Folly (41 page)

She then set off for the metropolis of Friday Harbor, to buy some jeans.

Jeans she found, and socks and a pair of work boots whose leather tops were not threatening to part company with their soles, and a sleeveless fleece vest, warmly red and without the glue spatters and burn holes that decorated her other vest. She had her hair cut short again, and at one o’clock she ate a sandwich in a place near the harbor and arranged to stash her bulky parcels beneath their register until five.

The historical museum was due to be open, but on her way there her eye was caught by a gallery window display of several wood pieces, bowls and a table. She paused to admire the professional use of the grain and the balance of textures, although she cast a more critical eye on the quality of the table’s inlay (osage orange, redheart, and ebony, garish and lamentably clumsy), and walked on down the block. She slowed, then turned and went back. The man who was sitting the gallery that dull afternoon glanced up as she came in the door, did a double take, and shot to his feet, a look of utter amazement spreading over his clean-shaven features.

“Aren’t you—omigod, you’re Rae Newborn!” he declared, voice rising in disbelief. When she nodded, he sidled over to a curtained-off back room, ducked in reluctantly as if fearing to take his eyes off her, shuffled around, slammed a drawer shut, and came back into the gallery with a magazine in his hand. He thrust it at her.

“I was just reading this,” he told her. “Somebody was talking about you the other day, and so I dug this out to show them and to reread it. How amazing.”

Nikki Walls, Rae would have bet. The man was probably one of the infernal woman’s “dozens of cousins.” She took the magazine politely, glancing through the advertisements for chisels and plans for Shaker armoires until she lit on the photograph of herself, four years and a whole lot of wear and tear younger, standing next to a piece she’d won a best of show with in New York. Frankly, she couldn’t imagine how this young man had recognized her. She gave him back the magazine, and he laid out the double-page spread of her workshop, all the chisels in place, works in progress arranged artfully if inconveniently across the floor, and he looked from it to her, beaming. Rae smiled back, feeling the nearly forgotten stir of being a Name. It was a small pond, but once she had enjoyed being one of its larger fish.

She let him talk about her pieces for a while, answered a couple of technical questions, and then turned the conversation to his own work. The pieces in the window were his, he admitted, and Rae went to look at them with her fingers. The man’s work showed a rare sensitivity and respect for wood, and if his eye for design was untutored, that could be taught; the other was a gift. He nearly choked when she told him that she wanted to buy the applewood bowl in the window.

“Oh hey, please, I’d love to give it to you.”

“Absolutely not. It’s a beautiful piece, you could get three times that in San Francisco. The only thing is, I’d like you to hang on to it for me until I get a roof up. I’m living in a tent, and it would not do the bowl any good to get leaked on.”

From the man’s reaction, Rae knew that half the people who came in the gallery would hear the tale behind the Sold sticker the piece wore, but she found she didn’t much mind.

As he was (reluctantly) making out the sales slip, he asked if, since she was here for a while, she had any plans to teach, either one-on-one or workshops.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” she told him, the simple truth. Teaching woodworking was far down on her list of priorities these days.

“Well, if you ever do, you’d be welcome to use my place. You could even do a residential thing—the people next door have a bunch of vacation cabins they rent out, right down on the water. And there’s people all over who would kill for the chance—Anacortes, Seattle even.”

She told him the same thing she’d told Gloriana in New York. “I’ll think about it. No, honestly, I will. I used to enjoy teaching.”

“Oh man, that’d be so awesome. I met someone who took a class
with you three, four years ago. You haven’t been teaching a lot lately, though, have you?”

Rae looked into his earnest and unlined young face, seeing that the news of her last two years had not penetrated the fringes of her chosen world. For which she was profoundly grateful.

“No, I’ve been a little out of things for a couple of years,” she told him.

He nodded sagely. “Sometimes you gotta do that. Return to the well-springs, like they say.”

“Right. I’ll let you know about the workshop. It wouldn’t be this year—my plate’s pretty full. But once I get my house up, who knows?”

When she had left the gallery, Rae had to sit down for a while and think about the conversation—which, taken in conjunction with her earlier phone conversation with Gloriana, a radically different breed of gallery owner, made it appear that Rae intended to take up her chisels again, and not just to build herself a place to store books and dinner plates. This reawakened interest in her profession had taken her by surprise; she had not even suspected it was coming. Up to now, she had been going through the motions; today, for the first time, she was aware of the juices stirring again.

Life, she reflected, had a way of sneaking up on you.

Even when you didn’t want it.

After a while she gathered up her scattered wits and continued on to the museum, where the woman was friendly and knowledgeable until she heard that Rae was interested in anything the museum had on Folly, at which point she put two and two together and became positively effusive and encyclopedic.

Very fortunately, Rae had a ready excuse, or the museum would have been spread in front of her feet until midnight, along with its entire staff of volunteers and their spouses and children. At twenty to five, more than two hours after she had walked in, she rose desperately to her feet, thanked the four enthusiastic amateurs who had appeared, apparently, out of the wallpaper, and bolted for the street.

Rae made for the harbor, holding before her the vision of a solitary canvas tent in a silent clearing. Her ears rang with the unceasing beat of human speech, her nerve endings quivered from the repeated goodwill of human intercourse, the back of her neck crawled with the continual presence of strangers behind her, and she felt not far from weeping with exhaustion. Near the harbor entrance she passed a telephone booth, and she had walked nearly a dozen more paces before her sense of responsibility
protested loudly enough to bring her to a halt. Reluctantly, she turned back to make the promised call to Tamara. With any luck, the answering machine would pick up again.

The answering machine did not pick up; instead—a gift from the gods that went far to wipe out the effects of the day—Rae heard a beloved voice in her ear.

“Petra!” she cried. “Hello, my love. I thought you’d be out riding.”

“Gran! Where are you? Did you get a phone?”

“No, afraid not—I’m over in Friday Harbor. I had some business to do here, so I thought I’d call and say hi. How are you?”

“We’re all great. Well, I’m not great; I bashed my leg the other day and since I have a test tomorrow and a paper due Monday, I’m home working hard.”

“Sure you are.”

Petra laughed happily at her grandmother’s skepticism. “Did you get my letter?”

“I did, yesterday. That’s great news, that you can come play with me for a while.”

“Dad says it depends on my grades—that’s why I’m home working. I really am. But if they’re okay, I can come, maybe even for two whole weeks!”

“And what else does it depend on? Did you and your father have a fight about this?”

“He’s just so weird these days, Gran!” Petra burst out in a rare flash of petulance. “All I said was how much I missed you and how lonesome you must be, and he just went off about how irresponsible I am and everything, like I’m some kind of stoner flaking off at school. I’m getting mostly As, Gran—what does he want?”

“Petra, sweetheart, calm down. It’s okay.” But Petra would not be calmed. It was difficult to comfort an upset adolescent over the phone while standing on a street corner and with no idea of the scope of the trouble, but Rae did her best. Her comfort consisted largely of listening to Petra’s outpouring of resentment and indignation, grunting the occasional “uh-huh,” and giving an apologetic shake of the head to a couple of people who wanted to use the phone.

At long last, Petra wound down; eventually Rae contributed the only thing she could think of that might help.

“You know, Petra, it sounds to me as if the real problem here isn’t you,
it’s something to do with your dad. Like maybe he’s got some hard worries at work, and instead of admitting it and talking about it, he just blows up.”

“Yeah,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Maybe.”

“Honey, you know your dad and I don’t always see eye to eye,”
(understatement of the year! Rae
thought) “but he loves you, and he works hard for you.”
(Give him the benefit of the doubt)
“If something’s not going well at work, he wouldn’t want you and your mom to know until he’d fixed it, would he? But it would make him short-tempered as a bear. You think?”

“Yeah. I guess.” This time Petra sounded, not convinced perhaps, but willing to consider it.

Rae’s strong impulse was to urge her granddaughter, “Don’t cross your father, Petra; don’t push him into a corner and make him react.” But she kept her mouth shut. It would only make things worse. Instead, she asked after Petra’s pony and dog, received news of a new kitten, and told Petra in response a few innocuous tidbits about the house. But not about the bones, and definitely not the bullets. They talked for a few more minutes, mostly concerning Petra’s school history project on Folly, before Rae reluctantly said she had to be going, and would write soon. Petra promised the same thing, and added that she’d try her best to be patient with Daddy.

Rae hung up, smiling, if unassuaged. For twenty minutes she had been blissfully unaware of her surroundings, unplagued by itches along her spine. Now, as she set off for the harbor again, a horn blared, practically under her feet. She leapt back for the safety of the curb and knocked hard against a man; the bag in his hands flew into the gutter. He cursed under his breath and irritably refused her help in picking up the spilled contents, so Rae escaped—checking this time to see that there were no cars bearing down on her.

Her heart rose when she recognized Jerry Carmichael standing halfway along the dock. Pleasure, in part, but at this moment mostly relief.

“You look harried,” he commented when she had come to a halt in front of him.

“I
feel
harried. My granddaughter’s becoming a teenager and many infinitely friendly and helpful individuals have been harrying at my heels most of the day; I feel a powerful impulse to kick someone. Can we go?”

“I thought you were going to do some shopping.”

“I did. Oh God, I left it in that—oh, let Ed bring it when he—oh damn! I said I was going to buy makings for a picnic. Christ. I’m sorry, Jerry, I’ll have to go back up and get something.”

He put out a hand. “Unlike you, I’ve had a nice quiet day, watching other people work. How about I go get your things and pick up our picnic, while you sit on the boat with your feet up and listen to the quiet.”

Had this been an order rather than a suggestion, Rae might well have dug in her heels and turned back to the town. But again, he looked more friendly than commanding, so after a moment she nodded and let him lead her to the boat, then allowed him to walk off.

“To protect and to serve,” she murmured, then went to collapse with her feet up and listen to the quiet. Of which, truth to tell, in the busy harbor there was not much.

Jerry was back in an amazingly short time—either that, or Rae, following her last two disturbed nights, had fallen asleep. He stepped onto the boat as laden with bags as a pack animal, pulled a long-necked bottle of Mexican beer out of one bag, and put the bottle down near Rae’s hand without comment before leaning over to slip the ropes from their ties. When they were free, he kicked them away from the dock and went to the wheel. The engine caught; Friday Harbor fell behind them.

Ten minutes later, he glanced down at where she had been sprawled, unmoving but for the effort of opening and drinking the beer, since he’d walked away at the dock to go fetch her shopping.

“Want another?” he asked her. She shook her head wordlessly. He had opened his mouth to say something else when the radio squawked, its message unintelligible to civilian ears. He took up the handset and identified himself, and listened for a moment. His face went dark, as fearsome as if he was about to hit someone, and he slapped the throttle down to an idle so as to hear more clearly. Rae sat up, watching him. He was turned her way, but his eyes were not seeing her. At last he spoke, two curt phrases. “Hold them all,” he said; then, “Twenty minutes.” He replaced the handset, and his eyes focused on her.

“I’m needed on Lopez,” he told her. “A girl has disappeared.”

“Go,” she urged.

“I can get you a ride,” he started, but she was shaking her head.

“We’ll worry about me later. Go.”

He went. The boat flew over the surface of the water as if jets and not propellers were powering it. Rae jammed her empty bottle down between the cushions to keep it from rolling about, and worked her way over to his side.

“Do you want something to eat?”

“That would be a good idea,” he acknowledged. “God knows when I’ll get a chance later.”

Bracing herself against the wildly bouncing motions, Rae found various containers of food, put together a thick sandwich, and took it, a pasta salad, a plastic clamshell container of deviled eggs, and two bottles of lemonade up to the wheel. He began eating the sandwich one-handed, and the eggs, while Rae dug into the container of salad with a plastic fork. When he had demolished his food, she held up the second fork questioningly, and was amused to see him open his mouth like some enormous fledgling bird. She fed the salad into his mouth, a process that seemed to entertain the recipient as much as it did the server. She went back to the bags for his chosen dessert, which turned out to be some thick and chewy cookies, and carried the box over to him. He ate three, and then they were at Lopez Island.