Folly (33 page)

Well, she told herself, at least she no longer had to feel haunted by the vision of poor Great-uncle Desmond lying in an unmarked and cactus-covered grave in Arizona.

But what the hell had happened to the man?

For the first time since moving to the island, Rae wished she had a phone. A seventy-year-old skeleton hardly seemed to justify emergency flares shot into the sky, but she knew that even a skeleton long stripped and dry had to require some kind of official treatment. Maybe not paramedics and one of those black, zippered body bags so beloved of television programs, but surely somebody with a truly authoritative clipboard and maybe a video camera would want to come out and put the bones in a box, to send them off to a nice sterile lab somewhere to be poked about and stared at for a while.

She looked up at her waiting house and thought,
This might be as good a time as any to break for lunch.
She dug out a can of tuna and made herself a couple of sandwiches, and took herself down to the water for a while to think.

What she found herself thinking was
Myself, I’d hate to end up in a nice sterile lab somewhere.

After a while, Rae forced herself back up to the building site to work on the walls. It wasn’t as hard as she anticipated. She cut and nailed studs, laying headers over the window and door holes, waiting for the symptoms of added stress—the jumpiness and sudden shortness of breath, the shadowy hearing and seeing of things that were not there, the brutal dive of a panic attack swooping out of the blue—but they all failed to arrive. Twitchy, yes, and she did keep a very close eye on the wall beside the fireplace, but her breath, once it had returned to normal, remained there; the breeze through the fragrant blossoms of the madrone was just the sky’s breath; the constant gentle motion of the wavelets remained a reassuring tempo and not a continual corner-of-the-eye threat.

She got through the rest of the day; she ate her evening meal; she slept—not a lot, and the gentle rainfall that started around midnight brought disturbing possibilities of restless skeletons outside the canvas walls, but in fact her sleeplessness was due more to the intensity of her contemplation than to any real fear. The more she thought it over, the
less she liked the idea of just turning over Desmond Newborn’s mortal remains to the unheeding hands of the law, to be bundled up willy-nilly into a box. She was quite certain they would not allow her to just leave him where he was; nor was she sure she would want that, if for no other reason than he would always be in the back of her mind, unfinished business, an unrecognized death. Even the long-imagined unmarked grave in an arid cemetery would have been recognition that someone, however nameless, had passed on. She could perhaps ask that the bones be brought back here for a proper burial—or was there some law about consecrated ground? If so, she would have what was left of him cremated, and bring his ashes back to the island to join those of Alan and Bella. In either case, she couldn’t help thinking it a jarring way to treat the old gent, jerked from his peaceful rest like that.

No, she would not leave him in his natural tomb; she would send word to Jerry Carmichael and allow the law to have its way with Desmond. First, however, she would go to him herself, and break it to him gently.

It would not, after all, be the first conversation she’d had with the dead.

The rain cleared by mid-morning. When the sun was as close to upright in the sky as it would get and the shadows behind the house were at their narrowest, Rae took up the smaller of her two kerosene lamps, along with a set of spare batteries and a bulb for the flashlight, and returned to the cave. The heap of thrown-about dirt behind the house was muddy; the plants were wilted; the hole was still there.

When her upper body was just inside the cave’s narrow entrance, Rae became aware of the silly urge to clear her throat, as if warning someone of her approach. She eased forward until she could reach the flashlight, which had rolled against the cave wall, and pulled it apart to replace its batteries. The bulb, she was pleased to find, had not broken in the fall. Her hands were remarkably steady. She shoved the flashlight into the back pocket of her pants and lit the lamp, turned the shield so it cast its light in front, then worked her way down the tunnel until she reached the small side cave where Desmond Newborn’s remains lay. There she turned the lamp around to illuminate the space.

And let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding; he was still there. God only knew what her reaction would have been if he’d been missing, she reflected a touch wildly, and then made herself settle back
against the wall to face the bones of the man who had made his home on Folly.

“I love your house, Uncle Desmond,” she told him.

Her voice rang oddly flat in the cave, and Rae abruptly felt ridiculous sitting and talking to a pile of bones and rags. Respect for the dead was one thing, but if Great-uncle Desmond was anything like the man she had come to imagine, he would either break down laughing or walk away in disgust.

What could she say to him?
Desmond, I’ve imagined meeting you ever since I was nine years old, when I found your medal in Grandfathers drawer? Desmond, fellow wounded black sheep, you helped me survive my childhood, you were my guide through some very dark days?
What could she say to him that he did not know?

So instead of talking to the shade, Rae simply sat with him for a while.

Then she got back to her knees and, scooting the lamp before her, went to examine the rest of his tomb.

The cave’s narrow opening grew wider and taller, until finally she could stand, if cautiously. She did not know what to expect of Desmond’s cave, although she would not have been surprised to find crates of smuggled goods—rum, or bathtub gin perhaps, it having been Prohibition when he died. Actually, she halfway thought she might find some hidden treasure or other, and was disappointed when the cave opened up to reveal nothing but a set of nearly empty shelves.

The main cavern was a lopsided egg perhaps fifteen feet long and ten wide, with a drip down the back wall falling from a calcified point into a pool of water no larger than a soup bowl. The back wall had crumbled and slumped any number of times over the years; short of attacking it with pick and shovel, Rae could not tell if the debris concealed another low passage leading farther into the depths of the hill. From the looks of the rock, she doubted there had been a further cave; certainly not in the last hundred years.

This room had been used by Desmond for storage, possibly while he was building the house, but little remained. Even the shelves he’d built were so rotten that she hesitated to touch them. A crate of wine bottles rested on its side on the cave floor, the bottle necks too thick with dust for her to guess at any contents. Half a dozen canning jars sat on one shelf, equally obscured by dust and the rust that bubbled out from their
lids, and with them a few odds and ends—a trowel missing a handle, some antique seed packets, a pile of rusted-together chain. And, a rectangular object slightly larger than a cigar box.

She reached for the box. Although metal, it was light enough to be empty, except that something inside shifted. Where it had lain there was now a sharply defined rectangle of startlingly bare wood, and she nearly put it back in place, thinking of the accusing questions of the officials who would come here to collect Desmond’s bones. But this was her land, was it not? Why shouldn’t she take her relative’s strongbox with her? Defiantly, she picked up one of the wine bottles as well, brushing against the lower shelf as she did so; the shelves teetered and nearly collapsed.
That would take care of any accusing mark in the dust
, she thought, but instead of giving them a firm push, she settled for moving the seed packets and dead tools around a bit to confuse matters, then blowing gently against the top of the strongbox to transfer its dust back in the direction of the shelf. The outline was obscured: good enough. Tucking the box under her arm and picking up the bottle and the lamp, she turned to make her way back to the cave opening, then froze.

She stepped away from the wall, holding the lamp up so it cast a more oblique light; no, it was no mistake: There was a petroglyph carved into the wall of the cave, an arching shape with swirls across its body and a high, proud dorsal fin. She traced the orca’s outline with a reverent finger, then turned her lamp attentively to the walls as she made her way back down the lowering passage, but it had no companions.

Rae paused at the opening to the side cave that held Desmond’s sad and dusty remains. She tried to think of something to say that was neither inappropriate nor embarrassing, and failed, so she crawled on toward the circle of light with her booty.

The narrow opening was an awkward space to work through. Rae let the wine bottle and the strongbox slide down gently into the dirt outside, leaving the flashlight and lamp, both of them shut down, in the cave behind her feet. She squirmed out of the opening, more or less falling forward into the soft soil outside, soft soil that hid something hard and viciously sharp.

“Shit!” she yelped, continuing her fall until she fetched up on her back against the black stones of the fireplace, grasped her right hand, and saw the line of red well up from the brown crust of mud. “Damn.” She struggled to her feet, reached for the neck of the wine bottle with her left
hand, and went rigid at the sound of a familiar voice echoing across the rocks: Nikki Walls. “Damn,” she said again, and snatched up the metal box to send it skidding back into the cave, then turned to flounder through the damp mud and beaten vegetation before the friendly busybody of a ranger could find her. Rae did not stop to think why she didn’t want Nikki to see the cave yet; she only knew that she wasn’t ready for it to become public property. So she waded frantically through the mess and ducked between the studs, tracking great clots of muck across the floorboards.

Nikki was halfway up the hill to the house when she was greeted by the sight of what looked like a newly dug-up corpse, covered in dirt from head to toe, hurrying down the stone steps. A newly dug-up corpse with an equally filthy wine bottle in her left hand and a lot of white teeth showing out of a wide-stretched grin.

“Nikki,” said the corpse. “Just the person I needed to see. Did your ranger training include first aid, I hope? ’Cause if not, you’re going to have to sit there and watch me try to put a Band-Aid on with my left hand.” She thrust out a hand that was dripping gore and covered with mud. Nikki took a sharp step back, then turned and followed Rae back down the hill, eyeing her closely all the way.

“Er, Rae? Have you been drinking?”

“Drinking? God, no, why—oh,” Rae said, looking down at the bottle she’d forgotten she was carrying. “No, it’s not even open,” which did not exactly answer Nikki’s question, although the ranger was reassured by Raes usual crisp diction and her unhindered coordination.

They reached the tent, and Rae put the wine bottle down at the side of the folding metal cook center, half concealed behind its legs. She turned to the tent, and stopped, looking down at herself. “Good Lord,” she said, and laughed merrily. “I look like a golem.”

Nikki Walls did not know what the Lord of the Rings had to do with anything, but she decided not to ask, merely held back the tent flap so Rae could maneuver her way through without brushing either dirty body or bloody hand against the canvas. Rae came out a minute later with a large metal first-aid kit.

“I think I’d better clean this off a little before we bandage the cut,” Rae told her apologetically. “Otherwise I’ll just get it wet again.”

“Good idea.” Nikki thought Rae would go over to the shower she’d rigged, a bucket with a shower head attached to it, but instead Folly’s owner pinched up a towel between thumb and forefinger and marched down to the cove. Nikki’s eyebrows went up as she saw the woman bend to unlace her mud-caked boots. Nikki still occasionally took quick dips in the fifty-degree water, but she’d been doing it since she was a kid, and she was half this woman’s age.
This is one tough old lady
, she reflected.

Not so old
, she corrected herself, as Rae’s firm back emerged from shirt and pants. Underwear but no bra, Nikki noted, and then turned away to put on a kettle of water. She couldn’t help glancing back at the cove twice in the next few minutes. The first time she saw Rae calmly floating in the icy water as if she were lying in a hot tub. The second time, checking that the splashing noises meant it was time to pour the water on the coffee grounds, she caught Rae just as she was rising up in the shallow edges of the cove. Nikki’s eyes narrowed at the jagged red marks down the woman’s left arm and chest. She had seen the neat scar on the back of Rae’s forearm where the plate had been implanted, but she hadn’t known the woman had been so torn up as that. She looked as if she’d fallen into a piece of farm equipment.

Rae came back to the campsite, clutching the inadequate towel around her, teeth chattering and gory right hand held out from her side.

“Thanks for putting on the coffee,” she said, and ducked into the tent. When she came out she was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, with a clean rag around her hand. She began to work at the first-aid box, oblivious of Nikki’s stare. After a moment, the ranger went over and took the kit from Rae’s hand.

“Let me.”

The cut was not deep, a slice across the outer side of the thumb’s pad. If they had been closer to town Nikki would have urged stitches, but it was not a cut that justified a boat trip into Friday Harbor, and neither woman suggested it. Nikki bathed the hand with antiseptic, dried it and tugged a trio of butterfly bandages across it, then covered the whole with gauze. The bleeding had nearly stopped already.

“How did you do it?” she asked, repacking the kit.

“Fell,” Rae said. “Onto dirt that must’ve had a piece of glass in it. It’s nothing, and I had a tetanus shot before I came out here.”

“You won’t be able to use a hammer for a couple of days,” Nikki advised.

Rae laughed and held out her left hand for Nikki’s examination. Her fingers were a network of scars, small shiny lines of many clean cuts, quickly healed. “Chisels,” she said briefly. Nikki’s eyes flickered a few inches farther up, to the three long, straight scars that crossed the pale skin of Rae’s inner wrist. She said nothing, just got up to pour the coffee.