Folly (35 page)

With absolutely no experience in the habits of a body in dissolution, Rae could not be certain what the relative position of the various limbs meant, but if she imagined it as a melted ice sculpture, it appeared as if the figure before her had expired in a somewhat slumped position, its— his—head resting against a slope to his right, his right leg slightly drawn up, his left leg outstretched. The bones of the left arm had slid out of the sleeve onto the ground, but the right sleeve remained folded against the body, its cuff tucked inside the remnants of the shirtfront.

Along with the bones of the right hand, she saw when she shone the flashlight down into the jumble of ribs and vertebrae.

The bones inside the shirt (and Rae couldn’t help wondering if this little exploration was going to give her nightmares) were cleaner, more protected from dust. Taking the edge of the shirt between her fingernails, she drew the fabric back, casting the powerful beam in among the bones to study what lay beneath: curving ribs, the knobs of the spinal column, flat pelvic bones, a lot of leathery scraps she didn’t care to think about, and sprinkled among them the small bumpy bones of the disintegrated right hand. And among these, an unnaturally smooth shape little larger than a pencil eraser. She wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been looking for it. Rae screwed up her face, which was inches from Desmond’s leather-draped skull (he’d had good teeth, she noted), and gingerly snaked two fingers in behind the waist of his trousers to retrieve the object.

A bullet. And not a smashed leaden blob as the others had been, but a clean, only slightly misshapen bullet. She put it in her chest pocket and buttoned the flap over it. She started to withdraw, but when her light came up, it illuminated an unexpected bulge on the back of the left shoulder blade. A second bullet, but this one had once been nearly the size of her little finger, though it was now flattened and half buried in the bone. At the thought of prying it out, her nerve finally failed, and she sat back to catch her breath; after perhaps five seconds she leaned forward again, to look more closely at the shapeless wad of metal. The bone around the bullet showed clear fracture lines, but no movement. The shoulder blade had cracked, but not fallen apart.

No, she corrected herself: The bone had fallen apart, and had then regrown, trapping the bullet in place.

She was looking at the work of a German sniper, whose shot had gone through Desmond’s shoulder and smashed the bone a decade before the smaller bullet that had killed him.

Enough—she couldn’t face any more. She had what she came for, the bullet and the metal box, and she moved to pick up the lamp and go. At the mouth of the side cave, however, one last oddity niggled its way into her mind: the weight of the dusty shirtfront as she had pulled it back. She took up the flashlight again, straightened out the fold of the shirt-front, and saw in the breast pocket the edge of a small leather-bound book the size of her grandmother’s New Testament, barely larger than her palm. She eased it out, letting the neck of the shirt fall back across the pocket, and glanced at the pages. It took a split second to realize it was not a Bible: The pages were covered with handwriting.

A diary.

Without hesitation, Rae flipped through to the final entry, twenty pages or so in from the end. There, on the twelfth of September, 1927, Desmond had written a brief entry.

My brother comes tomorrow, to talk me out of my folly. Let him try. Although I freely admit, to myself if none other, that the thought of seeing his face fills me with a terrible dread.

Letter from Rae
to Her Lawyer

May 25

Dear Pam
,

You’re going to think I’ve well and truly lost my mind this time. All I can say is, I wish it were that simple.

I want you to find a private investigator who has access to a forensic lab, and give him the enclosed packet. Do not open the packet. Do not report any of this to the police, do not let the lab report this— I swear to you it would only get them excited for no purpose. Ill explain it all once I know what it means. Please, trust me.

I need the lab to give me a complete analysis on the five objects I am sending, comparing them for similarities and differences. I want to know absolutely everything about each one, and I don’t care what it costs.

I may be returning to civilization for a few days; if so, I’ll phone and let you know where I am.

Sorry for the mystery. I’ll explain when we talk. Promise.

Rae

Rae was up that night until well after three o’clock, straining her eyes to finish Desmond Newborn’s diary; the hoot of Ed De la Torre’s horn before eight the next morning caught her still in her sleeping bag. She threw on some clothes, doused her face with cold water, and made coffee, drinking it with her mind far removed from Ed’s informative philosophic monologue. Eventually, he tired of her unresponsiveness, and stood to go. Rae hastily got to her own feet.

“Can you wait for just a minute, Ed? I need you to mail something urgent for me.” Without waiting for his response, she ducked inside the tent, took the note she had written to Pamela Church, and packaged it up with the five separately wrapped and numbered lumps of lead. She filled out the mailing label and sealed it, then took it and the letter to Jerry Carmichael and handed them to Ed. He seemed less than thrilled about having anything to do with the sheriff’s office, but made up for it in his hearty reassurances that the overnight package to the lawyer would make it into the box for the afternoon pickup.

When he left, Rae was tempted to climb back into her bed, but she had things to do before the machinery of the law began to turn and deposited Jerry Carmichael on her shore. She heated water and showered, tidied her tent and the space around it (which looked more than ever like a gypsy camp, with 2×4s propping up the sagging blue tarpaulin and various branches of the fallen cedar turned into pan hooks and drying racks), then slid the things she did not want anyone to see into
the bottom of her knapsack and piled clothes, shoes, and a toilet kit on top. Her locked trunk was all well and good, but some things she needed to keep with her.

When the sheriff arrived, she was ready. More than ready: She was, for what felt like the first time in her life, impatient, eager to move. Her campsite was spotless, every fire-blackened pan was gleaming, tent and tarpaulin were snug, the ground looked as if she had swept it. She heard the boat before she could see it, and was waiting on the dock with her knapsack at her feet. At nearly noon, the low tide had long since turned, and there was no hesitation as he came into the cove.

The sheriff was alone.

“Nikki’s bringing the others” were his first words to her. “We’ve got a woman from the university flying in later, to look at the bones, as she said, ‘in situ.’ This is all going to be very disruptive for you.” He looked at her with a mingled apology and question in his face.

“Actually,” she told him, “I was thinking I might just use this as an excuse to go over to Friday Harbor for a day or so. If I can trust your guys to keep an eye on the place, so the passing tourists don’t walk away with all my things.”

He looked surprised, and it occurred to her that he had been preparing an argument to persuade her to leave the island, for a few hours at any rate. But she knew full well how disruptive this was going to be, and wanted no part of it—besides which, she did actually have business on San Juan Island. If nothing else, between her hard labor and Ed’s commercial laundry (both of which appeared to involve pounding clothes on rocks) she was running short of things to wear.

She led him up to the house, where she had left both flashlight and kerosene lamp, and then back along the gap between rock wall and stone fireplace to the cave entrance. “He’s in there,” she said, pointing at the hole. “Do you want me to show you?”

“Is there anything tricky about finding him?”

“Not at all. He’s just sitting there.”

“Then if you could just wait here for a minute, I’ll check it and be right back.”

Carmichael looked too large to get through the entrance, but he did not get stuck, merely wriggled his shoulders a few times before his feet were disappearing. She followed the sound of his passage, heard him pause as he spotted the bones, then he turned and came back out.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve seen a lot of things in this job, but never anything like that. It looks like a movie set. Spooky.”

Rae thought it an interesting reaction: She didn’t think the bones spooky, just sad.

“I’ve got a generator and spotlights,” he said, and Rae made a face at the thought of the racket. Yes, far better to retreat, not to witness the invasion.

“Is there someone who could run me over to Friday Harbor?” she asked. “Or if you could radio to Ed and have him come pick me up.”

“Do you mind waiting for Nikki?”

Rae did, but didn’t tell him that. However, she also did not help him unload all the equipment he would use to illuminate and record the bones before their removal. She went into her tent and took up a book, turning her back on the entire proceedings. When the other boat arrived, she presented herself promptly to the ranger.

“Can I just go see the cave?” Nikki pleaded. Rae did not trust herself to speak, just nodded and retreated into the tent.

Nikki was back inside of ten minutes. Rae was wearing the good khaki pants that she had preserved, a cleanish T-shirt, and city shoes. She picked up her green knapsack.

“Shall we go?”

“Jerry says he’ll need you to make a statement, when things settle down a little. I saw where you found that wine, by the way.” She arched an eyebrow at Rae, to chide Rae for her lie, but Rae refused to be penitent.

“And if any bottles are missing, or if anything in the tent is disturbed without a warrant, my lawyer will raise holy hell.” Rae held the younger woman’s eyes to make it clear that half a dozen friendly visits did not mean a friendship without limits, ignored the hurt look that came over the ranger’s face, and turned to zip the door all the way around, then tie down the flap. Head down, ears shut against the cacophony of the generator, she followed Nikki to the boat and sat down, leaving the ranger to cast off. She heard Nikki talking on a radio, no doubt conveying Rae’s threat of legal wrath descending on the county, and then they were in open water.

Rae was far enough from Nikki to make speech difficult; neither of them said anything. After a while Nikki pointed out a splash and a fin a mile or so away and shouted at Rae that it was a minke whale. Rae nodded, and that was all.

You can’t hide, you can’t ignore.

Maybe not. But as far as Rae was concerned, beyond a certain point the continual picking open of wounds was torture for its own sake, pointless and even hindering to healing. There were times when a person had to hide; there were things it was best to ignore. She had stopped arguing with the professionals about it, since it just worried them and, in a hospital situation, a worried psychiatrist made for a hefty barrier between patient and outer world. Still, she had long ago come to the conclusion that sometimes, things actually did go away—or rather, a person could cover enough ground to leave the problem behind, and when it did catch up again it was apt to be weakened by the journey. Sometimes, pretending things—bravery, wholeness, humor—made them so.

Right now, she was content to close off the image of what was happening on Folly. She would not think about the violation of her privacy, not picture what they would do with Desmond Newborn, not even think about the old, stained leather diary with the brittle pages that lay in her knapsack. She would instead reduce herself to a small and intense point of focus, pretend this was an outing she had chosen; she would take care of the tasks she had set herself, then she would go back to Folly in the serenity of her chosen ignorance, to take up her hammer anew.

Her resolve was shaken when Friday Harbor appeared through the boat’s windshield. A forest of masts grew from the water, behind it a far more bustling town than she remembered. A ferry horn blared massively, and Rae twitched. Nikki glanced over at her, then returned to her task of threading the boat through traffic.