Folly (10 page)

Then Rae went to the tent, and for the first time in seventeen months, she snapped open the clasp of her big, heavily dented metal toolbox. She took from it a crosscut saw, a set of rough chisels with their mallet, her old-fashioned bit brace hand drill and its box of bits, and the sleek aluminum spirit level. Laying the tools down near the driftwood branches, she reached behind her to flick the tape measure from its pouch at her spine, and bent to work.

Weaving a selection of sea-worn driftwood into the strong underpinnings that she needed was no easy task. Each piece had to balance and lock into the next, resisting the tension and compression that would make the bench twist and collapse. By drilling and chiseling a hole to feed one branch into, by trimming and angling and sinking cross-supports, she could link the parts up into an airy yet solid whole. The sawdust smelled of brine, the wood was tacky to the touch and oddly unlike the tree it had been, and Rae was completely lost in her miniature silver forest when the voice boomed from behind her.

“Mornin’ there, Mizz—”

The words strangled in the boatman’s throat as Rae shrieked and jumped backward, her hammer leaping of its own volition into her hand. He reacted in kind, braced for a vicious fight, and they stared at each other across the upright snarl of partially attached driftwood, the wild-eyed woman and the equally startled man who had come up behind her back. Ed recovered first. With a visible effort he wiped the tightness from his face and straightened, taking off his baseball cap and running a hand over his mahogany-colored tonsure. When his arm went up, Rae glimpsed a band of geometric tattoo around his wrist, oranges and lapis blue.

“Sorry to surprise you like that,” he was saying. “I guess I sorta figured you’d heard me. My boat engine and all.”

Rae gulped in a breath.
Humor disarms’
was one of the vital lessons she had learned in her laborious climbs out of madness, second only to
Pretend
to be normal, and you will be.
She, too, stood up straight, gave the hammer a puzzled glance and dropped it back into its holster, and rubbed her hands together to hide their trembling. She cleared her throat.

“Guess I was a little preoccupied,” she told him, and stretched her mouth into what she hoped resembled a smile. “I didn’t hear you coming up on me.”

“So I noticed. Next time I’ll toot the horn to warn you. Sorry,” he said again. He was watching her warily, as if aware that he was standing across from a woman who heard voices in the empty spaces behind her ears. Given her means of greeting him, Rae thought his reaction understandable. Fear was contagious.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about,” she said, making an effort at easing the tension in the air. “I, er, don’t get a lot of visitors.”

Ed seemed to be thinking. And he was, but not about her words. He was reflecting,
So, this really is a woman I dropped off here—Rae, not Ray—and not at all a bad-looking one, who’s trying hard to hide how spooked she was when she turned around and all of a sudden there I stood. Just like all the other single women on the islands—no matter how brave they look, they’re scared shitless and needing a man around.
Which thought put a broad smile between his roguish white mustaches. “Yeah, the islands are like that in winter. Come summer, you could walk to Roche Harbor on the boat decks, but the rest of the year it’s quiet. ’Course, you’ll never get much traffic here, between the currents and the shoal and being a preserve and all.”

“I hope I don’t,” she said fervently, then realized how unfriendly that sounded. “Look, I was just going to make some coffee,” she lied. “Would you like a cup?”

“Oh, I won’t trouble you.”

“The only trouble is putting four scoops of coffee in the pot instead of two. I think I can manage that much.”

Ed relaxed a notch more:
Humor disarms.
“In that case, thanks, I’d like a cup.”

It was more than Rae could do to walk across the clearing with a perfect stranger at her back, particularly one who’d eyed her appreciatively, so she stretched out her hand in an “After you” gesture, and they walked across the clearing together, side by side though well apart. At the campsite, she filled the kettle and put it on the stove, then ducked into the tent for the wooden chair. She set it down a distance from its
canvas-sling cousin, then picked it up again to shift it half a foot closer. In a practiced move she unbuckled the belt and slung it over the slatted back, then went to rinse out the coffeepot.

Ed had set two bulging paper sacks from the Friday Harbor grocery store on the aluminum cook table; she sorted through them until she found her milk for the week. She opened the bag of coffee grounds and spooned some in, checked to see that the mug she intended for her visitor was more or less clean, and then turned to ask if he took sugar. Ed was perched on the edge of the canvas chair with her hammer in his hands, running his blunt fingers over the satiny finish of the handle. She shuddered, as if he had been caressing instead the back of her neck, and her hands yearned to snatch the tool away from him.

“Sugar?” she asked through clenched teeth.

“No, thanks. What kind of wood is this?”

With that opening, Rae was freed to go over and draw the tool gently out of his hands, smoothing her own thumb over the dark rich amber handle that she had turned and shaped to fit her palm and fingers like a custom-made glove. “It’s Honduran mahogany. I had a piece left over, I needed a handle, so I thought, Why not? I don’t think it’s really strong enough for the purpose, but time will tell.”

“Left over. Like from remodeling your kitchen or something?”

Rae had a brief vision of a kitchen clothed in that rich wood—like drowning in melted chocolate.
No; left over, as in a peace offering that didn’t work
, she nearly told Ed, but said instead, “I made a little end table for my daughter.”

His face closed in slightly. “Would that, er, would that be the daughter I met?”

“The one and only,” she told him. Now. She watched his face, and this time her smile, though slightly sad, came more naturally. “She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?”

He looked up, surprised either by the phrase or by the fact that it had been the woman’s own mother who said it.

“I … well, I guess.”

“Bossed you all the way back to Friday Harbor, I’ll bet.”

“You’re right about that.” One mustache hitched upward in a rueful grin.

“And then she asked you to keep an eye on me.” It was a guess, but not too far-fetched; Tamara had paid neighbors before.

Ed went still, and Rae moved to reassure him. “Don’t worry about it. I figured she’d find someone who could check to see that I wasn’t lying dead under a tree or going nuts and talking with the birds.”

She watched him closely, saw his sea-colored eyes skitter sideways, muttered a curse under her breath, and continued, “I bet she told you I’d been in a mental hospital.” His eyes became very interested in his frayed canvas shoes; answer enough. Shit, Tamara; why do you do these things? Well, if old Ed knew that, he probably ought to know the rest—or as much of the rest as Rae cared to tell. She couldn’t afford to have all of Friday Harbor thinking of her as the madwoman of Newborn’s Folly. Even if it’s what she was.

“Did Tamara also tell you I was badly injured in an accident that killed my husband?” She couldn’t think for a moment why she had failed to mention Bella. No, giving him Bella would have been too much: Sympathy for a loss was one thing; the extreme pity for loss of a child quite another. “No, I didn’t think she’d mention the accident. A person’s likely to be a little depressed for a while, after that.”

She gave him back the hammer, the wood slapping against his callused palm, and turned to make the coffee. “You take milk?”

“No, just black. Look, I’m—”

“Ed, it’s really okay. I’m afraid that my daughter’s just a manipulative bitch. I’m only sorry you have to be dealing with her.”

“Oh, hey, no, I’m not going to be dealing with her,” he asserted, although Rae thought his righteousness did not ring entirely true.

“Why not? Report to her how I’m getting on, take her money, we’re all happy. If it isn’t you, she’ll find someone else. Don’t worry about it.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. I’d rather you than some stranger hanging off my shore with a pair of binoculars.”

Normal, all very normal. Who wouldn’t be a little depressed after what the newspapers would call a “tragic accident,” huh, Ed? And so maybe since you didn’t like Tamara Collins all that much anyway, you’ll take what she said with a whole shakerful of salt and say the hell with her and all her talk about Mother’s need for sedation and Mother’s raving about voices and watchers, and you’ll just decide that Mother is actually a nice normal crackpot of a female who just decided to come live on a deserted rock and rebuild a weird shack, for the fun of it. You take Tamara’s money (no, my money, Rae supposed) and don’t bother to keep
quite as close an eye on things as you tell her you’re doing, and we’ll all be happy.

Besides, someone rich enough to own an entire island in the San Juans is bound to be a little flaky anyway.

In any case, the discomfort of talking about Tamara had distracted Ed from the possibility of another attack, and when he finished admiring the unusual handle on her hammer, he stretched out to drop it into its loop—even pointing the head in the right direction, either by intent or by accident.

“So, you build a lot of stuff?” he asked with a dubious glance at the strange-looking object (modernistic sculpture? clothes dryer? alien antenna?) that had so occupied her she hadn’t heard his boat approach. Rae thought she knew the source of his discomfort; it was something she had been dealing with all her adult life, since that first hardware store owner had tried to talk her into a lighter hammer.

“I’m a furniture maker. Tables and desks, storage chests and chairs, sometimes kitchen cabinets if people want a custom job. I specialize in inlay work.”

This last was the deliberate addition she used to nudge people away from the mental image of badly designed coffee tables with uneven legs and into the realm of the true craftsman. People who knew their stuff would at this point ask her name, and recognize it. Others like Ed would not know her from Joan of Arc, but would nonetheless grant her the aura of Artist. Ed was nodding wisely.

“We got a lot of people up here who paint, do pottery, that kind of stuff. Guy on Lopez, sells his pots in Seattle for three, four hundred dollars each.”

Rae did not tell Ed that her small pieces went for five figures in New York and Los Angeles, and figured that he wouldn’t be too impressed that one of her more experimental armoires was owned by MOMA, but he seemed happier now that he could think of her as one of those artistic types. Artistic tendencies explained a lot—even, it would appear, threatening your deliveryman with a hammer.

“Another coffee, Ed?”

“Oh no, thanks, Mizz Newborn.”

“Mr. De la Torre, anyone who nearly gets clobbered by a woman’s hammer and still agrees to carry away her dirty laundry ought to be able to call her by her first name. It’s Rae.”

He ducked his head in embarrassment—not just, it seemed, at the indelicate subject of dirty underwear. “Yeah, it’s funny. I first heard your name in the boathouse … short hair and heavy coat and all—it was kind of confusing when your daughter called you ‘Mother.’ Wasn’t till you spooked when I came up behind you just now that I was sure you weren’t some kind of trans—whatever. You know, like you read about. Always thought it must be confusing for their families, and … Well, anyway. Next time I’ll toot the horn,” he said, wrenching the subject violently back to the very beginning of their conversation. “Good thing you didn’t happen to have a shotgun leaning against the tree. I’d have sure got a surprise then, wouldn’t I?”

Rae had been under the strong impression that a move on her part, back under the madrone, and he would have gone for her throat, but she assured him that she rarely blew away her delivery boys, and went to help him unload the rest of her provisions from the
Orca Queen
, then cast off his line from her ramshackle floating dock. As the engine caught in a cloud of blue smoke and he turned for open water, she thought about his words, and it dawned on her, with some amazement, that never once had she envisioned the old wood-handled revolver as a weapon of defense.

Rae Newborn’s Letter
to Dr. Roberta Hunt

April 6

Dear
Dr. Hunter
Dr. H
,

I know you will be wondering how your client on the island is
holding out
coming along, and I wanted to
reassure
let you know
that all is well that I’m doing well
that the experience is proving

April 7

Dear Dr. H
,

Well, still alive here on

April 8

Dear Dr. H
,

My boatman comes in two days and

April 10

Dear Roberta
,

You being the good and caring therapist you are, I have no doubt that your mind has followed me north any number of times over the last month, wondering, wondering. Having been here on the island for ten days now, I can say that I believe it will prove in the end to have been the right decision.