Folly

by Laurie R. King

  “When you first got here,” he explained, “I was up on the hillside trying to figure out what the hell you were doing here, and I leaned against a dead branch. You must have heard, because you picked up a piece of firewood and threw it in my direction and then you started shouting— at me. ‘Allen, you son-of-a-bitch,’ on and on. You were furious, which I couldn’t figure out, and you knew my name—that really freaked me. I decided later that I must have heard you wrong, but at the time, I tell you, it had me worried. And then tonight when I said my name, you reacted so strongly, Allen’ itself must mean something to you.”

  A brief silence fell across the fire pit. “My husband’s name was Alan,” Rae told him. “He died.”

  “Ah,” he said, and then, in a different voice, “Oh. So tonight, when I told you my name, you must have thought… Christ, it’s a wonder you didn’t blow me away.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Can I sit down? My arms are getting tired.”

  She thought about it, then said, “Sit down on that chair, in the light where I can see you.”

  “I’d rather not be too close to the fire, if you don’t mind. If anyone came into the cove and spotted me, you might have problems explaining this. That could disrupt the plans of a lot of good people.”

  She should have insisted; after all, she had the gun, and he was on her property, a potential threat. But what in her youth she would have called the man’s “vibes” did not raise her hackles. For a reason she could not have begun to explain, it seemed natural to nod and say, “All right, but sit at the edge of the light, so I can see you.”

  Moving deliberately, the tall man picked up the chair Rae had been about to sit in several minutes earlier and moved it back from the light. He stepped forward, hesitated, bent down to retrieve her fallen tea mug and place it on a nearby stump-table, then sat down. When his hands were resting, clearly visible, on the chair’s wooden arms, Rae swung her leg over the tree trunk and dropped to the ground in front of it, her back to the bark. The firelight touched his nose and mouth, and she suddenly knew where she had seen him before, why his face seemed to require more hair.

  “You were in the pickup, waiting in line for the ferry the night …”

  She paused, and went on more slowly. “The night the Andrews girl disappeared.”

  “Damn,” he said, his monk’s features relaxing into a rueful smile. “I knew you’d made me then. I should have pulled my hat down and pretended to be asleep, but I saw you coming up the road and, well, I couldn’t help trying to get a closer look at my landlady.”

  Rae narrowed her eyes and adjusted her grip around the gun. “Would you care to explain that statement?”

  “I live here. On Folly. Not all the time, just a few days here and there, and I’ll admit I’ve never put the address on my driver’s license, but for the last eight years this has been what I think of as home.”

  “But… where?”

  “A cave, on the other side of the island. A small cave, just above sea level but it’s dry and warm enough, and not far from fresh water. Pretty basic shelter, little more than a hole in the earth, but it’s actually comforting that way.”

  “And where do you live when you’re not in the cave?” she asked. Why are you interested? she asked herself. Because damn it, this is an interesting man, came the response.

  “Wherever work calls me. Los Angeles. Denver. Spokane. Last month, by mere coincidence, work called me here. As it has a handful of times in the past. And that’s why I’m talking to you now, because having you here on the island changes things. It would be difficult for you to plead ignorance, if I were caught here. You could be considered an accomplice. Now, if you chose to take the risk, that would be a different matter, but I can’t allow you to be made vulnerable in ignorance.”

  “You’re doing something illegal on Folly,” Rae said. “Smuggling. What is it—drugs? guns? Freon?”

  “Freon?”

  “I understand there’s a lot of money in smuggling the stuff.”

  “Freon. Live and learn. No, what I smuggle may be technically against various laws, but it’s not for money, and it’s never in my opinion immoral. I smuggle people.”

  “People? People as in criminals, or people as in illegal immigrants?”

  “I’ll take the fact that you differentiate between the two as an encouraging sign.” This time his smile was crooked, almost boyish, and something deep inside her flipped right over: That was Alan’s smile. “No, people as in abused children and wives who are in danger. People as in underground railway.”

  “Caitlin Andrews—you did take her off that ferry.”

  “And I kept her here for nine interminable days until her mother could join us. Poor kid—she was so sick and tired of my music collection by the end of it. Anyway, the two of them stayed together in the cave for a night, then I passed them on north.”

  “Jerry thought it was something like that.”

  “My brother?” He sounded alarmed.

  “He figured it out, from the parents’ reactions and then the girl’s mother disappearing like that. He even used the same term: ‘underground railway’ He was sympathetic. At least, he didn’t seem to think anyone ought to search too hard for them.”

  “Interesting,” he mused. “Still, Jerry’s a cop, through and through, and if he came across this section of the railroad, he could do a lot of damage. And that’s why I’m here now. If you feel you need to tell him, please, say so now. If you are uncomfortable about any of this, just tell me and I’ll remove myself from the island. I know you’re close to Jerry, and it’s not fair to ask you to keep something like this from him. If you’re having a relationship with him, just say the word and I’ll be gone.”

  “I’m not.”

  “But he comes here.”

  “Jerry’s a friend. And you say he figures things out, but I’d say that when it comes to personal relationships, he’s a bit of a dunce. You know Nikki Walls? Of course you do, you were married to her… sister, was it?”

  He did not answer, just asked, “Is Jerry interested in Nikki?”

  “Well, no, but—” Rae stopped. Was any of this his business? Or was he simply maneuvering to get her guard down, and then—what? If he wanted to attack her, why wait until she had a gun in her hand? Something else that he had said then registered in her mind.

  “Spokane. Two girls disappeared there.”

  “Ellie and Joanna Rugeley”

  “Your work?”

  “Mine and others’.”

  “Why?”

  “Their mother was dead. The father was raping them. They had an aunt in Europe who wanted them. I helped them reach her.”

  Four simple declarative sentences; two lives snatched out of hell. If she could believe him. “Do you have any proof?”

  “Of what? That the bastard was abusing them, or that I helped them get out?”

  “That the girls reached their aunt.”

  “Ah,” he said, understanding what she was asking. “And proof that Caitlin and Rebecca are together, and alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course I do. Believe me, I document everything, cover my ass every step of the way. Signed letters from friends, neighbors, and teachers, statements by their doctors, tape recordings of what goes on in the house when the doors are shut, videos if I have them. And afterward, I get dated proof that they’re still alive a couple of weeks later. I don’t know if the letter from Caitlin and Rebecca has arrived yet, but I have one from Eleanor and Joanna. You may have read about Joanna writing a friend to say they’d both run away? That’s part of the process, taking the heat off. They wrote at the same time to me, for my records. I could show you their letter, but I keep everything in Seattle. We’d have to go there.”

  “So you don’t have anything here that would make me believe that you didn’t… kill those girls.” Rae braced herself for some reaction, from outrage to violence, but there was none.
He remained as he had been all along, serious and watchful.

  “Nope, not here. I don’t keep any evidence at all on the island, nothing that could be traced. You never know when some kid’ll stumble onto the cave. Not worth the risk.”

  His final word hung in the air between them. They looked across the fire at each other while Rae tried to decide what to do. Allen Carmichael was a self-confessed criminal, a large male trespasser who had stepped out of the darkness into her life, and every bit of good sense yelled at her that she ought somehow to tie him to a tree and hand him over to his brother.

  However, good sense had never been Rae’s strongest point. And she could hear Vivian in her ear, dead serious under his humor: Trust your bones, Rae.

  Her bones, she knew, should be quaking. A woman who couldn’t walk through a nice, safe, crowded airport without being certain that someone was about to attack her, a woman with vivid memories of what solitary places could hold, what strangers could do—she should have been on the edge of sheer terror. What was wrong with her well-oiled panic mechanism? She ought to get up and race for the promontory, shrieking and rousing the sailboat and everybody else for miles; instead, the gun in her hand was feeling less and less necessary, her position hunched up beside the fallen cedar more and more ridiculous. Her bones were telling her that Allen Carmichael was exactly what he said. Her bones were saying she should offer him a drink. Her bones were tired of sitting on the hard ground.

  Hell. Every important decision she’d ever made had been utterly irrational. Falling in love with Alan, having Bella, turning to woodworking, coming to Folly—all irresponsible, all transforming. Why not one more, knowing it might be her last? Trust your bones, Rae.

  Rae removed her finger from the trigger guard of the old revolver and pushed the weapon back into her sweatshirt pocket. With the motion, her—what? Guest? Tenant? Resident serial killer?—relaxed more fully into his chair, and when she was on her feet again, she saw that the smile now reached his eyes.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asked him.

  “I’d love one.”

  “Wine, beer, or Scotch? They’re all warm, I’m afraid.”

  “A beer, thanks—or no; I’ll have a proper drink with you. A small Scotch.”

  She poured two, and settled into the chair across from him. Carmichael held up his glass to her, and said, “To sanctuary.”

  “To Sanctuary,” she repeated. They both took a swallow, as if sealing a pact.

  “I’m curious,” he said, stretching his legs out to the fire. “Tell me about my brother and Nikki.”

  “There’s nothing to tell, really. As I read it, Jerry’s enough of a gentleman to think that because he’s known Nikki since she was a kid, and because she could have pretty much any man on the islands, his being fifteen years older than she is leaves him out of the running.”

  “Jerry is a fool,” he agreed. He took a sip from his glass, rolling it around his tongue in pleasure.

  “Nikki’ll have him in the end, I think. He needs someone he can feel he’s protecting.”

  “But I saw him bring you flowers,” the sheriff’s brother protested, without thinking.

  Rae went still as suspicion returned, nibbling around the edges of her mind. “You do watch me, don’t you?”

  “No. Not you. But I do always check for visitors in the cove before I take my boat out, and I happened to see him the other night, sitting here with a fresh bunch of store-bought flowers on the table. I do not watch you, not since the first days.”

  Rae wasn’t sure it was the entire truth he was telling, but remarkably enough, her nerves did not react to the thought of those eyes on her from the hill above. She could read no threat in Allen Carmichael’s eyes, no judgment even, just a great deal of understanding. She suddenly thought, He must be very good with frightened children and … and with those women for whom men were generally threatening.

  “Tell me what you do, exactly.”

  “What, in vanishing people?”

  “Yes, your organization. Does it have a name?”

  “No name, no real organization in the sense of a public face. It’s mostly women,” he explained, “helping other women get away from impossible and often dangerous situations. But sometimes a man is needed, for muscle or distraction or just to act like a husband where the police aren’t looking for a couple. And sometimes we have to put clients on ice for a few days, vanish them off the face of the earth. That’s where I come in. I vanish them, until the search cools off and we can put them on the next stage.”

  “How on earth did you get involved with it?”

  The dark eyes dropped to the glass in his hands; Rae remembered Jerry saying something about an incident in Vietnam. “That’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “A person’s experiences transform them,” Carmichael began, as if she hadn’t spoken and he had merely been pulling together his thoughts. “Literally change the structure of the brain. In my case, a single experience during the war stripped my brain down and rebuilt it, completely. It was what the papers label an ‘atrocity’ A bunch of scared, angry boys with M16s in their hands were pushed to the breaking point and turned on the nearest convenient target, which happened to be a civilian village. Forty-three innocent people died, women and children and old people. I could have prevented it, if I’d been paying attention, but I wasn’t. I didn’t.

  “They haunt me,” he said simply. “Especially the little kids. I hear their voices—some of them were still alive when I entered the village. And, to make a very long and convoluted story short, after I returned home, I eventually discovered that the only way I could sleep at night was if I spent the day in the service of children.”

  Rae could find no reply to that. He raised his eyes to hers, and smiled at what he saw. “Don’t look like that, for heaven’s sake. I have a purpose to life, a job that matters and that I do well. How many people do you know who can say that?”

  “Your calling,” she murmured. “A quest.” Why did images of monastic discipline and knighthood’s nobilities surround this tired, dusty-looking man?

  “I don’t know if I’d go so far as that,” he replied. “To tell you God’s honest truth, I sometimes think I do it just because I’m a troublemaker, and I really, really like getting away with things.”

  He had a gorgeous laugh, deep and full and infectious.

  “And here I thought it was the younger brother who was supposed to be the rebel against the older,” she commented.

  “Yeah, me and Jerry… I tell you, I’d just decided to come clean with you on Tuesday morning when who should I spy but my little brother, come to spirit you away? I was sure he’d found me and was getting you out of the way before they brought up the troops and the bloodhounds, but the troops never landed.”

  “No, I had to go to California for a few days on another matter.”

  “I figured you wouldn’t be gone long, once I saw the way you left things.”

  “It was you who searched my tent, wasn’t it? Before that—a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Your tent was searched?” Carmichael leaned forward sharply, squinting to see her face. “When?”

  “Sometime between when I finished framing the roof—the night you saw Jerry here with the flowers—and the day before I left for California.”

  “Sorry, it wasn’t me. I did have a quick glance through when you first came, for which I apologize, but I’ve had my hands full since then. Must’ve been some kids off the boats. I’ve chased two sets of them away the last few days, making ghost noises. Which reminds me—don’t be surprised if you hear rumors that Folly’s haunted.”

  More and more, Rae was beginning to mistrust her memory. She had been sloppy and left the toolbox tray the wrong way around, that was all. She stretched out an arm for the bottle and replenished their glasses.

  “How did you find the cave?” she asked. “Your cave. I didn’t see it when I went around the island.”

  “I discovered
the opening when I was a kid—used to sail all around these islands—but it’s obvious that other people have used it over the years. Smugglers, rumrunners. It’s tucked in behind a small rock spit, with trees down to the ground, not far from the waterfall. I’ve encouraged the tree branches to grow down to cover it, but it’s hard to see even without that, and nearly impossible to get into except at low tide.”

  “Are you the idiot who wrecked his boat?”

  “What?”

  She laughed, and then laughed again at the sound. She felt as if her skin had suddenly taken wing. She felt like a winter-dead tree bursting into full flower. She felt … she felt at ease. And not only because of the alcohol. “Jerry told me that he’d only known two idiots who would have tried to get onto Folly except through the cove, and one of those wrecked his boat trying.”

  “Hell no—I was the one who made it. In fact, that was the day I found the cave, when I was rescuing Jerry. He was the idiot who wrecked his boat on the reef. Dad was furious.”

  “What a pity I can’t give him a hard time about that.”

  “You could always have heard it from someone else. It was common knowledge when we were kids. Not the cave, of course.”

  “You really keep people there?” Desmond might have found the little cave behind the house a cozy retreat in stormy weather, but she wouldn’t care to spend many hours cooped up there.

  “It’s actually fairly comfortable. Some of the older kids call it the hobbit hole, and the younger ones seem to think it’s where Rabbit lives in Winnie-the-Pooh. Teenage girls have the hardest time with it at first— no hair dryer or Internet. I have a collection of posters they can put up— that helps, and every CD you can think of. I go through a ton of batteries for the CD players.”

  “Low tide,” she said suddenly. “I’ve heard you going in and out at low tide. You have a black inflatable.”

  He looked chagrined. “I knew you’d seen me. Sooner or later you’d have found me out.”