Folly

by Laurie R. King

  “That was an attempt at humor, Pam.” Rae moved on to the next cabinet.

  “Rae, we have to talk about him.”

  “Why, Pam? I’m not just being frivolous: Is there any point in expending more energy talking about Don Collins? Either he continues with the case or he doesn’t, the ball’s in his court. Hey, here’s some coffee. Do you suppose it’s still drinkable?” The cupboards were a weird mixture of the utterly familiar and the completely foreign. Rae picked up a box of herbal relaxing tea, its box thick with cheery platitudes, and wondered if it was something Tamara had brought when she came to clean the place up, or if she herself had bought it during the dark time: herbs to keep the Watchers at bay?

  “Rae, I do not think that Don has a chance of actually winning this, but he has put together a serious case and he has an aggressive law firm. If he can get his wife to testify that your state of mind remains disturbed, he may well convince a judge to place a hold on what you’re allowed to do with your money. He wouldn’t win, but you could be tied up in court for years.”

  Rae was more concerned with what lay beyond the case, and thought the silence from Don’s lawyers distinctly ominous. But since she did not know what could be done to avert whatever Don had in mind, she would not go into the possibilities with Pam. The ball truly was in his court; Rae would just have to pretend the silence was encouraging instead of like some jungle movie with the drums falling still. “Then I’ll just have to look absolutely boring and sane. Call me Ms. Prozac. I told you they’re coming to visit me, didn’t I?”

  “Who?” Pam sounded alarmed. “Don and Tamara? No, you most certainly did not.”

  “Petra wants to come stay with me for a week, so they’re bringing her.”

  “And when is this little confrontation to take place?”

  “There won’t be any confrontation. We’re far too well bred for that, didn’t you know? A week from tomorrow. On the first.”

  “Of July? Jesus, woman, are you nuts?”

  Rae stared at her furious lawyer, and began to laugh, a bit wildly. “Of course I’m nuts, you idiot—what do you think all this has been about?”

  “Oh, shut up,” Pam snapped. “You know what I mean. Look, you have to cancel. It’d be just asking for trouble, inviting Don into your front yard just when this legal action is under way.”

  “I don’t have a front yard.”

  “Rae!”

  “Sorry, I’m sorry. Okay, I admit a visit with Don there is going to be really, really uncomfortable, but assuming I refrain from braining him with a two-by, I can’t see that his coming or not is going to make any difference. I live on Folly, I’m not going to deny that. Some people might think that it’s a nutty place to live, but my house is coming along, it’s going to be a nice, conventional building—well, more or less. At any rate, it has straight walls and level floors and insulation, and it’ll have a real roof before too long. I have a water supply. It’s even fairly compliant with the state building code. Would an insane woman worry about the building code?”

  “What’s a two-by?”

  “A two-by-four. You know, construction lumber? God, you’re ignorant.”

  “I’m a lawyer, not a contractor, what do I know from lumber?”

  “And what do I know from law? Pam, if you’re flat out telling me not to have any contact with Petra or her parents, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. Contact with my granddaughter is what this is all about, remember? If there are specific things I ought to do or not do, say or not say, let me know and I’ll try my very best to follow your orders. Otherwise, we’ll have to let the courts muddle along until they throw it out. It might even work out for the best. I mean, Don’s probably hoping that while he’s there he’ll spot something or I’ll let something slip that he can use as evidence, but what about when I don’t? And surely having them leave Petra with me indicates a strong degree of trust? How could they claim I’m dangerous if they feel she’s safe alone with me? Look, I’m even making friends up there—that must count for something. The park ranger and the sheriff stop by all the time.” Maybe Ed was not the best person to offer as a character witness, Rae reflected.

  “The sheriff?”

  “He’s always dropping by. Brings me flowers. And steaks. Once he brought a bottle of champagne.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s very rude to sound surprised, Pam.”

  “Sorry,” the lawyer said, sounding more curious than apologetic. “It’s just that I can’t imagine you with anyone but Alan.”

  “I’m not with anyone but Alan. We’re not having an affair. We’re not going to have an affair. There’s no … chemistry.”

  “Then why are you smirking?” the suspicious lawyer asked.

  “Just a private joke. But Jerry is very smart, good-looking, nice sense of humor, stable as a mountain, so he’d make an ideal character witness. And the ranger is the most gorgeous woman you ever set eyes on. If we had a jury trial, between the two of them, all twelve jurors would be drooling.”

  This seemed to please Pam considerably more than Rae’s straight walls and water supply. Now there was a picture, Rae reflected: her cedar tree of a sheriff in uniform, testifying with calm and complete authority. And Nikki—if she was a tree, she’d be a—what? Something rare and exotic that was deviously hard to work, with lots of splintery bits to get under your skin but absolutely gorgeous when you’d finished. And Ed? Hmm. Ed was a cipher. A tree whose appearance gave no clue about its wood inside. Tamara was a fine, hard-working shade tree with rot at its base, and Don was without a doubt not a tree but poison oak, insidious, all-pervasive, and bringing a person out in blisters by mere proximity.

  Rae shook off her thoughts. Abandoning the coffee, which smelled even more rancid than the swill she’d been given by Escobar, Rae stood up and told Pam she thought she’d go upstairs for a look.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, I’d rather be alone. To say good-bye. Or something.”

  Halfway up the stairway, Rae paused: Five years ago, her hands had refinished the oak she stood on, wood that bore the memory of Alan and Bella’s feet, father’s like daughter’s so often bare, going up to bedrooms and television room, down to the breakfast table and the family hearth. The pat pat pat of Bella’s ghostly feet ran past Rae in the hallway, to precede her to the room Rae had shared with Alan with its big bed that had welcomed the day-old Bella home, the big bed where, often as not, Bella came to cuddle in the mornings, the bed where Rae and Alan had slept and talked and loved. Rae walked through the room, past the naked mattress, to push back the glass door to the balcony. She breathed in the dusty tang of the redwoods and sat down in the dirty wooden chair where she had sat so many mornings, looking out over a hillside that was somehow not as familiar as it had been, her ears seeking out the trickle of the tiny stream that Bella had dammed and fished and splashed in.

  Home.

  And yet, not home. While she was here, Alan and Bella were no longer the static, frozen mental images that she had encased in her memory. They moved and breathed here, but only as echoes (Mommy!) of her life with them. With their odors still buried in the folded blankets and their voices playing the air around her, Rae came face-to-face with the knowledge that, in spite of everything, she had moved on; they had died and she had not—and more than merely being alive, she had grown and she had changed, so that she was no longer the person who had flourished in this place. She still loved those two as she would never love another; she would never cease to mourn them, but she finally had to admit that losing them had not brought about the world’s end. Whether or not she would ever live between these walls again was an open question, but if she did, it would be as a different Rae Newborn.

  One other thing Rae knew, there in the chair with the ghost of a husband sliding back the glass door, planting a stubbly kiss on the back of her neck in his morning greeting, putting a steaming cup of tea on the chair’s wide arm, knew suddenly and with all the clarity of a voice speaking i
n her ear: The gun that she had cradled to her breast, the smooth wooden grip, the cool steel, the sweetly seductive bullets, would remain unused; the pistol that had killed Desmond Newborn would not be turned against his great-niece as well.

  “I miss you, Alan,” she said into the air. “I love you. Take care of Bella.”

  Then she closed and locked the sliding door, and went downstairs to tell her companions that she was ready to leave.

  She and Vivian returned to his house, to the rich odors and provocative shapes. He had suggested asking a few of Rae’s close friends over for an informal meal that evening, and she had agreed, but the early exhilaration of her return could not hold out against the grind of unfinished business, during the afternoon and the following morning. Jail visits and phone calls, legal papers and good friends with a surfeit of joy and worry in their eyes; far, far too many people altogether, for a woman accustomed to solitude. She tucked the hours with Vivian’s wood into her memory, and got on with the rest of it. By the third day, she was more than ready to leave.

  She crawled into the plane’s back-row seat, too tired for nerves, and kept her eyes closed for the entire trip. The small connecting plane bounced and rattled and touched down onto San Juan Island just before dusk. Ed met her in an equally rattly pickup truck, transferred her onto the Orca Queen, and took her out to Folly. He spoke so little, she wondered if she had done something to offend him—or maybe he was just intimidated by her linen-jacketed transformation from builder to imitation lawyer. In either case, she did not feel up to asking him, and although she offered coffee, she did not argue when he turned it down.

  “I will walk you up to the tent, though,” he said.

  “No, no, I’m fine.”

  “You don’t have a flashlight.”

  “It’s plenty light enough. The moon’s up, and I’m used to walking around in the dark. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Well, if you say so.” He held the boat against the dock until she was safely on shore, and then allowed it to drift free. “Good to have you back, Mizz Newborn.” Not “Rae,” she noted.

  “Thank you, Ed. See you Tuesday.”

  The lights receded, the engine noise faded. Rae climbed onto the promontory, dropped her knapsack at her feet, and raised her face to the night. She hadn’t seen stars for four days, wouldn’t have known if the moon had fallen from the sky, and every cell in her body told her she’d been breathing other people’s exhalations for far too long. Even the silence here was different. It comforted, like a friend who didn’t demand conversation. Unlike the silence surrounding Don Collins and his damnable court case, a silence that reminded her of Desmond’s description of no-man’s-land, straining for the sounds of a sneaking enemy. She should have instructed Pam to pursue it—pursue him—and find out just what he was up to. This was no time to play aloof, not with Don himself about to arrive.

  Or maybe not. Maybe it was best to ignore the whole thing. Yes, things did go away on their own, sometimes.

  She exhaled, rubbed her fingers through her cropped hair, stretched luxuriously, and then glanced at the dark sailboat lying offshore. The hell with them, she decided, and stripped off for a brief and icy nude swim in the cove.

  She dressed and laid a fire, but before it was going fully she went up to the house. The bare clean walls echoed her footsteps, and the fragrance greeted her like a friend. The building lay in stasis, the stack of cedar triangles for the stairs where she had abandoned them on Tuesday morning, her tool belt on its nail over the secret door. The hammer brushed her arm as she went by to retrieve her gun from its hiding place. The cave’s air felt dry enough against her face, so she left the toolbox with its beautiful chisels where it was, and shoved the gun into the front pocket of her hooded sweatshirt. It dragged down like some leaden marsupial baby, but it made her feel safer against the rustles of the night.

  The fire was going well when she got back to the campsite, sparks rising into the darkness, and she heated and ate a can of beans and some limp vegetables. She took the kettle from the hottest part of the fire and poured the water over a teabag in her mug, turned off the lamp to keep the flocks of moths from getting any thicker, and was just sitting down again when she heard the unmistakable rhythmic scrunch of footsteps approaching—and not from the beach, either, but from the hillside behind the tent. The mug of tea flew into the air as Rae lunged for the fallen cedar, scrambling over in a desperate effort of clumsy limbs, fighting to free the gun from its confining pocket.

  The footsteps came closer, matter-of-fact footsteps with nothing stealthy about them, which was in itself terrifying. Half a dozen steps more, and they rounded the tent, and there they stopped. Rae squinted past the rising sparks at the indistinct shape—and there was actually someone there, someone was there, an indistinct but solid figure taller than the side wall of the tent. The only thing about the intruder that Rae could see clearly were a pair of male hands, held forward so they were in the light, long fingers spread wide and palms angled outward in a declaration of peace.

  “I have a gun,” she choked out.

  “I know,” said a voice, and something about the intonation, combined with the shape of his hands, gave her pause. The gun drooped slightly as she raised her head up to see past the fallen tree.

  “Jerry?” she asked uncertainly.

  “No,” the ghostly figure replied. “It’s Alan.”

  Fifty

  Desmond Newborn’s

  Journal

  June 6, 1925

  At long last, the walls of my house have begun to rise up above the stones. And yet they bring me no small degree of sorrow, that walls are necessary at all. On a night like tonight, I should like to leave my house open to the breezes and the birds, to allow the moons great light to shine freely beneath the merest shadow of the roof.

  However, the crows and the raccoons would rob me blind, and after four years here, the endless, nerve-racking feeling of vulnerability that comes of constant exposure, of sitting on a dark shore beneath a solitary light, grows no less wearisome.

  Fifty-one

  Afterward, Rae could never quite believe that she hadn’t just shot him where he stood. Certainly the electrical reaction of that name among all others fizzing through her should by all rights have jerked her already twitchy finger tight against the steel tongue of the trigger. It would not have taken much of a pull. Instead, she froze, unbreathing and unblinking behind her fallen tree, staring across the leaping fire at the two wide-stretched hands, and then her heart gave a convulsive thud and time began to run again.

  “I could shoot you right there,” she found herself saying, as if the words might take the place of the actual deed.

  The man’s fingers spread a fraction of an inch wider. “Please don’t,” he said.

  For some reason, that response brought Rae up short. After a minute, she cleared her throat, which felt inexplicably raw.

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because I came to talk to you, unarmed, openly. I even waited until you had your gun with you. It hardly seems fair that you’d then use it on me.”

  His voice was low and melodious, his words reasonable, his tone, incredibly enough, humorous, and Rae was opening her mouth to tell him to step forward into the light when a horrible thought occurred to her: If he knew about her gun, then he could have laid hands on it. Trying to keep one eye on him while she was peering into the opened chamber left her vulnerable, but he stayed where he was, and all five bullets nestled securely in their spaces, untampered with as far as she could tell. She was tempted to fire one round into the night, just to be sure, but there were too many innocent people out there.

  “Come forward so I can see you,” she ordered, her voice none too firm.

  He edged up until she could make out the features of a tall, slim, wide-shouldered man in his fifties whose face had the vulnerable look of someone who had recently shaved off a beard. His short hair was newly cut as well, and for some reason looked as if he had normally wor
n it longer— perhaps because the drawn, almost ascetic lines of his face called for the frame of hair waving to below the ears. It seemed an oddly romantic image, for there was nothing particularly saintly about the rest of the intruder. He wore a faded plaid shirt under a short denim jacket, dark jeans that needed a wash, and stained hiking boots. No jewelry, not even a watch. His hands stayed up, fingers splayed, motionless as the rest of him under her gaze.

  The naked skin of his face was the only remotely vulnerable thing about the man. His brown eyes were impassive—remarkably calm for a man with a gun pointing at him. Almost as if he were the armed one here. If he had come to kill her, she thought, he would do it efficiently; she wouldn’t get beaten up and raped first.

  Cheerful idea. Her gaze went back to his face; it reminded her vaguely of someone she knew.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Allen Carmichael.”

  “Alan—Are you related to Jerry?”

  “He’s my brother.”

  A few—a very few—things came together in her mind. “You’re the brother who disappeared. He told me about you.”

  “Oh yeah? And what did he tell you?”

  A faint sardonic shading to the question stung Rae into bluntness.

  “Among other things that you’d never gotten over Vietnam.”

  “Vietnam was one of those things that proved hard to get over, all right. Some of us have had to settle for working around it instead.”

  “Are you Alan A-L-A-N?” she asked suddenly. That close a similarity really would be too much to bear.

  “A-double L-E-N,” he said, to her relief. Then he asked, “You were close to someone with the same name, weren’t you?”

  Suspicion flared again and the gun went back up. “How did you know that? Have you been in my things?”

  To Rae’s astonishment, the man threw back his head and laughed, a deep-throated, full-bellied guffaw. It was the most amazing thing he’d done so far, and truth to tell, she was sorry when a moment later he caught himself and raised his hands again.