She breathed in the vapors, took a tentative sip, and rolled it across her tongue. When she did not instantly gag and spit it out, Jerry asked, “Not vinegar, then?”
She swallowed. “No, but it wouldn’t make a bad marinade. Or a cleaning solution.”
She held it out for him to try. When he sipped and swallowed and still kept the glass, she poured herself some in the other one, screwed the bottle down into the sand, and sat back to try it again. Yes, about the most that could be said for the substance in the bottle was that it was not vinegar. Flat, heavy, with all the nuance of a boiled shoe and possessing a distinct aftertaste of mildew; but it was not quite vinegar.
Perversely, they both drained their glasses, although the moon had heaved itself several degrees farther into the sky by the time they did so.
“It’s not bad,” Jerry pronounced lazily, “if you don’t think of it as wine.”
“If I donate it to the historical society like Nikki asked me to, they could sell it as Desmond’s furniture stripper.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Yes it is.” She got to her feet, noticing with some concern that her legs had gone numb from the knees down. Although that might have been from the six-pack the two of them had polished off before dinner. “You want some drinkable wine, or would you rather have Scotch?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
Scotch it was, twenty-year-old single-malt tipple, and it required several swallows to scrape the fur from their outraged tongues. The moon danced with the faint ripples in the cove, breaking up and re-forming, as the small brown bats flitted back and forth over their heads.
“Not a bad place to grow up, was it, Jerry?”
“A fine place. I missed it while I was away. Used to wake up in the barracks smelling the sea.”
“Were you in Vietnam?” He would have been old enough to hit the final days of that war, Rae figured.
“Germany.”
“Lucky.”
“I guess. My brother went through ’Nam. Seeing what it did to him, I always felt like I’d cheated and somehow got away with a cushy couple of years. And then at the end of it they even paid for me to go to college. Survivor’s guilt, you know.”
Rae Newborn knew survivor’s guilt very well indeed.
“Did he die, then, your brother?”
“No. Wounded once, not badly enough to get sent home. But something bad happened over there that he never got over. I never knew the details, since it never came to trial, but it was some kind of My Lai thing, involving civilians. Children died. Like I said, he never got over it. When he came home he started working with abused kids, as a way of making amends, I always thought. I don’t know what he’s doing now.”
“Does he live around here?”
“Nobody seems to know where he lives. We get phone calls from time to time, and he sounds good, but he and my dad don’t see eye to eye, so he doesn’t come home much. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years.”
A tiny fish leapt out of the water, breaking the moon’s reflection into a shower of sparkles. Rae lifted her glass, and noticed the same reflections there, dancing. Maybe it was her vision, she thought; everything seemed to be dancing more than a little. She pulled herself together. “You know, ever since I got here I seem to be running into—what’s the saying? War and rumors of war. I mean, where I live, or where I used to live in California, there’s military bases all over the place, weapon development companies, you name it, to say nothing of kids with guns in their hands, but other than the foreign news I’d never hear about war. And then I come here, to the most peaceful, gorgeous corner of God’s green earth, and I buy a guidebook and read about places in my neighborhood called Slaughter and Victim Island and Murder Point. Bobby Gustafsen lives on Massacre Bay. Then there’s the Pig War, and smugglers of everything from Chinese workers to rum and cocaine, and Al Capone–type crime lords, and now here we are talking about Vietnam. And I suppose next you’re gonna tell me Nikki Walls went out with Desert Storm.”
“Not Nikki, no.”
She held up her hand, which seemed to wander around a little at the end of her arm under halfhearted control. “Don’t tell me who it was, I don’t want to know. It’s all I can do to cope with Desmond Newborn, who came out here to get away from shell shock. God—there’s another war.”
“A pertic—party—” He was having trouble with the word. “A pretty brutal one that was, too. You must mean the First World War.”
“Desmond’s own. Shot, gassed, diseased, and sent home broken. Took him years before he could think straight.”
“So he came here and built this place.”
“Built himself.” On reflection, Rae decided the observation was not as profound as it might have been. “I believe I’ve had too much to drink,” she told her guest.
“Comes from mixing grape with grain,” he agreed, sounding none too sober himself.
“Too bad I don’t have any vodka—we could stir some potatoes into the pot.”
Jerry thought that terribly funny, but when he caught his breath again, he said sternly, “I’ve got to have some coffee before I leave.”
“You don’t have to leave,” she said without thinking. The night went suddenly still for two heartbeats, until Jerry raised himself out of his chair.
“Yes, I do,” he said, and walked up to the campsite to put the kettle on.
She had not meant the offer as anything but a mooring place for his boat, the easy gesture between friends, but those two heartbeats of sharp awareness abruptly opened a door she had not known was there. And to have it so easily closed again was every bit as disconcerting as having it appear in the first place.
Had she meant more than a place to sleep? she wondered later, when the cup of coffee she had swallowed out of Jerry’s pot had not gone far to counteract the alcohol. He, on the other hand, returned swiftly to efficient sobriety, gathering his things to leave. Rae listened to him coming back across the clearing, the creak of his tool belt, the rattle of the hammer in its metal rest and the tap of the various screwdrivers against each other, a musical language as comforting as a native tongue. Then without warning he was behind her chair, his left cheek brushing her hair and his voice breathing words into her right ear.
“I’ll go now before one of us does something we’ll both regret tomorrow. ’Night, Rae. Thanks for the dinner.”
She reached out, but he was already away. She watched his ghostly progress down the beach, hearing the music of his tool belt and the thump of his boots across the dock, followed by the cough and growl of the boat engine. She lifted her face to the bowl of the sky and the dark branches framing its edges, then turned to look over her shoulder at the pale box of her suddenly expanded house, dropped so precipitately from the heavens.
How easy it would have been. A small turn of her face to his, one unambiguous word, would have been enough to change … everything. Most shocking of all was the realization that there was no reason that she should hold back. There was nothing holding her to faithfulness, not anymore. Even the suspicion that she found Jerry more attractive as a friend than as a lover would not have stood in the way, had he moved away from her any less quickly.
“I wouldn’t have had any regrets,” she told the house defiantly, and not entirely truthfully, then went with uneven dignity to her narrow bed.
Regrets were in plentiful supply the next morning, however; dry-mouthed, queasy-stomached, pounding-headed regrets. Rae groaned, squinted up at the unusually high angle of the sun hitting the canvas, groaned again. The idea of wielding a hammer today made her teeth ache.
Glass after glass of cool water, a handful of aspirin, a pot of powerful coffee, and some bread toasted over the propane stove brought her back to the brink of humanity, but the only thing she was truly happy about was that she hadn’t woken to find Jerry Carmichael’s humorous eyes watching her in this state. Jesus, she thought fervently. Never again.
She uncovered a pair of sunglasses, which
helped, and up at the house found a billed cap one of the deputies had left behind, which when tugged down to the rim of the glasses helped a bit more.
There was no way she was going to pick up a hammer until much later in the day, if then, but there was plenty of work that did not involve loud noises and sharp jolts. Unfortunately, those jobs all required a functioning brain. Bed was attractive, with a damp cloth draped across her forehead, but she dragged on her belt and squared her shoulders. She’d just have to let her hands do what they could.
Yesterday’s vast acceleration in her building’s progress created a new problem—namely, that she now had a second story with no way to get to it.
Desmond’s towers were stone, but the stairs themselves had been wooden. The upper windows—unfinished, according to his journal, thus open to the air—had sucked the fire up the towers as if they had been chimneys. Nothing was left inside but the mounting holes in the stone walls—now joined by one aluminum extension ladder and the smooth tree trunk that would be the stairway’s central pole, both of which Jerry’s muscular acrobats had dropped in before they capped the tower with an unceremonious if temporary hunk of plywood.
Rae had never built a circular stairway, but since first laying eyes on the project, coming here with Alan and Bella, she had read up on their construction, so she knew what she wanted to do. Here she would wind a wooden corkscrew, steps splaying out from the central pole with a handrail against the stones. She might do something more experimental with the other tower, but for the back one, the construction process was clear in her mind. It just needed meticulously detailed and completely accurate measurements and calculations.
Very soon, she was wondering if she wouldn’t be better going back to hammering.
It was going to be like building a sailing ship inside a bottle—measure thrice, cut once—only in this case, since she would need so many identical pieces, the Friday Harbor lumber mill was doing the bulk of the cutting for her. She would, however, order the steps as triangles, and shape each one to fit into its niche between the uneven tree trunk and the still more uneven walls.
The tower’s diameter, the height of the stairway, the depth and rise of each step, and the thickness of the wood all had to be factored in. Rae sweated over her drawings on through the afternoon before she finally had one that worked, and then she realized that although it was terribly elegant, it would deposit a person straight into the tower’s rear wall. Back to the drawing pad.
The second time she finished her figuring, Rae stared doubtfully at the results, and finally threw the pad down in disgust. What she needed was a swim in the icy cove, as much dinner as she could face, and an early night; tomorrow she could check the calculations with a clear brain, then take up her hammer again.
But the early night did not come about. Whether it was the remnants of alcohol, or the accumulated agitation of muscles gone five days without hard labor, or the intrusion of Jerry Carmichael’s humorous eyes, or just the bright moonlight against the sides of her tent, she lay awake, staring at the patterns the branches made on the canvas, moving slightly in the breeze.
About one in the morning she gave up the attempt, stepped into her sandals, and went out to sit for a while on the promontory. Two boats lay offshore, sleeping vacationers kept at bay, perhaps, by the stern No Trespassing sign. Somewhere around to the right, up the side of the island blessed with rock cliffs and a wicked reef, a familiar low engine muttered, her nocturnal neighbor. After a minute it went still, leaving Rae Newborn alone with the night.
There was a grunt close by, and she froze until the noise came again, and then she relaxed. Correction: leaving Rae Newborn alone with the night and the harbor seals.
Nine weeks she’d been here. When she arrived, she’d spent most of the time rigid with either terror or tension; gradually, with hard work, familiarity, and a spark of interest, the life of the island had taken her in, until she could understand why Desmond had called it Sanctuary. Having been forced off the island for three days, she could see more clearly than ever how essential it had become to her. The stillness that had so oppressed her in the early days now slipped into her as easily as the breath into her lungs: Where she had once felt the silence wrap her like a winding sheet, it was now a welcoming blanket.
Alone. At last.
She was even becoming accustomed to her life as a solitary, one tiny spark on a dark stage. The awareness of being alone still made her jumpy, but the knowledge that someone could be watching her out there was not as intensely threatening as it had been. How long had it been since she last imagined Watchers in the woods? And other than the night on Friday Harbor—which didn’t count, she decided, because the sheriff’s boots had set that one off—how long ago had her last panic attack been? Days. Weeks even. She slept badly, sure, she lost her temper, she ached for Alan and Bella and missed their presence hourly, but the pain of the loss was no longer on the edge of unbearable, tonight at any rate, and she did not feel the urge to take out the gun and hold it to her breast, or her temple.
Healing, they called it.
After a while she rose stiffly and went back to her tent, but only to gather her sleeping bag and fold up the camp cot. Still moving solely by moonlight, she carried her bedding to the house and unfolded her bed in front of the black stone fireplace, zipped the sleeping bag to her chin, and lay in her warm cocoon, listening to her house talking to itself, the ticks and creaks of the wood adjusting to its load, the brush of a branch against a wall. This was a house now, a hollow shell of walls broken by window holes; on this lower floor she could even pretend that the roof was in place. Brilliant moonlight streamed through the black rectangle of the doorway; through it she could see the silver-and-black lace of the madrone and the shimmer of the moonlit sea. It was like a stage setting, needing only the sudden, dramatic appearance of a human silhouette in the door for the play to begin. Rae smiled at the image, more fancy than threat, and after a while gave herself over to sleep.
The following day, halfway through a solid morning’s work that had done much to restore the feeling that she was building this house on her own, she was startled to hear the approach of a well-known motor. For a moment she wondered if she had lost a couple of days somewhere, but decided that no, this was not Tuesday, even if that was the Orca Queen pulling up to her dock. She laid down her tools to see what Ed wanted.
He stepped off the boat wearing long sleeves and looking like any other weather-beaten, middle-aged longhair, the peacock glory of his skin hidden under a batik print. The shirt was the brightest thing about him, too: He appeared subdued in spirit, and bore not his customary double armload of brown paper grocery bags topped by a roguish grin but a tiny cell phone and a wary look. He held the object as if his fingers were about to crush it, and thrust it at her as if it were a bomb, or a newborn infant, palpably relieved to get rid of it before it went off. She took it and automatically held it to her ear, but the instrument was dead. When she found the switch that turned it on, the small screen informed her it was out of range. She raised an eyebrow at Ed in unspoken query.
“You’re supposed to call your lawyer,” Ed told her. God, Rae thought, her heart simultaneously sinking and beating faster. What now?
“It’s not working,” she pointed out.
“They said that if I took you out on the boat a ways, it’d come into range.” He looked dubiously at the instrument, and she had to agree that something the size of two of his fingers was not likely to have a lot of power.
“Are you in a rush, Ed? Because if you’re not, this would give me a chance to see if these things work here. Give me twenty minutes to gain some height in the direction of Roche Harbor. If I don’t have any luck, then you can take me out on the boat. In the meantime, why don’t you put on a kettle for some coffee.”
“Fine with me, but she did say it was urgent. Nothing would do but I had to find somebody with a cell phone and come out right away. Said she’d pay me double.”
Rae set off down t
he path to the garden site on the eastern side of the island, glancing down every few steps to see if the instrument was ready to talk, but nothing, not until she had run out of navigable land and was climbing up the side of Mount Desmond. Then the tiny display flickered and grudgingly admitted that it might be possible. When the reception indicator gave three bars out of a possible four, she sat down on the steep hillside and punched in the string of numbers. The phone crackled, and rang on some distant planet. Pam Church’s secretary answered, Rae identified herself, and Pam herself came on the line.
“Rae, thank God. I feel like I’m trying to contact Antarctica or something. Why won’t you get a cell phone?”
“I’m speaking from a cell phone, and you can hear how well it works.”
“What?”
“What do you want?” Rae shouted into the phone.
“You sent me five bullets, Rae,” Pamela exclaimed through the static. She might as easily have said “anthrax vials” or “live scorpions.”
“You did send them to a lab?”
“But Rae, bullets? You know that if you have evidence of a major crime, you and I need to—”
Rae cut her off impatiently. “Pam, I may be insane, but I’m not stupid. Those bullets are seventy years old—four of them, at any rate. What did the lab say?”
“Are you absolutely sure there’s no potential liability here?”
“I’m positive,” Rae told her, not sure at all but unwilling to go into it.
“Okay. Well. You sent five bullets. Numbers three, four, and five all appear to be from the same weapon, which the lab thinks—”
“All three?”
“Three, four, and five, from a caliber gun out of common circulation since before the Second World War. Can you hear me? It sounds like you’re in Antarctica.”
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