Folly (56 page)

“So you don’t have anything here that would make me believe that you didn’t… kill those girls.” Rae braced herself for some reaction, from outrage to violence, but there was none. He remained as he had been all along, serious and watchful.

“Nope, not here. I don’t keep any evidence at all on the island, nothing that could be traced. You never know when some kid’ll stumble onto the cave. Not worth the risk.”

His final word hung in the air between them. They looked across the fire at each other while Rae tried to decide what to do. Allen Carmichael was a self-confessed criminal, a large male trespasser who had stepped out of the darkness into her life, and every bit of good sense yelled at her that she ought somehow to tie him to a tree and hand him over to his brother.

However, good sense had never been Rae’s strongest point. And she could hear Vivian in her ear, dead serious under his humor:
Trust your bones, Rae.

Her bones, she knew, should be quaking. A woman who couldn’t walk through a nice, safe, crowded airport without being certain that someone was about to attack her, a woman with vivid memories of what solitary places could hold, what strangers could do—she should have been on the edge of sheer terror. What was wrong with her well-oiled panic mechanism? She ought to get up and race for the promontory, shrieking and rousing the sailboat and everybody else for miles; instead, the gun in her hand was feeling less and less necessary, her position hunched up beside the fallen cedar more and more ridiculous. Her bones were telling her that Allen
Carmichael was exactly what he said. Her bones were saying she should offer him a drink. Her bones were tired of sitting on the hard ground.

Hell. Every important decision she’d ever made had been utterly irrational. Falling in love with Alan, having Bella, turning to woodworking, coming to Folly—all irresponsible, all transforming. Why not one more, knowing it might be her last?
Trust your bones, Rae.

Rae removed her finger from the trigger guard of the old revolver and pushed the weapon back into her sweatshirt pocket. With the motion, her—what? Guest? Tenant? Resident serial killer?—relaxed more fully into his chair, and when she was on her feet again, she saw that the smile now reached his eyes.

“Do you want a drink?” she asked him.

“I’d love one.”

“Wine, beer, or Scotch? They’re all warm, I’m afraid.”

“A beer, thanks—or no; I’ll have a proper drink with you. A small Scotch.”

She poured two, and settled into the chair across from him. Carmichael held up his glass to her, and said, “To sanctuary.”

“To Sanctuary,” she repeated. They both took a swallow, as if sealing a pact.

“I’m curious,” he said, stretching his legs out to the fire. “Tell me about my brother and Nikki.”

“There’s nothing to tell, really. As I read it, Jerry’s enough of a gentleman to think that because he’s known Nikki since she was a kid, and because she could have pretty much any man on the islands, his being fifteen years older than she is leaves him out of the running.”

“Jerry is a fool,” he agreed. He took a sip from his glass, rolling it around his tongue in pleasure.

“Nikki’ll have him in the end, I think. He needs someone he can feel he’s protecting.”

“But I saw him bring you flowers,” the sheriff’s brother protested, without thinking.

Rae went still as suspicion returned, nibbling around the edges of her mind. “You do watch me, don’t you?”

“No. Not you. But I do always check for visitors in the cove before I take my boat out, and I happened to see him the other night, sitting here with a fresh bunch of store-bought flowers on the table. I do not watch you, not since the first days.”

Rae wasn’t sure it was the entire truth he was telling, but remarkably enough, her nerves did not react to the thought of those eyes on her from the hill above. She could read no threat in Allen Carmichael’s eyes, no judgment even, just a great deal of understanding. She suddenly thought, He must be very good with frightened children and … and with those women for whom men were generally threatening.

“Tell me what you do, exactly.”

“What, in vanishing people?”

“Yes, your organization. Does it have a name?”

“No name, no real organization in the sense of a public face. It’s mostly women,” he explained, “helping other women get away from impossible and often dangerous situations. But sometimes a man is needed, for muscle or distraction or just to act like a husband where the police aren’t looking for a couple. And sometimes we have to put clients on ice for a few days, vanish them off the face of the earth. That’s where I come in. I vanish them, until the search cools off and we can put them on the next stage.”

“How on earth did you get involved with it?”

The dark eyes dropped to the glass in his hands; Rae remembered Jerry saying something about an incident in Vietnam. “That’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“A person’s experiences transform them,” Carmichael began, as if she hadn’t spoken and he had merely been pulling together his thoughts. “Literally change the structure of the brain. In my case, a single experience during the war stripped my brain down and rebuilt it, completely. It was what the papers label an ‘atrocity’ A bunch of scared, angry boys with M16s in their hands were pushed to the breaking point and turned on the nearest convenient target, which happened to be a civilian village. Forty-three innocent people died, women and children and old people. I could have prevented it, if I’d been paying attention, but I wasn’t. I didn’t.

“They haunt me,” he said simply. “Especially the little kids. I hear their voices—some of them were still alive when I entered the village. And, to make a very long and convoluted story short, after I returned home, I eventually discovered that the only way I could sleep at night was if I spent the day in the service of children.”

Rae could find no reply to that. He raised his eyes to hers, and smiled at what he saw. “Don’t look like that, for heaven’s sake. I have a purpose to life, a job that matters and that I do well. How many people do you know who can say that?”

“Your calling,” she murmured. “A quest.” Why did images of monastic
discipline and knighthood’s nobilities surround this tired, dusty-looking man?

“I don’t know if I’d go so far as that,” he replied. “To tell you God’s honest truth, I sometimes think I do it just because I’m a troublemaker, and I really, really like getting away with things.”

He had a gorgeous laugh, deep and full and infectious.

“And here I thought it was the younger brother who was supposed to be the rebel against the older,” she commented.

“Yeah, me and Jerry… I tell you, I’d just decided to come clean with you on Tuesday morning when who should I spy but my little brother, come to spirit you away? I was sure he’d found me and was getting you out of the way before they brought up the troops and the bloodhounds, but the troops never landed.”

“No, I had to go to California for a few days on another matter.”

“I figured you wouldn’t be gone long, once I saw the way you left things.”

“It was you who searched my tent, wasn’t it? Before that—a couple of weeks ago.”

“Your tent was searched?” Carmichael leaned forward sharply, squinting to see her face. “When?”

“Sometime between when I finished framing the roof—the night you saw Jerry here with the flowers—and the day before I left for California.”

“Sorry, it wasn’t me. I did have a quick glance through when you first came, for which I apologize, but I’ve had my hands full since then. Must’ve been some kids off the boats. I’ve chased two sets of them away the last few days, making ghost noises. Which reminds me—don’t be surprised if you hear rumors that Folly’s haunted.”

More and more, Rae was beginning to mistrust her memory. She had been sloppy and left the toolbox tray the wrong way around, that was all. She stretched out an arm for the bottle and replenished their glasses.

“How did you find the cave?” she asked. “Your cave. I didn’t see it when I went around the island.”

“I discovered the opening when I was a kid—used to sail all around these islands—but it’s obvious that other people have used it over the years. Smugglers, rumrunners. It’s tucked in behind a small rock spit, with trees down to the ground, not far from the waterfall. I’ve encouraged the tree branches to grow down to cover it, but it’s hard to see even without that, and nearly impossible to get into except at low tide.”

“Are you the idiot who wrecked his boat?”

“What?”

She laughed, and then laughed again at the sound. She felt as if her skin had suddenly taken wing. She felt like a winter-dead tree bursting into full flower. She felt … she felt at ease. And not only because of the alcohol. “Jerry told me that he’d only known two idiots who would have tried to get onto Folly except through the cove, and one of those wrecked his boat trying.”

“Hell no—I was the one who made it. In fact, that was the day I found the cave, when I was rescuing Jerry.
He was
the idiot who wrecked his boat on the reef. Dad was furious.”

“What a pity I can’t give him a hard time about that.”

“You could always have heard it from someone else. It was common knowledge when we were kids. Not the cave, of course.”

“You really keep people there?” Desmond might have found the little cave behind the house a cozy retreat in stormy weather, but she wouldn’t care to spend many hours cooped up there.

“It’s actually fairly comfortable. Some of the older kids call it the hobbit hole, and the younger ones seem to think it’s where Rabbit lives in
Winnie-the-Pooh.
Teenage girls have the hardest time with it at first— no hair dryer or Internet. I have a collection of posters they can put up— that helps, and every CD you can think of. I go through a ton of batteries for the CD players.”

“Low tide,” she said suddenly. “I’ve heard you going in and out at low tide. You have a black inflatable.”

He looked chagrined. “I
knew
you’d seen me. Sooner or later you’d have found me out.”

“Without a boat of my own, it would have been difficult. Would you like another drink?” Both glasses were empty.

“Better not. Two’s more than I usually have in a day.”

“Coffee, then? You know, I really don’t know if I can call you … that name. It’s just too weird for me.”

“A lot of people call me Mike, from my last name.”

“Mike. Michael okay?”

“Sure. And I would kill for a cup of coffee. It’s one of the things I can’t risk, down in the cave. Any odor that stands out against the smell of seaweed, I have to avoid.”

As Rae was filling the kettle, she suddenly chuckled. “You know the joke about Adam naming the animals?” Allen/Michael shook his head.

“Well, it’s not really very funny. But anyway, Adam is sitting there in the
Garden of Eden naming the animals. God’s bringing each one and Adam takes a look and says, ‘I’ll call this one a
parrot
, and that one’s a
tiger
, the next one’s called a
giraffe.’
God is waiting for Adam to find Eve, you see, to choose another creature he wants to spend his life with, and Adam just keeps on inventing these names—
porcupine, cat, rhinoceros.
So the day’s wearing on, God is getting a little impatient, and Adam’s names are getting more and more outlandish—
guppy
, he says,
platypus, hippopotamus
—and finally God’s getting tired of the whole thing, and when He brings in this weird-looking animal and Adam says,
‘Aardvark,’
God just explodes. ‘Why on earth are you giving My creatures these bizarre names?’ He shouts. ‘No one will ever respect an animal with a name like aardvark.’ ‘Well,’ says Adam, who’s pretty fed up with the whole thing himself, having spent the day expecting a wife and getting all these damned animals instead, ‘what would You name it?’ And God says, ‘How about Mike?’”

Rae looked at Allen and Allen looked at Rae, and Allen spoke first, his face straight but twitching. “You’re absolutely right. The joke’s not really very funny.”

They collapsed simultaneously into howls of laughter, sweeping away the last dregs of tension.

“No,” Rae admitted eventually, “but it’s appropriate.” She turned to pour the steaming water onto the coffee grounds, and the aroma filled the air.

“So what, you want to call me Aardvark?”

“Now there’s a thought,” she replied. “What do you take in your—”

But he was not to get any coffee that night. A powerful engine that neither of them had noticed was coming into the cove; the sound cut through the easy camaraderie like an axe. There was a quick scurry from the other side of the fire pit, and Rae turned to find Allen Carmichael vanished into thin air; only the gentle rising of the canvas seat betrayed his existence. For the first time, Rae called his name; the sound of footsteps on the other side of the tent halted.

“Look,” she said to the shadows, “you’re welcome to use the cave, and anything else on the island you need. I won’t say anything to your brother. In fact, let me know if I can help, if you need money or something.”

“Thank you,” came his low voice. “I’ll be gone for a couple of weeks. I’ll let you know when I get back.”

“Good luck,” she told the tent wall.

“Hide the glass I was using,” he ordered, and with a scrabble of his boots on the hillside, Folly’s ghost was gone.

Vibram soles
, she noted to herself. She missed him already.

She picked up his glass from the tree-stump table and put it on the ground behind the corner of the tent, then lit the lamp again. As she walked down to the dock with it to see what had brought Jerry Carmichael to her island at eleven-thirty at night, she found she was humming. It took her a moment to identify the tune, and when she did, she shook her head at herself: “Someone to Watch Over Me” …

At least Jerry hadn’t brought flowers. And he was in uniform, although it was clear even by the light of a kerosene lamp that his clothing lacked its customary crisp polish.

“You look like you’ve had a long day,” she told him.

“Very long. Sorry it’s so late—I took a chance you’d still be up, and when I saw your fire going I thought it’d be okay. Bobby Gustafsen decided to break up a fight by himself last night, got stabbed in the arm. He’ll be fine, but I got the call at two in the morning, and that’s when my day began. So yeah, it’s been a long one.” He collapsed into the chair that his brother had just so hastily vacated. The frame gave an alarming creak, but he stretched out his long legs toward the fire with a sigh, making himself at home. “Is that coffee I smell?”