Folly (60 page)

“Can I touch it?”

“It’s carved into the stone—you’d have to bash it with a hammer to do any damage.”

Petra’s fingers, strong and brown from long hours grasping reins, tipped by nails bitten short and painted a purple so dark it looked black, lowered delicately onto the incised image. She was not aware of holding her breath as she traced the arching figure, its swirl of pattern and the strong triangular fin, but Rae heard the faint sigh of satisfaction the child let out when her hand came away.

“Desmond wouldn’t have done that, would he?” Petra asked. It startled
Rae, hearing the intimately known name coming from another’s mouth. Petra seemed already to think of him as a personal acquaintance.

“No. That’s a Native American design—the people who hunted and fished these islands before the white man came. Some Salish or Nanaimo or Lummi probably got stuck here one stormy day with nothing better to do.”

Petra thought for a moment, and then she switched her flashlight back on and directed it upward. There on the low ceiling was a black discoloration, clear sign of the smoke from an ages-old torch.

“Aren’t you the clever one!” Rae exclaimed.

Petra ducked her head and her flashlight, and they left the cave.

Once they were out in the daylight, doors secured behind them and the sun dappling through the leaves above the campsite, Rae told her the rest of it, how she had found the bones she assumed to be those of Desmond Newborn.

She did not tell Petra the whole story—the bullet, the fire, and her private conclusions about what had happened. That, she decided, was too much family burden for a thirteen-year-old to carry. And because Desmond’s end was inseparable from what had gone before, she also kept secret the journal, the strongbox of mementos, and the locket. When the girl was eighteen, perhaps.

Then, to drive away the cold ghostly bones from Petra’s imagination, Rae tossed her a pair of leather gloves and put her to work.

Desmond Newborn’s
Journal

September 12, 1927

Mere months ago I lightheartedly proposed to myself the idea of a house-warming party, to which I imagined inviting all the kind and disparate souls who have nurtured me in my quest and helped me regain a few shreds of human dignity. From the bank manager to the ironmonger, the powerful magnate of the Roche Harbor quarries to the lady who bakes my bread, I imagined them all gathered beneath my new roof, unlikely companions, the initial discomfort of their distinct stations in life melting under the warm unlikeliness of the event. Alcohol, too, might lend its hand.

And then my brother wrote to say that he was coming, and a heaviness began to settle in, as the air grows close before a storm, as the Front went profoundly still just before a push.

I find myself listening, as one listened out into no-man’s-land in the dark of night, when placed in a far distant post, waiting for the movement of a German raiding party: Every small breath of wind through the wheat seems designed to conceal the enemy, every distant rattle of their Maxim guns timed to hide the rattle of the crawling men’s equipment, every cloud across the slim moon placed there to obscure the movement of grasses. You remove your steel helmet so the roots of your hair can help listen to the dark, your very skin shudders at the rustle of a nearby rat, and if the man at your side has to stifle a cough, God help
him. Here, I do not know what I am straining so to hear, just that the heavy air demands that I freeze and stare out into the distance, sweating and breathless.

I force myself to move; that is the only way to conquer the urge to bolt. And so I build and finish my front door, a door more suited to a besieged castle than an island shack, and I mount it with three immensely stout hinges fashioned by the man who sold me this piece of God’s earth, my friend and benefactor Thomas Carmichael on Orcas Island—although as yet the door swings free, for I will not receive his latch until I row across to Roche Harbor tomorrow.

It is, I say so myself, a good house. It sits well on the land, for all that it is odd, like its builder, although a little more flamboyant and considerably more robust. Just to see it, standing up the hill from its small harbor, lends a man strength of spirit. To walk through it, to stand upon its floorboards and look through its windows, steadies a man and calms the urge to listen with every pore for the creeping enemy.

Yet he is merely my brother. Three years the elder and disapproving of all he surveys, but what of that? The island is mine, the house as well; Ws pale gaze cannot harm them.

My brother comes tomorrow, to talk me out of my folly. Let him try. Although I freely admit, to myself if none other, that the thought of seeing his face fills me with a terrible dread.

In the wake of hard work, fresh air, a substantial dinner, and the absence of her mother’s eye, Petra went to bed early and fell instantly to sleep. Rae sat by the last glow of the fire, listening to Petra’s endearingly childlike snores mingling with the night. The moon was five days past full but the clear sky made it remarkably bright; the waves were high on the beach and receding.

Rae poured herself a glass of Scotch and took it down to the promontory. She felt restless, although she could not have said why. The moon, perhaps, and the nervous chittering of the high water retreating from wet rocks, to say nothing of the accumulated stresses of the last month pulling at her, stresses that ranged from the unforeseen reawakening of many kinds of life forces simultaneously to the heavy responsibility of a sleeping child, and taking in along the way murdered skeletons, familial revelations, the faces of her attackers, three cartons of shattered glass beauty, interesting ghosts, the crippling secret guilts of a daughter, and the rebirth of her life as a woodworker. Her flesh crawled, as if the soft night were studded with unfriendly, even malevolent eyes, watching her every movement. She rested her hand on the pocket of her sweatshirt from time to time, to reassure herself with the bulk of the pistol inside.

She sat as far as she could from the dark fringe of trees around the campsite, out on the farthest point of the promontory, settled on a flat rock with her knees drawn up to her chest. The Scotch helped calm the shivers along her arms and shoulders, and reduced the twitches up the back of her neck.

However, drink also lowered her resistance to the sensation of unheard voices in the bone behind her ears, a faint hissing pulse of sound that seemed, as always, to hold words that she had to strain to hear.

But she would not strain to render sense out of voices that were nothing more than the breeze in the trees and the blood in her veins. Petra required Rae’s full and capable presence. If it meant another dip into full-blown madness and voices at the end of the girl’s visit, well, she would deal with it, but not now. She drank her Scotch and watched the shadowy boats lying off her shore, rocking gently with the tide. The rapidly expanding population of the holiday weekend, she told herself; the low conversations she imagined could well be coming from them. Mosquitoes whined, and after a while, she went to bed.

Lying on the cot, inside her canvas walls, Rae’s unease only grew. She was excruciatingly conscious of the net window above Petra’s limp form, of the loose flap of the door across from her feet, of the flimsy canvas, just inches from her hand and hip, requiring only a sharp knife to enable an arm to reach in and grab. It was irrational, it was anxiety and not fear, but she began to feel as if the night air were a blanket laid over her face, and she was sweating far more freely than the cool air would justify. She lay rigid, heart pounding and breath uneven, fighting against a panic attack that she could not walk off for fear of disturbing Petra and which refused to fade on its own. She was not far removed from whimpering in the back of her throat when Petra turned over and spoke.

“Are you okay?”

Rae hadn’t realized the child was awake.
How long had the child been lying there listening to her grandmothers labored breathing?
Rae swung her legs over the side of the creaking cot and rubbed her face.

“Yes, sweetheart, I just can’t sleep. I’m sorry to wake you.”

“You didn’t. I had a dream, about a bunch of orcas, playing and fighting in a tangle under the water, and one of them swam right past where I was standing. It was beautiful, with a sort of white patch when it went by, but kinda scary, too. That’s what woke me up.”

“You know, I actually saw an orca do that, not too long ago,” Rae told her. “When I was out on Jerry Carmichael’s boat. It went right underneath us. It was magical.”

“I liked Jerry,” noted Petra, distracted momentarily from the topic of her dream.

“He’s a nice man.”

“Is he, like, a boyfriend or something?”

“Just a friend. I think he and Nikki are about to get together.”

“Nikki’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”

“She is indeed,” Rae agreed.

“I guess it must be hard, after … I mean, you loved Alan a lot.”

Ah
, thought Rae,
the things that can be spoken of in the safety of darkness.
“Yes, I did. And yes, it is hard. Very few men would have any idea of what they’d be getting into.”

Petra thought about this for a minute, then retreated back to her dream. “What do you suppose it means when you dream about orcas?”

“What does it mean to you?”

“God, Gran,” Petra complained in disgust, “you sound just like my shrink.”

Rae laughed. “Sorry. But really, you can’t just go and tell someone what their dream means without at least asking them what they think.”

“I guess. The shrink would probably say it had something to do with ‘adolescent sexuality,’” Petra said grimly. “They’re big on ‘adolescent sexuality’ and horses. Like that’s the only reason I like to ride.”

“Since you started riding when you were five I’d agree it’s probably not quite that simple, but everyone expects psychologists to know the answers, and they sometimes fall into the trap themselves. Dream interpretation has been around for thousands of years. It’s even in the Old Testament. If you want my opinion, I’d say that the person who carved the orca up in the cave would think that your dream was a spirit visitation. It sounded like a friendly one.”

“It was, I suppose. But big, and strong.”

“Spirits are powerful. That’s what makes them scary. Even the beneficial ones.”

“My spirit, huh?” Petra said, sounding impressed despite an attempt at scorn.

“Your totem animal. Go back to sleep, Petra.”

“Would you mind if… Sometimes when I can’t go back to sleep at home, I go outside for a while. To talk to the horses, you know? Can I go out for a few minutes? I promise I won’t go far.”

A cold trickle crept into Rae’s heart at this echo of her own young self, walking the Boston house and grounds while the world slept, and she made a firm vow to speak to Dr. Hunt about the child. In the meantime, however, she kept her voice even.

“Feel free. Actually, I was wondering if you’d feel more”—not “safe”; no reason to suggest dangers if the child didn’t feel them—“comfortable if we carried our beds up and camped out in the house. It’s pretty bare, but it’s friendly.”

That last word slipped out past the censor, but Petra did not seem to notice.

“Sure,” she said. “I’d like to sleep in your house. It smells good in there.”

“It does, doesn’t it? Okay, stick on some shoes,” Rae said, already on her feet doing just that. “You know how to fold the cot? Do you need a flashlight?”

“It looks pretty bright out there.”

“It is. Bring one anyway; you might want it.” With her back to Petra, Rae slipped the revolver out from under her pillow into the knapsack, along with the flare gun, and added a bottle of water and some crackers in case Petra got hungry during the night. She noticed the cell phone Tamara had pointedly left behind, and dutifully dropped that in as well.

On their way up the hill, encumbered by rattling cot and an armload of sleeping bag and pillow, stumbling over the uneven ground in the gray half-light, Petra giggled, and the half-panicky retreat from the tent was instantly transformed into a childish prank, something girls might do at a slumber party. It was a sensation Rae had not felt for many a long year, and she was vaguely aware of the unlikeliness of a fifty-two-year-old grandmother and her thirteen-year-old offspring reduced to helpless giggles, but she truly did not care. They wrestled their burdens up the winding stairway, and Rae helped Petra set up her cot next to the black chimneypiece, taking a spot near the window for herself.