Folly (5 page)

“Sorry,” she told them. The two gleaming heads sank back beneath the surface, and Rae somewhat nervously continued on down the promontory. She reached the end without further mishap, chose a rock facing due west, and settled down to watch the sunset paint the sky.

Desmond Newborn, she mused, might have sat on this same rock, watched that same sun go down in a blaze of oranges and blues. Well, perhaps not this very rock—adding boulders to the promontory had been one of the few actions Rae’s father had taken during his twenty-year stewardship of the property, to keep the point from eroding and opening up the island’s only cove to the sea. And Rae felt quite certain that Great-uncle Desmond had not sat down here in order to open a paper bag and take out six giant plastic pill bottles. Sleeping pills, tranquilizers, mood regulators, megavitamins (on the off chance that theory was not entirely bunk)—she lined them all up on a rock between her feet. The sleeping pills first. She wrestled off the childproof cap and slid a forefinger in to pull the first tablet up the side of the bottle, held it for a moment between finger and thumb, then flicked it away into the water. It disappeared with a small
plunk
and a sinuous spread of concentric circles, as did the next, and the one after that.

It occurred to her belatedly that heavy-duty tranquilizers might not agree with sea life. Oh well; maybe they would dissolve before the fish found them. In any case, tonight the fate of the local wildlife was not her main concern.

When the last sleeping pill had been swallowed by the sea, she screwed the cap back on and returned the bottle to the bag (wholesale poisoner of fish she might be, but she was not going to be accused of littering) before reaching for the Prozac. Those pills made a slightly different sound, more of a
plink.
And the giant megavitamins made a
plonk
, but they, too, vanished beneath the gentle undulations of the water, and they and the rest were all gone before the last banner of orange had faded from the horizon.

Now she possessed nothing more lethal than a hundred aspirin tablets and a bottle of very old Scotch, two things any normal woman
might have.
Pretend normality
was Rae’s current credo. She was sick to death of pills and control exercises and dream analyses and the overriding magnifying-glass approach of psychiatry. She’d come to envision psychotherapy as first cousin to the debriding horrors of the burn wards, taking control of the healing process by ripping away the body’s attempts at scar tissue, no matter how excruciating. Demons needed confronting, yes, but not every hour of the day. Avoidance was, after all, a coping technique; so, now, she would treat her problems with a healthy dose of avoidance, even if Psychiatric Truth declared:
You can’t hide, you can’t ignore.

Bullshit. Normal people did, every day.

The rebellious thought made her a little happier. The absence of pills frightened her a little, but that was only to be expected. Fear was normal, too.

Beneath a sky of deepest indigo, with the full moon rising and her pharmacological boats sunk behind her, Rae took out the flashlight and picked her way back to the tent along the unfamiliar shore.

Rae’s Journal

March 31

I wonder if anyone but me has caught the significance of this date? Not only the night of the full moon, when Luna-cy is at its fullest, but the eve of April Fools’ Day as well. The Hunter surely would have been on it in a flash, but as far as she’s concerned, I left California on the Ides of March, which carries a very different sort of symbolic content. Give her credit, though—she might even be encouraged if I’d told her I was aiming for this date to begin my folly—a sense of humor indicates a healthy degree of perspective. But I haven’t told her anything of substance for weeks now. Poor well-meaning woman: I must send her a postcard.

The date is a private joke. Alan would have appreciated it, if he were here, but then Alan living would drain the joke of meaning.

I first saw the island five years ago, a few months after my father died. When his estate was divided up between myself and various distant relations, for some reason he had specified that the island be left to me. I knew vaguely that there had once been a house here, built by my mysterious Great-uncle Desmond, but no one I knew had ever seen it. So that summer, Alan and I decided to take a look at what I had inherited before putting it on the market. It was actually more an excuse for a holiday than anything else. Bella came with us. She was four and a half then, and I was just back from London, triumphant and exhausted. I know I must have looked as tired as I felt, because while we were here three different people referred to Bella as my granddaughter. Alan was livid, but really, how many women have babies at the age of forty-two? Talk about an April Fool …

Anyway, we hired a boat in Roche Harbor to bring us out here. It’s called
Sanctuary Island on all the maps and deeds, and that’s the only name I had ever heard for it, but when I told the old guy in the boathouse where we wanted to go, he scratched his head for a minute and then said, “Oh—you mean Folly.”

Alan was delighted. He’d once spent a summer with a college fiend whose family had a Victorian folly in the grounds of their country house, a fake ruin, forlorn and more than a little ridiculous, but appealing. The island’s nickname came from the house that once stood here, although I’ve never known if it was because the house had something quirky about it, invisible in the only photograph I have, or because in ruins it looked like the fake in the garden of Alan’s fiend. More likely the latter. But in either case, Folly it was called, by the locals and, from then on, by us.

The house—the folly—that I intend to rebuild, those stones that I plan on reclothing with wood and plaster, was built and burned in the Twenties, and was long since jungle by the time we saw it. We came, Alan and Bella and I, and we saw, and we fell under its lonely spell. Our planned quick survey of the island stretched far into the afternoon, cut short only by Bella’s hunger. We hiked around the surprisingly large island, found a beach and a fresh, clear spring and eagles’ nests and trees and even a sort of mountaintop (well, hilltop) clearing where the world stretched on to infinity.

No, we determined, we would not be selling off this part of my inheritance. When Bella was a little older, when Alan and I had less pressing schedules, it would be a retreat, not only a glorious summer holiday place but a building with personality, a folly in its truest sense of extravagance and irrationality (madness in one of its more amusing manifestations). We began the lengthy preliminaries—legal wrangles, engineer’s inspections, restoration permits.

Three and a half years later, before we could return to the island, they were both dead.

I am here instead.

Newborn’s Folly.

Only Alan would appreciate the joke.

With reluctance, Rae closed the leather covers of her journal and laid it to one side, next to the old revolver and its six bullets arranged tidily on the corner of the makeshift writing desk, that they might keep her company as she wrote. She leaned back against the reassuring lumps of the tool belt, taken off only when she sat down at the desk, then rubbed absently at the surgical scar along her left forearm, over the metal plate that made her arm ache when fatigued, when cold, and whenever else it damn well felt like it. She took her hand away and gathered up the bullets. The six of them fit neatly into a fist; six bullets that made a lovely dull metallic rasping sound when rolled around in a closed hand, like a mouthful of wet pebbles. She poured them into her other palm, and picked one out. Soft, warm, gray lead at one end, cool brass jacket flaring into the base at the other. A simple thing, really, awaiting a tap in just the right place. She wondered if she shouldn’t number them, carve Roman numerals in their soft nub ends so she could tell them apart, but that seemed too much like the list making that marked her worst periods, so she warmed them some more and then arranged them back in their triangle, three on a side, good little soldiers.

The tent surrounding her was brand new, ordered from a catalogue along with half the kitchen equipment and waiting for her in Friday Harbor. Petra had helped her raise it, making it clear that this was about the coolest thing ever, while Tamara looked on in growing disbelief that anyone could possibly consider it shelter. The air inside smelled of water-proofing
chemicals and the wrinkles in the canvas and the mesh windows were still crisp from the packing box. Rae had been glad to find all the poles in with it.

Rae Newborn’s family was not the sort to indulge in a camping holiday. The closest she’d been to the tenting life was a week with Alan in a canvas-roofed cabin in Yosemite. It had been cold. It was cold now. The walls shifted of their own accord, shivering when the air brushed against them. All the flaps were tied snugly across the windows, but the door was still crimped in spots, and lay against the opening unevenly. Someone outside could, by a stealthy approach and sinking to his knees, peep in at her where she sat at the desk.

Rae reached behind her to pull the hammer from its belt holster, placing it squarely on the desk in front of her.

There’s no one out there.

The canvas shivered again; a twig or pinecone hit the peak of the roof with a slap. Rae’s body tightened against the noise. She started in on the breathing and visualization exercises that would encourage the muscles to relax, wondering all the while
Why did that twig hit the tent? Was it a twig or was somebody throwing something, and will the next step be a branch scratching the wall even though there aren’t any branches for six feet in any direction and after that a knock or a noise like a key tapping on glass only there’s no glass window in a tent maybe the Watchers’ll just lean against the canvas lean in and push against my space here pushing in on me until the aluminum tent poles bend and the walls
—

She stood up so abruptly the chair toppled over, then reached for the control of the hanging kerosene lamp. Its bright glow faded, the shadows grew soft and then dimmer, until with a small
pop
the light died.

This had always worked at home, the cocooned feeling of being in the dark so those Watchers in the light couldn’t see in. What she had failed to take into account was that her campsite had no floodlights, no means of throwing up a barricade of light in the compound outside. Just the moon.

That was stupid, Rae
, she berated herself.
Now you’ll have to wait until Ed comes to get enough lights to hang up outside, half a dozen ought to do it, but not kerosene, that wouldn’t be too safe. Propane ought to be better although what a racket they’ll make, and how long does a lamp burn on a propane canister, anyway? No good if I had to go out in the dark and change the canister, maybe the lamps could be put on one of the big canisters like I’m using for the stove, harder to hang but
—

“You’re not going to do that,” Rae said aloud. The tent seemed to agree, relieved that it was not about to be set beneath a spotlight. Ridiculous—trees strung about with dangling propane tanks. Everyone in the islands would come to see it. Planes would divert to look down at her.

It’s dark. Get used to it.

Rae felt her way over to the cot, and from there to the bedside table (two crates of builders’ reference books) that held clock and flashlight. She picked up the heavy metal tube, but instead of thumbing it on, she stood in the dark tent, listening and watching. The moon was still too low in the sky to illuminate the tent, which meant that it was also no protection against any Watchers trying to creep up on her. She clicked the flashlight on to check the door, immediately clicked it off again. On, off; which was worse? She wanted nothing more than to sit at the desk and write in her journal for the rest of the night, concentrating hard on ink and paper behind the shelter of the canvas walls until the darkness had been gotten through and dawn allowed her to buckle on the tool belt again. But writing was no solution. She turned on the flashlight, took Tamara’s matches out of her pocket, and lit the lamp again.