirk in the corner of his mouth.
She turned her back on him, crossed her arms, and made her voice as dry as dust. “And can you tell me, Sheriff Carmichael, why you found it necessary to move that great stack of lumber?”
“Why, Ms. Newborn, you might’ve been hiding any number of skeletons under all that wood. We didn’t have any choice.”
Jerry and his deputies must have spent hours, moving every scrap of wood from the place where the lumberyard had piled it on the first flat ground after the rock promontory. And for some reason, the sheriff’s department had found it necessary not just to shift that hideous young mountain, but to haul it all the way across the clearing to the very foot of the stone foundations. It was a gift, saving one solitary carpenter days and days of backbreaking labor.
“You want me to have them move it back?” he asked, with mock anxiety. “I’ll call them up right now, pull ’em off the search.”
Rae turned to face him. “Jerry, you fool. You shouldn’t have. But thank you.” She stepped forward and, after the briefest hesitation, went up on her toes and kissed his stubbled cheek. Then she briskly went to find her much-traveled purchases and led the way up the dock.
She put on the big kettle so Jerry could shave and shower, and took out eggs and bread to begin breakfast. A scrap of leftover ham from their picnic the night before and a bit of stale cheese made it an omelet, and then she showed him how to hoist the water into the shower reservoir to rinse off. He had a spare uniform in the boat, and when he had finished, hair slicked, cheeks smooth, gun strapped on, nobody would have ever known how he’d spent the night.
She walked him back up to the boat, and thanked him for … well, everything. He stepped into the boat, she stood on her worn dock, and they looked at each other. After a minute, Jerry smiled gently and nodded, as if she had said something, then lifted his hand briefly in farewell.
Thirty-eight
Letter from Rae to
Gloriana Boudreau
June 1
Dear G,
Our phone conversation the other day was a bit inconclusive, but I’ve been turning it over in my mind, and as you see, I’ve decided to send you some photos, to give you an idea of the layout here. A couple of them might even be usable.
Do not take this as a commitment on my part. I don’t know if I’m capable of taking on anything else right now, and I’m not playing coy when I say I may not be able to see it through.
No contracts, G, and NO PUBLICITY. If I hear a rumor that Rae Newborn is building a live-in sculpture on a remote island, Ill know instantly where it came from.
Furthermore, if we do this, it’ll have to be one step at a time, and with the clear understanding that I am fee to call a halt at any point along the way. Agreed?
If you decide to accept those unacceptable requirements, and if I’m feeling strong enough, we’ll need to talk about a photographer. Jaime Brittin did a sensitive job with Cassandra a few years back, if he’s available, or that guy who did the photo essay on Yosemite whose brother you knew.
You can write me at the address below—and no, I don’t have a phone, or a fax or an email.
Rae
Thirty-nine
Rae was back at work long before Jerry Carmichael tied up at Lopez. Her labor went fast now, luxuriously so, with the heavy lumber at her feet instead of those three hundred long yards of hillside away. When Ed pulled in the following week, at ten o’clock in the morning on the first day of June, he was amazed to see the actual outline of a house, tying together the double towers for the first time since 1927. His shout of “Whoo-ee!” rang through the trees, startling the squirrel into a rage and bringing Rae to the front steps. They waved at each other, her brown arm and his richly colored one, and she slipped the hammer into its holster before trotting down to meet him. She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt, and Ed watched her approach with appreciation. No, not a bad-looking woman at all, he said to himself, and all by her lonesome out here. He tucked his thoughts away as she approached, and held out a bag of food for her to take.
They talked about her house as she unloaded the cold stuff and the block of ice into her cooler, and she asked about his weekend and agreed that yes, she definitely had seen an increase in the number of boats.
“Yep,” he remarked, “Memorial Day to Labor Day, we just sorta turn the islands over to the mainlanders, take their cash, and stand back.”
“I’ve had two boats try to anchor in the cove, even with the new sign up.”
“Put in an ice machine and a hot shower, you can make a killing,” he suggested.
“I had a little different kind of killing in mind,” she replied grimly. “I swear the second guy had to’ve been a lawyer—he stood on his deck the other night with his girlfriend, who was wearing a string bikini even though it was only about fifty degrees out, and he argued my ear off about how he’d put in here for years, had rights to continue no matter what the sign said.”
“So what’d you do?” Ed looked at her slyly out of the corner of his eye as he tugged one white mustache. “Threaten him with your hammer?”
She laughed. “No, I had to resort to ruining his dirty weekend. I told him that in the future he really ought to take his used condoms and toilet paper back with him. The young woman seemed to take offense, because I heard them arguing until three in the morning and they left first thing in the morning.”
Ed opened his mouth, then subsided, with a slightly abashed look on his face that made Rae suspect he’d been about to make an off-color joke.
Another day, she might have teased it out of him, even if it meant opening herself up to the assumptions behind those interested eyes of his. But she really did not want to begin a dating-and-mating ritual with Ed De la Torre, certainly not this morning, when she was feeling groggy to begin with from her arguing neighbors. At least the small but irritating outboard motor that went past at all kinds of strange and unneighborly hours hadn’t then chosen today to putt by and wake her on one of its pre-dawn jaunts.
Rae reached the bottom of the shopping bags, folded them away, and then picked up the newspaper to read the headlines.
“They haven’t found that girl, then?” she asked. “Caitlin Andrews?”
“Nope. Combed every inch of Lopez, had divers follow back the way the ferry came; only thing they came up with was somebody saw a girl like her talking to an older guy on the ferry just after it left Anacortes. ’Course on a busy run like that, there were at least a dozen blond teenagers on board and half the guys on the islands would count as ‘older,’ so it means less than nothing.”
“I just wondered,” she said, adding with infinite casualness, “Sheriff Carmichael was giving me a ride home from Friday Harbor when he got the call. I had to wait hours until he was free to bring me back, and I was curious how he was getting on.”
“Yeah, he and the guy in charge have what you might call a history, so Carmichael turned his deputies over for the search and then did all their patrols himself.”
“On what was probably the busiest weekend of the year.”
“He was no doubt stre
tched a little thin,” Ed agreed, sounding not unpleased at the thought. “We even had a couple citizen’s arrests—a bar fight on Orcas that got out of hand and nobody to respond. That must’ve been fun. How does that work, do you know?”
Ed had been arrested and convicted at least twice that Rae knew of, but still the gleam of the amateur law enforcer shone in his eyes. Rae had to admit that she knew nothing whatsoever about the process of a citizen’s arrest, and Ed moved on to philosophy (Martin Buber this time) until it was time for him to take his leave.
That explained Jerry Carmichael’s absence, Rae told herself back at the building site. She’d been halfway expecting him to pull into the cove one evening, just in passing. She trimmed a length of 2×4 and set it between the studs as a fire block.
On Wednesday, Nikki Walls pulled into the cove just before midday, carrying a paper grocery bag. They met at Rae’s kitchen, and Rae’s mouth started watering when she saw what Nikki had brought: tomatoes, a whole basket of dark red tomatoes, firm and smooth as a milk-full breast and nearly as large. Rae cupped one in both hands and breathed in the earthy fragrance.
“Ahh,” she sighed. “Man. These aren’t from any grocery store.”
“My sister-in-law. She raises the plants in a portable greenhouse, lifts the top off as soon as the sun is warm enough, always has the first tomatoes on the island. She grows about ten different kinds, says that when you start your garden, she can give you recommendations for varieties that do well here. And this is goat cheese from a cousin of mine on Lopez; thought you’d like to try it. And then since I was inviting myself for lunch, I brought a loaf of bread as well.”
They ate the dense, still-warm, herb-laced bread smeared with the tangy white cheese and topped by drippy tomatoes. Rae had to say that she did not think she’d ever had a more perfect meal.
It was true. In recent weeks, Rae’s palate had begun to awaken again. Before, food had been habit and duty; now, particularly since the dinner with Jerry Carmichael in Friday Harbor, the world of taste was waiting for her to rediscover all kinds of things. The downside was that most of the food in her pantry tasted like its containers, and she had suddenly realized that the wine she had been happily drinking, and of which she had a plentiful supply, was more suited to the cook pot than the glass.
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