Folly (36 page)

“It’s really a pretty quiet little town,” she said reassuringly. “And I called my aunt, who has a small inn a couple of miles outside town, and she says she has a room free for tonight. If you like it, that is.”

No town was quiet, compared with Folly, Rae thought, but she told Nikki that would be fine.

“I’ll just put in to the dock and run you up to—”

“No need for that,” Rae interrupted. “You have work, and I have things to do in town.” She met Nikki’s green eyes evenly. It was like being mean to a kitten, seeing the faint hurt in the wrinkles on Nikki’s pale brow, but at the same time, Rae knew that if she didn’t cut this tie of responsibility here and now, she was in danger of becoming Nikki Walls’s property for life. After a minute Nikki shrugged her narrow shoulders and reached into her pocket for a pencil.

Rae took the address, thanked her, and was off the boat before the second line was secure. Nikki called that she was welcome, and Rae walked away before the ranger could offer to pick her up the next day.

Rae strode briskly up the street, excruciatingly conscious of the number of strange men behind her back. She made it a couple of blocks, and then ducked into the first likely place to buy a map, taking her time before forcing herself back out to the street. She traveled a little farther, then retreated to a coffee shop, where she ordered a sandwich she didn’t want for the privilege of sitting at a table with her back to a wall, the map and a phone book borrowed from the cashier on the table in front of her. She located the bank, the newspaper office, Friday Harbor’s historical society, and then asked the waitress for a good place to buy some blue jeans. First of all, though, the bank.

She ate half the sandwich, leaving the waitress a nice tip by way of apology, and made it as far as the bank in one try. There she introduced herself to the manager as the owner of an account set up in February by her lawyer in California. She received her ATM card and took out some cash with it, then rented a safety deposit box large enough to hold Desmond’s strongbox and his diary. Before she put the battered tin container away, she lifted the lid to take another look at its enigmatic contents. She’d had to break the lock to open it, but the treasure it held was not the sort to require guarding. A smooth gray pebble, a small shell, and two pieces of twig had been placed in the box, along with a pearly button, a bit of green ribbon, a three-inch maroon tassel, and the program for a concert that gave neither date nor location. The only understandable item among all these mementos—if mementos they were—was a handsome gold locket on a heavy chain, containing a lock of a dozen or so long blond hairs pressed into one side and a thicker lock of short brown hair on the other. Blond and brown touched when the locket was shut. She put it back and closed the tin box, locked the bank box, and thanked the manager.

On the street again, she rested her shoulders against the brickwork while she checked the location of the post office on the map, then set off to identify herself to the people there as well. It was getting easier, she found to her relief. No one here crowded her, no footsteps speeded up, and there were plenty of open doors waiting to rescue her, many honest citizens ready and willing to come to her aid.

The post office held three letters for her, one from Pamela concerning
a bill, and one from Gloriana, the owner of the New York gallery that sold Rae’s smaller pieces, saying, Please, please,
please
get in touch. The third was from Petra. Rae stood outside the post office, tore it open, and fumbled to catch the note that fell out from between Petra’s folded pages. It was from Tamara, and in growing amazement, Rae read:

Rae went through the note again, this time reading between the lines. “Don and I will need to bring her to you” meant that Rae could not be trusted to be at the airport to meet Petra’s plane, and Tamara did not wish to risk a stranded thirteen-year-old. “If Petra chooses” to stay meant if Tamara and Don approved of Rae’s state of mind and her living circumstances.

Rae had to give Petra credit for getting even so conditional an approval, but the more she considered Tamara’s letter, the greater grew her astonishment—not at Petra’s manipulative skills, but at the sheer, brazen effrontery of Petra’s father. She shook her head in wonder:
First he instigates an incompetency case against me, then he has the nerve to expect me to welcome him as a guest.
As she had so often before in her dealings with the man, Rae wavered between disgust and admiration: She felt she ought to embrace fully the outrage Don inspired, yet she was also constantly in awe of his utter self-interest, his easy assumption that things would go his way simply because he wanted them to.

Amazing, Rae thought, coming down as always on the side of bemusement. But it might also be a form of unstated challenge: Don saying,
I’m grown-up enough to compartmentalize my life; are you?
Very
well—as a challenge, a means of letting him know how she felt without saying it directly, she would allow him to set his Gucci loafers on Folly. As proof of her own mental resilience—to herself if no one else—it would be without parallel.

Petra’s letter was a relief, chatty and meandering, giving mere glimpses of the battle that had raged before Tamara had written her note, including the brief but ominous admission that she’d “never seen Dad as mad as he was” when his daughter refused to accept his decision of “no.” Tamara had had to step in and soothe the waters, and Petra went blithely on, assuming that all was well again. Rae was not so sure, but despite her concern, the letter’s childlike glee was contagious, and Rae reread some of the lines to make the impending visit more real in her mind. Some minutes later, with a smile on her face, blissfully unheeding of the threatening presence of other people all around her, Rae looked up to find a sheriffs car sitting at the curb in front of her. A fresh-faced young man in a crisp new uniform was looking over the top of the car at her.

“Mrs. Newborn?”

“More or less.”

“Um. Sorry?”

“Ms. is fine.”

He blushed, both cheeks taking on red circles like clown paint. “Ms. Newborn, right. Um, you are her?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, good. The sheriff wants to talk to you.”

For a moment Rae thought in disgust that she was about to be hauled back to the island to answer questions, and watched the boy deputy get back in the car, but he then fiddled with a car phone for a moment before lying flat across the front seat to open the passenger-side door. Sitting upright again, he held the phone out in her direction. She slipped her knapsack from her shoulder and sat on the edge of the cruiser’s front seat to take the phone, leaving the door open and one foot on the ground.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Newborn?”

“This is she.”

“Jerry Carmichael here. It’s about the dirt in the area behind your house.”

“Yes,” Rae responded, mystified.

“Well, it’s just that we really ought to sift through it, just to be thorough, and it occurred to me that if you were thinking about moving it out of there anyway, my guys could as easily dump it where you like rather than putting it carefully back where we found it. Up to you.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Sheriff. No, I certainly don’t want it there. I was planning eventually on putting it over with the other soil I excavated, around the hill a ways. If you’d shift it anywhere in that general direction, that would be helpful.”

“I did see that place. And I noticed that you’d been collecting the stuff you sieved out into a pile nearby. You want us to do the same?”

“It would be too much bother, Sheriff.”

“None at all. Uh, would you mind if we borrowed your wheelbarrow?”

“Any of the outdoor tools at all, help yourselves,” she replied, with the stress on
out.
Although if it meant getting all that soil out of there, she might even lend him one of her rattier chisels.

“Thanks, that’ll speed it up.”

“But watch out for the glass and nails. I cut myself on something in there the other day.”

“Will do. See you later, then.”

The phone went dead and she handed it back to the young man, then asked him, “How did you find me?”

The pink bloomed on his cheeks again. “Sheriff said watch for a six-foot-tall woman with short gray hair and a green backpack. Didn’t take long.”

She thanked him, then watched the cruiser drive away. Back to research.

She discovered that the historical museum was not open until the following afternoon, so she went on to the newspaper office instead. This occupied a building with a flat gray false front, like something from a Western, but the cowboys inside were of the cyber variety, and back issues were available for perusal. The mid-1920s? the woman asked. No problem;
the Journal had
been in print since 1906.

Rae found the article about the “fiery destruction” of the house on Sanctuary Island, also known as Newborn’s Folly, in September 1927. It was front-page stuff, jockeying for space with a political scandal in Olympia and a rash of burglaries in the county, in which the stolen items included half a dozen laying hens, a skiff, a buried Mason jar filled with cash, and the engine out of someone’s Model T The flames had been
seen from Roche Harbor, at the northern end of San Juan Island, by an early-morning fisherman in the wee hours of September 14. The date jolted Rae, and she had to drag her attention back to the article and read on. By the time firefighters could get a boat out to Sanctuary, they found the house burned to the foundations, and although they had stayed on to search by daylight, no trace was found of its eccentric builder. Since his rowing skiff was also missing, it was thought that he might have left the island in the wake of the fire.

The following issue saw an article about Desmond Newborn, who by now, since he had not appeared in Roche Harbor or any of the other island towns, was presumed dead, “consumed by the fierce flames.” He was, the editorial noted, from a prominent Eastern family, but of his past, little was known. Residents and visitors to the islands knew him by the work of his hands, the twin-towered structure that had been dubbed The Folly by locals. The editor went on to say that Desmond Newborn was familiar to the residents and businesses of Roche Harbor—to which he was in the habit of rowing every week, in any but the stormiest of weather, to pick up groceries, newspapers, building supplies, and the rare piece of mail—as a polite, quiet man with a “wry” sense of humor.

That last interested Rae: She had somehow not thought of Desmond Newborn as having a humorous side, wry or otherwise. Certainly the diary showed little of that, although she supposed that the house itself argued for a quizzical worldview.

There were no illustrations to the articles, and nothing in the next few papers, but a month after the fire Desmond’s name appeared again, this time paired with that of his brother.

Nikki had been right, Rae reflected: The island had been park domain by the beginning of 1928, a good year and a half before Desmond’s last letter.

Desmond’s purported last letter, Rae corrected grimly. She turned to the next issue
of the Journal

During the spring, a scant handful of mentions caught her eye. The county wished to remind boaters that Folly was off limits for the gathering of wood or shellfish. An arrest had been made of a pair of boys for poaching eggs during nesting season. And in March the sheriff announced that the ashes of Desmond Newborn’s residence had been probed, and judgment reached that, unless Newborn had been in the hottest portion and thus totally consumed, he had not been there at all. Therefore, the sheriff asked anyone with information on Mr. Newborn’s whereabouts, particularly in the middle of September of the previous year, please to come forward.

After that, nothing. On the anniversary of the fire a brief article appeared, as well as on the subsequent few anniversaries—due, she figured, to the romantic images the two ruined towers evoked for passing boaters.

At five o’clock Rae was thrown out of the newspaper offices. Bleary-eyed after two stints of difficult reading in twenty-four hours, filthy of hand and crook of back, Rae tottered out onto the street and tried to orient herself to the modern world. She dug out her map and looked for the inn run by Nikki’s aunt, and thus missed the sudden pause and subsequent acceleration of a passing sheriff’s car. She set off in the right
direction, and had just begun to find her stride when another car belonging to the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department drifted over onto the shoulder of the road ahead of her and stopped. This time, the sheriff himself emerged, dressed, despite the official vehicle, in jeans and a clean, freshly pressed chambray work shirt. He closed the cruiser’s door and came around the back of the automobile to join her.