Folly

by Laurie R. King

  “Who gives a shit?” he muttered. Oh, Alan, her heart cried; thank God you’re not here to see this.

  “It’s you that’s been phoning around the islands? And searched my tent two weeks ago?”

  “Had to be sure.” His words were slurred from the damage done by her hammer, but she could understand them. She also heard clearly that there was no regret in his voice; if anything, there was pride.

  “Does that also mean you broke into my house? Trashed the place looking for where I’d gone?”

  “Found you.”

  “Oh yes, you’re a clever boy, all right. But why smash all Alan’s glass?”

  That got a reaction. Rory convulsed and Rae fell over backward onto her rear end as she scrabbled uphill with both feet to get away from him. He lay back impotently.

  “He loved that shit,” he snarled. “I was with him when he bought one, stupid bastard, drooling over it like it was a Rembrandt or some-thing. Five hundred bucks for a fucking paperweight. A present for you. And then when he left, he gave me a lousy hundred bucks. Pissed me off. So I broke ’em.”

  It was a statement vastly more revealing than he could have known. When Rae first saw who it was, she had assumed it was all about money; no doubt Rory believed it was, too. But what she heard was far more raw and visceral than any drive for hard cash: Alan had loved the glass, so Rory would smash it. Alan had loved Rae: Rory would drive her mad, beat her up by proxy, provoke her to suicide.

  Alan had loved Bella, too. If Bella had survived the accident, what would Rory have done? Rae pictured the savaged corkboard and ripped drawings in Alan’s study, and knew that this man would have done more to their daughter than steal an antique silver rattle from her crib.

  Alan had done everything he could for his son, but the boy was just a black hole that even a father’s love could not fill. Rae flashed back to the strange dream she’d had, with Rory and Don standing over a baby’s crib, pulling off one mask after another, but she refused to think about that now: She might pity Rory Beauchamp; if she thought about it, she might even understand what had led him to this point, but not now. And she would never feel sorry enough to grieve for him. He had tried to hurt Petra; for that he would pay.

  The sun was rising now, the very tops of the cedars turning golden with the first light of the new day; she and Rory could see each other clearly. To be sure, she went forward until his face was at arm’s length from hers. She was aware of the approach of a familiar boat engine, heard, too, the change in Petra’s frantic noisemaking, but she wanted to kick this man before Jerry got to him. Kick him hard, where it would hurt him the most: in his pride.

  “Your father wasn’t the stupidest bastard in his family. You know what you’d have got if you sold those glass pieces instead of breaking them? At least a couple hundred thousand dollars. And all those paintings and lithographs on the walls that you just ignored? Even on the black market, they’d have put another, oh, half, three quarters of a million in your pocket.” He winced at each blow. Rae watched with pleasure, and prepared the final kick. “And you didn’t even think to look for a safe. Talk about stupid.”

  She turned and walked away, leaving him for Jerry Carmichael.

  Fifty-six

  Rae Newborn stood with her boots on the island’s rocky promontory, holding in her hands the box that Ed De la Torre had brought her two days before. She had saved it for tonight, the autumn equinox, although she was not quite sure why. Because it felt right, she supposed, and that was reason enough.

  Seventy-two years and ten days after his death, on a warm September evening, Desmond Newborn was about to come home for good. Not that she could be positive just which day was the anniversary of his death, how long he had waited in his cave for the end to take him, but it hardly mattered now. Today was the equinox, halfway between midsummer and the winter solstice, and today she would scatter his ashes.

  “Your towers finally have windows in them, Desmond,” she told his spirit. “The roof is shingled. And my front door looks just like yours. Folly is a shell, but it’s secure. I’m going to stay here over the winter, working on the inside.” And after that… well, who knew?

  “There’s going to be a book about you, Desmond. Maybe not everything about you—I’ll have to think about that—but all about Folly, and how you built it, and how I restored it. The photographer brought me some of his pictures—there’s a magnificent one of the beach over on Lopez where you gathered a lot of your stones. It’s going to be a spectacular book. And your great-great-great-niece Petra is going to help me with the words. My granddaughter wants to be a writer. You’d be so proud of her.”

  She stopped, hearing the sound of footsteps coming up the promontory after her. In a minute, the man whose name she was getting used to was standing behind her. He smelled of coffee.

  “I’m going to have to stop carrying on these conversations with Desmond,” she said, without turning to face him. “People are going to think I’m a little unbalanced.”

  “They wouldn’t dare,” Allen said.

  The growl of a boat opening throttle as it came free from the Roche Harbor restrictions reached her ears, and she knew her companion would be eyeing it carefully, ready to fade away if it came too close. It was like living with a ghost when Allen was here, his habitual disinclination to be seen causing him to vanish at the hint of an intruder. Sometimes Rae found herself talking to empty air.

  He was a ghost in other ways as well. The overlay of his name on her tongue, once jarring, was beginning to feel oddly inevitable, as if the syllables denoted a relationship rather than a distinct person. It was not that he filled the Alan-shaped hole in her life, exactly, but he did take over some of that same space. He was unlike Alan in all ways but the key ones at the centers of their beings, and that core similarity allowed the one man to overlap and merge with the other. Which was the ghost was not always clear to her, and Rae knew full well that it was more than a little weird, and probably unhealthy as well. She just couldn’t bring herself to worry about it.

  The boat moved off, and he settled down at her side. An oak, she thought, in Vivian’s tree game. Scarred and fire-girt, bent by forces that would have had lesser trees flat. The only oak she’d ever met.

  “Allen?”

  “Mm?”

  “I’ve decided to go to California next month. I need to clear out Alan’s clothes, give Bella’s toys to the local shelter, do something about my workshop. I’ll be gone two or three weeks.”

  “You feel ready for that?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m glad. I’m supposed to go to Europe for a week or two myself, to set up a link with a group there. Around the tenth.”

  “Then I’ll aim for the same date.” Allen would not stay in the house while she was away. Folly might be considered haunted, but ghosts did not generally light fires and cook themselves meals.

  Satisfied, Rae worked open the top of the box, then eased her way down the boulders to the water. There was an odd shimmer to its surface tonight, a seasonal bioluminescence due to some kind of plankton. When she sprinkled the ashes, they flowered and glowed briefly where they landed.

  When the box was half empty, she closed it, then climbed back up to sit beside the island’s ghost. The rest of the ashes she planned to divide in the morning: half beneath the madrone tree, heavy now with clusters of red berries, the remainder in the spring’s lower pool among the ferns and the salamanders.

  When the glow had subsided and the sun was fully gone, they walked back together to the house. It smelled still of raw plaster, although the air no longer felt damp with it. She waited until Allen had drawn the curtains before she lit the lamps.

  Gloriana’s photographer, Jaime Brittin, had spent the day on Folly. It was his second trip to record the house’s progress, following a preliminary session in late July, and he had left the table in the middle of the room—a slab of Vivian’s walnut burl—piled high with a wild assortment of photographs: old black-and-white portraits
and her crude snapshots mixed up with his sleek July studies that looked ready for framing on Gloriana’s gallery walls. Lying on top of one stack was the bashed-up strongbox, which Rae had brought out after the photographer left, to give Desmond’s journal to Allen.

  She sat down in one of the frayed canvas camp chairs and began to gather together the photos while Allen stirred up the fire in the black fireplace and went to the liquor cabinet (a plastic milk crate) to pour them each a glass of wine.

  “Did you finish reading the journal?” she asked him.

  “I did. Are you going to use it in the book?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “You should. It’s very moving. Amazing how like Vietnam that war seems to have been, except their mud was cold.”

  The house warmed rapidly, now that the windows were in and the door was secure, and Rae shrugged out of her jacket, then draped it over the back of the chair.

  “What did you say to the photographer, when he was posing you on the front steps with the door latch in your hand?” Allen asked.

  “You were watching?”

  “Of course I was watching. You said something to him that made him nearly drop his camera.”

  “Oh yes,” she said with a smile. “He wanted a modern duplicate of the picture of Desmond as one of the book’s echoes, so I told him, ‘If someone bursts in tonight and shoots me, I’m going to be really upset.’ Of course, poor Jaime had no idea what I was talking about.” Allen laughed and Rae joined him, but she glanced uneasily over at the door as well. Allen, sensitive always to the fears of others, put down his glass and went to turn the bolt.

  He came back to the fire and picked up the small leather book, thumbing through the pages of a man’s life.

  “I wonder what that final entry was going to be,” he mused. “‘I have a’ something.”

  “Ah,” said Rae. His head came up at the sound. “That’s the reason why I’m hesitating about using the journal in the book. Here, I’ll show you.”

  She sorted through the photos and extracted several, then laid them out on the floor in front of the hearth like some exotic game of solitaire. Allen watched over her shoulder as Rae identified each subject for him.

  The first was an enlargement of the old photograph of Desmond on his steps. Either as a result of superior equipment or through surreptitious retouching, the latch was now clear in his hand. His face remained half shaded: one dark eye, dark hair falling against one pale cheek, dark jacket with a smudge of light dust on one sleeve.

  Below it she laid two others, William and Lacy, taken from the family albums by Tamara: William on the left at the age of seventy—hawk-like face, thin mouth, eyes like a pair of ice chips—Lacy on the right looking as if she might burst like a balloon under one glance of her husband’s eyes. The picture showed her as a young woman, very beautiful in her Edwardian ruffles and Gibson girl hair. Her skin was pale, the texture of a flower petal that would bruise at a touch, and her eyes, too, though nicely shaped, would have benefited from a judicious application of Petra’s makeup. Since in the early years of the century no proper lady would have thought of such a thing, in the picture they looked almost as pale as her skin.

  Then beneath those two photos Rae placed a snapshot of her parents: her father dark and shadowy, as befitted a man who had spent his life in the shadow of his father; her mother, before she became sick, a classic blond California beauty of the Forties.

  As the fourth and bottom row, Rae set down a picture of herself, in which Jaime had contrived to find a trace of beauty, even mystery, in a tall graying woman with a hammer in her hand.

  Finally, she reached for the metal strongbox and took out the gold locket with the two locks of hair. She opened it, and arranged the golden clamshell at the place where Desmond’s photograph met those of William and Lacy. The brown curl and the blond were slightly tangled, but Rae made no attempt to separate them. Then she removed the box’s other, odder contents. The assorted objects that she had thought might be mementos—twigs, shell, and pebble; concert program, button, ribbon, and tassel—she arranged to the right of the photographs. Last, she took the diary from Allen, leafed through to find Desmond’s careful notation of eight unexplained dates scattered through the first two months of 1919. She laid the diary below the mementos, then sat back against Allen’s knees.

  “What do you see?” she asked.

  It took him only moments. “Damn,” he exclaimed, sitting up abruptly. “You think that explains it?”

  “I think so, yes.” Rae picked up the photographs of Desmond and her father, leaving the rest where they lay. “I think that when my father was about seven years old, it occurred to William that the boy’s eyes were not going to grow any lighter. He thought back to the boy’s birth date, and to nine months before, and he arranged a trip out west to see his little brother’s island.

  “On that visit, he just happened to show his brother a picture of Lacy and her son, and Desmond saw instantly what it meant. But because Desmond was a soldier at heart, true and straightforward, he couldn’t see what lay behind the picture. Or rather, what lay behind his being shown the picture.”

  Eight dates; eight odd souvenirs.

  “That night, he sat down to write about it in his journal—I found an uncapped pen in the debris under the house, right in front of the fireplace where his chair was—but before he could get his discovery down, his brother came back in and killed him. In revenge. William was always big on revenge, and on the sanctity of his possessions.

  “What Desmond sat down to write was: ‘I have a son.’”

  Rae looked from one picture to the other, then picked up her own brown-eyed photograph and inserted it between them. She even had the same generous mouth.

  “Desmond Newborn was not my father’s uncle,” she told her island’s ghost. “Desmond Newborn was his father. My grandfather.”

  “Your island is well named,” Allen replied after a minute.

  Rae smiled, sadly, and dropped her head back against his supporting knees. “Newborn’s Folly.”

  Allen laid a hand on her hair, and gently corrected her. “Newborn’s Sanctuary.”

  About the Author

  LAURIE R. KING lives with her family in the hills above Monterey Bay in northern California. Her background includes such diverse interests as Old Testament theology and construction work, and she has been writing crime fiction since 1987. The winner of both the Edgar and the John Creasey Awards for Best First Novel for A Grave Talent, the debut of the Kate Martinelli series, she is also the author of six mysteries in the Mary Russell series, including The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and most recently, Justice Hall, as well as a thriller, A Darker Place. Her website address is laurierking.com.

  “Prickling with excitement.”

  —Booklist on A Grave Talent

  “A lively adventure in the very best of intellectual company.”

  —The New York Times Book Review on A Letter of Mary

  Enter the spellbinding world of

  Laurie R. King

  The thrill of the chase … literate, harrowing suspense … There’s nothing elementary about the mysteries of Laurie R. King!

  Since 1993, Laurie R. King has been tantalizing readers with her

  award-winning, internationally acclaimed novels of mystery and

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  along with excerpts from the more recent novels. Each is available now wherever Bantam Books are sold.

  A GRAVE TALENT

  A Kate Martinelli Mystery

  WINNER OF THE EDGAR AND JOHN CREASEY AWARDS

  FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL

  The unthinkable has happened in a small community outside of San Francisco. A series of shocking murders has occurred, each victim a child. For Detective Kate Martinelli, just promoted to Homicide and paired with a seasoned cop who’s less than thrilled to be handed a green partner, it’s a difficult case that just keeps getting harder.
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br />   THE SECOND CHILD was found six weeks later, fifteen miles away as the crow flies, and in considerably fresher condition. The couple who found her had nothing in common with Tommy Chesler other than the profound wish afterwards that they had done something else on that particular day. It had been a gorgeous morning, a brilliant day following a week of rain, and they had awakened to an impulsive decision to call in sick from their jobs, throw some Brie, sourdough, and Riesling into the insulated bag, and drive down the coast. Impulse had again called to them from the beach where Tyler’s Creek met the ocean, and following their picnic they decided to look for some privacy up the creekside trail. Instead, they found Amanda Bloom.

  Amanda, too, was from over the hill in the Bay Area, though her home was across the water from Tina’s. There were a number of similarities in the two girls: Both of them were in kindergarten, both were white girls with brown hair, both were from upper-middle-class families. And both of them had walked home from their schools.

  TO PLAY TOO POOL

  A Kate Martinelli Mystery

  When a band of homeless people cremate a beloved dog in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the authorities are willing to overlook a few broken regulations. But three weeks later, when the dog’s owner gets the same fiery send-off, the SFPD has a real headache on its hands. The autopsy suggests homicide, but Inspector Kate Martinelli and her partner have little else to go on. They have a homeless victim without a positive ID, a group of witnesses who have little love for the cops, and a possible suspect, known only as Brother Erasmus, whose history leads Kate along a twisting road to a disbanded cult, long-buried secrets, the thirst for spirituality, and the hunger for bloody vengeance.

  HIS BREATH huffing in clouds and the news announcer still jabbering against his unemployed ears, the currently unemployed former Bank of America vice presidential assistant was slogging his disconsolate way alongside Kennedy Drive in the park when, to his instant and unreasoning fury, he was attacked for a second time by a branch-wielding bearded man from the shrubbery. Three weeks of ego deflation blew up like a rage-powered air bag. He instantly took four rapid steps forward and clobbered the unkempt head with the only thing he carried, which happened to be a Walkman stereo. Fortunately for both men, the case collapsed the moment it made contact with the wool cap, but the maddened former bank assistant stood over the terrified and hungover former real estate broker and pummeled away with his rubbling handful of plastic shards and electronic components. A passing commuter saw them, snatched up her car telephone, and dialed 911.