When they had eaten, Vivian shooed Jordan out of the kitchen and handed Rae a dishcloth.
“Final papers,” Jordan explained with an apologetic smile as he allowed himself to be pushed out. “Grades are due.”
“I’ll bring you a coffee when we’re done washing up,” Vivian shouted after him, and rolled up his sleeves.
“Jordan teaches?” Rae asked.
“At the uni. Part-time, so far—Shakespearean lit and creative writing. He never met Alan,” he added, knowing what she wanted to ask. “He’s a writer—his first novel’s coming out in the fall. Real highbrow stuff, boy growing up in a small town.”
Rae made the appropriate noises of interest, but her mind was not on Jordan Benedict’s literary future. After a minute, Vivian dropped the sponge in the soapy water and turned to plant his back against the sink.
“What is the matter?”
“I’m sorry, Viv, I’m not being a very good guest, am I?”
“Sod that. What’s wrong?”
“I saw the men who attacked me, this afternoon. Stood on the other side of a one-way mirror not four feet from … oh Christ, Viv, it was like a nightmare. I honestly expected his hand to come through the glass at me. It’s—I mean, it’s okay, I’m glad they caught them, but it’s left me—”
He seized her shoulders with his wet hands, marched her over to a chair, pushed her into it, then went to the cabinet and poured her a large slug of expensive brandy.
“Drink that.” He stood over her until she had swigged half of it, then he nodded. “Nothing like booze for the shakes. Now, tell me everything.”
Rae told him, if not everything, at least a clear outline of the last months. He went back to the dishes, and when he had stacked the last pan on the stove, he filled the coffeemaker, then set out cups and a jug of milk. She finished her story about the time the coffeemaker stopped spluttering. Vivian took a cup to Jordan, and when he came back, he poured enough brandy into theirs to dilute the mixture to room temperature.
“You’re working now?” he asked, an apparent non sequitur. “Not just the bloody four-by-twos?”
“Gloriana has some idea of the house as subject of a book of photographs. I told her I’d think about it.”
“Tell her you’ll do it. Do anything. Work, and love—they’re what keep anyone from running off the rails.”
“You’re more firmly on the track than I’ve ever seen you, Vivian. Jordan’s a sweetheart.”
“Jor’s a bloody wonder. The best thing that ever happened to me. And you—you gonna find someone in those islands of yours?”
It was said as a jest, but Rae hesitated a split second too long with the memory of Jerry’s hard mouth on hers before laughing her response. Vivian was on it in an instant.
“You have found someone! Why, you beaut, tell Uncle Viv all.”
“No, I haven’t found anyone. How could I? I’m a hermit; the only man I see is the aging hippie who brings me groceries. But I’ll tell you, he’s worth a minute’s fantasy, this guy. He’s like something out of a Jimmy Buffett song, and he’s got these incredible tattoos …”
Ed and his skin sidetracked Vivian, and as he refilled their cups, not bothering with the coffee this time, he told her about this tattooed boy he’d once known. The subject drifted safely away from Rae’s love life.
The level in the bottle went down, and they moved into the comfort of the living room, where Vivian lit a fire with wood scraps from the shop below. She asked him about recent acquisitions; he told her a few tall tales about the wood trade.
“You wrote me about a piece of burl,” she suddenly remembered. “I don’t think I even wrote you back, did I?”
“You did not.”
“Do you still have it? Let me see it.”
“Not tonight. But let me tell you how it came to me,” and he was off again, the only man who could make buying and selling dead trees sound like piracy on the high seas.
It was pure pleasure listening to him, watching his eyes gleam like black diamonds. It was even a pleasure, if a bittersweet one, when Jordan came in and joined the conversation for a while before wandering off to bed. She watched him go, unaware of the look on her face, somewhere between wistful and yearning.
“So,” Vivian said in a brook-no-nonsense voice when they were alone again. “What’s this about you and some bloke?”
“It’s nothing, Viv. There’s just… the sheriff up there seems to have a thing for me.”
“Anything wrong with him?”
“Not a thing. He’s a few years younger, but not much, and a really nice guy.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Don’t be rude. Alan was nice.”
“Alan was a lot of things, but I don’t think ‘nice’ would’ve been your first word in describing him. What’s your sheriff’s name?”
“Jerry Carmichael. He’s six two, lots of muscle, lived on the islands his whole life. Good sense of humor, sensitive without being sickening about it. He’s even a good listener; do you know how few men are good at listening?”
“So what kind of a tree would he be?”
“What kind of-— Oh, right. Let me see.” Rae had nearly forgotten Vivian’s old game, typing people as trees. Vivian himself was clearly a eucalyptus: thirsty Australian native; bending to a certain point and beyond that terribly brittle; unworkably hard when dry; going up in flames at the merest spark. Alan had been bamboo—flexible looking, steel at the core— and Rae, Vivian had once let slip, was one of those Monterey Pines hanging on to the cliff face near the sea, battling the elements but tough and with roots deep in the unfriendly ground. “Jerry’s a cedar, I think. Straight, strong, solid, both soft and impervious. Plus that, he smells good.” Rae suddenly blushed, and Vivian crowed with laughter.
“Gotcha! So what’s he like in bed?”
“Vivian! Alan died less than two years ago. I’ve known Jerry two months, met him maybe half a dozen times. Though I will admit, he’s not bad at kissing.”
“‘Not bad’? Ah, Rae, come on now.”
“What? Damn it, what’s wrong with him?” Having been not at all sure she wanted Jerry, she now found herself fully prepared to defend the man against her old friend’s scorn.
“Since when is an okay nice guy good enough for you? After Alan, I’d’ve thought—”
“Don’t.” Rae was suddenly enraged. “Don’t you go there, Vivian. Alan was once in a lifetime.”
“You think I don’t know that? I knew you before, and during, and now after Alan. I know you well enough to tell you that if you can’t have that, you’re better just sticking to your work.”
Rae gaped at him, incredulous. “You, of all people, say that.”
“Too right, me of all people.” Vivian was angry now as well, and not just at her attack. “I’ve spent my life not knowing, and now I do, I see why it was you lit up like a bloody floodlight when you met Alan Beauchamp. Chemistry, electricity—shit, I don’t know what it is. But I do know that you’d be a pinheaded moron to take another man into your bed if you didn’t have some of that going. You’d kill him dead, with Alan always lying there between you.”
“Vivian, you’re talking nonsense.”
He slammed down his cup so violently it shattered. The smell of spilled brandy filled the air, but Vivian ignored it, ignored the blood running down his finger and the damage being done to the table’s finish. He grabbed Rae’s arm and hauled her to her feet.
“Come ’ere.” He dove for the door, and Rae had no choice but to follow, wondering what the hell this was about. She found him standing in the center of the shop, between a stack of rough-cut oak boards and a shapeless mass nearly the size of a small car draped in a canvas tarp.
“Look at those,” he ordered, pointing at the boards.
She looked. “Okay. Very nice.” Nothing spectacular, but oak was always an appealing wood, even without a quirk to it.
“Now look at this, and tell me I’m talking nonsense.”
He whipped th
e tarp off the mass with the air of a conjuror, and stood back.
The walnut burl was, at first glance, simply an ugly, ungainly, dense lump of vegetable matter. An untrained eye might have considered it worthy of a bonfire.
Rae’s eye saw instantly that this was indeed something special. What had Vivian said in his letter? Just Rae’s kind of thing, he’d called it: dark and twisted and completely impossible. She was aware of Vivian’s watching her, peering into her face as she bent down to study the twist of grain, running speculative fingertips over the grotesque surface.
“You feel it,” he declared triumphantly.
“Vivian, you’re a genius.”
“Chemistry, God damn it. That stuff there’s nice.” He cocked his thumb dismissively at the milled lumber. “This”—he slapped the burl— “this bloody beaut’s why we both work with goddamn dead trees. And you want to tell me you can go back to that?”
She followed his pointing finger to the boards, which were, in truth, perfectly … nice.
“How do you know, Viv? Just because a fabulous piece of wood like this is something you’re instantly sure of doesn’t mean there aren’t other pieces you haven’t had to think about first. Since we seem to be stuck on this damned metaphor. How many times have you brought me a piece and said, ‘I don’t know about this one, Rae’?” She imitated his Australian drawl, which drew a reluctant smile from him.
When he answered, however, he was dead serious. “So how do you know, Rae? When I brought you that filthy piece of half-rotted maple that’d been in somebody’s basement for ninety years and you made that incredible twisty piece with the ebony drawers, how did you know it was worth bothering with? I’ll tell you. It was in your bones. Wasn’t it? You felt in your bones there was something great there. So tell me, Rae Newborn: What do your bones tell you about your nice sheriff?”
She picked at the frayed side of the burl for a minute, and then blew out a breath. “I hate you, Vivian.”
“Nah. You love me.”
“That too.”
“Trust your bones, Rae. Trust your bloody bones.”
But that night she lay staring at the ceiling, wondering how she could know what her bones thought when the rest of her was so distracted by the memory of Jerry’s arms and mouth.
Forty-eight
Desmond Newborn’s
Journal
October 1, 1926
The poet has declared, No man is an island.
Having resided now for five years on an island among islands, I have to say that the statement is truer here than any other place I have known.
Recluses there are here aplenty, misanthropes or men running from something. Eccentrics abound—the Scotsman rumored to be building an authentic Scottish castle to the north of me, the Oxford graduate explorer and big-game hunter of the last century who seldom wore shoes, and a hundred others.
Each soul here occupies his island home, cut off by a stretch of cold, treacherous water from the warmth of his neighbor’s hearth. Even on the more populous of islands, even on those large enough to have a center where the sea is unseen, the resident is never unaware of the salt water just beyond his door.
This knowledge of how alone and endangered we all are is the very thing that binds us together. Only during the war did I find such easy friendships, such ready willingness to lend a hand or a shoulder. On the mainland we pass by our neighbor’s drive with nary a glance; here, we peer and crane, to reassure ourselves that all is well with him. On dry land, neighbors argue over fence lines and border encroachments; here, the sea between us, while not precisely an enemy, is never to be trusted with the safety of a child or a neighbor. We know the danger around us; we know who we can trust.
Here, all men are islands, linked by the touch of the sea. That which divides us is what brings us together.
Forty-nine
Vivian was right, Rae decided: If she couldn’t have love then work was the best. Friends, and work: the flexing of expert muscles, the shared vocabulary of a passion; the rediscovery of who she had been, what she would be again. And if Rae had drunk far too much the night before, at least the expensive brandy was gentle to her head, and she rose in the morning not suffering too badly.
When Vivian’s two assistants came in they wheeled the burl over to the light, and all four woodworkers spent a tense couple of hours arguing about which cut would give them the best grain. Chalk marks were made and rubbed out, half a ton of gnarled, unprepossessing tree trunk was pushed and prodded, and finally the remnant of a living thing, a sapling when Elizabeth Tudor took the throne, was fed into Vivian’s enormous saw. They stood tensely, oblivious of the terrible noise, until the sawn slab was separated. Four faces relaxed in the pleasure of the texture and the shape.
Rae circled the slab of wood, already planning how she would work around the incursion of pith in the center, admiring the precision of the cut Vivian had chosen.
“You were right,” she told him. “It’s absolutely gorgeous.”
“I’m always right.” He was not talking only about wood.
“You’re the man,” she agreed.
When they had brushed the sawdust from their hair, Rae and the sawyer climbed into Vivian’s ancient Audi and headed up into the hills to Rae’s house. Pam Church was meeting them there, and Rae had offered to catch a ride with her instead, but Vivian came from a family of lawyers and did not really believe that a person could be friends with one. Rae did not insist: The more warm bodies she had with her in the house, the better.
The amazing thing, she thought an hour later when she stood beside the car in the redwood-scented quiet, was how little it had changed. Aside from the shiny new electronic security panel on the wall next to the front door, she might have walked away yesterday. Bella might be peeking out of the upper window, Alan sitting at his desk grading papers.
Even her shop was a land of ghosts, the big power machines brooding under their covers, the stacked lumber airing on the heavy shelves, row after row of hand tools gathering dust. She had already told Vivian that she would not be spending the night at her house, if he didn’t mind her using his as a hotel; walking through the house with him at her side, she was glad she had done so. Everywhere Rae could feel the faint outlines of Watchers, waiting in the dark spaces among the trees.
While Rae and Pam were occupied with the claims forms and the accumulated bills for house and taxes, Vivian retreated to Rae’s shop, where he set about furiously oiling everything in sight against the incursion of rust. When she stuck her head in some time later, he was fussing with the wood, rearranging and turning it, muttering curses under his breath.
Rae left him there, and went through the downstairs rooms with Pam to see if the insurance man had missed any damage or theft. The dust sheets had been taken from the furniture, folded neatly in a tall stack now but showing signs of wear: The top one had been ripped and trampled. Bare wires marked the stereo system; the television set and all its attachments were stripped, the silver cabinet empty. Rae was relieved to find little pure destruction beyond the glass collection, which had been carefully swept up into cartons as if she might want to save it. She pulled open one of the boxes and glanced in at the sparkling fragments, then closed it again sadly. Alan would have wept. Something in the frozen motion and elegance of glass had spoken to him more deeply than it did to Rae, and it was for his pleasure that she grieved over all that once-molten beauty now ground to dust. Still, the invader had not touched the art on the walls, either not knowing its value or realizing the difficulties of unloading Picasso sketches and Modernist prints. Her much-loved and painstakingly assembled collection of furniture—Maloof and Stickley chairs, a Morris settle, an antique apothecary’s chest from Japan—was also intact, aside from an ugly bash in a Medieval English trestle table where one of the heavier vases had landed on its way to destruction.
Alan’s study, on the other hand, was heartbreaking. The invader appeared to have systematically upended entire file cabinets, strewn a
bout the notes for articles Alan had planned to write, and flung into the air reviews, photographs (So much for finding that negative of Desmond that Nikki wanted flickered irrelevantly through Rae’s mind), and correspondence dating back twenty years. Alan had kept a display of Bella’s drawings tacked to a corkboard beside his desk; the board had been ripped from the wall and stomped, by careless or angry boots, the drawings shredded. When Pam turned around from her contemplation of the computer remnants, she found Rae on her knees, a mutilated drawing in her hands and tears on her face. Pam swore under her breath, and waded over to Rae.
“I’m sorry, Rae, I should have tidied those up. Stupid of me to let you see them.”
“I have all the best ones,” Rae told her as she allowed the lawyer to pull her to her feet. She surrendered the torn drawing of Petra’s horse, watched Pam smooth it out and slide its ragged halves into a drawer, and then looked back at the totality of the destruction and asked in despair, “What was he looking for?”
“Whatever it was, either he didn’t find it, or else he did and wanted to hide the fact. Come on, let’s get out of here,” Pam urged.
Rae followed her back to the kitchen, and started to search through cabinets for the makings of coffee.
“About Don,” Pam began.
“Oh, fuck Don,” Rae responded.
“No thanks.”
“What’s he done now?” Rae asked, slamming one cabinet door and jerking open another.
“Nothing, actually. I haven’t heard from his lawyers in a couple of weeks.”
“Did you expect to?”
“Sure. I fired back a powerhouse of a response, no holds barred, a real don’t-fuck-with-me document. I thought it might at least get a letter in reply.”
“Maybe you scared the hell out of them, they’re withdrawing.” Pam just snorted. “Or maybe they sent Don a bill and when he couldn’t pay it, fired him.”
“Lawyers don’t fire clients,” Pam responded automatically.
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