Folly

by Laurie R. King

  She didn’t ask how he knew the schedules so well, just nodded her agreement and turned on her heel to throw some things into the knapsack. Telling him about the toolbox could wait.

  When she reached down to unbuckle her tool belt, she stopped: the gun. She couldn’t possibly take it on the plane; on the other hand, she didn’t want to leave it in the tent, even inside the locked trunk. Rae snatched up the flannel-wrapped object and trotted up the hill to the house, paused to pick up the precious box of woodworking tools (the only thing of real value on the island since Desmond’s journal and strongbox had gone into the Friday Harbor bank) and took gun and box through the woodshed into the cave. She left them just inside the cave’s entrance, and secured both invisible doors on her way out.

  Jerry was in the boat, on the radio making her travel arrangements. She ducked into the tent and threw off her dirty work clothes, grabbing up a wrinkled shirt and trousers, exchanging mud-caked boots for city shoes and rummaging through her stored clothes until she found a linen blazer. If she was going to hang around a jail, she’d look like a lawyer, not a suspect. The jacket was rumpled beyond fashion and tighter than she remembered across her shoulders, but it would have to do. Rae took a last look around, dropped the bedside clock and her journal into the knapsack, then zipped and tied shut the windows and door and hurried to join Jerry on the boat.

  Conversation was virtually impossible over the motor. In Friday Harbor he eased the boat up to a dock near the ferry, where Bobby Gustafsen, wearing his deputy’s uniform, stood waiting. Bobby caught the boat’s rope, gave Rae a shy grin and Jerry a set of keys, and then stepped onto the boat in Jerry’s place. She and the sheriff scurried up and over the bridge onto the ferry, which immediately cast off and lumbered out into the channel between San Juan and Shaw. Still on Jerry’s heels, Rae went up some stairs and through some doors, and then they were in the shipboard cafeteria with the smell of French roast coffee and maple syrup. She dropped into a seat, ears ringing and nerves jangled, grateful that for the next hour at least she would not be rushing anywhere. Jerry went over to the food line and came back with a trayful of things wrapped in cellophane. He dug in; she sipped her coffee.

  “I take it you’re driving me to the airport?” she asked.

  “If that’s all right,” he said, looking suddenly doubtful around his sandwich.

  “It’s fine,” then, “I’m grateful,” she amended. “I’d just think you had things to do. Sheriffing about.”

  “Let Bobby be in charge. He loves it. And what’s the point in being the sheriff if I can’t move things around to let me spend a few hours with a woman I—” He halted, and changed it to, “—with a friend.”

  Rae smiled ruefully. “So I didn’t manage to scare you off with all that truth telling?”

  “Were you trying to?”

  “Might be a good idea, if I could,” she told him, and reflected that it would all be much simpler if she could decide how she felt about this relationship.

  “Sorry. No can do.”

  “Just… keep your eyes open, okay? With me?”

  “Always do.”

  Which reminded her. “Jerry, I need to tell you that it’s possible someone’s been going through my tools, sometime in the last week.”

  His eyebrows came together in a frown. “Is something missing?”

  “No, just part of my toolbox got moved around, but I don’t know when. And it could have been just my own absentmindedness.”

  “But you don’t think it was,” he said. It was not a question.

  “Honestly? With that toolbox? No.”

  They looked at each other over the plastic table, oblivious to the magnificent scenery rolling past the big windows. “What are we going to do about this?” he said at last.

  “Well,” she said. “It’s possible that if these two guys I’m going to look at were the ones who attacked me last year, they’ll be able to explain what’s going on now.”

  “And if not?”

  “If not, we’ll have to think about it.”

  They both thought about it a great deal over the next three days, beginning with Rae on the airplane south and Jerry in the car heading back north and then west. Rae also thought about the way Jerry had sat behind the wheel of his official car at the airport drop-off, eyeing the masses of people, and, with a sort of “Oh, the hell with it” shrug, leaned over and kissed her. When Rae had surfaced, flustered beyond words, she halfway expected an audience, but the only one openly watching was the pretty cop on duty, who nudged her hat brim up with one finger, a gesture like a salute, then moved off down the line.

  Rae had grabbed her knapsack out of the backseat and looked over the top of the car at the big man in the uniform, who had, if nothing else, taken her mind off her apprehension about being shut in a plane with strangers.

  “You look great,” he told her. She glanced down at herself in surprise, and then, hesitantly, returned his grin.

  “So do you,” she admitted, and went to catch her plane.

  The woman at the check-in counter took one look at Rae’s taut features and said she’d be happy to trade the forward aisle seat that Jerry’s travel agent had booked for a window seat in the absolute last row on the plane. Rae marched to the gate, head down and teeth gritted, and sat in a corner with her back against the wall. She was the last passenger to board, and settled into her seat, light-headed with relief. All those people, and not one had grabbed her from behind.

  For two hours her spine ceased its crawling; although she kept a wary eye on every person going to and from the toilet, at least her nerves did not imagine that a hand could come through the wall at her. On the ground at San Jose, she again waited until everyone but the flight attendants were off before she picked up her knapsack and scurried to the door.

  To her surprise, the person looking toward the gate with the worried, “Did she miss the plane?” expression was wearing not a sheriff’s department uniform, but a brief red leather skirt and a suede jacket: Pam Church. The lawyer’s face cleared when she saw Rae, and she gave her a quick embrace and a peck on the cheek.

  The lawyer’s first words were a near-duplicate of Jerry’s last. “God, woman, you look superb.”

  Again Rae glanced at her undistinguished and unkempt clothes, but Pamela shook her head.

  “No, I mean you. You look like you’ve spent the last three months at a health spa, pumping iron and sitting on the beach. Brown and muscular.”

  “I don’t know about pumping iron, but I’ve shifted a hell of a lot of wood and nails.”

  “Whatever it is, it suits you. You need a manicure, of course, but your hands have looked like that ever since I’ve known you. Is that all you have?” She gestured at Rae’s disreputable knapsack.

  “That’s it,” Rae told her.

  During the drive to the county jail, over the mountain highway that was home and not home, they caught up on a lot of business and a little personal news, which had always been the balance in their relationship. Traffic was heavy going over the hill as it was smack in the middle of commute hour, but Pamela did not seem worried about the delay.

  “Sheriff Escobar said he’d wait for you,” she told Rae.

  “Are you coming in?”

  “If you want me to. If not, I’ll drop you there, and we can get together tomorrow for a proper going-over. You’re not going back to Seattle tonight, I hope?”

  “Oh no. As long as I’m here, I’ll stay a couple of days, take care of business, dust the plants, water the shelves.”

  “Um. Would you like to stay with me? I have an extra room; I’d be more than happy to have you.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “I just hate to think of you all alone in that big house,” the lawyer said cautiously.

  “I’m staying with a friend tonight—my wood man, Vivian Masters. He’s driving me up to the house tomorrow, and maybe I’ll stay on then. I’ll see how it feels.”

  “Well, the offer stands.”

&nb
sp; “Thank you,” Rae said. “I appreciate it.” She did, too.

  Then they were at the jail, and Pam was looking at her doubtfully and saying that maybe she’d come in after all, and then there was a uniform that was like Jerry’s but different and much smaller, and a lot of coming and going and delay and doors opening and closing until finally Rae was in a room with Sheriff Escobar and a couple others and she was looking through the mirror at a line of complete strangers. Half a dozen stocky, dark-haired men, with absolutely nothing to distinguish one from the next. They all looked like thugs, although she was dimly aware that they used police personnel to fill out the ranks of a lineup.

  “Are both of the men here?” she asked the sheriff, trying not to sound panicky.

  “Only one. We’ll do a second lineup with another group.”

  “I just don’t know.”

  “Take your time. Ignore the clothes; think about what part of their faces you saw. You want me to have them turn?”

  “I guess.”

  The line of men dutifully shuffled to face right, then left, and at the final shift of position Rae stiffened.

  “Something?” the sheriff asked.

  “The fourth one. Could you have him come up and sort of, well, grimace?”

  He gave the order to the lineup, and one by one the men came up to the glass, bared their teeth as if checking for stuck spinach, and went back into line. The fourth such grimace sent a jolt through Rae that turned her bowels to ice water.

  “That’s him,” she stammered. “Look, can I use the toilet?”

  “Do you identify one of these men, Ms. Newborn? For the record.”

  “Number four. He’s the one who threw me off the road. He had a mustache then. Look, I really need—”

  She was whisked away. When she returned, feeling unnaturally empty, a different group of men stood on the other side of the mirror, shifting restlessly at the delay. All were taller than those in the first lineup, and blond-haired, and she waited fearfully for another twist of recognition while they turned from one side to another. Nothing.

  “It could be number two,” she had to say finally. “But it could be number two’s brother, as well. I’m sorry, I can’t be anywhere near as certain about this one.”

  The sheriff did not seem unduly worried about it, and when they had finished the paperwork, Rae looked over at him.

  “I didn’t pick out two policemen, did I?”

  “Oh, no, you most certainly did not. And don’t you worry about the second one—we’ve got something to work on him with now.”

  “They haven’t said anything about who hired them? If anyone?”

  “Not yet. But if you want to phone me tomorrow, I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “What about my house being broken into? Did these guys do that, too?”

  “I’m afraid they couldn’t have. Both of them were in jail when that happened—an alibi that’s hard to break. We’ll ask them, of course, if maybe they mentioned to somebody that the house might be empty, but somehow I don’t think so. Other than the deliberate damage, the break-in itself looked pretty smooth. Maybe not professional, since nothing much was missing, but from a cooler head than these two. You going up there, while you’re here?”

  “I’m meeting my lawyer there tomorrow, to see if I find anything she and the insurance man missed.”

  “Let me know if you do. Now, can I get you a ride somewhere? Arrange some dinner?”

  “I have someone expecting me, thanks, but if someone could give me a lift across town, it’d be a help.”

  The someone expecting Rae was her tree merchant and importer of exotic hardwood, Vivian Masters, a sawyer with the name of an English aristocrat, the build of an Olympic weight lifter, the voice of an Australian drover, and the hands of a Dutch diamond cutter. Vivian had been Rae’s partner in craft for more than a dozen years before the accident. When she had phoned him from the airport in Seattle to tell him she was coming down and would want to drop by the shop, he had shouted with pleasure, and insisted that she stay with him and his lover (who Rae knew by long experience would be tall, intense, probably bearded, possibly foreign, and lamentably temporary).

  When she stepped out of the official car at Vivian’s door, he burst from the shop at a run. Arms like steel bands wrapped around her rib cage, a grip that would have triggered a panicky struggle for escape had it been any man in the world other than Vivian. Him she hugged back with equal fervency, her arms around his neck, her chin resting on his hair, as they rocked with the pleasure of seeing each other. Then the wood merchant thrust her at arm’s length and declared how positively buff she was, and how the hell was she, anyway, she looked good enough to eat. Rae looked over her shoulder at the bemused driver and waved good-bye, then strolled into Vivian’s yard with her arm over his shoulder, his arm around her waist.

  Vivian lived, literally, over the shop, which might have had something to do with his various lovers’ disinclination to become permanent, but when Rae walked through his shop door she felt her lungs instantly expand, followed a moment later by her soul. The fragrance of a hundred woods filled the air, the distilled essences of topsoils stretching from Borneo to Nicaragua. Two years had passed since Rae last set foot in Vivian’s warehouse, and the instantly remembered visceral magnificence of the air caught her unawares. She felt dizzy, frightened and intoxicated simultaneously. She had to sit down, and was aware of tears trembling in her eyes, and of Vivian bending over her in concern.

  “I’m okay,” she reassured him. “I’d just forgotten.”

  He straightened to his full five foot five, sawdust-clogged blond Afro and all, and turned to survey his wooden kingdom. “I know. When I’m gone for a while and come back, the bloody place does the same thing to me.”

  “It’s… primeval.”

  He shot her a look that was pure joy. “Shit oh dear, girl, it’s fine to see you. Come in, have a drink. Have ten drinks. Let’s get smashed to the eyelids and talk about wood and trees and curse the fucking gallery owners. But first you have to meet Jordan. Jor!” he bellowed hugely up the stairway that led to his living quarters. He continued talking as they went up. “I can’t believe you two’ve never met, like my left hand not knowing my right, but I guess it was that Christmas—oh, Christ Almighty.” Vivian turned on the narrow stairway to look into Rae’s eyes, his voice gone suddenly soft. “What a terrible time that was. I never told you. When I talked to you, coupla days after the funeral, I knew damn well you were goin’ through hell up in that house of yours, but you told me you wanted to be alone. I knew I should’ve gone and snatched you up and brought you here, even then I knew it, and instead of that I let you talk me into leaving you be and just dove in head over heels with Jordan, like some demented teenager with his balls on fire. I was a fucking idiot and—”

  She impulsively took his face in her hands and gave him a quick kiss on the lips. “You’re not an idiot, and honestly? Nothing you could have done would have made a speck of difference. Even if I’d let you come near, that kind of breakdown is like a broken leg or an earthquake— friends can’t make it heal any faster or stop any sooner.”

  “Yeah,” he said in his Aussie drawl, “but mebbe I wouldn’t’ve felt like such a shit.”

  A voice came down the stairs. “You notice that his primary concern in the matter is the problem of being stuck with a feeling of guilt?”

  “A course,” Vivian retorted, instantly happy again. “You don’t think I’d worry myself about a mad sheila like Rae, do you? Rae—Jordan Benedict. Jordan my love, this is the other woman in my life. You have to adore her, I order you to, she’s a genius.”

  Rae had never seen Vivian quite so manically Australian before, and it occurred to her that, unlikely as it might be, the man was nervous. The proximity of the mentally ill had that effect on people, but she wondered if in this case it might not be something else. Such as the man in the doorway above them, a man who had survived eighteen months with Vivian Masters (whose relationship
s had never gone more than four in all the time she’d known him), a man who did, granted, have a beard, but who was neither foreign nor tall, and more comfortable than intense.

  His handshake was strong but not assertive, and if he was troubled by Rae as rival—a rival, moreover, who had been smooching Vivian on the stairs—it did not show.

  “Hello,” he said. He had a book in his left hand, one finger marking his place.

  “Good to meet you.”

  Vivian had pushed past them and was already in the apartment, shouting over the clatter of beer bottles. “Have a beer, Rae? Go and dump your clobber—you know where your room is—and then we’ll eat. Here, try this little brewery up in Marin, daft name but paradise in a bottle. Say, you haven’t turned into a vegetarian or some crap?”

  “No, I eat anything.”

  “That’s a relief. Seems like everybody I know’s sworn off meat or drink or both. Don’t know how they bloody expect—”

  “Vivian.” The wood man and his client both stopped what they were doing to look at the source of that gentle, authoritative voice. When he had their full attention, Jordan continued. “I do adore her, Vivian. I recognize her genius. And I’m very happy to share your life with the Other Woman. So would you stop racketing around like a frog in a frying pan? Just calm down. Everything’s fine.”

  Vivian’s jaw dropped, then snapped up into a crooked grin. He beamed at Rae, kissed Jordan, and wordlessly went back into the kitchen. Looking calmer. Rae met the man’s eyes, saw the depth of affection and humor there, and felt like kissing him herself.

  Rae slipped into the evening with the ease of a fish entering its native pool. The meal had been cooked by Vivian, who rarely bothered but when he did always created some culinary echo of himself—blunt, muscular, and full of unexpected subtleties. He couldn’t have followed a recipe if his life depended on it, but he stormed around and tossed together unlikely ingredients that worked. Tonight’s was vaguely Middle Eastern in flavor, with touches of Japan and New England.