Folly (51 page)

What would they think, if they were to notice me sitting among them? What tales would I tell, were I to be transported back to their company? That they as a people have all but died off That their shell middens are more prominent than they are? That nothing is left of them in these islands but their shades?

And what if I were to find myself similarly confronted by a strangely dressed man from the future, telling me tales of how I too have died unmourned, forgotten but for the stone midden I left behind? No heir, no friends, no great public foundation to mark my passing, nothing more than the ripples of a stone in water or the outline of a whale carved in the wall.

And yet, surely the earth holds far too many men who would Make their Mark, who would Change the World? Am I wrong to think that some of us ought to pass through the world more quietly?

Tuesday came, nine days short of The Arrival, and while the morning mist still lay on the water, a boat pulled into the cove. The boat was not Ed’s, and the man who jumped onto the dock holding the boat’s rope was not bearing groceries. Nor did he start up toward the clearing, but rather stood waiting for her to come down. Jerry’s face looked … official. Not grim, just watchful and concerned.

“What’s wrong?” Rae asked when she was standing in front of him.

“I’m having a call patched through on the radio. You want to get on board and take it?”

The hell with this
, was all that flashed through her mind:
I really am going to have to make some kind of phone arrangement so the rest of humanity doesn’t need to act as my damn messenger boy.

“Hello?” she asked the device.

“Good morning, Ms. Newborn, this is Sheriff Escobar. How you doing?”

“I
was
doing fine. Why do I think that’s about to change?”

“I’ve got two men here I’d like you to look at. Could you possibly get on a plane and come in for a lineup?”

“What, today?”

“I can’t hold ’em beyond tomorrow without charging them,” he said, and that was all he said. Rae could hear him waiting through the crackling that came across the receiver while she stood on Jerry’s gently rocking boat and stared at the dials and gauges. Of all the things Rae did not
want to do nine days before her family descended on her, leaving the islands to go to a crowded airport full of other anxious people, then closing herself into a plane, all for the purpose of looking at two men she probably couldn’t identify (and with the result of stirring up all kinds of unwelcome memories if she could), was fairly high on the list.

However, she owed Sam Escobar, owed him for his persistence and his honesty, for his patience with a woman who heard bumps in the night, owed him for the kindness with which he had tried to coax a terrified and obviously unbalanced victim out from behind her paper-strewn sofa.

“I’ll be there,” she told him.

“Thank you.”

She heard relief in his voice—too much relief, perhaps. “Don’t you have anything to charge them with other than my identification?”

“Yes, but they’d be bailed before dark, and gone. If you can ID these two, we have a chance to hold on to them.”

“All right. But I have to tell you, I may not remember their faces. It’s been a long year and a half.”

“All we can do is try,” he said crisply. “Let me know when you’re getting in—I’ll have someone meet you at the airport.”

Jerry seemed pleased that she was going, which Rae took as an indication of his relief that she and her problems were going to be out of his jurisdiction, if only temporarily. Policing a spread-apart county couldn’t be an easy task, she reflected. She thought about telling him what she had found in her toolbox, even though it would underscore his conviction that she was in some kind of danger, but he was already in motion, and so, it appeared, was she.

“I can get you on a two-thirty flight out of Seattle, if you can get ready in twenty minutes. They’ll hold the Anacortes ferry. That’d get you to San Jose before five-thirty.”

She didn’t ask how he knew the schedules so well, just nodded her agreement and turned on her heel to throw some things into the knapsack. Telling him about the toolbox could wait.

When she reached down to unbuckle her tool belt, she stopped: the gun. She couldn’t possibly take it on the plane; on the other hand, she didn’t want to leave it in the tent, even inside the locked trunk. Rae snatched up the flannel-wrapped object and trotted up the hill to the house, paused to pick up the precious box of woodworking tools (the only thing of real value on the island since Desmond’s journal and
strongbox had gone into the Friday Harbor bank) and took gun and box through the woodshed into the cave. She left them just inside the cave’s entrance, and secured both invisible doors on her way out.

Jerry was in the boat, on the radio making her travel arrangements. She ducked into the tent and threw off her dirty work clothes, grabbing up a wrinkled shirt and trousers, exchanging mud-caked boots for city shoes and rummaging through her stored clothes until she found a linen blazer. If she was going to hang around a jail, she’d look like a lawyer, not a suspect. The jacket was rumpled beyond fashion and tighter than she remembered across her shoulders, but it would have to do. Rae took a last look around, dropped the bedside clock and her journal into the knapsack, then zipped and tied shut the windows and door and hurried to join Jerry on the boat.

Conversation was virtually impossible over the motor. In Friday Harbor he eased the boat up to a dock near the ferry, where Bobby Gustafsen, wearing his deputy’s uniform, stood waiting. Bobby caught the boat’s rope, gave Rae a shy grin and Jerry a set of keys, and then stepped onto the boat in Jerry’s place. She and the sheriff scurried up and over the bridge onto the ferry, which immediately cast off and lumbered out into the channel between San Juan and Shaw. Still on Jerry’s heels, Rae went up some stairs and through some doors, and then they were in the shipboard cafeteria with the smell of French roast coffee and maple syrup. She dropped into a seat, ears ringing and nerves jangled, grateful that for the next hour at least she would not be rushing anywhere. Jerry went over to the food line and came back with a trayful of things wrapped in cellophane. He dug in; she sipped her coffee.

“I take it you’re driving me to the airport?” she asked.

“If that’s all right,” he said, looking suddenly doubtful around his sandwich.

“It’s fine,” then, “I’m grateful,” she amended. “I’d just think you had things to do. Sheriffing about.”

“Let Bobby be in charge. He loves it. And what’s the point in being the sheriff if I can’t move things around to let me spend a few hours with a woman I—” He halted, and changed it to, “—with a friend.”

Rae smiled ruefully. “So I didn’t manage to scare you off with all that truth telling?”

“Were you trying to?”

“Might be a good idea, if I could,” she told him, and reflected that it would all be much simpler if she could decide how she felt about this relationship.

“Sorry. No can do.”

“Just… keep your eyes open, okay? With me?”

“Always do.”

Which reminded her. “Jerry, I need to tell you that it’s possible someone’s been going through my tools, sometime in the last week.”

His eyebrows came together in a frown. “Is something missing?”

“No, just part of my toolbox got moved around, but I don’t know when. And it could have been just my own absentmindedness.”

“But you don’t think it was,” he said. It was not a question.

“Honestly? With that toolbox? No.”

They looked at each other over the plastic table, oblivious to the magnificent scenery rolling past the big windows. “What are we going to do about this?” he said at last.

“Well,” she said. “It’s possible that if these two guys I’m going to look at were the ones who attacked me last year, they’ll be able to explain what’s going on now.”

“And if not?”

“If not, we’ll have to think about it.”

They both thought about it a great deal over the next three days, beginning with Rae on the airplane south and Jerry in the car heading back north and then west. Rae also thought about the way Jerry had sat behind the wheel of his official car at the airport drop-off, eyeing the masses of people, and, with a sort of “Oh, the hell with it” shrug, leaned over and kissed her. When Rae had surfaced, flustered beyond words, she halfway expected an audience, but the only one openly watching was the pretty cop on duty, who nudged her hat brim up with one finger, a gesture like a salute, then moved off down the line.

Rae had grabbed her knapsack out of the backseat and looked over the top of the car at the big man in the uniform, who had, if nothing else, taken her mind off her apprehension about being shut in a plane with strangers.

“You look great,” he told her. She glanced down at herself in surprise, and then, hesitantly, returned his grin.

“So do you,” she admitted, and went to catch her plane.

The woman at the check-in counter took one look at Rae’s taut features and said she’d be happy to trade the forward aisle seat that Jerry’s travel agent had booked for a window seat in the absolute last row on the plane. Rae marched to the gate, head down and teeth gritted, and sat in a corner with her back against the wall. She was the last passenger to
board, and settled into her seat, light-headed with relief. All those people, and not one had grabbed her from behind.

For two hours her spine ceased its crawling; although she kept a wary eye on every person going to and from the toilet, at least her nerves did not imagine that a hand could come through the wall at her. On the ground at San Jose, she again waited until everyone but the flight attendants were off before she picked up her knapsack and scurried to the door.

To her surprise, the person looking toward the gate with the worried, “Did she miss the plane?” expression was wearing not a sheriff’s department uniform, but a brief red leather skirt and a suede jacket: Pam Church. The lawyer’s face cleared when she saw Rae, and she gave her a quick embrace and a peck on the cheek.

The lawyer’s first words were a near-duplicate of Jerry’s last. “God, woman, you look superb.”

Again Rae glanced at her undistinguished and unkempt clothes, but Pamela shook her head.

“No, I mean
you.
You look like you’ve spent the last three months at a health spa, pumping iron and sitting on the beach. Brown and muscular.”

“I don’t know about pumping iron, but I’ve shifted a hell of a lot of wood and nails.”

“Whatever it is, it suits you. You need a manicure, of course, but your hands have looked like that ever since I’ve known you. Is that all you have?” She gestured at Rae’s disreputable knapsack.

“That’s it,” Rae told her.

During the drive to the county jail, over the mountain highway that was home and not home, they caught up on a lot of business and a little personal news, which had always been the balance in their relationship. Traffic was heavy going over the hill as it was smack in the middle of commute hour, but Pamela did not seem worried about the delay.

“Sheriff Escobar said he’d wait for you,” she told Rae.

“Are you coming in?”

“If you want me to. If not, I’ll drop you there, and we can get together tomorrow for a proper going-over. You’re not going back to Seattle tonight, I hope?”

“Oh no. As long as I’m here, I’ll stay a couple of days, take care of business, dust the plants, water the shelves.”

“Um. Would you like to stay with me? I have an extra room; I’d be more than happy to have you.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“I just hate to think of you all alone in that big house,” the lawyer said cautiously.

“I’m staying with a friend tonight—my wood man, Vivian Masters. He’s driving me up to the house tomorrow, and maybe I’ll stay on then. I’ll see how it feels.”

“Well, the offer stands.”

“Thank you,” Rae said. “I appreciate it.” She did, too.

Then they were at the jail, and Pam was looking at her doubtfully and saying that maybe she’d come in after all, and then there was a uniform that was like Jerry’s but different and much smaller, and a lot of coming and going and delay and doors opening and closing until finally Rae was in a room with Sheriff Escobar and a couple others and she was looking through the mirror at a line of complete strangers. Half a dozen stocky, dark-haired men, with absolutely nothing to distinguish one from the next. They all looked like thugs, although she was dimly aware that they used police personnel to fill out the ranks of a lineup.

“Are both of the men here?” she asked the sheriff, trying not to sound panicky.

“Only one. We’ll do a second lineup with another group.”

“I just don’t know.”

“Take your time. Ignore the clothes; think about what part of their faces you saw. You want me to have them turn?”

“I guess.”

The line of men dutifully shuffled to face right, then left, and at the final shift of position Rae stiffened.

“Something?” the sheriff asked.

“The fourth one. Could you have him come up and sort of, well, grimace?”