Folly

by Laurie R. King

  “I went to see it four times,” Nikki told her. “Drove all the way to Seattle twice. I even bought the catalogue, just for that. I … well, I’m really glad you came here. And if there’s anything I can do, just say. Please.”

  Good heavens, Rae reflected; the woman actually is a fan. And she thanked her.

  The northern corner of the island was a less precipitous rock face than the western side; heavy splashes of guano testified to its long history as a nesting site for a dozen varieties of bird. Nikki handed over the binoculars again and described each type of nest, its occupant and the bird’s habits. The Parks Department had participated in a banding the spring before, it seemed, and Nikki had been the first to volunteer.

  “I hope we can continue to do it,” she told Rae abruptly. “I mean, this is your island, no matter what my bosses say—I’ve seen the legal agreement, and you have every right to throw us off. But I hope you don’t. We need every sanctuary we can get. For the birds, I mean.” The ranger had the grace to look uncomfortable, aware that the hand of friendship she had extended might well now be seen as the proposed handshake of a business agreement.

  “Nikki, I don’t intend to throw anyone off, although my lawyer would have a fit if she heard me admit that. There’s not enough sanctuary in the world; I’d hate to rob the birds of theirs.”

  “That’s great, especially because there’s some very interesting wildlife on Folly—a big pigeon guillemot rookery come June, river otters, and the like. Have you seen the eagle nest?”

  “I saw one when I was here several years ago. I don’t know if it could be the same one.”

  “Sure to be. Eagles use the same nest for years and years. Yours was here when I was a kid, though it was probably the current one’s parents’. There it is. See?”

  They had now reached the western flank of Mount Desmond, its sheer wall rising nearly a thousand feet straight out of the sea. Here and there, trees had attempted a foothold, and on one of the dead snags near the water perched a massive tangle of sticks. Nikki looked at it hopefully, although there was no sign of nesting activity that she could see. A little farther around, a glimpse of the bald mountaintop gave Rae her second opportunity to offer information, because Nikki had never heard there was a hut on its summit, long derelict or otherwise. The ranger thought it more likely to have been a birder’s blind than an armed forces watch-tower, and Rae did not argue with her, although as she remembered it, the hut had been far too heavily built to be the work of a casual bird-watcher.

  Three quarters of the way around the island, rock face gave way once more to forest. Just before the trees began, another water source leaked down, darkening the rock and causing green growth to crop up vigorously on the ledges below. Rae asked Nikki to pause so she could study this seepage through the binoculars, but she eventually decided that the quantity of water staining the rock was much less than that of her primary spring.

  “Too bad,” Nikki sympathized. “It would be a lot shorter to bring that water over.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Rae agreed ruefully. “There’s even a cave it’s started to carve out.”

  “Probably just softened the sandstone enough to let the rain wear at it. That layer of rock pops up here and there, and often brings water and little caves with it. Soft sandstone between harder stone, you see? That’s where the water goes.” She powered up the engine again, and in a few minutes Rae’s tent came into view.

  The tide was still going out, but Nikki nudged the boat up to the rickety dock so gently the fenders barely compressed, and held it there with the casual skill born of a lifetime on water while she and Rae finished their conversation.

  “I put in an order this morning for an official U.S. Government Piss Off sign,” she told Rae. “‘Trespassers on this refuge will be strung out for the eagles to eat,’ something like that.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “You will, come summer.” Nikki looked up at the stone towers, then blurted out, “I just can’t tell you, how fantastic it is to have Folly rebuilt. You know, when I was young, we used to think it was haunted. Kids still think it is. Still, I have to say it’s a little hard to visualize how it ties together…”

  “I have a guide,” Rae told her. Nikki looked at her out of the corners of her green eyes. “A picture,” she explained.

  “Really? A picture of the actual Folly? Oh, I’d love to see that.”

  “It’s on the madrone where the bench is. Do you have time now, or maybe you’d rather get off before the tide goes out any more?”

  Nikki practically leapt off onto the floating dock. Rae caught up to her at the bench, where the young woman peered up at the laminated photograph. Rae pulled the picture off its tack and handed it to her.

  “When you said ‘guide,’” Nikki commented, “at first I thought you meant you’d found someone who remembered it.”

  “No, just the picture,” Rae said. “If I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to begin.” Although she supposed that Desmond Newborn might be called a guide, at that.

  “You know, I thought I’d seen all the old pictures of the Islands. But I’ve never seen this one.”

  “It’s a family snapshot I had enlarged. That’s Desmond Newborn.”

  “Your uncle.”

  “Great-uncle,” Rae corrected her. “My grandfather’s younger brother.”

  “Oh, of course. It must’ve been taken in, what? The Thirties?”

  “Mid-Twenties sometime. Not long before he disappeared, I’d guess.”

  “I thought he died.”

  “He must have eventually, but not around here. He was last heard of in the late Twenties; after that, nobody knows what happened to him.”

  “But there was something strange about his disappearance, wasn’t there? I can’t remember, just that people used to talk about how he’d no sooner finished building it than it burned and he dropped dead. It added to the mystery of the place.”

  “Going by what I’ve been digging out of here, I’d agree that it burned down shortly after he finished it. And considering how long it must have taken him to build, it wouldn’t be too surprising that seeing it burn would have driven him away. I know it would dishearten me.” That was putting it mildly. How would it feel, to see the labor of years go up in smoke? Something along the lines of seeing a husband and daughter being fed into the flames of the crematorium?

  Nikki’s inquisitive mind was still chewing on the problem. “But he must’ve died. The island’s been a sanctuary since 1928, and I thought it came to the Parks Department in a will.”

  Rae shook her head. “My grandfather was the one to turn it over to the state, at first informally and then, when it looked like Desmond was probably dead, on a more permanent basis. The last thing that anyone knows is that Desmond wrote to his brother, my father’s father, just before the stock market crash in 1929, from Arizona or New Mexico, I forget which.”

  “A puzzle,” Nikki said, reluctantly parting with the photograph and watching Rae return it to its tack before they turned back to the dock, the ranger’s bright head barely clearing the level of Rae’s shoulder. “But it is an amazing house. The historical society would love a copy of the picture.”

  “The negative’s in California. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “How long do you think it’ll take you to rebuild?”

  “Nowhere near as long as it took him. Most of his original labor went into the stonework, and that’s still in great shape. The house itself is fairly straightforward. It’ll be rough, of course, none of the finish work done, but I won’t have any problem in sealing it up before winter.”

  “You’re planning on staying here, then?”

  “I was thinking about it.”

  “The weather’s nowhere near as friendly in January as it is now” was Nikki’s only comment.

  “Well, we’ll see,” Rae said, and thanked her for the boat tour.

  “My pleasure,” Nikki replied cheerfully, th
en clasped Rae’s offered hand and trotted out onto the weather-beaten boards. As Rae watched her pull smoothly away, she found herself wondering if the other kids used to call her “Nosy Nikki.”

  Twenty

  Letter from Rae to

  Her Granddaughter

  April 23

  Dearest Petra,

  I found something exciting to put into your report the other day, buried in the foundation of Desmond’s house.

  I told you I’ve been finding things of his in the rubbish under the house—all nonflammable stuff, of course (and nonbreakable, meltable, or rust-awayable). No gold bricks or bags of doubloons, I’m afraid, though there were a handful of coins, along with cook pans and dinner plates, a hunting knife with a blackened bone handle, a few chess pieces (also bone, I think, though it’d be hard to tell black from white now), a string of silver medallions (silver the metal, not the color—they’re absolutely black with tarnish!) that might be one of those decorative bands men wear around their cowboy hats, a fishing reel (and all the hooks, fortunately all safely corralled in what looks like an old tin cough-drop box), a thoroughly melted and rusted-away pistol (no bullets in it, fortunately—I seem to remember that they can go very unstable with age), and a lot of other blobs and whatnots I can’t identify.

  So there I am, scraping the last bit of soil from the rock floor of the foundation, and I notice a hole the size of my fist along the back wall. This is the first gap I’ve found in Desmond’s stonework, and it looks just the right size to let mice and other undesirables under the house, so I get down on my creaky old knees to take a closer look. And I find that it’s not a gap where a stone has fallen away, but a hollow in the center of a soccer ball–sized stone.

  Great-uncle Desmond found a stone mortar, as in mortar and pestle, the kind Native Americans used to pound nuts and things, and he incorporated it into his foundation. And I would say that it was just another convenient rock to him, but for its placement smack in the middle of his back wall, where the fireplace stands. Nobody but he would have seen it (and now me) but I think he must have come across it on the island—an archaeological discovery just like I’ve been doing with his things—and mounted it there deliberately. A piece of personal symbolism, tying his house to the people who were here before.

  Nice, huh?

  I’m afraid it’ll be under the floorboards again by the time you get here, but I’ll take some pictures of it for you. I’m nearly finished with another roll, which I’ll send via Ed either this Tuesday or next. I’m also nearly finished with the floor—I hope to have the building inspector out to approve the foundations soon. Keep your fingers crossed!

  I hope Mandy’s hoof is better. Horses do seem to pick up a lot of stones, don’t they?

  Love,

  Gran

  Twenty-one

  Why had she neglected to tell Petra (and through her, Tamara and Don) the full story of the soon-to-be-rehidden mortar in the foundation? After all, she’d told her about the old pistol, knowing that it might create an unfortunate subconscious link between Folly and violence in the minds of the child’s parents—although she had been careful not to describe how wicked it still looked, pitted and scarred as an old soldier and every bit as deadly. But the contents of the mortar were something else. Rae could not have said exactly why she found them troubling; she simply knew that she did not want Petra handling them. If Petra came, Rae would have to discourage any exploration of the crawl space below the floor: nail down the access door while she was here, perhaps, or at least cover it with a throw rug.

  Within the mortar’s hollow, protected from fire and debris and a certain amount of ash and dust, Rae had found two objects, side by side: a stone spearhead, as wickedly sharp as the day it had been shaped, and the thumb-sized wooden figure of a man.

  It was just a man—no facial details, unfortunately; the cleverness of Desmond’s hands had not extended to artistic representation of the human form. Or perhaps simplicity, even crudeness, was his intention. At any rate, human it was, a man fully clothed even to the hat. Imagination might identify this figure’s hat brim with the headgear Desmond wore in the photograph, but the face could have been that of any clean-shaven male. Or female, for that matter.

  It was the spearhead that disturbed her. What did it signify? Had Desmond merely come across it one day, and placed it in his foundation as a token of the island’s previous inhabitants? Or was its significance darker, more totem than token, a warrior’s killing talisman buried in the house’s foundations to protect the inhabitant from harm? And was the thing as pristine as it looked? Or had it been used, had it shed blood? Killed? And if so, was the blood animal or human? Spears seemed more weapons of war than of the hunt, and even a quick glance at the county map revealed a bloody past, with place names such as Victim Island and Slaughter Point. Had one man killed another with this razor-sharp rock, here on peaceful Folly?

  For the time being, Rae left the spearhead where she had found it. That night, sitting by the fire, she turned the small figure over and over in her hands, her expert fingers getting to know it. Her immediate impulse had been to carve her own manikin and lay it alongside the hat-ted man, back in the depths of the foundation. However, picturing the two figures lying throughout the years in such close proximity, even without the lethal stone blade watching over them, brought with it a more immediately identifiable frisson of discomfort: incest. Desmond Newborn might be her father’s uncle, but all her life he had felt like the brother she never had, a shadow twin, whispering beneath the covers, two of us against the world. Months, years from now, sitting in her snug living room in front of Desmond’s fireplace and surrounded by the subtle labor of her own hands, knowing that beneath her feet a wooden male lay beside his wooden mate … It felt too like a fertility rite for comfort. Had the figure been bearded, hatless, and worn spectacles, she might have found that Alan was moving into its outlines, but no: This was unarguably Desmond Newborn.

  She sat with the figurine cupped in her hands, her fingers laced together so that the bulge of its hat rested in the meeting place of her thumbs, the squared-off boots just at the edge of her little fingers. Well, Desmond, she told him, I’ll just have to make sure that we look like brother and sister. Or partners. Surely the creator of Lacy Runner’ was enough of an artist for that.

  So it was that over the next few evenings, having spent the mornings clearing off the foundation stones with a wire brush and patching the few places where Desmond’s cement mortar had failed, then the afternoons trenching the hill for the laying of PVC pipe, Rae sat by her campfire and whittled a painstaking wooden self-portrait. She chose madrone in lieu of Desmond’s cedar, madrone being a harder wood and more accepting of detail, but in all other ways she followed his lead, her character the same height as his, her shoulders as wide, with the same bend to their trousered legs. When she was satisfied with Desmond’s companion, she fashioned a cedar base, so that the two guardians of her hearth might stand upright, elbow-to-elbow, comrades—twin siblings, even—with no tinge of romance in their splintery hearts.

  She completed the work late Friday night, running tiny brass screws up through the flat base into the feet of the two Newborns. She studied the features for a bit, wondering what first Desmond and then she had intended by this whimsy. Before she went to bed, she carried the linked figures over to the workbench, and there she left them overnight, standing in the open air beneath the stars, in a spot where they would catch the early morning sun as it crept under the madrone’s wide branches, fragrant now with masses of tiny white flowers. In the morning she rose and drank her coffee, waiting for the shadows to move across the watchful pair, and when the sun was off them, she blew the figures free of petals and took them over to the foundation, where she trimmed the base until it fit snugly into the hole of the Indian pounding-stone. A carelessly carved man on one side, a meticulously shaped figure of a woman on the other, with a hammer at her hip and boots on her feet, the drape of her shirt, she now noticed, subtl
y flatter on the left side of her thumbnail-sized chest than on the right—an exaggeration of her injuries, but psychologically true. And what, she wondered in amusement, would the sharp-eyed archaeologist of the next millennium make of that little detail? Amazons in the San Juans?

  Then she hesitated. Leave the spearhead, with all its ambiguity— amusing curiosity or double-edged threat—or remove it, to be replaced by the image of herself? She pulled it carefully from the back of the mortar. It was a beautiful thing, to be sure, dark gray with faint light threads lending it texture. And brilliantly shaped, by an artist as well as a craftsman, each side mirroring the other, the undulations of its edge calling for the testing thumb even as it clearly menaced. She held it up by the blunt end, half-tempted to prick a few drops of blood, some obscure instinct for sacrifice. She laid the flat of it against her wrist; it covered all three scars. She pushed down, feeling it cool into the warm flesh. Tilting it slightly would draw blood. Tilting and then drawing it back …

  Rae snatched the blade away from her lifeblood before it could cut her. After a moment, she reached forward to lay it crosswise in the mortar’s depths. In front of it she wedged the two wooden figures; they now stood between her and the sharp blade. Heavy-handed symbolism, she scoffed, but sometimes that was better than the overly subtle.

  She brushed off her hands and stood up. Her guardian spirits in place, at long last it was time to breach the vast, ugly blue tarpaulined stack of lumber.

  One thing Rae had known from the very beginning was she would build her house with wood of the same solidity that Desmond Newborn had used. Modern lumber is milled far below its nominal size: A “2×4” actually measures one and a half by three and a half inches, a “1×10” is a mere five eighths of an inch thick. Adequate, particularly when sheathed with plywood, but noticeably less solid than the full measure.