Folly (63 page)

Her hand swept down and caught up the abandoned hammer, the tool that had been the beginning of everything in her life, and as she did so her husband’s son suddenly realized she was there. The unlit matches spilled to the steps as he grabbed for the gun in his belt, and the gun came around at the same moment that twenty-one ounces of drop-forged steel with a handle carved of Honduran mahogany left Rae’s palm.

The hammer took him in the face. His hand convulsed briefly on the pistol, and lead brushed past Rae’s scalp to slap safely into the beams behind her, but Rory was tumbling backward, unconscious before the back of his head cracked against the rocky hillside.

She retrieved her hammer and stood over him with it, panting hard and fighting the urge to shriek like a banshee and either bash him again or kick him all the way into the waves, but her feet were bare, her hammer too precious, and her rage too short-lived. She settled instead for pulling the loaded flare gun from the waistband of her shorts and aiming it straight at his darkly bloodied face. Her finger twitched, and then she raised the gun to the heavens and squeezed; the third flare exploded upward to join its fading brothers.

Rae did not know how long she sat on the bottom step with the hammer beside her, watching over the unconscious figure, before she heard Petra’s voice—not more than a minute or two, she decided later, since the last flare was still sputtering overhead.

“Gran?” came the whisper, so high-pitched it ended in a squeak.

Rae stood quickly. “I’m here, sweetheart. It’s finished—everything’s
okay. You wait there.” The house reeked of kerosene, horribly dangerous to the least spark (had that bullet hit the stones …), and she scurried across the room to the access door, folded herself through, and closed it behind her. Petra flung herself at Rae, sobbing out her relief at last. Rae held her close and rocked her like a baby, taking comfort as much as giving it, until eventually her granddaughter’s fear loosed a few notches.

She nuzzled the child’s unkempt hair, and ventured humor. “Were you Petra-fied, my love?”

As she had hoped, the child snorted involuntarily at the bad joke, and although she then hugged Rae all the tighter, Rae thought that the immediate reaction had passed. “Okay,” she said. “It’s nearly over now. We’ll have to go around the house to get to the tent—the lamp spilled inside the house and it really stinks in there. So it looks like you get to go barefoot on the island after all, in spite of your mother’s wishes.”

“A lamp?”

“Kerosene, yes.” With any luck, the child would assume it to be an accidental spill.

“But what happened?” Petra wailed. “I waited and waited and then I thought I heard shooting, and then nothing happened for the longest time and—”

“I know, love, I was coming back for you. That was him shooting, but all he hit was the ceiling. I knocked him on the head. He’s out cold, and I took his gun.”

“But if he wakes up—”

“Petra, it’s okay. He doesn’t have a gun, he’s hurt, and the police will be here any minute. Come on, let’s go.”

The girl clung to her as they picked their way down the steep slope and circled the tower. The first intimations of dawn were bringing light to the eastern sky. It seemed years since the sunset.

At the tent they retrieved flashlight and shoes. Rae took a kitchen knife to her clothesline and bundled it up into her pocket, then picked up two saucepans.

“I’m going to tie him in case he wakes up,” she said, handing the pans to Petra. “I need you to go to the end of the promontory and make a lot of noise. I can’t believe anyone could sleep through gunshots and flares, but you’ve got to make sure—create enough of a racket to make them come to the decks of their fancy boats and ask what the hell you’re doing, okay? Bang and crash and shout as loud as you can. I’ll join you there.”

Petra took their only remaining flashlight.

Rae went cautiously up the hill, gun in hand, not at all sure Rory wasn’t going to leap at her as she approached. He did not. It looked, in truth, as if he would not be leaping at anyone for a long time. Still, Rae nervously bound his feet together, cut the line, then held his hands together to bind those as well. They were twitching, and small moaning noises were coming out of his throat. She could see his outline now, and in a few minutes, his face. He was wearing a plaid shirt—another imitation of Alan—and his glasses were smashed on the rocks. With a start, Rae realized that his eyes were not only open, but looking straight at her. She stepped back hastily; he did not move.

“Rory? Can you hear me?” There was no response, but looking into his eyes, she thought he was aware. “Rory, do you know who I am?”

Ten minutes earlier she would not have seen the brief spasm of disgust that passed over his battered face, but now it was light enough. She took it as answer, and squatted down at his side. Petra’s saucepans clanged once, tentatively, and then again with more conviction, and soon she was bashing and shouting at the top of her young lungs. Rae smiled involuntarily, and Rory’s eyes became slits.

If he was sufficiently aware to notice her expression, then he could answer a few questions, she decided. “You paid those two bastards to attack me, didn’t you? Did you know they’re in jail?” She waited in vain for a response. “Did you actually tell them to rape me, or was that their own decision?”

“Who gives a shit?” he muttered.
Oh, Alan
, her heart cried;
thank God you’re not here to see this.

“It’s you that’s been phoning around the islands? And searched my tent two weeks ago?”

“Had to be sure.” His words were slurred from the damage done by her hammer, but she could understand them. She also heard clearly that there was no regret in his voice; if anything, there was pride.

“Does that also mean you broke into my house? Trashed the place looking for where I’d gone?”

“Found you.”

“Oh yes, you’re a clever boy, all right. But why smash all Alan’s glass?”

That got a reaction. Rory convulsed and Rae fell over backward onto her rear end as she scrabbled uphill with both feet to get away from him. He lay back impotently.

“He loved that shit,” he snarled. “I was with him when he bought one, stupid bastard, drooling over it like it was a Rembrandt or some-thing.
Five hundred bucks for a fucking paperweight. A present for you. And then when he left, he gave me a lousy hundred bucks. Pissed me off. So I broke ’em.”

It was a statement vastly more revealing than he could have known. When Rae first saw who it was, she had assumed it was all about money; no doubt Rory believed it was, too. But what she heard was far more raw and visceral than any drive for hard cash: Alan had loved the glass, so Rory would smash it. Alan had loved Rae: Rory would drive her mad, beat her up by proxy, provoke her to suicide.

Alan had loved Bella, too. If Bella had survived the accident, what would Rory have done? Rae pictured the savaged corkboard and ripped drawings in Alan’s study, and knew that this man would have done more to their daughter than steal an antique silver rattle from her crib.

Alan had done everything he could for his son, but the boy was just a black hole that even a father’s love could not fill. Rae flashed back to the strange dream she’d had, with Rory and Don standing over a baby’s crib, pulling off one mask after another, but she refused to think about that now: She might pity Rory Beauchamp; if she thought about it, she might even understand what had led him to this point, but not now. And she would never feel sorry enough to grieve for him. He had tried to hurt Petra; for that he would pay.

The sun was rising now, the very tops of the cedars turning golden with the first light of the new day; she and Rory could see each other clearly. To be sure, she went forward until his face was at arm’s length from hers. She was aware of the approach of a familiar boat engine, heard, too, the change in Petra’s frantic noisemaking, but she wanted to kick this man before Jerry got to him. Kick him hard, where it would hurt him the most: in his pride.

“Your father wasn’t the stupidest bastard in his family. You know what you’d have got if you sold those glass pieces instead of breaking them? At least a couple hundred thousand dollars. And all those paintings and lithographs on the walls that you just ignored? Even on the black market, they’d have put another, oh, half, three quarters of a million in your pocket.” He winced at each blow. Rae watched with pleasure, and prepared the final kick. “And you didn’t even think to look for a safe. Talk about stupid.”

She turned and walked away, leaving him for Jerry Carmichael.

Rae Newborn stood with her boots on the island’s rocky promontory, holding in her hands the box that Ed De la Torre had brought her two days before. She had saved it for tonight, the autumn equinox, although she was not quite sure why. Because it felt right, she supposed, and that was reason enough.

Seventy-two years and ten days after his death, on a warm September evening, Desmond Newborn was about to come home for good. Not that she could be positive just which day was the anniversary of his death, how long he had waited in his cave for the end to take him, but it hardly mattered now. Today was the equinox, halfway between midsummer and the winter solstice, and today she would scatter his ashes.

“Your towers finally have windows in them, Desmond,” she told his spirit. “The roof is shingled. And my front door looks just like yours. Folly is a shell, but it’s secure. I’m going to stay here over the winter, working on the inside.” And after that… well, who knew?

“There’s going to be a book about you, Desmond. Maybe not everything about you—I’ll have to think about that—but all about Folly, and how you built it, and how I restored it. The photographer brought me some of his pictures—there’s a magnificent one of the beach over on Lopez where you gathered a lot of your stones. It’s going to be a spectacular book. And your great-great-great-niece Petra is going to help me with the words. My granddaughter wants to be a writer. You’d be so proud of her.”

She stopped, hearing the sound of footsteps coming up the promontory after her. In a minute, the man whose name she was getting used to was standing behind her. He smelled of coffee.

“I’m going to have to stop carrying on these conversations with Desmond,” she said, without turning to face him. “People are going to think I’m a little unbalanced.”

“They wouldn’t dare,” Allen said.

The growl of a boat opening throttle as it came free from the Roche Harbor restrictions reached her ears, and she knew her companion would be eyeing it carefully, ready to fade away if it came too close. It was like living with a ghost when Allen was here, his habitual disinclination to be seen causing him to vanish at the hint of an intruder. Sometimes Rae found herself talking to empty air.

He was a ghost in other ways as well. The overlay of his name on her tongue, once jarring, was beginning to feel oddly inevitable, as if the syllables denoted a relationship rather than a distinct person. It was not that he filled the Alan-shaped hole in her life, exactly, but he did take over some of that same space. He was unlike Alan in all ways but the key ones at the centers of their beings, and that core similarity allowed the one man to overlap and merge with the other. Which was the ghost was not always clear to her, and Rae knew full well that it was more than a little weird, and probably unhealthy as well. She just couldn’t bring herself to worry about it.

The boat moved off, and he settled down at her side. An oak, she thought, in Vivian’s tree game. Scarred and fire-girt, bent by forces that would have had lesser trees flat. The only oak she’d ever met.

“Allen?”

“Mm?”

“I’ve decided to go to California next month. I need to clear out Alan’s clothes, give Bella’s toys to the local shelter, do something about my workshop. I’ll be gone two or three weeks.”

“You feel ready for that?”

“I do.”

“I’m glad. I’m supposed to go to Europe for a week or two myself, to set up a link with a group there. Around the tenth.”

“Then I’ll aim for the same date.” Allen would not stay in the house while she was away. Folly might be considered haunted, but ghosts did not generally light fires and cook themselves meals.