Folly

by Laurie R. King

  Rae anchored the list back under its rock, satisfied. Her family’s rear ends would be cushioned by nice clean canvas. Hell, with that many chairs she could throw a party. So now, instead of constructing some rough imitation furniture, she could begin her stairway.

  She had been hungry to do so ever since Ed had brought that tower of thick cedar triangles milled for her in Friday Harbor. Rough, dull, and crudely sawn, they were pure potential, awaiting their magical transformation. When she had first stacked them up in the house she had not been able to resist licking her thumb and wetting the dry wood into color: orange, like the freshly scrubbed stone walls of the tower, like the morning light that would pour down the stairway from the high windows.

  It made her warm just thinking about it.

  Jerry Carmichael had come by twice since the night she had finished the roof framing. His first visit had been to reassure himself that she was well and untroubled by visitors, and to reassure her that the various law enforcement personnel had been alerted to keep an eye on Folly; if this did not exactly fill Folly’s resident with enthusiasm, she did not mention it to him. The second visit was more of the same, with two additional pieces of news: one, that the forensic anthropologist was working on Desmond, and two, that whoever had been phoning around in search of her had stopped doing so. Rae seized on this as an encouraging sign, doggedly ignoring Jerry’s uncertainty. Jerry’s day off was Thursday, three days from now. He’d said he would be there in the morning with tool belt and steaks. She still was not sure just what his attentions meant, whether he was being a friend, or doing his job with a fanatic’s scrupulousness, or whether he was, in fact, romantically interested. She found this last proposition the least likely. She was, after all, at least six or eight years older than he was and no prize, in her body or her mind. Furthermore, she could not fail to notice his disinclination to take advantage of the various openings that had come up. The ambivalence could not be allowed to persist for much longer, that she knew. Still, puzzling as his trips to Folly might be, she did enjoy his presence. His willingness to spend his precious day off with her was a piece of knowledge that Rae tried not to take out and think about too much, for fear that too much handling would either wear it out or chase it away.

  In any case, first the stairway.

  Because the wood had come to her more or less shaped to size, most of the work would be delicate—trimming the shapes to fit between the stones and the center pole, chiseling away at the bottom surfaces so the metal supports were flush with the wood. For the first time in weeks, Rae took up the box that she had built many long years before to hold her woodworking tools; she carried it to the house, humming quietly.

  She wrestled with the ladder that had been left in the tower, cursing under her breath the harsh intractability of aluminum until she had it on the ground outside, and then set about bracing the wooden center pole so it stood upright and equidistant from the walls, cursing out loud the clumsy persistence of wood. At long last, the pole was upright to her satisfaction. She brushed off her hands and went over to her beloved toolbox, squatting down to thumb open the hand-forged latch and pull back the pieced exotics that made up the lid. She frowned, and a sensation of cold began to spread out from the pit of her stomach as she cast about for an explanation of what she was seeing.

  As a woodworker, Rae Newborn was the most methodical of women. An outsider might find her shop a jumble of crudely sawn wood, abandoned tools, and half-completed pieces, but Rae knew instantly where everything was, could feel in a moment when something had been moved.

  Something had been moved.

  The toolbox was a product of her own hands, a piece of equipment both practical and decorative, just like the furniture she made. It had been constructed with a specific set of tools in mind: Japanese chisels made by families that had forged swords for warriors since the fifteenth century, a wooden mallet that she wore out and had to replace every few years, an antique folding measure of brass and ivory that Alan had given her one Christmas—these and other tools that her fingers knew and found without the consultation of her eyes.

  And the tray that formed the top layer was turned the wrong way around. The front left corner of the tray was where her fine-grit touch-up sharpening stone lived, but instead of that oily black square, the front left corner was now occupied by the wickedly sharp blade of the one-inch Takahashi chisel, normally in the upper right. If she’d gone to pick up the stone without looking, as she often did, she’d have sliced off the end of her thumb.

  Could she possibly have put the upper tray back the wrong way? While she was tired, distracted enough that her hands forgot a movement they had performed a thousand times? When had she last opened the box, anyway? Building the driftwood workbench, she’d taken out a medium-sized V-shaped chisel from the bottom layer to run the strip of inlay up one leg, then put it back—and there it was, undisturbed in its niche with all its brothers. Since then, she had not had reason to use fine tools, but … wait. Eight, nine days ago—a couple of nights anyway after the celebratory steak dinner with Jerry Carmichael, she had wiped them all down with a lightly oiled rag so the sea air would not get its rusty teeth into their vulnerable steel. She’d had a drink with dinner, and another one afterward, and had, she recalled, been thinking about Jerry as she sat on the tent floor and wiped her tools—but no, she did not think that she could have dumped the top layer of the box down the wrong way. Blind drunk, inflamed with passion, or stark staring delusional, Rae’s hands would have replaced the upper tray of the toolbox they had made with the sharpening stone in the front left corner. She could not imagine otherwise.

  Which meant that someone had been going through her possessions. The was-it-a-footprint up near the spring back in April had been bad enough; this time it was as if Crusoe had discovered Friday asleep in his bed.

  Rae lifted the upper tray and righted it, then closed the box, latched it shut, and got to her feet. Her hammer came into her hand, and she paced up and down the bare wooden room clutching it, not knowing if she should be angry or frightened or both. She paced and swung the heavy tool back and forth with such force that it would have threatened her kneecap, had its presence and its weight not been such a natural part of her grip.

  A stranger, or a nosy acquaintance? She couldn’t even decide which would be worse, or how to ask Jerry if he had— Or Nikki! Now there was something she could imagine: curious Nikki, slightly and unwillingly jealous of Jerry’s affections, finding an excuse to go through Rae’s possessions.

  Slow down, she warned herself, coming to a standstill in front of the tower entrance. You cleaned the tools a little more than a week ago, and you haven’t been off the island since then. You’ve been right here, hammering furiously away. It had to have been someone sneaking inside while you were busy on the roof. Or in the woodshed behind the house.

  Most likely it was when she was inside the shed: On the roof she’d have seen anything moving in the cove or the clearing, and she’d only begun working inside the house itself this morning.

  Jerry had said he knew no more than a couple of idiots—wild kids, it sounded like—who would even attempt to get at the island other than up from the cove. This might have been an exaggeration, however; certainly sneaking up to the camp through the trees while Rae was working would hold much less risk of being seen than a stroll down the promontory in full view.

  Rae abruptly realized that she was stomping up and down again, swinging twenty-one ounces of steel furiously at the end of her arm as if looking for someone to hit with the thing. She held the clawed head up in front of her curiously, and it occurred to her how odd it was that anger could be antithetical to insanity. Psychotics acting out their imbalance might join the two definitions of “mad,” but in truth, indignation, righteous or otherwise, was sometimes just what a disturbed person needed to restore a strong sense of identity and entitlement.

  Better to get mad than be mad, you might say.

  And, Rae realized, she was indeed a
ngry.

  Angry enough to march halfway down the hill before it struck her that she might have even better cause to be afraid. The revelation came in Jerry Carmichael’s voice, a question she had struggled to push away ever since he had asked it.

  “Why are you so sure those were delusions?”

  Rae faltered, nearly tripped over her suddenly frozen feet, and then tucked her head down and scurried on to the tent, falling breathlessly through the flap door and going not to the various places that might have been picked over by an intruder, but to the pistol that lay on the table in her tent, the pistol that she had vowed to keep close at hand and forgotten in her delusion that Folly was a safe refuge. Fingers shaking, she checked to see that all five bullets were in the chambers and snapped it shut again. The click seemed very loud, and she glanced rapidly between the door and the screen window, ready for battle.

  The most threatening thing that appeared was a blue jay, and although Rae winced at its squawk, she was by then sitting on the edge of her cot, the gun clasped in both hands.

  There was Nikki’s flare gun, too, she reassured herself. Come on: No one was going to attack her smack in the middle of a summer’s day in a heavily populated watery playground. She knew without going to the promontory that there would be half a dozen boats—sail, motor, and paddle-powered—within shouting distance. Several times a day, boats or dinghies ventured into the open end of the cove in hopes that the No Trespassing sign did not mean them, only retreating when they saw clear signs of habitation. Ironic, perhaps, for a hermit to find safety in numbers, but there it was.

  Still, from here on out, she would keep the gun with her, wearing it on her carpenter’s belt with all the other tools. Maybe not stuck openly into the hammer holster, but if she wrapped its handle in a rag and pushed it into one of the belt’s two big nail pouches, the weapon would look innocuous enough, one more lumpy object on a tool belt. She tried it, hated it, didn’t know how long she could bear having the thing riding against her belly, but its weight was, she had to admit, reassuring.

  Then she turned to a careful scrutiny of the tent. There were any number of incongruities that might have resulted from a stranger’s search of her possessions; however, all of them could as readily have been due to her own carelessness. She was nowhere near as scrupulous with socks as she was with chisels, so that finding a pair of underwear among the T-shirts and Petra’s last letter in with the receipts from the builder’s supply proved nothing.

  Calmer now, she went back up to her stairway—albeit with her hand resting on the nail pouch near the butt of the gun, and her eyes probing the bushes. A hundred times during the afternoon she froze at what she was doing to listen for sounds, got up half of those hundred times to check the window and door openings, but there was never anything there that shouldn’t have been, except once a couple of kids on an inflatable dinghy with a motor, who saw her in the doorway and putted away back out of the cove.

  After a couple of hours, she quit work in disgust. She was so jumpy she’d come close to ruining one perfectly good step, and she was exhausted in a way she hadn’t been since her early dirt-hauling days. She halfway wished that Jerry was coming tonight, then she was equally glad he was not: Rae was old enough to know that a Jerry Carmichael with his protective feathers ruffled was a problem she did not need. And in this mood, she was almost sure to end up going to bed with him—something else she was not at all sure she wanted.

  No: What she needed was not a protective male, but a restoration of her own sense of security.

  If she’d learned nothing else over the past two years, she had absorbed one painful lesson: There is no such thing as safety; there is only strength.

  Forty-six

  Desmond Newborn’s

  Journal

  November 11, 1922

  Armistice Day. A noisy storm played over the islands the other night, and for the first time in seven years, the thunder was not a bombardment, the lightning over the horizon not some poor bastards up the line getting it. Thank you, God, for this favor.

  I have been on Sanctuary for a year and five months, and still live in a rough shack. I have begun my foundations, but they have long months to go. The better part of this year I spent ranging through the islands in my rowing skiff, searching out the right stones with which to build my house. The natives find me amusing. They wave as I pass and they nudge each other good-naturedly when I enter the grocery store, but I respond in kind, with words few but friendly, so they think me harmless, if colorful.

  The beach on Lopez that I discovered last spring has proven an almost limitless source of perfect stones, although, in the nature of perfect things, one must dig deep for them. I have overturned the entire beach from one end to the other three times now, and will return again in the spring. Fortunately, there was a lad who lives nearby with a stout motor-boat, who for a small fee saves me from the worst of my labors. Rowing a heavily laden skiff even with the tide is no easy matter; if I am caught on the water at the turn, the situation rapidly ceases to amuse.

  I have discovered a small cavern immediately behind where I am laying my foundations. It seems to me to have been used by my Indian predecessors on the island, but I do not think they would object to my making use of it. The place is snug and dry: a secure dugout that even a direct shell would find hard to collapse.

  I shelter in the cave sometimes when the weather is inclement, and I seem to feel around me the men who came before, companions strangely dressed and murmuring in incomprehensible tongues.

  What would they think, if they were to notice me sitting among them? What tales would I tell, were I to be transported back to their company? That they as a people have all but died off That their shell middens are more prominent than they are? That nothing is left of them in these islands but their shades?

  And what if I were to find myself similarly confronted by a strangely dressed man from the future, telling me tales of how I too have died unmourned, forgotten but for the stone midden I left behind? No heir, no friends, no great public foundation to mark my passing, nothing more than the ripples of a stone in water or the outline of a whale carved in the wall.

  And yet, surely the earth holds far too many men who would Make their Mark, who would Change the World? Am I wrong to think that some of us ought to pass through the world more quietly?

  Forty-seven

  Tuesday came, nine days short of The Arrival, and while the morning mist still lay on the water, a boat pulled into the cove. The boat was not Ed’s, and the man who jumped onto the dock holding the boat’s rope was not bearing groceries. Nor did he start up toward the clearing, but rather stood waiting for her to come down. Jerry’s face looked … official. Not grim, just watchful and concerned.

  “What’s wrong?” Rae asked when she was standing in front of him.

  “I’m having a call patched through on the radio. You want to get on board and take it?”

  The hell with this, was all that flashed through her mind: I really am going to have to make some kind of phone arrangement so the rest of humanity doesn’t need to act as my damn messenger boy.

  “Hello?” she asked the device.

  “Good morning, Ms. Newborn, this is Sheriff Escobar. How you doing?”

  “I was doing fine. Why do I think that’s about to change?”

  “I’ve got two men here I’d like you to look at. Could you possibly get on a plane and come in for a lineup?”

  “What, today?”

  “I can’t hold ’em beyond tomorrow without charging them,” he said, and that was all he said. Rae could hear him waiting through the crackling that came across the receiver while she stood on Jerry’s gently rocking boat and stared at the dials and gauges. Of all the things Rae did not want to do nine days before her family descended on her, leaving the islands to go to a crowded airport full of other anxious people, then closing herself into a plane, all for the purpose of looking at two men she probably couldn’t identify (and with the result of stirring up
all kinds of unwelcome memories if she could), was fairly high on the list.

  However, she owed Sam Escobar, owed him for his persistence and his honesty, for his patience with a woman who heard bumps in the night, owed him for the kindness with which he had tried to coax a terrified and obviously unbalanced victim out from behind her paper-strewn sofa.

  “I’ll be there,” she told him.

  “Thank you.”

  She heard relief in his voice—too much relief, perhaps. “Don’t you have anything to charge them with other than my identification?”

  “Yes, but they’d be bailed before dark, and gone. If you can ID these two, we have a chance to hold on to them.”

  “All right. But I have to tell you, I may not remember their faces. It’s been a long year and a half.”

  “All we can do is try,” he said crisply. “Let me know when you’re getting in—I’ll have someone meet you at the airport.”

  Jerry seemed pleased that she was going, which Rae took as an indication of his relief that she and her problems were going to be out of his jurisdiction, if only temporarily. Policing a spread-apart county couldn’t be an easy task, she reflected. She thought about telling him what she had found in her toolbox, even though it would underscore his conviction that she was in some kind of danger, but he was already in motion, and so, it appeared, was she.

  “I can get you on a two-thirty flight out of Seattle, if you can get ready in twenty minutes. They’ll hold the Anacortes ferry. That’d get you to San Jose before five-thirty.”