Folly (31 page)

Nikki halted to stare at her. “Ed showed you his tattoos?”

“That one I saw by accident, more or less. He did show me his arms. They’re amazing.”

Nikki and Jerry Carmichael looked at each other, but Nikki said only, “Ed is kind of like a cat. He doesn’t take to a lot of people.”

“Look,” Rae said abruptly. “Should I be concerned about Ed? I mean, I know he’s a rogue, but can I trust him?”

“Oh sure,” Nikki answered immediately, as if the idea of Ed De la Torre being cause for worry was laughable.

Jerry Carmichael, though, took his time in responding. “I’d say Ed has a sharp eye for the quick buck, but he has his own sense of morality. He might sell a little marijuana to his friends, maybe a few mushrooms, but he’d draw the line at anything harder. And he’d never steal from a friend, although it’s not always easy to tell if you’re a true friend or just someone he’s setting up. ‘Rogue’ is a good word for him. But if you’re talking about violence, to my knowledge he’s only aggressive when he’s been drinking. And he’s been off the bottle for years. The one thing I would say you ought to watch for is, he’s got a reputation with single women. Especially women over forty.”

“But only consensual,” Nikki hastened to add.

“That’s true. I’ve never heard a whisper of Ed’s forcing himself on anyone. Seduction, that’s Ed’s game.”

The smile Jerry Carmichael gave Rae had more than a trace of the seductive itself. It startled her, until he then turned it on Nikki as well. Ranger and sheriff climbed onto the boat and cast off. As Jerry steered toward the open water, Nikki leaned into him to say something over the noise of the boat. Rae watched carefully, but she could tell no more about the nature of their relationship from that piece of body language than she had learned from seeing them together. There was depth there, that much was obvious, but in what direction was impossible to tell.

She shook herself. It was none of her business. Jerry Carmichael was not her concern.
So it was that more than a week after trimming the boards from her sub-floor, interrupted by water systems, No Trespassing signs, and visits from her community, Rae was free to return to the actual work of raising her house. First, though, she washed the breakfast dishes and pulled on her swimsuit for a brief (a very brief) dip in the frigid cove. Finally, she strapped on her tool belt and resumed her proper labor.

With the floor in place, Rae could now reach the first section of stonework without risking her neck on a ladder set on uneven ground. She filled a bucket from the end of the hose beside the house, spread out a plastic tarp to save the floorboards from a drenching, and set to with a heavy brush and soapsuds.

Desmond’s fireplace and towers had been built out of water-rounded stones ranging from fist-sized in the fireplace to watermelon-sized in the towers. The effort he had gone to was enormous, boggling to contemplate. Furthermore, as the day went on and the stones emerged from their thick layer of moss and char, it became apparent that Desmond had chosen them for more than size.

At first Rae thought that she would never rescue the stones from their patina, that all the elbow grease and harsh cleansers in the world would never make the fireplace stones anything but black. Then, standing critically back from the fireplace to evaluate her progress, she realized that although the stones themselves were indeed unremittingly dark, the mortar between them was not. As an experiment, she took her bucket and brush over to the adjoining tower, and quickly discovered that the rocks there were considerably lighter. Desmond had selected his stones from the beach below (and, very probably, from a lot of other beaches as well) with an eye to their color. The fireplace was black, the wet stones as glossy as if they had a layer of wet ink over them, but the tower was, for lack of a better word, orange. Translucent agates the size of a teapot, iron-rich metamorphic boulders, mottled sandstone with infinitesimal seashells embedded in it, all of them in shades ranging from yellow to pale brick, giving the overall impression of a warm, glowing orange. New, and in the full sunlight, it must have been an extraordinary sight.

Unable to resist, she crossed the platform to the other tower, scrubbed for a few minutes, and found there not orange, but greens and even blues. She had never seen anything like it.

“Uncle Desmond,” she said aloud, “you’re a wonder.”

She dove back into the work with renewed vigor, scrubbing at the stones, gouging away at the engrimed mortar, starting at the floor and working her way up.

Late that night she finished the rough scrub of the first dozen feet of the fireplace. She stood across the bare platform where the door would be, trying to imagine coming into a room with that at the end of it. It rose like a living thing, primitive and massive and at the same time sophisticated, with faint traces of pale gray threads here and there in the darkness of the stone that echoed the web of the mortar. She would, she decided, replace all the visible mortar in a dark gray color very like the present stained tone. And to the left she would build a storage wall, more Japanese than Shaker in its simple elegance, of some slightly cool wood, birch perhaps, or spalted maple, to repeat the dark lines, formal against the rising tower of stone, with the least touch of ebony inlay to tie the two shapes together.

Yes; oh yes.

The next day, Rae found the bullets.

She was on the stepladder, scrubbing patiently at an especially ragged bit of mortar when a chunk of the stuff the size of her thumb came away in her hand. She fumbled and caught it, turned it over curiously to see why this particular bit had proven more unstable than the rest, and found embedded in its base an odd gray lump.

Her first thought was that a stone had slipped past Desmond’s screen when he had prepared the sand for the cement. She pulled off her thick rubber gloves and picked the lump out with a thumbnail, then frowned at the soft, slightly flat object in the palm of her hand. It was like no stone that she had come across; more like a piece of metal. Had Desmond perhaps driven a nail between the stones to hang something on, and it had melted into a lump with the heat of the fire? How hot would a fire have to be, to do that? And why would that careful workman have bashed a hanger into his nice neat stonework a scant two feet from the ceiling? It was as odd as the pair of holes she had discovered in the smooth inner surface of his front door.

She buttoned the lump into her shirt pocket and went on with her work, thoughtful.

Rae broke off that afternoon while it was still light and tugged on her damp suit for a swim. The water was not warming up much with the weather, but it seemed that a person could grow accustomed to anything, because after half a dozen such dips she no longer felt as if her heart was about to stop every time she submerged. After all, it seemed wasteful to be the owner of a nice clear bay and not make use of it. And Nikki’s books were proving more interesting than she could have anticipated; Rae now knew the names of all the commonest plants and sea creatures around the cove, from Acorn barnacles to Yellowlegs (greater and lesser) and their habits and characteristics. She did not know why it seemed important to know these things, but it did, as if she was learning the names of neighbors and what they did for a living.

She pulled herself out at the dock and picked her way barefoot over to the stove, where she set the big pan of water on to heat for a proper shower. Then she took an old narrow-bladed chisel from her toolbox and the big flashlight from beside the bed, and crossed over to the workbench.

Getting at the underside of the bench through the forest of driftwood legs was no simple matter, but Rae managed to find a slot where she could thread her head in. It was damnably awkward and she only managed to shine the light into one of the holes, but it was enough to confirm that, half an inch beneath the surface of what had once been the inside of Desmond’s front door, not far from the place where the latch had been mounted, there was a spot of gray metal similar to those she’d found in the fireplace. She drew back and, working mostly by touch, gouged and pried at the wood surrounding the holes, only slicing into her fingers two or three times.

The thing seemed to have gone in at an angle, Rae was thinking when something dropped from the wood into the sandy soil. She retrieved it: a gray, misshapen lump a little bigger than a pencil’s eraser. She placed it on the workbench above her head, and went to work on the other hole. It was higher up on the door, buried at a slightly more oblique angle, and its lump proved to be even more completely preserved, with a rounded head and blunt end.

Bullets, all of them.

No doubt about it: Three bullets had gone flying through the air of Desmond’s Folly to lodge in its walls. At least three, she corrected herself, and in two opposite directions.

She set all three lumps on the workbench while she went to bandage
her fingers and make her dinner, but when she glanced over at the three gray objects and noticed how they echoed the three roofing nails that she had driven into the wood, the duplication made her uneasy. She walked across the meadow to retrieve them, and buttoned them into her shirt pocket.

After dinner, over coffee, she lined the three objects up on a tree-stump table and sat back to contemplate them.

Bullets didn’t necessarily have to mean that someone got shot. Maybe Desmond just liked to fire his gun. If Sherlock Holmes had enjoyed blazing away at his living room wall until the queen’s initials were pocked out of the plaster, why not Desmond Newborn? Maybe the man had gotten drunk. Maybe he had an attack of the jitters on Christmas Eve and hallucinated German soldiers coming down the chimney.

On the other hand, she wondered if there was any way of finding out if the three lumps of lead had come from the same gun. It would be something, anyway, to confirm that two different weapons hadn’t blazed across the room at each other. Maybe Jerry Carmichael could submit them to a police lab for her—but surely he would consider it frivolous, a waste of taxpayers’ money.

She wondered, too, how many more such lumps she would find, were she to pick closely through the great pile of unidentified objects the sieve had separated out for her.

Oh come on, Rae
, she chided herself.
Is life so dull you have to manufacture a melodrama, a furious gun battle in a small wooden room?
Still… How long after those bullets hit the wall had the place burned? And how long before Great-uncle Desmond disappeared, fleeing the San Juans for the wilds of Arizona?

For a week, Rae pondered these things. While she finished cleaning and mortaring the stones of the black fireplace, then moved her plastic sheets over to the orange tower and cleaned that, and finally set to work on the blue tower, she turned the implications of the three bullets over and over in her mind. The moon went dark and was reborn. Pleasure boats drifted past. Nikki stopped by to say hello, Ed came and went, leaving behind some heavy tarps and three green plastic water tanks, and Rae said nothing about gun battles to either of them. She was still wondering about the three bullets when she finished with the higher reaches of the stones, cleared away the protective plastic from the floorboards, and carried the last of the wall studs for the first floor up to the site.

On Thursday, Rae framed out the wall to the left of the fireplace, vaguely recalling Desmond’s peculiar doubled supports at the spot. She secured the two-bys with a temporary brace, turned the corner, and fastened down the top plate. That night, she retrieved the problematic chunk of Desmond’s wall from the dump pile and carried it over to the lamp by the fire.

Sill plate along the bottom, upright 2×4 studs, held together by a couple feet of scorched, half-rotten, still-attached siding. For two weeks now she’d been convinced that there was a purpose to Desmond’s doubled studs, that the wall above had been breached by a door or window. She had no way of knowing how wide the opening had been—if there had been a second support, it was not in the eighteen-inch-square segment of Desmond’s wall she possessed.

She turned the problem over in her mind as she lay listening to the noises of the night, the owls and the bats, her resident raccoon, a plane and a ferry and the tide going out. At the tide’s lowest mark, a quiet engine puttered by and, looking at the lightening canvas, Rae decided that it was close enough to dawn to justify rising. She made coffee, drew on her belt, and in the pearly light of a misty dawn walked the beaten path up to the house. She set her mug down on the floorboards in front of the fireplace and went over to the section of wall where Desmond’s doubled support had been, adjacent to the fireplace. There she leaned out between her fresh new studs to look down at the sharp slope of the rock face into which the house was nestled.

There was a lot of soil out there, rock and debris under heavy vegetation, as would be expected when the burning house collapsed, some of it falling outside the foundation. However, there should have been little woodwork on this side, other than the roof overhang, since the chimney and tower together made up more than half the wall—and yet the level of accumulated soil appeared more or less continuous. During the night it had occurred to her that some wooden extension of the house might have rested on the stones behind the fireplace. If so, and considering the location of the doubled 2×4, Desmond’s framed hole might well have been for access to a wood box, a place to store firewood that was convenient to the fireplace and avoided the debris inevitably left behind when wood is carried through living quarters. And although getting at such a woodbin from the outside and filling it with logs would be a job—one that in her opinion would benefit from climbing ropes to help
the householder work his or her way around the steep west wall—the idea might be worth adapting with, say, an exterior set of steps.

Rae eased herself out between her studs and onto the treacherous surface of the rock face. She had not cleared any of the debris here, since her policy was to create a secure footing before venturing into hazard. This was the closest she had been to danger her entire time on the island, and she was all too aware that if she fell, Ed would not find her for four days.