Folly

by Laurie R. King

  “Just dangling halfway up a mountain.”

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing. What else did they say?”

  “There’s a lot of technical information here. Do you want me to read it to you?”

  “Save your throat. Why don’t you overnight it—Ed can bring it when he comes back on Tuesday. What about the other two bullets?”

  “The other two are from a different gun, also an older handgun. These two were too badly damaged for the lab to see any distinctive marks, but numbers four and five had a sixty percent match on the striations—I’m reading this, not exactly sure what it means—and number three, while too misshapen to retain any marks, weighs approximately the same number of grams as four and five. Is that all clear? Rae? Are you still there? Oh, damn this connection, anyway!”

  Rae woke to the voice in her ear, told her lawyer she’d be in touch, and jabbed the END button on the still-squawking telephone.

  It was one thing to suspect, to play with the possibilities as if she were Petra constructing one of her stories for Bella’s entertainment, but in the glaring light of day—

  Deep in thought, Rae turned blindly down the hill, and somehow made it back to the campsite without mishap. She found Ed drinking his ritual coffee, a pair of garish red half-glasses perched on the end of his nose and a book by a man called Spencer in his hand. He looked up as she approached, and pulled off the reading glasses.

  “Any luck?” he asked. She handed him back the tiny instrument.

  “Sure—all I have to do is climb to the top of the mountain. I think I’ll wait to get a cell phone until the technology improves a little.”

  “Good idea. Can I offer you some of your own coffee?”

  She took the cup he poured and allowed his conversation to beat against her ears, making responses in more or less the correct places. She even managed to pull herself together enough to give him her list of supplies and milling dimensions for her tower stairway, which would enable her to get that going a week sooner.

  She barely noticed when he left. Instead, she reluctantly made her way up to the house to stand before the chip in the fireplace where twenty-two days earlier she had dug out bullet number three.

  The bullets she had labeled numbers one and two were those she had pried from the wood of the front door.

  Number four, which the lab had paired with number three, was the lump of lead she had taken from between the bones in the cave, the loose bullet that had been left behind when the tiny scavengers had finished their work on Desmond Newborn’s remains.

  Five she had shot herself into a soft log on the beach, then dug out and dropped in its bag. A bullet from the antique pistol inherited from her father, the gun with the rosewood grip that Rae had brought to the island as her own last escape.

  Forty-two

  Rae’s Journal

  June 5

  I feel so peculiar, as if I am coming down with the flu—feverish, restless. Nauseated.

  I guess revelation will do that to you.

  When I came here, my only intention was to occupy myself with building a house. In the back of my mind was the vague hope that I might learn something about Desmond, the life that brought him here, what happened after he left this place.

  I did not imagine that I would discover that he had not left at all.

  Five bullets. Two of them fired from a handgun into the heavy door, by someone standing near the fireplace. From the pitted, rusty lump of metal that seventy years later made me think of an old soldier, scarred but potentially deadly.

  Two, then, from Desmond’s gun.

  Three other bullets. All from a second revolver. One lodged in the fireplace, the second in Desmond’s body, the third fired into a spongy tree trunk by me as a sample.

  Three from William’s gun.

  And I thought I was being melodramatic, fantasizing a shootout in the cabin. Even now it feels absurd to write that sensational word. What could “shootout” have to do with William and Desmond Newborn, one brother a building tycoon, the other a holder of the Great War Croix de Guerre?

  There is, however, no doubt in my mind: Desmond Newborn was killed by the gun now resting in my knapsack. Desmond Newborn was killed by his brother.

  I imagine it happened like this:

  Desmond has spent the day entertaining his brother—or rather, submitting grimly to his brothers disapproving inspection. He rows William back to Roche Harbor in the afternoon, not returning to Folly until sunset or later. Too late to do any work, too late even to bother changing out of the suit he’d put on to face William. Desmond merely takes off the jacket and the stiff collar, stirs up the fire against the cool September evening, and sits in his easy chair with a glass of whiskey, allowing the island peace to creep back in and soothe his badly shaken nerves.

  He dozes in his chair. Or perhaps he rouses to cook himself a meal, or even takes a walk before returning to the hearth. In any case, the evening passes.

  By the time his brother William steps back onto the shore of Folly that night, either self rowed (in the skiff that went missing that same night, which the Journal article attributed to the island burglar?) or brought by a hireling, Desmond is preparing for bed. His feet are bare, his suspenders looped down off his shoulders, the buttons on his good white shirt undone. He sits down before the fire with his journal, uncaps his pen to write about the day’s events, but gets no further than three short words before the noise at the door has him on his feet, a soldier’s instant and unthinking response.

  What did Desmond hear moments before William burst in? It may have been merely the working of the latch that he had mounted that very day, the latch I removed from the door all those years later. It had no locking mechanism; William would merely have laid his hand on it and pulled the heavy door open far enough to fire around it. Did he catch Desmond in the act of going for his own gun? One of William’s shots went wild and buried itself in the fireplace. Others may have missed their mark as well, but one did not. It struck Desmond dead center, passing through the unbuttoned shirt to sink into his lower left abdomen: There were no holes in the shirt itself.

  Desmond had his own gun by now and returned fire. Did he know who his attacker was? Had he perhaps looked into William’s eyes in that last moment? In any case, he fired back in the direction of the dark outside his door. Two of his bullets hit the door—entering the wood at different angles, perhaps because it was pushed open by the impact of the first shot. Bitter irony: Desmond’s attacker protected by the defensive thickness of the builder’s own front door. I imagine William beat a hasty retreat into the night— uninjured, as far as I know. No neighbors heard the sounds, since the same orientation that baffles phone reception on Folly would have channeled the echoes of gunshot off in the direction of distant Vancouver Island.

  Desmond abandoned his gun (which was empty when I dug it up), and his uncapped pen had flown away with his first lunge, but he managed either to retrieve or to retain his diary, and thrust it into his breast pocket. He crawled through his secret door, bleeding terribly, knowing all too well what such a wound meant. He made it through the woodshed and into the cave, where I believe the end must have come fairly soon; there was no sign of any first-aid attempt, no indication that he had even tried to stanch the wound. By the position of the skeleton, Desmond just put his right hand inside his shirt, rested his head back against the wall, and died.

  The house, meanwhile, was burning. Accident—an oil lamp knocked to flames by a stray bullet or Desmond’s dive across the room? Or deliberate effort? I can’t imagine that Desmond showed William his secret escape route, which meant that William (God, I can’t believe I’m writing this—William! Grandfather!) would have believed that setting the house on fire would either destroy its occupant or drive Desmond out into vulnerability. In either case, Folly and its owner were wiped out. William Newborn left the island, sinking or taking his brother’s rowing skiff with him to introduce the possibility of Desmond’s escape, and he we
nt home to Boston, inventing a letter two years later, but never saying a word of the truth to anyone.

  Fantasy? No doubt, but how else to explain the facts? My grandfather’s gun killed Desmond Newborn.

  But why? Granted, even as an old man Grandfather was a furious man, fueled by resentments and the supreme joy of doing his enemies in the eye. The only thing that really mattered to him was the acquisition and maintenance of power, chiefly through wealth. Work, friendships, even family left him cold: Supreme authority, over all he surveyed, was what really mattered. He would have sold his only child, my father, had the offer come in high enough.

  Could the shooting have been a money dispute gone bad? Desmond demanding his portion of their inheritance, and William losing his temper?

  I do not know. All I am sure of is, the scenario in my mind is very clear.

  My grandfather murdered his brother, the brother whose handiwork I have come here to lift up again.

  A simple plan, carefully worked out, and a bare minimum of outside help. Elegant, is what they called it. And when The Thief goes missing, or turns up drowned, no one will be too surprised.

  Forty-three

  In less than a month, Rae would have houseguests—whether she had a house or not. She had water and a rudimentary shower, she had walls that were raw and unfinished but of sufficient solidity to reassure city dwellers, and she had a capacious privy, the use of which would no doubt be good for her guests’ spiritual development.

  Three things she needed, though, before her daughter and son-in-law arrived to entrust the sole surviving member of the family’s next generation to the madwoman’s mercies: a roof, more seating, and a way to hide the cave.

  The chairs in a pinch she could always buy from Friday Harbor or fashion from stumps, but the roof was urgent for everyone’s physical comfort, and concealing the cave was every bit as important for her psychological comfort. Why, she did not exactly know, but the idea of Don Collins poking disdainfully into the cave where Desmond had died filled her with revulsion.

  During the days, she tackled the roof. Because she had no photograph of the inside of the house, she had no way of knowing how Desmond had supported his gable roof, but she doubted, considering the building sensibilities of his age, that he had done anything with the upper floor but finish it with a triangular attic space above for future storage.

  Rae, however, craved height and light in her upstairs room. She would keep the ceiling open to the rafters and put a (historically inaccurate) window into the south-facing gable wall. Therefore her wood counted, needed to be beautiful as well as structural: cedar again.

  It was a chore getting all the lumber up and through the wide upper east window, but it was her only choice. Standing outside, she would work the rope up the pulley, lifting two or three boards at a time, each bundle bumping and teetering its way up the house’s outside wall. Then she would go inside, climb the ladder in the tower, and swing the boards onto the floor.

  Except the ridge beam. That came up not in a bundle, but by itself, thirty-two feet of rich, fragrant, native Washington State red cedar six inches thick and eighteen wide, six hundred pounds of tree. The stripped cedar logs she had lifted were toothpicks by comparison. The entire house groaned when the pulley took on the weight, and the beam crept up the wall, one terrifying millimeter at a time.

  When at last, cursed at, cajoled, and sweated over, the roof beam lay threaded across the sills of the upstairs window frames, Rae allowed herself a whoop of triumph. All those lists, all those drawings, the endless calculations of weight and height and angles, all the compulsive, emotionally draining paperwork that had been taken by all as a symptom of Rae’s mental imbalance, all that lengthy battle for the right to try doing this was justified, vindicated by the presence of a massive slab of lumber lying at rest seventeen feet off the ground.

  Not that it was in place. The remaining ten feet would be every bit as arduous, but that would involve propping and bracing first one end, then the other: like building the pyramids, not impossible if one took it slow.

  And Rae took it slow, and safe. To the top of the existing headers inched the great beam, then into the air with a series of enormously sturdy temporary braces. Once it was floating in the air, Rae could start cutting and fastening down the rafters.

  Ed came, found her dangling among the 2×10s, and departed without his coffee and conversation. Nikki appeared briefly with vegetables from a relative’s garden. The sun shone, the wind blew, and Rae raised up the bones of her roof.

  Then on the eighth day, the roof’s framework was finished. A web of cedar lay suspended over the entire house: the massive red authority of the center beam, bearing down; the rafters that held it, looking delicate by comparison, stretching out to transfer the weight onto walls and thence to bedrock; the collar ties that linked each rafter pair into a flat A, ties whose fibers were slack for the last time before the supports came out, the weight came down, and their long lives of tension began. Locked together like a skeletal rib cage, ready to receive the thing that was the ultimate purpose of shelter, a roof. Compression: tension. All Rae needed to do was remove the temporary braces that held the great beam in place, and her house would be, if not covered, then certainly enclosed.

  First, though, she would placate the spirits. She climbed down the tower ladder and stood on her front steps, surveying her choices.

  Through the ages, particularly in northern Europe, it was traditional to mount a branch when a structure’s high point was reached, a sacrifice to the spirits of the trees that had given their lives for human shelter. Properly speaking, the roof tree should be either cedar, which grew all around her tent, or fir, which stood nearby. Those were, after all, the woods she had used in the house. However, Rae found herself eyeing the madrone that overshadowed her workbench, the tree at whose base lay the ashes of Alan and Bella, a tree that for seventy-two days had been absorbing their molecules into its roots and leaves. The madrone’s outer skin was shedding vigorously now, rich brown flakes against the smooth, fresh, pale green inner bark. More and more over the past weeks, Rae had felt like that inner bark, shedding the rough outer protection until she stood, smooth and naked and fresh and serene.

  Foolishness, she mocked herself. Nonetheless, it was to the madrone that she moved, and with a brief inner apology, it was one of the madrone’s small branches that she cut off with her folding knife. She carried the branch to the house, climbing front steps and tower ladder and second-story ladder until she was standing at the very height of the roof, her head even with the bare, fire-scarred tops of the towers. There she nailed the wide-leafed branch.

  The view was astounding, on a clear afternoon such as this. She felt that she could see halfway to Japan, that San Francisco had to be just against the horizon. Vancouver Island stood to one side, the mountainous Olympic peninsula below, mainland Washington to her left. Sailboats had been scattered across the blue water for her pleasure, their sails tipped with the breeze. The dark bulk of a cargo ship made for the Pacific; closer in, a turmoil of white spray and dark flecks, the whole less than the size of her thumbnail at arm’s length, marked the passage of a pod of Dall’s porpoises, teasing along in front of a motorboat. Over the past two months, she had grown to know the regulars, animal and human. The kathunk sound of one of her less technologically sophisticated neighbors making a weekly trip into the market, the powerful thrum of another neighbor who went past at water-skiing speed whether he was pulling someone or not, a vacationing teak sailboat that had been around for the last few days and that had more than once prompted her to pull out her binoculars in envy. There were a couple of black inflateables in the neighborhood, one of which she had decided was the middle-of-the-night disturber-of-the-peace. That boatman had been away for a while, although she had heard the motor again Saturday just before dawn. Seasonal birds came and sometimes went on, and the orcas, too, seemed to have a pattern that she vowed to begin noting down one of these days. Unlike the floatplanes that swe
pt past at unpredictable times, day and night, carrying those residents too impatient or important for water travel. And then as Rae stood there supervising the varied elements of her watery community, her right arm crooked around the roof beam and her boots balanced on the sill plates twenty feet above solid rock, another boat rounded the end of San Juan Island, scudding rapidly in a direct line for her cove, white spray flying up from its bow. She knew the boat long before she could make out the man at its helm.

  Jerry Carmichael had not been back to the island since the framing crew had swarmed in and transformed her house, eight days earlier. Rae could soon hear his motor above the movement of air and branch; from her godlike perch, unseen and unsuspected, she watched him tie up and step onto her dock. He had a thick dark bottle in one hand and a grocery bag with flowers sticking out of the top in the other. Smiling, Rae lowered herself down to the floor and took up her hammer, and set about freeing her roof beam from its supports.

  In a few minutes, drawn by the sound of hammering, Jerry emerged up the ladder from the tower. He was still carrying the bottle, but had exchanged the bag for Rae’s two elegant wineglasses, which looked small between the fingers of his hand. He stopped just inside the room, in the corner where the black stones of the fireplace met the orange stones of the tower, to watch her work.

  Temporary supporting nails screamed their withdrawal from the floorboards, chocks and shims were bashed out of the way, and then the front support wobbled free. Rae caught it and gathered up the pieces, dumping them with all the other rubbish against the empty opening of the south tower. Then she took the hammer to the back brace, which was now bearing most of the weight. Rae slammed the tool against the base of the support, again and again, feeling the blows all along the length of her body, just as the entire house was doing. The bones of her feet and the skin of her scalp, the cedar beneath her boots and the two figurines deep in the foundation below all shuddered with the harsh, joyful reverberations of steel against wood. The support gave minutely, then shifted visibly, then more, until finally with one great blow she was catching the boards to keep them from crashing to the floor. She and Jerry stood still, heads tilted, listening.