Folly (44 page)

“So what’d you do?” Ed looked at her slyly out of the corner of his eye as he tugged one white mustache. “Threaten him with your hammer?”

She laughed. “No, I had to resort to ruining his dirty weekend. I told him that in the future he really ought to take his used condoms and toilet paper back with him. The young woman seemed to take offense, because I heard them arguing until three in the morning and they left first thing in the morning.”

Ed opened his mouth, then subsided, with a slightly abashed look on his face that made Rae suspect he’d been about to make an off-color joke.

Another day, she might have teased it out of him, even if it meant opening herself up to the assumptions behind those interested eyes of his. But she really did not want to begin a dating-and-mating ritual with Ed De la Torre, certainly not this morning, when she was feeling groggy to begin with from her arguing neighbors. At least the small but irritating outboard motor that went past at all kinds of strange and unneighborly hours hadn’t then chosen today to putt by and wake her on one of its pre-dawn jaunts.

Rae reached the bottom of the shopping bags, folded them away, and then picked up the newspaper to read the headlines.

“They haven’t found that girl, then?” she asked. “Caitlin Andrews?”

“Nope. Combed every inch of Lopez, had divers follow back the way the ferry came; only thing they came up with was somebody saw a girl like her talking to an older guy on the ferry just after it left Anacortes. ’Course on a busy run like that, there were at least a dozen blond teenagers on board and half the guys on the islands would count as ‘older,’ so it means less than nothing.”

“I just wondered,” she said, adding with infinite casualness, “Sheriff Carmichael was giving me a ride home from Friday Harbor when he got the call. I had to wait hours until he was free to bring me back, and I was curious how he was getting on.”

“Yeah, he and the guy in charge have what you might call a history, so Carmichael turned his deputies over for the search and then did all their patrols himself.”

“On what was probably the busiest weekend of the year.”

“He was no doubt stretched a little thin,” Ed agreed, sounding not unpleased at the thought. “We even had a couple citizen’s arrests—a bar fight on Orcas that got out of hand and nobody to respond. That must’ve been fun. How does that work, do you know?”

Ed had been arrested and convicted at least twice that Rae knew of, but still the gleam of the amateur law enforcer shone in his eyes. Rae had to admit that she knew nothing whatsoever about the process of a citizen’s arrest, and Ed moved on to philosophy (Martin Buber this time) until it was time for him to take his leave.

That explained Jerry Carmichael’s absence, Rae told herself back at the building site. She’d been halfway expecting him to pull into the cove one evening, just in passing. She trimmed a length of 2×4 and set it between the studs as a fire block.

On Wednesday, Nikki Walls pulled into the cove just before midday, carrying a paper grocery bag. They met at Rae’s kitchen, and Rae’s mouth started watering when she saw what Nikki had brought: tomatoes, a whole basket of dark red tomatoes, firm and smooth as a milk-full breast and nearly as large. Rae cupped one in both hands and breathed in the earthy fragrance.

“Ahh,” she sighed. “Man. These aren’t from any grocery store.”

“My sister-in-law. She raises the plants in a portable greenhouse, lifts the top off as soon as the sun is warm enough, always has the first tomatoes on the island. She grows about ten different kinds, says that when you start your garden, she can give you recommendations for varieties that do well here. And this is goat cheese from a cousin of mine on Lopez; thought you’d like to try it. And then since I was inviting myself for lunch, I brought a loaf of bread as well.”

They ate the dense, still-warm, herb-laced bread smeared with the tangy white cheese and topped by drippy tomatoes. Rae had to say that she did not think she’d ever had a more perfect meal.

It was true. In recent weeks, Rae’s palate had begun to awaken again. Before, food had been habit and duty; now, particularly since the dinner with Jerry Carmichael in Friday Harbor, the world of taste was waiting for her to rediscover all kinds of things. The downside was that most of the food in her pantry tasted like its containers, and she had suddenly realized that the wine she had been happily drinking, and of which she had a plentiful supply, was more suited to the cook pot than the glass.

Next time Ed came, Rae vowed, her shopping list would be more of a challenge.

The price for the lunch was giving Nikki a personal tour of the house and cave, but it was a small price. Besides which, Nikki would have talked her into the tour anyway.

The small side cave was empty now, swept clean of death’s presence, and the main cavern had nothing but a crate of bottles and some rickety shelving to show that a human had ever been here. Jerry had not mentioned seeing the petroglyph of the orca and Nikki did not notice it now, probably because Rae stood in front of it holding the lamp.

“Did you ever open that bottle of wine?” Nikki asked.

“Not yet. I sent a letter to my lawyer asking her to find out what they’d be worth.”

“Good idea. That’s all you found here?” Nikki poked around the edges of the larger cave as if hoping for another hidden entrance.

“That’s all,” Rae told her. It was a flat-out lie, but she was not ready to share the contents of the diary or the strongbox with anyone, particularly a talkative woman who was related to half the local population. “I think Desmond had moved his stuff into the house by the time it burned down. This was just storage space while he was building.”

Nikki nodded thoughtfully, took a last look at the crate of dust-covered bottles, and crawled out of the cave in front of Rae. The narrow path between the cave’s opening and the house had been swept clean—literally—by Jerry’s team, put through a sieve, and left for her at the garden site.

She and Nikki worked their way around the house, with even the surefooted ranger bracing her left hand against the siding that Rae had nailed up along the back wall. They slithered down the hill, rounded the front tower, and walked up the steps and through the outline of the front door. Once inside, Nikki turned in a slow circle, getting a sense of the space.

The back and left-hand walls, from the fireplace all the way around to the door and incorporating the front tower, were now solidly sheathed on the outside in cedar. The remainder of the front and the eastern wall were both still skeletal, studs and headers, fire blocks and cross braces. Nikki leaned out of the framed-in window space on the east and looked down at the ground, which on this side was a good ten feet below the windowsill.

“How are you going to get the wood up on these sides?” she asked.

“Once I get the second floor framed, I’ll put up some scaffolding, mount the siding from there.”

“I was trying to picture you hanging out over the edge in a climbing harness or something. Not that I’d put it past you.”

Rae laughed. “No, the climbing harness is for the roof.” She could see the young ranger trying to determine if it was a joke.

Nikki chose to change the subject. “That’s a heck of a lot of wood you moved up here.”

“Actually, Jerry Carmichael and his deputies moved it up. He claimed they had to search the ground underneath it, but they were just being helpful. Incredibly so.”

Nikki shot her a glance, and when she looked back at the pile of lumber, there was an unhappy little smile on the ranger’s face. All she said, though, was “I think everybody’s interested in seeing Folly rebuilt.”

“In that case,” Rae told her, “I’d better get on doing just that.”

With the cage of the first-floor walls up and firm, Rae was ready to move on to the second floor. She had decided that, although her interior walls would carry a rough plaster finish, the ceilings should be wood. So she had ordered peeled cedar logs with one side milled flat, exposed beams that would support the upper floor.

Each one weighed a ton, or so her middle-aged muscles informed her. She could pick up one end without much problem, but carrying a log’s full weight and lifting it over her head was more than she could manage.

Which was where primitive technology—Rae’s favorite kind—came in. A block and tackle, rigged from the reinforced and braced header over the wide east window, would do most of the work for her. Once the beam was inside, she could use a manual lift, rented from the builder’s supply outlet and delivered by Ed the week before, to raise it onto the upper plates. Slow and careful work, but not a risk to skull or muscle, assuming she watched what she was doing.

The first log was immense, awkward as hell, and frighteningly close to impossible to maneuver: raising it up, swinging it through the window hole, rolling and wrestling it onto the lift, and cranking it up to the upper level. The sun was low over the treetops and her muscles were trembling with stress and sweat-induced dehydration by the time the first log was in place. She slumped against the door frame and gazed up at the ropes and ladders and shims and one beautiful, honest, stripped cedar tree, lying perfect and clean against the indigo sky.

Jesus, she thought in despair; this is going to take forever. And Petra would be here in four weeks, parents in tow.

The sun rose Thursday at quarter after five; it found Rae already at work. Beam number two took less time than the first one had, and the third one was faster yet. The trick was to ignore the thuds, bashes, and scrapes of its passage and just get the damn thing up. Manhandling and mistreating wood was not a thing that came easy to Rae Newborn, but she was learning.

She broke off for a late breakfast at eight-thirty, and spent the whole meal with her eyes on the project, calculating. Then she brushed off her hands and went back to the pulley rope. The fourth log was a breeze—a stiff breeze, but it went up so smoothly she couldn’t think what her problem had been. The fifth one found her so cocky that she took her eye away for a split second; the young tree slipped off its high perch and came within an inch of killing her.

The immense boom of its fall reverberated, and faded, and she was miraculously still intact. Not even a concussion, which she richly deserved for her instant of inattention; nothing more serious than the scraped shoulder she’d got jumping out of the way. Then reaction set in, and she tottered shakily over to the framed doorway and collapsed onto the step, her head between her knees, breathing shallowly. When she raised her head again, she was looking down at a veritable armada of invaders.

Rage, pure, strengthening rage brought her to her feet and filled her lungs to bellow, “This is private property, God damn it! Can’t you read the damn sign?”

Occupants of two of the boats whirled to look up at the mad (certainly angry) woman of Folly, but the third and last boat, from which an anchor had just been dropped, shifted and a man came out into view, a big, smooth-shaven man in jeans and plaid shirt whom Rae had no trouble recognizing.

Jerry Carmichael. What was the man up to now? And at his shoulder the equally familiar head of red hair: Nikki Walls, wearing shorts, work boots, and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

Men, and women, too, were pouring off the boats, into dinghies, onto the dock. They looked like quitting time at a factory. They looked like the Amish community gathering to raise a barn in that Harrison Ford movie. They looked like …

They looked like salvation.

Rae scowled at them as they drifted up the beach, scowled at the tools and the work belts. She stayed where she was in her doorway until she
was glaring down at seven grinning figures from her superior position on the upper step, staring into the eyes of three strangers, two known deputies (Bobby Gustafsen and the boy with the blushing cheeks), Nikki Walls, and Jerry Carmichael.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded, sounding to her own ears like an elderly schoolmarm.

Jerry answered her. “We had some free time. You have some work that needs doing. This is Kathryn, one of my deputies; Nikki’s cousin Bo; and Matty, an old friend. The rest you know.”

Rae looked out over the eager faces of her new neighbors, her friends and community, and she could not bring herself to say the words, “No thank you, I have to do this myself.” She took a deep breath, stepped back, and, for that afternoon at any rate, the island community took control of Folly.

It was disturbing, frightening almost, the speed with which a team of eight worked. The remaining logs were up in a trice, without use of her slow equipment, hefted by large men and wrestled bare-handed into place. The tongue-and-groove cedar boards for the ceiling and the upper story’s floor—kiln-dried, these, and not a warp in sight—were laid tightly onto the flat upper sides of the logs and nailed invisibly into place. Working alongside them, Rae could spot no difference between her work and theirs, not a single crack or gap.

Two ladders were fetched from the armada and siding was thrown up on the remaining first floor even as the second story was taking shape overhead. When the upper level had been framed, those walls, too, were sheathed—although Rae had to look away when the crew’s two acrobats reached the precipitous southeast corner. Her team of helpers put the window holes precisely where she wanted them, they laid neat headers along the tops, they let in diagonal 1×4 braces for additional stability, and not one of the nails from their temporary blocks punched carelessly through the cedar ceiling. They squared, plumbed, and leveled as they went, they set aside studs weakened by knots to use for jacks or cripples, they even turned the boards used for the headers to avoid cupping.

In other words, they knew what they were doing.

They were there for seven and a half hours, during which time Rae’s work was more that of consultant and overseer than laborer. Several times she put down her hammer to fetch cold drinks from the trio of well-iced coolers which they had also provided. She watched both as an
onlooker and as a participant, saw the way the men on the team looked at Nikki, even her cousin, saw Nikki’s reciprocal awareness even of the married man Bobby Gustafsen, noticed the young ranger’s amusement over and acceptance of the men’s response. And Rae saw also Jerry’s amusement, avuncular and hearty to a degree that made her wonder if it wasn’t just a bit forced.