Folly (20 page)

The gun, like the man behind it, was huge and steady and utterly terrifying: the dream’s nightmare phase. “Drop it!” the man barked.

“Wha—?” Rae looked down at her left hand and saw that she had come out of the tent carrying her own weapon. “It isn’t loaded,” she told the man in the tan uniform, holding the gun away from her body by the tips of her fingers as if to repudiate its very existence.

“Place it on the ground, Ms. Newborn. Now.”

Rae started to obey, then hesitated. “Would you mind if I put it on the table instead? Sand is really hard on the works.”

By all rights, the man should have bellowed at her for instant obedience. Instead, after a hesitation of his own, Rae’s intruder nodded; in a way it was even more daunting than shouting would have been. “On the table, then. Move slowly. Now, come away from it, and keep your hands out from your sides. Okay, now turn around.”

Footsteps approached behind Rae’s back, and she braced herself against the inevitable rush of fear, but the man’s hands as he patted her down were brisk and surprisingly gentle. “Okay,” he said, which she took for permission to turn around. She watched as the man backed toward the cook table, his gun still out although it was pointing at the ground between them. He picked up Rae’s wood-handled revolver, spun its chamber to check that it was indeed empty, glanced at it more closely, and laid it down.

“Nice weapon,” he said. His gruff voice gave no hint of his thoughts; he might have been about to arrest her, or to invite her for tea. “Looks antique.”

“It was my grandfather’s,” Rae told him. She felt awake, but the conversation was doing nothing to convince her of that. “I was… about to clean it last night, and I fell asleep. Sorry to come out waving it around, I forgot I had it in my hand.” In the real world, the uniformed man would now ask if she had a permit, and when she didn’t, the gun would be confiscated. But he did not ask about permits. Instead he studied her for a minute, then gestured across the clearing at her workbench.

“The table’s new. You build it?”

“Yes, last week. I needed a place to work on.” Had she broken some mysterious San Juan law? Did she need a permit for gathering driftwood, like she did for shellfish?

“Pretty fancy workbench. Looks good there, though. I take it you are Rae Newborn?”

The sheriff looked at the tall, strongly built woman a little older than himself, the lines of great strain alongside her generous mouth and the round red blotch on one cheek the same dimensions as the button on her cuff. There was intelligence in that face, and bravery despite the circumstances of the day and what he knew of her past. She looked at him evenly.

“Yes, I’m Rae Newborn.”

The big man seemed to come to a decision. He slid his considerably sleeker, flatter gun into its holster and snapped the strap over it. “I’m Jerry Carmichael, San Juan County sheriff. Welcome to the San Juans.”

“Thank you,” Rae managed.

“This is Nicola Walls,” Carmichael then told her, taking a step back to clear her view of the woman and child, who had moved apart and were now standing side by side, paler than ever and looking a little shaky at having been greeted by a gun. The child’s face was pressed against his mother’s waist, and her right arm was draped in loose protection around his shoulders. “Nikki’s with the Parks Department,” the sheriff said.

Not a wife; a girlfriend, perhaps, in spite of the age difference—the woman’s early thirties to his late forties.

“Morning,” Rae said to Nikki Walls. The child peered one eye around his mother’s jacket. Nikki bent to say something to him, and after a minute, he nodded and consented to being led forward, clinging to his mother’s hand. He appeared to be about five, though small for his age, and Rae was already bracing herself against the first time he called the woman “Mommy.” When they had worked their way up to the campsite, Nikki extricated her hand from her son’s and held it out to Rae. It was
warm and slightly sticky, not much larger than a child’s hand itself, and Rae had to fight an urge to wipe this tactile memory of childhood from her skin. Her mind gave up trying to suggest this was an elaborate hallucination: The touch of Nikki’s child-warmed hand was real.

“Rae Newborn,” she forced out.

“I know,” Nikki surprised her by saying. “When Jerry told me he was coming out here I asked if I could tag along and meet you.”

Good heavens
, thought Rae;
who’d have expected a woodworking fan out here?

“This is my son Caleb,” the young woman continued. “Caleb, say hi to Ms. Newborn.”

The boy’s hand was clenched into the hem of Nikki’s coat, his face turned away.

“Good to meet you, Caleb,” Rae told the side of his head.

Mother and child were extraordinarily beautiful, but not by any conventional standard. Theirs was the beauty of a giraffe crossing a plain, or a flamingo wading through a marsh, or an alien on an otherworldly terrain: Human measurements of loveliness seemed inappropriate, somehow. The jeans they both wore and the red knee-high boots the child had on looked as unlikely as hats on a pair of kittens. They were too ethereal to be mere mortals, with pale red curls, delicate bones, and white freckled skin: like something out of an Irish folktale, perhaps, wood nymphs and sprites. The child’s thick frizz of hair stood out in finger-length red dreadlocks; the mother’s had been gathered into a pair of tight French braids along the side of her head that ended in a snug bun at her neck, which was probably the only way she could keep the curls under control. Despite the troubling handshake, Rae felt a vague desire to touch the two, to reassure herself that they were corporeal and not some trailing remnant of her fitful sleep. She caught the impulse, and pulled herself up sharply.

“Coffee,” she stated, and went to make it.

“I should apologize for disturbing you so early, Ms. Newborn,” the sheriff said. “Ed De la Torre told Nikki that you were usually up with the sun, so we thought it’d be okay. Even though the sun isn’t exactly up.”

“It’s fine. I am usually awake at dawn, but I had a sort of disturbed night, and I seem to have slept in. I would’ve been awake as soon as the blue jays started up, so don’t worry about it.”

The detached and unreal sensation persisted; coffee would help, she told herself. Strong coffee. She dumped in another large spoonful. And
food: Was there anything to eat in her pantry? By Sundays her fresh food was generally gone, although she still had five eggs and plenty of butter.

“Have you had breakfast?” she asked her as-yet-unexplained guests.

“We brought a picnic,” Sheriff Carmichael replied, which was both a relief and a further source of confusion. Did people in the San Juans habitually drop in on each other, food in hand? Somehow, learning the habits of a new community had not entered in during her planning.

“Caleb,” the sheriff said. “You remember where you put that big bag?” The boy nodded. “Think you can get in and out of the boat all on your own, to fetch it?”

Before Nikki could protest, her son shot off down the hill and onto the promontory. All three adults watched the small figure dart across the floating dock and clamber over the side of the sheriff’s launch. A drift of fog threatened to vanish the child, boat and all, back into the netherworld from which he had come, but after a minute, the luminous head reappeared on deck above a bag so tall his arms could barely contain it; Rae could see the cause of maternal concern. Caleb sidled up to the high side and peered down at the dock below. The boat shifted, the dock was unsteady; the bag was large, the boy small. Nikki drew breath to call out instructions, but the sheriff spoke up quietly.

“See if he can figure it out,” he told her. Rae wondered at the undercurrents of that mild command, which bore the marks of a long, close relationship. It was not quite that of an older brother bossing his sister around, neither was it that of a husband. The nearest Rae could place it was that of a divorced couple who remained very close, or that of an uncle who had helped his niece grow up and was now doing the same for her son.

“He’ll drop the bag in the water,” Nikki protested, although Rae did not think it was the bag that worried her.

“So we’ll have soggy croissants.”

Now it was Rae’s turn to stifle a protest. Fresh croissants, in the water?

But the child had it now. He rested the bag on the edge of the boat, stretched up to grab the bag’s top edge, and let it swing down onto the wood. The balance was precarious and Rae braced herself for the splash, but Caleb saw the danger and, leaning farther out over the side, swung the bag securely away from the gap and let it go. He then climbed back up and over the side, gathered up their breakfast, and marched proudly up the dock and the rocky spit to the waiting adults.

Rae pushed down the filter plunger on the coffeemaker, aware that
two years ago, if confronted with a shy child, she would have suggested he push the plunger for her. Now she made no effort to bring Caleb out of himself. When she had produced the other chair and distributed plates, she asked Nikki what her son wanted to drink instead of addressing the child directly. She talked, in fact, mostly to the sheriff, avoiding those two glowing heads as much as possible.

“You settling in okay?” the sheriff asked her.

“I guess.” “Settled” was not the word for the last eighteen hours, but a full explanation was too daunting a prospect. She gave him an artificially wide smile. “It took some time to get used to the night noises, but I’ve gradually sorted out the raccoons from the deer from the mice, and they don’t keep me awake now.” A blatant lie, but he couldn’t know that. Or could he? Those steady brown eyes in that sun-darkened face seemed to see a great deal. “Coffee?”

The croissants were gorgeous, flaky outside and chewy within. There were also three kinds of muffin, a big plastic container of fruit salad, some tubs of flavored yogurt, and another plastic box of still-warm spicy link sausages. When the time came to toss wrappers into the fire pit and rinse out the cups, Rae found that she had eaten three of the croissants as well as half a dozen sausages and a blueberry muffin the size of a soft-ball. Combined with her share of two pots of coffee, her eyelids were so wide open now the lashes might have been glued to the lids.

She also found that, while she was devouring all that food, she had without realizing it been the object of a subtle bit of questioning on the part of the sheriff, who now knew rather more about her and her family than she thought necessary, particularly with the ranger and her son listening in. She poured steaming water over the mugs and knives in the dishpan, put the kettle back on the fire, and sat down to confront the sheriff.

“So tell me, do you normally come out and break bread with every newcomer to the islands?”

Sheriff Carmichael turned slightly in his chair. “Nikki? Maybe you and Caleb …”

Nikki reluctantly got to her feet and addressed her son. “Caleb, let’s go down and see how many crabs we can count on Ms. Newborn’s beach.”

The sheriff’s eyes lingered on their retreating backs, and when they were out of earshot, he turned back to Rae and drew a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his shirt. He unfolded it, and got up to hand it to her.

“Does this man look familiar to you?”

It was a faxed photograph of a square-jawed, wide-necked man with close-cropped blond hair and a curl to his lip as he stared down the camera.

“He looks like a Nazi,” she said.

“That’s what I thought. But do you know him?”

“He doesn’t look familiar. Is this another mug shot from Sheriff Escobar? This one’s even further from the description than the one your deputy brought out the first week I was here.”

“Escobar told me he didn’t think this was the guy, but he asked me to bring it out anyway, see if it rang any bells.”

“I see. No, it wasn’t this guy.” She glanced up. “He told you I’d been…”

“Attacked, yes. The general outline, not the details.”

“Well, this isn’t one of them. One of them was blond, but a darker color than this. And his neck wasn’t as thick. This guy looks like a weight lifter.” If she had been attacked by this muscular Nazi, Rae was thinking, she might well not be here to look at his picture. She handed the photo back, and Carmichael fed it into the fire.

“It was a long shot. They picked the guy up for a similar assault; Escobar thought it was worth a try.”

“Sorry.”

“He said I should tell you they are still working on it.”

“I can see that.”
Probably the main reason he had Carmichael trudge out here, to let me know he’s working hard.

“You want to tell me what’s happening out here?” he asked, his voice and expression unchanged. Rae assumed he was talking about the mug shot.

“You said he told you about—”

“I mean here, on Folly. You obviously had a bad night, you fell asleep with a gun in your hand, and you’re jumpy as all get-out. I
am
the sheriff here, after all. If you’re having a problem, I’d like to know about it.” And if she was about to go nuts and start shooting at night noises, he’d need to know that as well, she thought. Still, it was nice of him to put it as concern
for
her rather than
about her.
Who knew—it might even be true.

Where, however, to start?

“Before you begin,” he said, “you should know that your sheriff gave me a certain amount of background. I know that you were in a bad accident and lost your family, spent some time in the hospital, and then no sooner did you get out than two men attacked you. You spent the next eleven months in a psychiatric hospital. Escobar told me that because I
had to know, but maybe I should make it clear that as far as he’s concerned, that hospitalization wasn’t that out of the ordinary, considering what happened to you. He’s really glad you’re doing better.

“I’m only telling you all this so you realize that neither of us hold anything against you. I grew up with a cousin who developed schizophrenia in his late teens, so I’ve seen at first hand the stigma attached to mental illness. So that’s not part of the picture. Now please, what is going on here that you’re not happy about?”