Folly

by Laurie R. King

  When her upper body was just inside the cave’s narrow entrance, Rae became aware of the silly urge to clear her throat, as if warning someone of her approach. She eased forward until she could reach the flashlight, which had rolled against the cave wall, and pulled it apart to replace its batteries. The bulb, she was pleased to find, had not broken in the fall. Her hands were remarkably steady. She shoved the flashlight into the back pocket of her pants and lit the lamp, turned the shield so it cast its light in front, then worked her way down the tunnel until she reached the small side cave where Desmond Newborn’s remains lay. There she turned the lamp around to illuminate the space.

  And let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding; he was still there. God only knew what her reaction would have been if he’d been missing, she reflected a touch wildly, and then made herself settle back against the wall to face the bones of the man who had made his home on Folly.

  “I love your house, Uncle Desmond,” she told him.

  Her voice rang oddly flat in the cave, and Rae abruptly felt ridiculous sitting and talking to a pile of bones and rags. Respect for the dead was one thing, but if Great-uncle Desmond was anything like the man she had come to imagine, he would either break down laughing or walk away in disgust.

  What could she say to him? Desmond, I’ve imagined meeting you ever since I was nine years old, when I found your medal in Grandfathers drawer? Desmond, fellow wounded black sheep, you helped me survive my childhood, you were my guide through some very dark days? What could she say to him that he did not know?

  So instead of talking to the shade, Rae simply sat with him for a while.

  Then she got back to her knees and, scooting the lamp before her, went to examine the rest of his tomb.

  The cave’s narrow opening grew wider and taller, until finally she could stand, if cautiously. She did not know what to expect of Desmond’s cave, although she would not have been surprised to find crates of smuggled goods—rum, or bathtub gin perhaps, it having been Prohibition when he died. Actually, she halfway thought she might find some hidden treasure or other, and was disappointed when the cave opened up to reveal nothing but a set of nearly empty shelves.

  The main cavern was a lopsided egg perhaps fifteen feet long and ten wide, with a drip down the back wall falling from a calcified point into a pool of water no larger than a soup bowl. The back wall had crumbled and slumped any number of times over the years; short of attacking it with pick and shovel, Rae could not tell if the debris concealed another low passage leading farther into the depths of the hill. From the looks of the rock, she doubted there had been a further cave; certainly not in the last hundred years.

  This room had been used by Desmond for storage, possibly while he was building the house, but little remained. Even the shelves he’d built were so rotten that she hesitated to touch them. A crate of wine bottles rested on its side on the cave floor, the bottle necks too thick with dust for her to guess at any contents. Half a dozen canning jars sat on one shelf, equally obscured by dust and the rust that bubbled out from their lids, and with them a few odds and ends—a trowel missing a handle, some antique seed packets, a pile of rusted-together chain. And, a rectangular object slightly larger than a cigar box.

  She reached for the box. Although metal, it was light enough to be empty, except that something inside shifted. Where it had lain there was now a sharply defined rectangle of startlingly bare wood, and she nearly put it back in place, thinking of the accusing questions of the officials who would come here to collect Desmond’s bones. But this was her land, was it not? Why shouldn’t she take her relative’s strongbox with her? Defiantly, she picked up one of the wine bottles as well, brushing against the lower shelf as she did so; the shelves teetered and nearly collapsed. That would take care of any accusing mark in the dust, she thought, but instead of giving them a firm push, she settled for moving the seed packets and dead tools around a bit to confuse matters, then blowing gently against the top of the strongbox to transfer its dust back in the direction of the shelf. The outline was obscured: good enough. Tucking the box under her arm and picking up the bottle and the lamp, she turned to make her way back to the cave opening, then froze.

  She stepped away from the wall, holding the lamp up so it cast a more oblique light; no, it was no mistake: There was a petroglyph carved into the wall of the cave, an arching shape with swirls across its body and a high, proud dorsal fin. She traced the orca’s outline with a reverent finger, then turned her lamp attentively to the walls as she made her way back down the lowering passage, but it had no companions.

  Rae paused at the opening to the side cave that held Desmond’s sad and dusty remains. She tried to think of something to say that was neither inappropriate nor embarrassing, and failed, so she crawled on toward the circle of light with her booty.

  The narrow opening was an awkward space to work through. Rae let the wine bottle and the strongbox slide down gently into the dirt outside, leaving the flashlight and lamp, both of them shut down, in the cave behind her feet. She squirmed out of the opening, more or less falling forward into the soft soil outside, soft soil that hid something hard and viciously sharp.

  “Shit!” she yelped, continuing her fall until she fetched up on her back against the black stones of the fireplace, grasped her right hand, and saw the line of red well up from the brown crust of mud. “Damn.” She struggled to her feet, reached for the neck of the wine bottle with her left hand, and went rigid at the sound of a familiar voice echoing across the rocks: Nikki Walls. “Damn,” she said again, and snatched up the metal box to send it skidding back into the cave, then turned to flounder through the damp mud and beaten vegetation before the friendly busybody of a ranger could find her. Rae did not stop to think why she didn’t want Nikki to see the cave yet; she only knew that she wasn’t ready for it to become public property. So she waded frantically through the mess and ducked between the studs, tracking great clots of muck across the floorboards.

  Nikki was halfway up the hill to the house when she was greeted by the sight of what looked like a newly dug-up corpse, covered in dirt from head to toe, hurrying down the stone steps. A newly dug-up corpse with an equally filthy wine bottle in her left hand and a lot of white teeth showing out of a wide-stretched grin.

  “Nikki,” said the corpse. “Just the person I needed to see. Did your ranger training include first aid, I hope? ’Cause if not, you’re going to have to sit there and watch me try to put a Band-Aid on with my left hand.” She thrust out a hand that was dripping gore and covered with mud. Nikki took a sharp step back, then turned and followed Rae back down the hill, eyeing her closely all the way.

  “Er, Rae? Have you been drinking?”

  “Drinking? God, no, why—oh,” Rae said, looking down at the bottle she’d forgotten she was carrying. “No, it’s not even open,” which did not exactly answer Nikki’s question, although the ranger was reassured by Raes usual crisp diction and her unhindered coordination.

  They reached the tent, and Rae put the wine bottle down at the side of the folding metal cook center, half concealed behind its legs. She turned to the tent, and stopped, looking down at herself. “Good Lord,” she said, and laughed merrily. “I look like a golem.”

  Nikki Walls did not know what the Lord of the Rings had to do with anything, but she decided not to ask, merely held back the tent flap so Rae could maneuver her way through without brushing either dirty body or bloody hand against the canvas. Rae came out a minute later with a large metal first-aid kit.

  “I think I’d better clean this off a little before we bandage the cut,” Rae told her apologetically. “Otherwise I’ll just get it wet again.”

  “Good idea.” Nikki thought Rae would go over to the shower she’d rigged, a bucket with a shower head attached to it, but instead Folly’s owner pinched up a towel between thumb and forefinger and marched down to the cove. Nikki’s eyebrows went up as she saw the woman bend to unlace her mud-caked boots. Nikki still occasionally took
quick dips in the fifty-degree water, but she’d been doing it since she was a kid, and she was half this woman’s age. This is one tough old lady, she reflected.

  Not so old, she corrected herself, as Rae’s firm back emerged from shirt and pants. Underwear but no bra, Nikki noted, and then turned away to put on a kettle of water. She couldn’t help glancing back at the cove twice in the next few minutes. The first time she saw Rae calmly floating in the icy water as if she were lying in a hot tub. The second time, checking that the splashing noises meant it was time to pour the water on the coffee grounds, she caught Rae just as she was rising up in the shallow edges of the cove. Nikki’s eyes narrowed at the jagged red marks down the woman’s left arm and chest. She had seen the neat scar on the back of Rae’s forearm where the plate had been implanted, but she hadn’t known the woman had been so torn up as that. She looked as if she’d fallen into a piece of farm equipment.

  Rae came back to the campsite, clutching the inadequate towel around her, teeth chattering and gory right hand held out from her side.

  “Thanks for putting on the coffee,” she said, and ducked into the tent. When she came out she was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, with a clean rag around her hand. She began to work at the first-aid box, oblivious of Nikki’s stare. After a moment, the ranger went over and took the kit from Rae’s hand.

  “Let me.”

  The cut was not deep, a slice across the outer side of the thumb’s pad. If they had been closer to town Nikki would have urged stitches, but it was not a cut that justified a boat trip into Friday Harbor, and neither woman suggested it. Nikki bathed the hand with antiseptic, dried it and tugged a trio of butterfly bandages across it, then covered the whole with gauze. The bleeding had nearly stopped already.

  “How did you do it?” she asked, repacking the kit.

  “Fell,” Rae said. “Onto dirt that must’ve had a piece of glass in it. It’s nothing, and I had a tetanus shot before I came out here.”

  “You won’t be able to use a hammer for a couple of days,” Nikki advised.

  Rae laughed and held out her left hand for Nikki’s examination. Her fingers were a network of scars, small shiny lines of many clean cuts, quickly healed. “Chisels,” she said briefly. Nikki’s eyes flickered a few inches farther up, to the three long, straight scars that crossed the pale skin of Rae’s inner wrist. She said nothing, just got up to pour the coffee.

  “Is that where you found the bottle?” Nikki asked.

  “Bottle?” asked Rae, after a brief but telltale hesitation.

  “Of wine. That you were carrying when you came stumbling down the hill looking like my little brother when he tried to dig to China.”

  “Oh, the wine. Yes, it was up behind the house. It must’ve belonged to Desmond. I don’t suppose it could still be any good.”

  “Was it lying on its side? If the cork stays wet, wine lasts a long time.”

  “It was, yes.”

  “Is it red or white? Red lasts longer.” She glanced at Rae. “I have a brother-in-law who’s into wine. ‘Raspberries in the nose’ and all that. Drives us crazy at Thanksgiving.”

  “I don’t know—what color it is, I mean. Let me look.” But Nikki was already holding the dusty bottle up to the light.

  “It’s red,” she pronounced. “And the cork looks fine. Are there any more? They could be worth something.”

  “I don’t know,” Rae said again, and then kicked herself for not saying, No, that’s the only one. Nikki was on it in an instant.

  “Let’s go look,” she suggested, all but wagging her tail in eagerness. “That would be cool, to find a stash from the Twenties. The historical society would love it. You could—”

  “I’ll let you know if any more turn up.”

  “But I’m—”

  “Nikki.”

  The ranger broke off, belatedly aware that the easygoing owner of Desmond’s Folly was sounding remarkably like Nikki’s ferocious and generally disapproving old grandmother, the Irish matriarch who ruled the clan’s holiday dinners with an iron tongue.

  “I’ll let you know,” Rae repeated, now that she had the other woman’s full attention. “This is my treasure hunt, not a community project.”

  Chastened, even hurt, and looking very like her small son, Nikki put the bottle down and subsided into her chair. “Okay. Sorry.”

  “Hey. I know you’re just trying to help out, and I appreciate that. But at the moment, I’d rather do it myself. I don’t want to give your bosses the least reason to poke their noses in.” It was a feeble excuse, since Rae had full faith in her lawyer’s ability to keep governmental hands away from Folly, but Nikki was nodding sadly. “Thanks anyway, for the offer. And for the doctoring.” She held up her hand. A spot of red had come through the bandage, but it was not spreading very fast. “By the way, was there anything you wanted here? I never did ask if you had some reason for dropping by.”

  “No. Just in the neighborhood, and I wanted to see how far you’d gotten on the walls.”

  One of the drawbacks of being a part of the community, Rae reflected, was that you had the responsibility to respond to your neighbors. You had to allow them to intrude, to nibble at your time and attention, even when your temptation was to throw them off the island. So when she got to her feet, to indicate that the visit was at an end, she also gave Nikki a smile, albeit a rather forced one. “That’s fine. Don’t think you have to bring me a bag of food as an excuse to come.”

  Nikki returned the smile. She allowed Rae to walk her back to the boat, but once aboard, she turned for a parting shot. “I hope you at least think about the historical society,” she urged. “With the wine, I mean. They’d love to add a bottle of Folly wine to their display.”

  Twenty-eight

  Desmond Newborn’s

  Journal

  August 22, 1921

  For two years and four months I was a sojourner across the face of the land, from the still night I crept away from my family home until the glorious morn eight weeks ago when I set foot on this island. For eight hundred and fifty-two days I was a man without a home, a vagabond whose worldly goods were on his back and in his pockets, one untrustworthy, unsavory figure among the many who move on the fringes of society.

  I belonged with those other outcasts, too. I felt at home with their rootlessness, felt relieved that they demanded no more of me than a handful of half-spoiled vegetables for the communal pot and a pair of watchful eyes against the railway guards. Not that I was always comfortable with the degree of drunkenness and crudeness and the constant peril from the truly insane, but the simplicity of the demands made by the homeless brotherhood is soothing to the troubled soul. If I cried out in my sleep, my neighbor would do no more than curse me and kick my leg to silence me; he would not make earnest inquiry into the troubles I bore, for they were much the same as his.

  Still, even before the violent episode in Yakima, I was growing fatigued of the life, restless in a manner that wandering could no longer assuage. Returning to Boston might be impossible, but the thought of returning to the confines of any city at all made it difficult to breathe. And yet I found myself stopping to admire the lines of houses, the solidity of their stones, the promise they held of shelter and permanence, a stage on which the future of one’s life might be lived out. Hovel and redbrick mansion alike, all spoke to my growing desire for walls and a roof, to stand between me and the elements.

  Memories of childhood summers by the sea, long sun-drenched hours of freedom and companionship, no doubt drove me ever farther west, until I ran out of land—and even then I continued, across these lovely, blue, scattered islands in a gently flowing sea.

  It comes to me that this is an ironical enterprise, when one considers Williams chosen manner of expanding the family fortunes by building houses and factories, railway stations and huge blocks of offices for others. He would laugh at his younger brother’s idea of “building.”

  Foolishness, perhaps, but my only other choice is to contin
ue moving west, either on the sea or into it. Here I will stop, here I will build and live. And God willing, after finding peace, here I will die.

  Twenty-nine

  Forty-eight hours went by, the remainder of Saturday and all of Sunday, while Rae came to terms with both the physical bones and the reconstruction of her past that they entailed.

  Not that she spent the days staring off into space; far from it. Saturday she worked on her boat dock, keeping busy away from the house and the cave, thinking of nothing in particular but the job at hand. Saturday night she constructed a squirrel-and raccoon-proof food safe out of scavenged branches, deliberately rough-looking but tight enough to thwart the increasingly clever hands of her furry neighbors. And Sunday, although she returned her attention to the house, she was mostly hauling lumber and framing the first-floor walls, mechanical labor made awkward by the bandage on her hand.

  All the while, however, the back of her mind was occupied with her options concerning Desmond’s remains. Gradually, the choices came together, and the decision was made.

  On Monday morning, fresh coffee to hand, Rae sat down and wrote a letter:

  Dear Sheriff Carmichael,

  I am asking Ed De la Torre to drop this by your office when he gets back to Friday Harbor. If he does so late in the afternoon, or if you get it late, please do not imagine there is any urgency in the matter. Waiting a day (or two, or six for that matter) is much preferable to having you rush out here in the dark.

  I have found some old human bones in a cave behind the house. I believe they are the remains of my great-uncle Desmond Newborn, who disappeared in the late 1920s. I don’t know what one does with bones that ancient, but I imagine there needs to be some sort of official examination before I can have them buried or cremated.