Folly (42 page)

The sun was low behind them when they approached the ferry landing at the northern tip of the island. One ferry was nestled into the docking pad and another was lying offshore, its engines grumbling quietly. What looked like several hundred people lined the walkway and the upper levels of both boats, and Jerry put in around the corner from the ferry at the dock. He paused, one foot off the boat.

“I’m not sure—”

“Go,” she interrupted. “Do your job.”

He nodded, and strode away.

She followed, slowly, and joined the crowd on the landing. It took her a while to sort out fact from rumor, but one thing was sure: A fourteen-year-old girl named Caitlin Andrews had disappeared from the ferry. The girl and her parents had gotten on in Anacortes, headed for a Memorial Day boating weekend with business associates of the father, and Caitlin had wandered off while Mom and Dad had coffee in the ferry’s dining area. As the boat neared Lopez, its first stop and their destination, her parents looked for her, then searched for her, to her mother’s concern and the father’s mounting fury. All the other Lopez-bound cars off-loaded, and Caitlin did not appear on the car deck. Caitlin was not on any car deck. Caitlin had vanished.

Boats were already searching along the ferry’s wake, but with darkness coming on, they had not much time. Jerry Carmichael was speaking with the ship’s personnel, and seemed to be instigating a thorough search of the ship, control room to lifeboats. After a while his voice came over the
loudspeaker, asking the driver of each of the cars still on board—just the driver, please—to go and stand next to his or her vehicle, with the keys.

Time passed. The other ferry gave up and sailed away, continuing on to Shaw, Orcas, and San Juan. The next ferries chugged past without slowing. The small café at the head of the landing did a booming business in coffee and anything edible, and after a while Rae dug back into the picnic bags to make sandwiches for Jerry’s deputies. By nine o’clock the sun was setting and the line of vehicles waiting to get on the ferry extended up the road and around the corner into the woods. Rae bought a cup of coffee and walked slowly past the cars and their variously irate or dozing passengers. She was still bone tired, but the jittery reaction to being around too many people had subsided. Why, she wasn’t sure, because there seemed to be nearly as many people around the ferry dock as she had seen in all of Friday Harbor. Maybe it was because they were all focused on something other than Rae Newborn, woodworker and resident of Folly. Anonymity was a poor substitute for solitude, but it seemed to placate the nerves.

Anonymous she might be on Lopez Island, but hardly invisible. The people who had stuck it out, determined to get on the ferry and off the island, wandered in and out of the parked vehicles, carrying on conversations about everything from the ferry service to the local school board, perched on each other’s fenders and saying “Hello” as she passed, or “How you doin’?” or “Any news?” She nodded, smiled, or shook her head, and walked on, ignoring the feeling of being watched. Of course, she
was
being watched, but only as a convenient distraction by bored individuals. That she could handle. One woman barking into her cell phone from behind the wheel of her BMW glared furiously at Rae, but then, she was glaring at everything else as well. One young man and his friends had been making inroads into a twelve-pack of beer, so that an impromptu party was starting up around them; Rae gave their truck a wide berth, head down and heart beating swiftly. They did not seem to notice her. In the next few cars, people looked to be sleeping.

The driver of one vehicle, a late-model pickup with a dozen rolls of fiberglass insulation in the back, was slumped into his seat but seemed to be staring at her intently as she strolled up the line of cars. Rae thought the man might say something as she reached his half-open window, but he merely shifted his gaze to the back of the car in front of him—embarrassed at being caught staring? Or had he realized she was not the person he thought? A hasty glance as she went past his window revealed only a
bearded face with a network of lines near his eyes and a head of long, wavy hair flowing out from under a baseball cap. She flicked her eyes away before he in turn could catch her looking and continued on up the hill in the growing dusk, sipping her tepid coffee. The guy reminded her of one of her neighbors back home, she reflected idly, a man named Mac something, McArthur maybe, who lived farther up her road. A real mountain man, who did carpentry and yardwork to pay his property taxes but had little more to do with the world. From an MIA/POW sticker on his ancient Ford pickup and a couple of overheard remarks at the local market, she had decided that he was a soldier who had never really come home from the jungles of Vietnam. No doubt there were a fair few of those here on the islands as well. Although this particular man’s pickup indicated a greater degree of affluence than McArthur’s beat-up truck.

Fantasy, all of it, as no doubt was the feeling that he was looking at her retreating form through his rearview mirror, and again that he was watching for her when she reappeared at the top of the hill, headed back toward the water. Maybe she fulfilled some fantasy of his, a fantasy involving a tall gray-haired mountain woman. She smiled to herself, then her attention went up ahead to the beer drinkers. In her absence, however, they had attracted the notice of one of the many law enforcement personnel gathered around the ferry, and the young men stood in abashed silence as their licenses were examined. Rae stood in line to use the hard-pressed portable toilets, then went back to Jerry Carmichael’s boat.

An hour later, dozing among the cushions, she was startled to hear the sudden racket of car engines starting up, one after another, and numerous voices being raised—relieved voices that told her the ferry had at last been cleared for loading. She listened to the thumps of the cars passing over the metal bridge, and went to see what was happening.

“Hey,” she called to a group of boarding foot passengers. “Did they find her?”

“She’s not on the boat,” said a man.

“They’re going to search the island,” said another.

Rae pulled her jacket closer around her chest, and shivered.

Rae’s Journal

May 26

A house is not always a home, despite the blandishments of real estate ads.

The old saying that home is the place where “When you have to go there, they have to take you in” does not apply to all of us. Maybe it doesn’t apply to most of us in this day and age. I have two houses— three if I count the Boston mansion, those vast cold hallways of my childhood home turned into a halfway house now, tenanted by a constantly shifting band of people working their way from locked ward to the freedom of their own front door keys.

None of the three contain any “they” who are required to let me in. In none of them could I find the sense of loyalty (however grudging) and permanence that is “home.”

A house is just a building until it becomes a home.

But is that really so? A house is a convenient reality, but it is also a metaphor for one’s self. The house stands, it looks out across the view, it runs smoothly, it is strong (or flimsy) and honest and beautiful. We are our house.

A house is a statement of belief in the future. The “House of” someone is not just the bricks and mortar, but the legacy, the inheritance, the impact the family will have on the world. We build a house because we are a family, not the other way around.

And like the human body, a locked house may feel secure, but its walls are no more impregnable than human skin. A house cannot, in the end, protect its human beings from any harm greater than rainfall. The terrible truth of the matter is, as court records and shelters for battered women tell us, for a woman, it is behind those locked doors that the greatest threat may lie.

I wonder if fourteen-year-old Caitlin Andrews heard Watchers in the hallway outside her bedroom door.

The last cars loaded onto the ferry. Rae watched their lights dip and rise as they came off the bridge, dip and rise, and made up her mind. There was no reason to delay here. She caught up her bags, leaving the ravaged scraps from the picnic, and stepped onto the dock. Striding toward her was a dark figure that could only be Jerry Carmichael. After another few steps, he saw her.

“I’m going to take the ferry back to Friday Harbor,” she called out. “Ed or somebody will give me a ride to Folly.” More likely she’d end up staying the night and going out in the morning, since it was nearly midnight. No matter.

“I was just coming to tell you that I’m finished here for the time being,” he replied, coming to a halt in front of her. “They’ve decided to hand it over to the big boys, in case a lowly county sheriff messes things up, and I’m making the officer in charge nervous. So I’ve given my deputies their jobs and told them I’d be back in the morning.”

“Which is maybe six hours off. You should catch some sleep.”

“Frankly, I’d rather take you home.”

Rae studied his face in the shifting light. His expression betrayed nothing, although a tautness beneath the watchful calm made her think he might be angry at something. “Okay,” she agreed. “If you’re not just doing it to be gallant.”

“God forbid,” he said, making an effort at lightness. “Sheriffs aren’t allowed to be gallant. The oath of office specifically forbids it.” He took
the bags from her hands, and stepped back to allow her to go first. This time she did so without hesitation.

Rae cast off. Carmichael reversed away from the dock, where the long-delayed ferry was also being freed from its connection with the dry land, and he took their launch in a wide circle around the churning water that the big engines were turning up.

In the darkness, and with the first urgency gone, Jerry’s speed barely kept them ahead of the ferry. The night was clear and the air, even moving, no longer seemed cold. Rae sat next to where he stood peering out at the placid water.

“Can you tell me what happened?” she asked him.

“A girl by the name of Caitlin Andrews just disappeared from the boat. By the time the family realized she was missing, all the Lopez passengers were already off. It’ll take a day or two to hunt them all down, see if any of them noticed anything. But she’s definitely not on the boat now.”

“I saw her family,” Rae commented. Jerry grunted, but said nothing, and she leaned forward in an attempt to read his expression. It was too dark. “What do you mean by ‘huh’? You think the family—what, they threw her off the boat? They had her in the trunk of the car? What?”

“There’s nothing to think. The state guys haven’t even done an interview yet, beyond the initial statement. I just didn’t trust the father’s attitude.”

“Like he’s hiding something?”

“Like he doesn’t have a thing in the world to hide, all honest and up front about what a difficult child Caitlin is, how they were looking forward to a quote ‘family bonding time’ unquote this weekend. But he looked to me like a very worried man. Like a salesman trying to convince the world that his company’s not about to fold. And he said at least three times that his daughter was a liar and a hussy.”

“A hussy?”

“Sorry—my word, not his. What he said was that Caitlin is, in his word, ‘impossible’ and that she always wears heavy makeup and shows a lot of skin.”

“Other than the skin, it sounds like my granddaughter. What did the mother have to say?”

“Not a thing. She let Dad do all the talking. However, she kept one eye on him the whole time, and she always positioned herself just behind his line of vision.”

“All of which means what?”

“She’s afraid of him,” he said baldly. “She’s more afraid of her husband than she is worried about her daughter. I think they might well find that the girl’s run away from an abusive father, that the mother’s terrified he’ll take it out on her, and that the father’s scared that the girl will talk before he can get her back under his control. That’s just my take on it. I don’t know what the
real
cops’ll make of it.”