Folly (48 page)

Except the ridge beam. That came up not in a bundle, but by itself, thirty-two feet of rich, fragrant, native Washington State red cedar six inches thick and eighteen wide, six hundred pounds of tree. The stripped cedar logs she had lifted were toothpicks by comparison. The entire house groaned when the pulley took on the weight, and the beam crept up the wall, one terrifying millimeter at a time.

When at last, cursed at, cajoled, and sweated over, the roof beam lay threaded across the sills of the upstairs window frames, Rae allowed herself a whoop of triumph. All those lists, all those drawings, the endless calculations of weight and height and angles, all the compulsive, emotionally draining paperwork that had been taken by all as a symptom of Rae’s mental imbalance, all that lengthy battle for the right to try doing this was justified, vindicated by the presence of a massive slab of lumber lying at rest seventeen feet off the ground.

Not that it was in place. The remaining ten feet would be every bit as arduous, but that would involve propping and bracing first one end, then the other: like building the pyramids, not impossible if one took it slow.

And Rae took it slow, and safe. To the top of the existing headers inched the great beam, then into the air with a series of enormously sturdy temporary braces. Once it was floating in the air, Rae could start cutting and fastening down the rafters.

Ed came, found her dangling among the 2×10s, and departed without his coffee and conversation. Nikki appeared briefly with vegetables from a relative’s garden. The sun shone, the wind blew, and Rae raised up the bones of her roof.

Then on the eighth day, the roof’s framework was finished. A web of cedar lay suspended over the entire house: the massive red authority of the center beam, bearing down; the rafters that held it, looking delicate by comparison, stretching out to transfer the weight onto walls and
thence to bedrock; the collar ties that linked each rafter pair into a flat A, ties whose fibers were slack for the last time before the supports came out, the weight came down, and their long lives of tension began. Locked together like a skeletal rib cage, ready to receive the thing that was the ultimate purpose of shelter, a roof. Compression: tension. All Rae needed to do was remove the temporary braces that held the great beam in place, and her house would be, if not covered, then certainly enclosed.

First, though, she would placate the spirits. She climbed down the tower ladder and stood on her front steps, surveying her choices.

Through the ages, particularly in northern Europe, it was traditional to mount a branch when a structure’s high point was reached, a sacrifice to the spirits of the trees that had given their lives for human shelter. Properly speaking, the roof tree should be either cedar, which grew all around her tent, or fir, which stood nearby. Those were, after all, the woods she had used in the house. However, Rae found herself eyeing the madrone that overshadowed her workbench, the tree at whose base lay the ashes of Alan and Bella, a tree that for seventy-two days had been absorbing their molecules into its roots and leaves. The madrone’s outer skin was shedding vigorously now, rich brown flakes against the smooth, fresh, pale green inner bark. More and more over the past weeks, Rae had felt like that inner bark, shedding the rough outer protection until she stood, smooth and naked and fresh and serene.

Foolishness, she mocked herself. Nonetheless, it was to the madrone that she moved, and with a brief inner apology, it was one of the madrone’s small branches that she cut off with her folding knife. She carried the branch to the house, climbing front steps and tower ladder and second-story ladder until she was standing at the very height of the roof, her head even with the bare, fire-scarred tops of the towers. There she nailed the wide-leafed branch.

The view was astounding, on a clear afternoon such as this. She felt that she could see halfway to Japan, that San Francisco had to be just against the horizon. Vancouver Island stood to one side, the mountainous Olympic peninsula below, mainland Washington to her left. Sailboats had been scattered across the blue water for her pleasure, their sails tipped with the breeze. The dark bulk of a cargo ship made for the Pacific; closer in, a turmoil of white spray and dark flecks, the whole less than the size of her thumbnail at arm’s length, marked the passage of a
pod of Dall’s porpoises, teasing along in front of a motorboat. Over the past two months, she had grown to know the regulars, animal and human. The
kathunk
sound of one of her less technologically sophisticated neighbors making a weekly trip into the market, the powerful thrum of another neighbor who went past at water-skiing speed whether he was pulling someone or not, a vacationing teak sailboat that had been around for the last few days and that had more than once prompted her to pull out her binoculars in envy. There were a couple of black inflateables in the neighborhood, one of which she had decided was the middle-of-the-night disturber-of-the-peace. That boatman had been away for a while, although she had heard the motor again Saturday just before dawn. Seasonal birds came and sometimes went on, and the orcas, too, seemed to have a pattern that she vowed to begin noting down one of these days. Unlike the floatplanes that swept past at unpredictable times, day and night, carrying those residents too impatient or important for water travel. And then as Rae stood there supervising the varied elements of her watery community, her right arm crooked around the roof beam and her boots balanced on the sill plates twenty feet above solid rock, another boat rounded the end of San Juan Island, scudding rapidly in a direct line for her cove, white spray flying up from its bow. She knew the boat long before she could make out the man at its helm.

Jerry Carmichael had not been back to the island since the framing crew had swarmed in and transformed her house, eight days earlier. Rae could soon hear his motor above the movement of air and branch; from her godlike perch, unseen and unsuspected, she watched him tie up and step onto her dock. He had a thick dark bottle in one hand and a grocery bag with flowers sticking out of the top in the other. Smiling, Rae lowered herself down to the floor and took up her hammer, and set about freeing her roof beam from its supports.

In a few minutes, drawn by the sound of hammering, Jerry emerged up the ladder from the tower. He was still carrying the bottle, but had exchanged the bag for Rae’s two elegant wineglasses, which looked small between the fingers of his hand. He stopped just inside the room, in the corner where the black stones of the fireplace met the orange stones of the tower, to watch her work.

Temporary supporting nails screamed their withdrawal from the floorboards, chocks and shims were bashed out of the way, and then the front support wobbled free. Rae caught it and gathered up the pieces,
dumping them with all the other rubbish against the empty opening of the south tower. Then she took the hammer to the back brace, which was now bearing most of the weight. Rae slammed the tool against the base of the support, again and again, feeling the blows all along the length of her body, just as the entire house was doing. The bones of her feet and the skin of her scalp, the cedar beneath her boots and the two figurines deep in the foundation below all shuddered with the harsh, joyful reverberations of steel against wood. The support gave minutely, then shifted visibly, then more, until finally with one great blow she was catching the boards to keep them from crashing to the floor. She and Jerry stood still, heads tilted, listening.

Not a sound, not a creak or a groan from the neatly aligned pairs of rafters that stretched from roof beam to walls, distributing the weight of that young tree without a murmur, pulled taut against the collar ties, compression and tension working together in beauty.

The cork popped loudly, and Jerry caught the foam in the two glasses. She dragged the now-useless wood over to the discard pile, slid the hammer into its loop against her thigh, and went over to take the glass of champagne from her visitor. He held up his glass to her in a wordless toast, and then his eyes went up to the massive beam over their heads.

“How the hell did you get that up by yourself?” he asked.

“A step at a time, Jerry. One small step at a time.”

He crossed the airy room to the south window and stood admiring the view. “Bobby told me you looked to be nearly finished framing. I figured that called for a celebration.”

“Champagne and flowers.”

“And dinner. I know you eat meat.”

She sipped from her glass and pushed away the uncharitable niggle of resentment, that Deputy Gustafsen had been keeping an eye on her, and incidentally the progress of her work, and further, that Jerry Carmichael had decided that mere completion was not celebration enough.
Damn it
, Rae scolded herself,
you are impossible to please
, and held out her glass for a refill.

She was feeling easier about his presence by the time they went down to the campsite.

Jerry had brought steaks, thick and marbled with fat. He had also brought the expertise to cook them, so while Rae looked about for
something to hold the grocery-store flowers, he laid logs and kindling in her fire pit and told her about his week. Like old friends, Rae thought with amusement, although she’d met him less than two months before.

“We finally figured out how that Andrews girl got off the ferry,” he was telling her. “She must’ve gone under her own power, though, so she’s a runaway now, not a kidnap victim, no matter what the father says. She was driven off the ferry in a pickup truck, either hunched down on the floor under a blanket or in a tool compartment across the back. Just drove right off while her parents were standing there tapping their feet and waiting for her to show up at the car. Fifth or sixth car off was the pickup, and you know what the driver did then? He went up around the corner, turned into the park road, circled around, and got back in line for the ferry. The same ferry, heading west. We didn’t even think to look in the line of cars waiting to get on, for Christ sake.”

“So what was it, a boyfriend?”

“Some scruffy-looking older guy. As far as anyone knows, Caitlin didn’t have any older friends, much less boyfriends. But did you hear the kicker? About the mother?”

“No, what happened to her?”

“Last week, on Friday, the mother disappeared, too.” He sounded, incredibly enough, amused, as if this was someone’s clever trick.

Rae sat forward in the canvas chair and stared at his profile. “You don’t sound terribly worried about it, Jerry.”

“I’d say the only thing to worry about is if the two of them come home. See, the wife sent a letter, saying that she and Caitlin had taken their passports and fled the country, to get away from the husband. They couldn’t go at the same time because the father was always watching, so she waited a couple of days till he was fully occupied with the hunt, and then she pretended to collapse. She spent the next seven days, while he thought she was in bed weeping, out selling or pawning every last little thing she could pry loose from the house. At the end of it she stripped the checking and savings and took off. She’s riding the underground railway now, and good luck to them both.”

“Seems a little extreme. I mean, why didn’t she just file for divorce?”

Jerry, hunkered down out of the rising smoke from the fire, grimaced. “From what I’ve been told, it was one of those cases of a guy with enough weight to make sure that complaints and reports found cracks to fall into. The wife—Rebecca’s her name—had a history of emotional
problems; she’d never have got custody of the kid, would’ve been lucky to get visiting rights. And as for alimony, don’t make me laugh.”

“So now she and the girl have to disappear,” Rae said.

“Until Caitlin turns eighteen.”

“That doesn’t seem right.”

“Was it Shakespeare who said, ‘The law’s an ass’?”

“Dickens, I think. That’s an odd thing for a lawman to admit, Jerry.”

“I see it from the inside, Rae. It’s getting better—I do honestly believe that—but there are still plenty of big, unfair holes waiting to swallow up the innocent.”

“Don’t I know it. I could have bought a house with what I’ve paid out to my lawyer over the last year.”

It was said spontaneously, but the instant it left her mouth Rae knew that it had also been deliberate. She did not know for certain why Jerry Carmichael continued to drop by Folly, but if it was, in fact, something more than mere neighborliness on his part, she wanted all her cards laid on the table from the beginning. Or most of her cards. The Conversation, in fact. Complaining about lawyers had been an invitation for Jerry to take a step into her life; he did not hesitate.

“Legal problems, huh?”

She took a breath, let it out carefully. “My son-in-law, Don Collins, is trying to get me declared mentally incompetent.”

The big sheriff gaped, and then guffawed as if she’d made the world’s funniest joke. Only when he realized that she was not laughing herself did he swivel on his heel to stare up at her.

“You’re not serious? God. I’m sorry—for laughing, I mean. I—”

“Don’t apologize, Jerry, for heaven’s sake. It’s the nicest thing anyone’s done for a long time, in fact, treating my instability as a joke.”

“But you are serious,” he said, still doubtful.

“Jerry, you knew I’d been in a mental hospital.”

“Yeah, but you’re cured, right?”

“What’s ‘cured’? Jerry, look. There are some people who are so stable you could build an office block on top of them—no self-doubt, no neurotic tendencies, not so much as a psychosomatic illness all their life. At the other end of the scale are the flat-out psychotics—delusional, violent, self-destructive, uncontrollable even with heavy medication. Most people spend their lives somewhere between the two extremes, functioning well most of the time, dipping into neurotic or even
psychotic behavior under stress or hormones or the phase of the moon— no one really knows, although most mental illnesses seem to be about one part chemistry to four or five parts circumstance. Schizophrenia, like you said your cousin has, is a little different, but you probably know that.”