Rae took the address, thanked her, and was off the boat before the second line was secure. Nikki called that she was welcome, and Rae walked away before the ranger could offer to pick her up the next day.
Rae strode briskly up the street, excruciatingly conscious of the number of strange men behind her back. She made it a couple of blocks, and then ducked into the first likely place to buy a map, taking her time before forcing herself back out to the street. She traveled a little farther, then retreated to a coffee shop, where she ordered a sandwich she didn’t want for the privilege of sitting at a table with her back to a wall, the map and a phone book borrowed from the cashier on the table in front of her. She located the bank, the newspaper office, Friday Harbor’s historical society, and then asked the waitress for a good place to buy some blue jeans. First of all, though, the bank.
She ate half the sandwich, leaving the waitress a nice tip by way of apology, and made it as far as the bank in one try. There she introduced herself to the manager as the owner of an account set up in February by her lawyer in California. She received her ATM card and took out some cash with it, then rented a safety deposit box large enough to hold Desmond’s strongbox and his diary. Before she put the battered tin container away, she lifted the lid to take another look at its enigmatic contents. She’d had to break the lock to open it, but the treasure it held was not the sort to require guarding. A smooth gray pebble, a small shell, and two pieces of twig had been placed in the box, along with a pearly button, a bit of green ribbon, a three-inch maroon tassel, and the program for a concert that gave neither date nor location. The only understandable item among all these mementos—if mementos they were—was a handsome gold locket on a heavy chain, containing a lock of a dozen or so long blond hairs pressed into one side and a thicker lock of short brown hair on the other. Blond and brown touched when the locket was shut. She put it back and closed the tin box, locked the bank box, and thanked the manager.
On the street again, she rested her shoulders against the brickwork while she checked the location of the post office on the map, then set off to identify herself to the people there as well. It was getting easier, she found to her relief. No one here crowded her, no footsteps speeded up, and there were plenty of open doors waiting to rescue her, many honest citizens ready and willing to come to her aid.
The post office held three letters for her, one from Pamela concerning a bill, and one from Gloriana, the owner of the New York gallery that sold Rae’s smaller pieces, saying, Please, please, please get in touch. The third was from Petra. Rae stood outside the post office, tore it open, and fumbled to catch the note that fell out from between Petra’s folded pages. It was from Tamara, and in growing amazement, Rae read:
Dear Mother,
I have given Petra my permission, conditional to her good behavior in the meantime, to spend a week with you on your island. Considering the complicated travel arrangements necessary, Don and I have agreed that we will need to bring her to you. We will only stay a few days, and if Petra chooses to do so, she will remain with you. We can arrange the details of her return later. I propose that we spend the Fourth of July weekend with you, arriving on July first.
Love,
Tamara
Rae went through the note again, this time reading between the lines. “Don and I will need to bring her to you” meant that Rae could not be trusted to be at the airport to meet Petra’s plane, and Tamara did not wish to risk a stranded thirteen-year-old. “If Petra chooses” to stay meant if Tamara and Don approved of Rae’s state of mind and her living circumstances.
Rae had to give Petra credit for getting even so conditional an approval, but the more she considered Tamara’s letter, the greater grew her astonishment—not at Petra’s manipulative skills, but at the sheer, brazen effrontery of Petra’s father. She shook her head in wonder: First he instigates an incompetency case against me, then he has the nerve to expect me to welcome him as a guest. As she had so often before in her dealings with the man, Rae wavered between disgust and admiration: She felt she ought to embrace fully the outrage Don inspired, yet she was also constantly in awe of his utter self-interest, his easy assumption that things would go his way simply because he wanted them to.
Amazing, Rae thought, coming down as always on the side of bemusement. But it might also be a form of unstated challenge: Don saying, I’m grown-up enough to compartmentalize my life; are you? Very well—as a challenge, a means of letting him know how she felt without saying it directly, she would allow him to set his Gucci loafers on Folly. As proof of her own mental resilience—to herself if no one else—it would be without parallel.
Petra’s letter was a relief, chatty and meandering, giving mere glimpses of the battle that had raged before Tamara had written her note, including the brief but ominous admission that she’d “never seen Dad as mad as he was” when his daughter refused to accept his decision of “no.” Tamara had had to step in and soothe the waters, and Petra went blithely on, assuming that all was well again. Rae was not so sure, but despite her concern, the letter’s childlike glee was contagious, and Rae reread some of the lines to make the impending visit more real in her mind. Some minutes later, with a smile on her face, blissfully unheeding of the threatening presence of other people all around her, Rae looked up to find a sheriffs car sitting at the curb in front of her. A fresh-faced young man in a crisp new uniform was looking over the top of the car at her.
“Mrs. Newborn?”
“More or less.”
“Um. Sorry?”
“Ms. is fine.”
He blushed, both cheeks taking on red circles like clown paint. “Ms. Newborn, right. Um, you are her?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, good. The sheriff wants to talk to you.”
For a moment Rae thought in disgust that she was about to be hauled back to the island to answer questions, and watched the boy deputy get back in the car, but he then fiddled with a car phone for a moment before lying flat across the front seat to open the passenger-side door. Sitting upright again, he held the phone out in her direction. She slipped her knapsack from her shoulder and sat on the edge of the cruiser’s front seat to take the phone, leaving the door open and one foot on the ground.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Newborn?”
“This is she.”
“Jerry Carmichael here. It’s about the dirt in the area behind your house.”
“Yes,” Rae responded, mystified.
“Well, it’s just that we really ought to sift through it, just to be thorough, and it occurred to me that if you were thinking about moving it out of there anyway, my guys could as easily dump it where you like rather than putting it carefully back where we found it. Up to you.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you, Sheriff. No, I certainly don’t want it there. I was planning eventually on putting it over with the other soil I excavated, around the hill a ways. If you’d shift it anywhere in that general direction, that would be helpful.”
“I did see that place. And I noticed that you’d been collecting the stuff you sieved out into a pile nearby. You want us to do the same?”
“It would be too much bother, Sheriff.”
“None at all. Uh, would you mind if we borrowed your wheelbarrow?”
“Any of the outdoor tools at all, help yourselves,” she replied, with the stress on out. Although if it meant getting all that soil out of there, she might even lend him one of her rattier chisels.
“Thanks, that’ll speed it up.”
“But watch out for the glass and nails. I cut myself on something in there the other day.”
“Will do. See you later, then.”
The phone went dead and she handed it back to the young man, then asked him, “How did you find me?”
The pink bloomed on his cheeks again. “Sheriff said watch for a six-foot-tall woman with short gray hair and a green backpack. Didn’t take long.”
She thanked him, then watched the cruiser drive away. Bac
k to research.
She discovered that the historical museum was not open until the following afternoon, so she went on to the newspaper office instead. This occupied a building with a flat gray false front, like something from a Western, but the cowboys inside were of the cyber variety, and back issues were available for perusal. The mid-1920s? the woman asked. No problem; the Journal had been in print since 1906.
Rae found the article about the “fiery destruction” of the house on Sanctuary Island, also known as Newborn’s Folly, in September 1927. It was front-page stuff, jockeying for space with a political scandal in Olympia and a rash of burglaries in the county, in which the stolen items included half a dozen laying hens, a skiff, a buried Mason jar filled with cash, and the engine out of someone’s Model T The flames had been seen from Roche Harbor, at the northern end of San Juan Island, by an early-morning fisherman in the wee hours of September 14. The date jolted Rae, and she had to drag her attention back to the article and read on. By the time firefighters could get a boat out to Sanctuary, they found the house burned to the foundations, and although they had stayed on to search by daylight, no trace was found of its eccentric builder. Since his rowing skiff was also missing, it was thought that he might have left the island in the wake of the fire.
The following issue saw an article about Desmond Newborn, who by now, since he had not appeared in Roche Harbor or any of the other island towns, was presumed dead, “consumed by the fierce flames.” He was, the editorial noted, from a prominent Eastern family, but of his past, little was known. Residents and visitors to the islands knew him by the work of his hands, the twin-towered structure that had been dubbed The Folly by locals. The editor went on to say that Desmond Newborn was familiar to the residents and businesses of Roche Harbor—to which he was in the habit of rowing every week, in any but the stormiest of weather, to pick up groceries, newspapers, building supplies, and the rare piece of mail—as a polite, quiet man with a “wry” sense of humor.
That last interested Rae: She had somehow not thought of Desmond Newborn as having a humorous side, wry or otherwise. Certainly the diary showed little of that, although she supposed that the house itself argued for a quizzical worldview.
There were no illustrations to the articles, and nothing in the next few papers, but a month after the fire Desmond’s name appeared again, this time paired with that of his brother.
FOLLY GOES TO STATE
Mr. William Newborn, of Boston, Massachusetts, has granted to the State of Washington the island on which his brother, Desmond Newborn, built the house known throughout the San Juan Islands as “The Folly,” a sobriquet attached to the structure with a view to its colorful twin stone towers front and back. Mr. William Newborn, appreciating the affection his brother (presumed dead in the fire that consumed “The Folly” last month) felt for the islands and the wildlife, has granted the State the use of the entire island as a preserve for resident and migrating birds. The grant covers a fifty-year period, and applies until such a time as any direct relative of Mr. Desmond Newborn (he leaves no descendents) wishes to take up residence on the island.
Folly is currently home to two nesting pairs of bald eagles as well as two or three juvenile birds, a colony of auklets, and a sizable heron rookery. San Juan County is pleased to know that such a jewel is to be held safe for the heritage of our children.
Nikki had been right, Rae reflected: The island had been park domain by the beginning of 1928, a good year and a half before Desmond’s last letter.
Desmond’s purported last letter, Rae corrected grimly. She turned to the next issue of the Journal
During the spring, a scant handful of mentions caught her eye. The county wished to remind boaters that Folly was off limits for the gathering of wood or shellfish. An arrest had been made of a pair of boys for poaching eggs during nesting season. And in March the sheriff announced that the ashes of Desmond Newborn’s residence had been probed, and judgment reached that, unless Newborn had been in the hottest portion and thus totally consumed, he had not been there at all. Therefore, the sheriff asked anyone with information on Mr. Newborn’s whereabouts, particularly in the middle of September of the previous year, please to come forward.
After that, nothing. On the anniversary of the fire a brief article appeared, as well as on the subsequent few anniversaries—due, she figured, to the romantic images the two ruined towers evoked for passing boaters.
At five o’clock Rae was thrown out of the newspaper offices. Bleary-eyed after two stints of difficult reading in twenty-four hours, filthy of hand and crook of back, Rae tottered out onto the street and tried to orient herself to the modern world. She dug out her map and looked for the inn run by Nikki’s aunt, and thus missed the sudden pause and subsequent acceleration of a passing sheriff’s car. She set off in the right direction, and had just begun to find her stride when another car belonging to the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department drifted over onto the shoulder of the road ahead of her and stopped. This time, the sheriff himself emerged, dressed, despite the official vehicle, in jeans and a clean, freshly pressed chambray work shirt. He closed the cruiser’s door and came around the back of the automobile to join her.
“Ms. Newborn,” he said. “Could I by any chance interest you in a bite of dinner?”
Jerry Carmichael moved quietly, Rae noticed, as some big men do, so as not to frighten lesser humans—or to step on them by accident. Alan had moved that way. Alan had lived that way. And why was she thinking about Alan?
“I’m pretty tired,” she answered. “I was heading for the inn Nikki Walls arranged for me. She said it was quiet.”
“Is that the one her aunt owns? It’s a good two miles out, and she doesn’t serve dinner. We could eat and I could drop you there in the time it’d take you to walk it.”
If his attitude had been even faintly pushy, Rae would have said a polite thanks and continued on around him, but Carmichael seemed content to go by her decision, offering an alternative rather than coaxing. She found herself folding her map away.
“I’d like dinner, thanks.”
It did not occur to her that “dinner” meant anything but a quick burger, so it wasn’t until they were inside the door of the restaurant that she came to a halt.
“I’m not really dressed—” she began, but was cut off by the approach of a young blond woman with a gold loop through her left nostril, a wide smile on her face, and a pair of menus in her hand.
“Good evening, Sheriff. Two tonight?”
“Thank you, Sara. That corner table’d be good.”
It was early, so only three or four of the twenty or so tables were taken. Rae wavered, on the brink of demanding to be taken elsewhere, then decided that at this hour, it was not likely that anyone would look askance at a woman who was dressed for a hike in the woods sitting down to white linen and sparkling crystal. She did, however, excuse herself to scrub irritably at the day’s accumulation of dust, salt spray, and newsprint. When she got back to the table, the sheriff rose, an old-world courtesy that also reminded her of Alan. She plunked down in her chair, yanked her intricately folded napkin onto her lap, and told the attentive Sara, “Wine. Red.”
The waitress was new enough to the job to blink at Rae’s brusqueness, but the man seated across from Rae suggested a variety and a maker, and Sara went off to fetch it.
Rae applied herself to the menu, aware of the gaze of a pair of all-seeing eyes on her, but unwilling to be drawn out of her sulk. When the wine came she swallowed two large gulps without tasting it. This had been a long day filled with unaccustomed demands and revelations, following a sleepless night, and she could feel the restless stir of energies, pushed deep down. She needed quiet and solitude; she’d told the sheriff as much, yet he had still brought her here; let him deal with a difficult dinner companion.
What she failed to reckon with was the sheriff’s long experience with hostile witnesses. After a moment, she became aware of a large, callused hand with nicely shaped nails b
eing held across the table in her direction. She looked up.
“My grandmother would turn me over her knee for my manners. I believe you’ve met my alter ego, Sheriff Carmichael,” he told her. “My own name is Jerry, Jerry Carmichael.” Rae looked at the extended hand, and her mouth twitched, not so much at the humor of the introduction as at the picture of any woman turning this man over her knee. She took his hand over the table, and felt her own work-hardened hand completely enfolded in the delicate grasp of a vise, a vise of great precision as well as strength.
“Rae Newborn,” she said in response, and he let her go.
“Nikki tells me you’re a woodworker,” he said as he picked up his menu. “Furniture and tables and things.” They seemed to be starting from scratch—not only with new introductions, but they’d covered the question of her profession at least once already. She took another swallow of wine, thought, What the hell, and responded in the same way she had two weeks before.
“I used to be,” she corrected him. However, Carmichael seemed to be more interested in the choices before him than in her faults and failures. She lowered her own eyes to the menu, and was suddenly ravenous. He made comments about a couple of items, suggesting an appetizer that sounded unlikely but that, in his words, “went down a treat.”
Rae made her choice, Sara materialized and took their orders, and Rae reached out for her glass, which had somehow been refilled while her attention was on the menu. The sheriff raised his glass to her, and sipped.
“You seem to come here a lot,” she commented.
“Oh, I own two of the tables.”
“You own …?” Was this some kind of San Juan tradition? she wondered, but suddenly his habitual expression of quiet watchfulness gave way to an eye-crinkling smile.
Folly Page 27
