Folly

by Laurie R. King

  Rae laughed. “Sorry. But really, you can’t just go and tell someone what their dream means without at least asking them what they think.”

  “I guess. The shrink would probably say it had something to do with ‘adolescent sexuality,’” Petra said grimly. “They’re big on ‘adolescent sexuality’ and horses. Like that’s the only reason I like to ride.”

  “Since you started riding when you were five I’d agree it’s probably not quite that simple, but everyone expects psychologists to know the answers, and they sometimes fall into the trap themselves. Dream interpretation has been around for thousands of years. It’s even in the Old Testament. If you want my opinion, I’d say that the person who carved the orca up in the cave would think that your dream was a spirit visitation. It sounded like a friendly one.”

  “It was, I suppose. But big, and strong.”

  “Spirits are powerful. That’s what makes them scary. Even the beneficial ones.”

  “My spirit, huh?” Petra said, sounding impressed despite an attempt at scorn.

  “Your totem animal. Go back to sleep, Petra.”

  “Would you mind if… Sometimes when I can’t go back to sleep at home, I go outside for a while. To talk to the horses, you know? Can I go out for a few minutes? I promise I won’t go far.”

  A cold trickle crept into Rae’s heart at this echo of her own young self, walking the Boston house and grounds while the world slept, and she made a firm vow to speak to Dr. Hunt about the child. In the meantime, however, she kept her voice even.

  “Feel free. Actually, I was wondering if you’d feel more”—not “safe”; no reason to suggest dangers if the child didn’t feel them—“comfortable if we carried our beds up and camped out in the house. It’s pretty bare, but it’s friendly.”

  That last word slipped out past the censor, but Petra did not seem to notice.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’d like to sleep in your house. It smells good in there.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? Okay, stick on some shoes,” Rae said, already on her feet doing just that. “You know how to fold the cot? Do you need a flashlight?”

  “It looks pretty bright out there.”

  “It is. Bring one anyway; you might want it.” With her back to Petra, Rae slipped the revolver out from under her pillow into the knapsack, along with the flare gun, and added a bottle of water and some crackers in case Petra got hungry during the night. She noticed the cell phone Tamara had pointedly left behind, and dutifully dropped that in as well.

  On their way up the hill, encumbered by rattling cot and an armload of sleeping bag and pillow, stumbling over the uneven ground in the gray half-light, Petra giggled, and the half-panicky retreat from the tent was instantly transformed into a childish prank, something girls might do at a slumber party. It was a sensation Rae had not felt for many a long year, and she was vaguely aware of the unlikeliness of a fifty-two-year-old grandmother and her thirteen-year-old offspring reduced to helpless giggles, but she truly did not care. They wrestled their burdens up the winding stairway, and Rae helped Petra set up her cot next to the black chimneypiece, taking a spot near the window for herself.

  Petra, despite her protestations of habitual insomnia, was asleep again in minutes.

  Rae woke with a start. It was nowhere near dawn, although the moonlight that streamed through the framed window hole had traveled across the floor while she slept and was now set to creep up the wall. The night was absolutely still; Petra’s slow breathing was the only sound. Even the voices in Rae’s head had fallen silent again.

  So what had woken her?

  She lay in the warm cocoon of her half-zipped bag, waiting for the sound to repeat itself, expecting the cry of a night bird or the scrabble of tiny nocturnal claws on her roof, even the breathy exhalation of a passing orca.

  Nothing came.

  There had been a noise, of that she was certain. Petra had the big flashlight on the floor under her cot, but Rae reached down to her knapsack to fish out the smaller one. Her hand found the revolver instead.

  The moment she felt it, sliding cool and heavy into the palm of her hand, Rae’s mind acknowledged that she was frightened. Moving with infinite caution against the creaks of the wooden cot, she eased her feet to the floor and padded silently across the rough boards to the window. She stood to one side of the rough opening, the sweetness of new-sawn fir in her nostrils, and looked across the clearing from her bird’s-eye perch to the promontory and the open waters beyond.

  The world was without motion. The tide was nearing its turn, and the earlier slow roll of the water and the accompanying dark-light shift of the offshore boats had ceased. The landscape resembled a badly faded black-and-white photograph, pale shapes against darker shadow. The lack of any intermediate grays rendered familiar objects into things that the eye could only identify by filling in the blanks: The tent Rae knew because it was in its place and the sharp edges of its top defined it, but two thirds of it was in shadow, and the side walls might have been nonexistent. A vertical gleam Rae’s eyes read as the coffeemaker, moonlight reflecting off its curved glass, but if it had been across the clearing, she would never have known what it was. An oddly shaped pale patch bisected by dark lines, she eventually decided, was one of the white canvas-seated chairs, the shadowy upright obscuring parts of the pale fabric.

  Some things, though, were transformed into otherworldly imports, alien offerings on a familiar shore. A round black patch the size of a turkey platter lay surrounded by clear, pale rock, where Rae could not recall an indentation. A shape with the outline of a squatting leprechaun occupied the corner of the faintly glowing fire pit, and farther down, where the brief pale flashes of wavelet met the overall gleam of the wet shore, a large black circle lay, like a gateway to another world. For a moment Rae smiled, thinking of offering it to the budding writer behind her as the midnight entrance to her magical cave city, and then her smile faded as she racked her brain to remember what object there on the shore would fill an oval space of maybe seven feet by four. There were no boulders on that part of the beach, no tide pools retained by the porous rock and sand.

  Then a movement caught her eye in all that stillness, a brief flicker of dark against light. She waited to see if it was the raccoon that stopped by to rattle her food safe or one of the tiny black-tailed deer that swam between the islands. The movement was not repeated, for so long that Rae was thinking her visitor had gone around the front of the tent and disappeared into the trees, and then on the far side of the tent a nudge of shadow was cast by a matching round of something light, before it, too, was gone again.

  Whatever was moving around out there, it was nearly as tall as her tent. Rae’s gut turned to ice, her armpits started sweating, but her immediate thought, strangely enough, was of a bear. The idea may have been inspired by her earlier suspicions of raccoon and deer, but even as her mind pictured the huge animal, even as she was simultaneously wondering if there were bear on the islands and waiting for the rip of claw on canvas while she was sorting through what she might use to block the stairway against its advance, another part of her mind was laying out another, far darker and more terrifying picture.

  There’s a man down there.

  All that, from half-seen motion to sure knowledge, took perhaps three seconds; immediately on its heels, and before fear could flower, her desperate mind threw up another possibility.

  The last time a strange figure had edged into her firelight, it had been a man saddled with an undertaking both illegal and noble. Allen—she was becoming reconciled to the possibility of that name—had said he would be gone for two weeks, but perhaps he had returned early, and had come looking for her.

  The sharply defined corner of the tent seemed to quiver slightly, as Rae pictured the man below drawing back the tent flap. She was not prepared for the short burst of light that flared in the perfect shape of a tent and then as quickly was gone, leaving her with a ghostly square imprinted on her retinas. She stifled a gasp at the sudd
en brightness and blinked to clear her vision.

  If it was Allen Carmichael, he would know her habits well enough to figure that, unless she was off the island, she would be in the house. To get here he would have either to cross the moonlit clearing or take a wide and circuitous path halfway up the mountain and down the trees on the eastern side of the rock face.

  If it was Allen Carmichael.

  Anyway, would Allen, knowing Rae had a gun, not call out a warning?

  But if it was not him?

  And then Rae confronted the cold, terrifying fact that in trying to convince everyone else of her staid normality, she might have been gambling with her granddaughter’s life.

  Drawing back from the window, Rae circled around until nylon brushed the side of her foot. Taking her eyes off the tent for a bare instant, she ducked down and snatched up her knapsack, then stood up quickly to watch the hillside for movement while her fingers searched through the contents. The first thing to reach her hand was Tamara’s cell phone. She pulled it out and turned it on, cradling it to her chest to stifle the beep, then glanced at the display. Out of range. She dropped it in the pocket of her shorts anyway, thinking that she and Petra might hike high enough to get clear access to the transmitters, and then she put her hand back in the knapsack to retrieve the plastic box containing the flare gun. Fumbling with the unfamiliar shapes and trying not to take her eyes from the clearing, she got it loaded and went back to her position at the window. She was too charged with adrenaline to be concerned with appearances, but she was briefly aware that she must look quite mad, a barefoot woman in T-shirt and shorts, hair on end, a gun in each hand. Petra snored softly from the dark recesses of the room.

  She waited, growing more tense by the second. Had he crossed the clearing while she was looking away? Was it Allen? Or Jerry, come back for some reason—and if so, was she about to blow the sheriff’s head off? Could it have been Don that she saw—Don acting not out of greed this time but revenge, or Don with a clever plan, Don confident that he could pick off Rae and leave Petra unharmed? Oh, Christ—was that a noise she heard downstairs? Moving feet? Keep her eyes on the tent, or the stairway?

  Then movement again by the tent, and a figure stepped forward. Impossible to tell in the ambiguous light, but it looked closer to Jerry’s height than his brother’s. What if it was only a passing boater, searching for aid in a medical emergency—but no, an honest person would have started calling out before his feet hit the shore. With that thought, Rae’s eyes flickered to the odd oval shape on the beach, and knew in an instant what it was: a rubber inflatable, black as the water, like Allen Carmichael’s only smaller, silently rowed and drawn up on her shore. Rae’s grip tightened on both guns, the old pistol in her right hand and the flare gun in her left, and she silently urged the intruder to come into the light. Or to walk to his boat and row away—but that was too much to hope for.

  Be Allen, she prayed. Be Jerry. Be that obnoxious lawyer I threw out of my cove, be anyone but the faceless voice that sent the invaders to my home, my delusions given substance, my imaginary invaders who are currently sitting in the county jail Be a child or a lost scuba diver or—

  The man’s face seemed to tilt into a full oval as the moon struck it, and he looked up at the house, seemingly straight at Rae. She tried to open her throat, to call a last hopeful “Allen?” And then all sound, all breath, froze within her.

  The man picking his way up the hill was taller than Rae. He wore his hair in a close crop of curls, had a neatly trimmed beard shadowing the edge of his jaw, and a pair of wire-framed spectacles glinted light from his eyes. It was a face Rae had sat across the table from for nine years, a face Rae had drawn often and sculpted twice, a face (minus the glasses) she had woken up to on more than three thousand mornings of her life, a face she had kissed and caressed and mourned with a grief that came close to killing her, a face atop a body whose movement did not seize her with such a sense of familiarity.

  “Alan?” she whispered, and then took a step forward directly into the moonlight to lean out of the window frame and say aloud, “Alan?”

  The man looked up and saw her clearly, and then his right arm came up and all her recognition, all the wonder and hope and the impossible joy that had begun to dawn were sucked up in an instant, back into a hole and gone. The man’s arm held a gun; Alan with a gun in his hand was simply unthinkable; therefore the man was not Alan.

  The pistol she had in her hand went off an instant after his, and whereas his shot hit the siding (another generation of bullets in the woodwork, Rae registered wildly), her bullet happened to strike the ground not far from his legs before ricocheting noisily into the night. She had not been aiming, had no time to think of aiming, but her lucky shot sent him leaping backward into the darkness near the tent.

  Not Alan, not a friend, Rae thought, and then she was hurrying across the room to hush the terrified Petra. She stuck the pistol in her waistband and clapped her free hand across the child’s mouth, whispering harshly in her ear, “Petra, stop it! You have to be quiet, please, Petra.”

  The girl regained control quickly and sat, trembling but silent. Rae bent forward and let her hand slide over to cup the side of Petra’s head comfortingly.

  “Petra, there’s a man out there with a gun.” A statement, alas, that any school-aged child would understand and respond to. “I’ve got a gun, too, but we have to go hide in Desmond’s cave until he goes. Come on.”

  The discarded tools and roofing materials still lay in a pile, barring access to the gaping doorway of the empty front tower; Rae now flung aside the scraps of wood and tools until her fingers found the climbing harness, thrown there after the roof was finished. She crossed the room again, grabbed Petra’s arm, and hurried her over to the rear tower.

  “The top of the woodshed’s about ten feet down from the tower windows,” she whispered in the girl’s ear. “It slopes, so don’t move away until I can show you where to go. Do you want me to tie the harness around you, or can you hang on to it while I lower you down? You can’t make any noise at all.”

  “I can hold it,” Petra whispered back. Rae gave her granddaughter’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze before she placed the anchoring loop in the girl’s strong hands. Then she helped her up to the bare stones of the tower’s empty window frame and, bracing herself against the wall to counteract the girl’s weight, slowly lowered her down. The instant the rope went slack, Rae yanked it up. This time she stepped into the harness and buckled it on with frantic fingers (Was that a noise coming up the stairs?), then swung her legs over the tower’s window frame, looped the end of the rope around the eight inches of stone that separated this window opening from the next, and took hold of the rope.

  And paused. Shoot the flare gun now, while she had the chance? Or keep quiet until Petra was safe, then shoot it off? If the man below saw a flare go up, which way would he run—to his boat and escape, or to the house and attack?

  She couldn’t risk it. Get Petra hidden first; that had to be her priority. Rae took a firm grip on the rope and eased herself out into the black pit on the north wall of the house.

  She was not altogether certain the stonework would hold, being built for the straight load of gravity and not the sideways strain of a rope with the weight of a grown woman on it, but it did not give way, and in seconds Petra was patting her grandmother’s descending legs. Once on the shed roof, Rae yanked the rope free, balled it up and stuffed it into the waist of the harness, then felt her way across the woodshed, Petra following cautiously. At the far end, Rae slithered off to the ground below, helped Petra down, and worked the hand-carved catch by feel before lifting her granddaughter into the black void beyond.

  She pulled the door shut behind them, whispering at Petra to stay put while she went to get the lamp from the cave, then groped her way blindly through the depths of the shed, cursing the splinters in her bare knees, cursing herself for bringing both guns and a useless cell phone but no flashlight. When she reached the s
pot where she knew the door had to be, she whispered a reassurance to the girl, fifteen feet away but a mile off in the pitch dark, and then, relying on memory alone, bent to let her fingertips work the hidden catch.

  She jabbed the locking splinter up under her fingernail, but after that it did not take much fiddling. The door opened, the cool cave air was on her face, and in an instant she had light, and Petra, and the door shut behind them. Safe.

  Rae stripped off the damnable climbing harness and slumped back against the wall until she became aware that Petra had crawled into the side cave and was curled against the wall in an unconscious imitation of Desmond Newborn’s final position. Her young face was pinched with fear, and she trembled as if from cold. Rae crawled in next to her and gathered the child into her arms. Petra buried her face in Rae’s shoulder and shook soundlessly, as aware as her grandmother that it was far from over. Rae stroked the child’s hair rhythmically, murmuring a seamless string of meaningless phrases.

  In the meantime, her mind was racing. Measure twice, cut once— only this time it was not a piece of lumber she was risking, but her granddaughter’s life. And her own, which over the past weeks she had come to value once more. She had made a mistake in leaving the flashlight behind; she had made a risky choice in opting for silent escape; they could afford no more mistakes or risks. She had to be clearheaded.

  The tools at hand were: a handgun, which now held four bullets; a flare gun and three flares; a kerosene lamp with five or six hours’ worth of fuel, more if they kept it burning low; seven dusty wine bottles filled with near-vinegar; a freestanding shelf unit of spongy wood; a drip of water every minute or so; a climbing harness and rope; and whatever Petra had in her pockets. Rae asked her, and came up with a crumpled tissue, a broken seashell, and some black-purple lipstick.

  Rae grimaced, and then her eyes lit on the other thing she had left in the cave, the only thing of real value she had brought with her to the island, deposited here to keep it safe from marauding trespassers: her toolbox with the Japanese chisels.