Folly (64 page)
Authors: Laurie R. King
Satisfied, Rae worked open the top of the box, then eased her way down the boulders to the water. There was an odd shimmer to its surface tonight, a seasonal bioluminescence due to some kind of plankton. When she sprinkled the ashes, they flowered and glowed briefly where they landed.
When the box was half empty, she closed it, then climbed back up to sit beside the island’s ghost. The rest of the ashes she planned to divide in the morning: half beneath the madrone tree, heavy now with clusters of red berries, the remainder in the spring’s lower pool among the ferns and the salamanders.
When the glow had subsided and the sun was fully gone, they walked back together to the house. It smelled still of raw plaster, although the air no longer felt damp with it. She waited until Allen had drawn the curtains before she lit the lamps.
Gloriana’s photographer, Jaime Brittin, had spent the day on Folly. It was his second trip to record the house’s progress, following a preliminary session in late July, and he had left the table in the middle of the room—a slab of Vivian’s walnut burl—piled high with a wild assortment of photographs: old black-and-white portraits and her crude snapshots mixed up with his sleek July studies that looked ready for framing on Gloriana’s gallery walls. Lying on top of one stack was the bashed-up strongbox, which Rae had brought out after the photographer left, to give Desmond’s journal to Allen.
She sat down in one of the frayed canvas camp chairs and began to gather together the photos while Allen stirred up the fire in the black fireplace and went to the liquor cabinet (a plastic milk crate) to pour them each a glass of wine.
“Did you finish reading the journal?” she asked him.
“I did. Are you going to use it in the book?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“You should. It’s very moving. Amazing how like Vietnam that war seems to have been, except their mud was cold.”
The house warmed rapidly, now that the windows were in and the door was secure, and Rae shrugged out of her jacket, then draped it over the back of the chair.
“What did you say to the photographer, when he was posing you on the front steps with the door latch in your hand?” Allen asked.
“You were watching?”
“Of course I was watching. You said something to him that made him nearly drop his camera.”
“Oh yes,” she said with a smile. “He wanted a modern duplicate of the picture of Desmond as one of the book’s echoes, so I told him, ‘If someone bursts in tonight and shoots me, I’m going to be really upset.’ Of course, poor Jaime had no idea what I was talking about.” Allen laughed and Rae joined him, but she glanced uneasily over at the door as well. Allen, sensitive always to the fears of others, put down his glass and went to turn the bolt.
He came back to the fire and picked up the small leather book, thumbing through the pages of a man’s life.
“I wonder what that final entry was going to be,” he mused. “‘I have a’ something.”
“Ah,” said Rae. His head came up at the sound. “That’s the reason why I’m hesitating about using the journal in the book. Here, I’ll show you.”
She sorted through the photos and extracted several, then laid them out on the floor in front of the hearth like some exotic game of solitaire. Allen watched over her shoulder as Rae identified each subject for him.
The first was an enlargement of the old photograph of Desmond on his steps. Either as a result of superior equipment or through surreptitious retouching, the latch was now clear in his hand. His face remained half shaded: one dark eye, dark hair falling against one pale cheek, dark jacket with a smudge of light dust on one sleeve.
Below it she laid two others, William and Lacy, taken from the family albums by Tamara: William on the left at the age of seventy—hawk-like face, thin mouth, eyes like a pair of ice chips—Lacy on the right looking as if she might burst like a balloon under one glance of her husband’s eyes. The picture showed her as a young woman, very beautiful in her Edwardian ruffles and Gibson girl hair. Her skin was pale, the texture of a flower petal that would bruise at a touch, and her eyes, too, though nicely shaped, would have benefited from a judicious application of Petra’s makeup. Since in the early years of the century no proper lady would have thought of such a thing, in the picture they looked almost as pale as her skin.
Then beneath those two photos Rae placed a snapshot of her parents: her father dark and shadowy, as befitted a man who had spent his life in the shadow of his father; her mother, before she became sick, a classic blond California beauty of the Forties.
As the fourth and bottom row, Rae set down a picture of herself, in which Jaime had contrived to find a trace of beauty, even mystery, in a tall graying woman with a hammer in her hand.
Finally, she reached for the metal strongbox and took out the gold locket with the two locks of hair. She opened it, and arranged the golden clamshell at the place where Desmond’s photograph met those of William and Lacy. The brown curl and the blond were slightly tangled, but Rae made no attempt to separate them. Then she removed the box’s other, odder contents. The assorted objects that she had thought might be mementos—twigs, shell, and pebble; concert program, button, ribbon, and tassel—she arranged to the right of the photographs. Last, she took the diary from Allen, leafed through to find Desmond’s careful notation of eight unexplained dates scattered through the first two months of 1919. She laid the diary below the mementos, then sat back against Allen’s knees.
“What do you see?” she asked.
It took him only moments. “Damn,” he exclaimed, sitting up abruptly. “You think that explains it?”
“I think so, yes.” Rae picked up the photographs of Desmond and her father, leaving the rest where they lay. “I think that when my father was about seven years old, it occurred to William that the boy’s eyes were not going to grow any lighter. He thought back to the boy’s birth date, and to nine months before, and he arranged a trip out west to see his little brother’s island.
“On that visit, he just happened to show his brother a picture of Lacy and her son, and Desmond saw instantly what it meant. But because Desmond was a soldier at heart, true and straightforward, he couldn’t see what lay behind the picture. Or rather, what lay behind his being shown the picture.”
Eight dates; eight odd souvenirs.
“That night, he sat down to write about it in his journal—I found an uncapped pen in the debris under the house, right in front of the fireplace where his chair was—but before he could get his discovery down, his brother came back in and killed him. In revenge. William was always big on revenge, and on the sanctity of his possessions.
“What Desmond sat down to write was: ‘I have a son.’”
Rae looked from one picture to the other, then picked up her own brown-eyed photograph and inserted it between them. She even had the same generous mouth.
“Desmond Newborn was not my father’s uncle,” she told her island’s ghost. “Desmond Newborn was his father. My grandfather.”
“Your island is well named,” Allen replied after a minute.
Rae smiled, sadly, and dropped her head back against his supporting knees. “Newborn’s Folly.”
Allen laid a hand on her hair, and gently corrected her. “Newborn’s Sanctuary.”
LAURIE R. KING
lives with her family in the hills above Monterey Bay in northern California. Her background includes such diverse interests as Old Testament theology and construction work, and she has been writing crime fiction since 1987. The winner of both the Edgar and the John Creasey Awards for Best First Novel for
A Grave Talent
, the debut of the Kate Martinelli series, she is also the author of six mysteries in the Mary Russell series, including
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
, and most recently,
Justice Hall
, as well as a thriller,
A Darker Place.
Her website address is
laurierking.com
.
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—
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—The New York Times Book Review
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A Letter of Mary
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A GRAVE TALENT
A Kate Martinelli Mystery
W
INNER OF THE
E
DGAR AND
J
OHN
C
REASEY
A
WARDS
FOR
B
EST
F
IRST
N
OVEL
The unthinkable has happened in a small community outside of San Francisco. A series of shocking murders has occurred, each victim a child. For Detective Kate Martinelli, just promoted to Homicide and paired with a seasoned cop who’s less than thrilled to be handed a green partner, it’s a difficult case that just keeps getting harder.
THE SECOND CHILD
was found six weeks later, fifteen miles away as the crow flies, and in considerably fresher condition. The couple who found her had nothing in common with Tommy Chesler other than the profound wish afterwards that they had done something else on that particular day. It had been a gorgeous morning, a brilliant day following a week of rain, and they had awakened to an impulsive decision to call in sick from their jobs, throw some Brie, sourdough, and Riesling into the insulated bag, and drive down the coast. Impulse had again called to them from the beach where Tyler’s Creek met the ocean, and following their picnic they decided to look for some privacy up the creekside trail. Instead, they found Amanda Bloom.
Amanda, too, was from over the hill in the Bay Area, though her home was across the water from Tina’s. There were a number of similarities in the two girls: Both of them were in kindergarten, both were white girls with brown hair, both were from upper-middle-class families. And both of them had walked home from their schools.
TO PLAY TOO POOL
A Kate Martinelli Mystery
When a band of homeless people cremate a beloved dog in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the authorities are willing to overlook a few broken regulations. But three weeks later, when the dog’s owner gets the same fiery send-off, the SFPD has a real headache on its hands. The autopsy suggests homicide, but Inspector Kate Martinelli and her partner have little else to go on. They have a homeless victim without a positive ID, a group of witnesses who have little love for the cops, and a possible suspect, known only as Brother Erasmus, whose history leads Kate along a twisting road to a disbanded cult, long-buried secrets, the thirst for spirituality, and the hunger for bloody vengeance.
HIS BREATH
huffing in clouds and the news announcer still jabbering against his unemployed ears, the currently unemployed former Bank of America vice presidential assistant was slogging his disconsolate way alongside Kennedy Drive in the park when, to his instant and unreasoning fury, he was attacked for a second time by a branch-wielding bearded man from the shrubbery. Three weeks of ego deflation blew up like a rage-powered air bag. He instantly took four rapid steps forward and clobbered the unkempt head with the only thing he carried, which happened to be a Walkman stereo. Fortunately for both men, the case collapsed the moment it made contact with the wool cap, but the maddened former bank assistant stood over the terrified and hungover former real estate broker and pummeled away with his rubbling handful of plastic shards and electronic components. A passing commuter saw them, snatched up her car telephone, and dialed 911.
Three minutes later, the eyes of the two responding police officers were greeted by the sight of a pair of men seated side by side on the frost-rimed grass: One was shocked, bleeding into his shaggy beard, and even at twenty feet stank of cheap wine and old sweat; the other was clean-shaven, clean-clothed, and wore a pair of two-hundred-dollar running shoes on his feet.
The two officers never were absolutely certain about what had happened, but they filled out their forms and saw the two partners in adversity safely tucked into the ambulance. Just before the door closed, the
female officer thought to ask why the homeless man had been dragging branches out of the woods in the first place.
By the time the two officers pounded up the pathway into the baseball clearing, the second funeral pyre had caught and flames were roaring up to the gray sky in great billows of sparks and burning leaves. It was a much larger pile of wood than had been under the small dog Theophilus three weeks earlier, but then, it had to be.
On the top of this pyre lay the body of a man.
A MONSTROUS REGIMENT
OF WOMEN
A Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mystery
The dawn of 1921 finds Mary Russell, Sherlock Holmes’s brilliant young apprentice, about to come into a considerable inheritance. Nevertheless, she still enjoys her nighttime prowls in disguise through London’s grimy streets, where one night she encounters an old friend, now a charity worker among the poor. Veronica Beaconsfield introduces Russell to the New Temple of God, a curious amalgam of church and feminist movement, led by the enigmatic, electrifying Margery Childe. Part suffragette, part mystic, she lives quite well for a woman of God from supposedly humble origins. Despite herself, Russell is drawn ever deeper into Childe’s circle … far closer to heaven than Mary Russell would like….
THE DOOR CLOSED
behind Veronica, and I was half-aware of her voice calling out to Marie and then fading down the corridor as I sat and allowed myself to be scrutinised, slowly, thoroughly, impassively. When the blonde woman finally turned away and kicked her shoes off under a low table, I let out the breath I hadn’t realised I was holding and offered up thanks to Holmes’s tutoring, badgering, and endless criticism that had brought me to the place where I might endure such scrutiny without flinching—at least not outwardly.
She padded silently across the thick carpet to the disorder of bottles and chose a glass, some ice, a large dollop from a gin bottle, and a generous splash of tonic. She half-turned to me with a question in her eyebrows, accepted my negative shake without comment, went to a drawer, took out a cigarette case and matching enamelled matchbox, gathered up an ashtray, and came back to her chair, moving all the while with an unconscious feline grace—that of a small domestic tabby rather than anything more exotic or angular. She tucked her feet under her in the chair precisely like the cat in Mrs Hudson’s kitchen, lit her cigarette, dropped the spent match into the ashtray balanced on the arm of the chair, and filled her lungs deeply before letting the smoke drift slowly from nose and mouth. The first swallow from the glass was equally savoured, and she shut her eyes for a long moment.
When she opened them, the magic had gone out of her, and she was just a small, tired, dishevelled woman in an expensive dress, with a much-needed drink and cigarette to hand. I revised my estimate of her age upward a few years, to nearly forty, and wondered if I ought to leave.
“Why are you here, Mary Russell?”
“King has a gift for the rich, decisive detail and the narrative
crispness that distinguished Conan Doyle’s writing.”
—The Washington Post Book World
WITH CHILD
A Kate Martinelli Mystery
Adrift in mist-shrouded San Francisco mornings and alcohol-fogged nights, homicide detective Kate Martinelli can’t escape the void left by her departed lover, who has gone off to rethink their relationship. But when twelve-year-old Jules Cameron comes to Kate for a professional consultation, Kate’s not sure she’s
that
desperate for distraction. Jules is worried about her fiend Dio, a homeless boy she met in a park. Dio has disappeared without a word of farewell, and Jules wants Kate to find him. Reluctant as she is, Kate can’t say no—and soon
finds herself forming a friendship with the bright, quirky girl. But the search for Dio will prove to be much more than either bargained for….
AND STILL, ALL THAT FALL
, she looked for Dio. Once a week, she made the rounds of the homeless, asking about him. Always she asked among her network of informants, the dealers and hookers and petty thieves, and invariably received a shake of the head. Twice she heard rumors of him, once at a house for runaway teenagers, where one of the current residents had a friend who had met a boy of his description; and a second time, when one of her informants told her there was a boy-toy of that name in a house used by pederasts over near the marina. She phoned a couple of old friends in the Berkeley and Oakland departments to ask them to keep an ear out, and she arranged to be in on the raid of the marina house, but neither came up with anything more substantial than the ghost she already had. She doubted he was in the Bay Area, and told Jules that, but she also kept looking.
That autumn, in one of those flukes that even the statistician will admit happens occasionally, it seemed for a while that every case the Homicide Department handled involved kids. A two-year-old with old scars on his back and broken bones in various states of mending died in an emergency room from having been shaken violently by his eighteen-year-old mother. Three boys aged sixteen to twenty died from gunshot wounds. Four bright seventeen-year-old students in a private school did a research project on explosives, using the public library, and sent a very effective pipe bomb to a hated teacher. It failed, but only because the man was as paranoid as he was infuriating. A seven-year-old in a pirate costume was separated from his friends on Halloween; he was found the next morning, raped and bludgeoned to death. Kate saw two of her colleagues in tears within ten days, one of them a tough, experienced beat cop who had seen everything but still couldn’t bring himself to look again at the baby in the cot. The detectives on the fourth floor of the Department of Justice made morbid jokes about it being the Year of the Child, and they either answered the phone gingerly or with a snarl, according to their personalities….
“Like a slow-burning fire, the story makes you hurt deeply for
King’s characters before you realize what’s happening to you.”
—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
A LETTER OF MARY
A Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mystery
Late in the summer of 1923, Mary Russell Holmes and her husband, the illustrious Sherlock Holmes, are ensconced in their home on the Sussex Downs, giving themselves over to their studies: Russell to her theology, and Holmes to his malodorous chemical experiments. Interrupting the idyllic scene, amateur archaeologist Miss Dorothy Ruskin visits with a startling puzzle. Working the Holy Land, she has unearthed a tattered roll of papyrus with a message from Mary Magdalene. Miss Ruskin wants Russell to safeguard the letter. But when Miss Ruskin is killed in a traffic accident, Russell and Holmes find themselves on the trail of a fiendishly clever murderer.
THE NEXT DAY
,
The Times
arrived at one o’clock in the afternoon. It still lay folded when I turned off the lights and went upstairs, and it had not moved when I came back through the house on Friday for an early cup of tea. Two hours later, Holmes came down for breakfast and picked it up absently as he passed. So it was that nearly forty hours had elapsed between the time I saw Miss Ruskin off on the train and the time Holmes gave a cry of surprise and sat up straight over the paper, his cup of tea forgotten in one hand.
“What is it? Holmes?” I stood up and went to see what had caught his attention so dramatically. It was a police notice, a small leaded box, inserted awkwardly into a middle page, no doubt just as the paper was going to press.
I
DENTITY
S
OUGHT OF
L
ONDON
A
CCIDENT
V
ICTIM
Police are asking for the assistance of any person who might identify a woman killed in a traffic accident late yesterday evening….
I sat down heavily next to Holmes.
“No. Oh surely not. Dear God. What night would that have been? Wednesday? She had a dinner engagement at nine o’clock.”
In answer, Holmes put his cup absently into his toast and went to the telephone. After much waiting and shouting over the bad connexion, he established that the woman had not yet been identified. The voice at the other end squawked at him as he hung up the earpiece. I took my eyes
from Miss Ruskin’s wooden box, which inexplicably seemed to have followed me downstairs, and got to my feet, feeling very cold. My voice seemed to come from elsewhere.
“A wonderful book, simultaneously inventive, charming, witty, and suspenseful. I loved it.”
—Elizabeth George
THE MOOR
A Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mystery
Though theirs is a marriage of true equals, when Sherlock Holmes summons his wife and partner, Mary Russell, to the eerie scene of his most celebrated case, she abandons her Oxford studies to aid his investigation. But this time, on Dart-moor, there is more to the matter than a phantom hound. Sightings of a spectral coach carrying a long-dead noblewoman over the moonlit moor have heralded a mysterious death, the corpse surrounded by oversize paw prints….
THE TELEGRAM
in my hand read:
RUSSELL NEED YOU IN DEVONSHIRE. IF FREE TAKE EARLIEST TRAIN CORYTON. IF NOT FREE COME ANYWAY. BRING COMPASS
.
HOLMES
To say I was irritated would be an understatement. We had only just pulled ourselves from the mire of a difficult and emotionally draining case and now, less than a month later, with my mind firmly turned to the work awaiting me in this, my spiritual home, Oxford, my husband and long-time partner Sherlock Holmes proposed with this peremptory telegram to haul me away into his world once more. With an effort, I gave my landlady’s housemaid a smile, told her there was no reply (Holmes had neglected to send the address for a response—no accident on his part), and shut the door. I refused to speculate on why he wanted me, what purpose a compass would serve, or indeed what he was doing
in Devon at all, since when last I had heard he was setting off to look into an interesting little case of burglary from an impregnable vault in Berlin. I squelched all impulse to curiosity, and returned to my desk.
Two hours later the girl interrupted my reading again, with another flimsy envelope. This one read:
ALSO SIX INCH MAPS EXETER TAVISTOCK OKEHAMPTON, CLOSE YOUR BOOKS. LEAVE NOW
.
HOLMES
Damn the man, he knew me far too well.
“The great marvel of King’s series is that she’s managed to preserve the integrity of Holmes’s character and yet somehow conjure up a woman astute, edgy, and compelling enough to be the partner of his mind as well as his heart.”
—The Washington Post Book World
O JERUSALEM
A Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mystery
In 1918, Russell and Holmes enter British-occupied Palestine under the auspices of Holmes’s enigmatic brother, My croft, and find themselves at the service of two travel-grimed Arab figures who receive them in the orange groves fringing the Holy Land. A rash of murders seems unrelated to the growing tensions between Jew, Moslem, and Christian, yet Holmes is adamant that he must reconstruct the most recent one in the gully where it occurred. His findings will lead him and Russell into mortal danger.
THE SKIFF WAS BLACK
, its gunwales scant inches above the waves. Like my two companions, I was dressed in dark clothing, my face smeared with lamp-black. The rowlocks were wrapped and muffled; the loudest sounds in all the night were the light slap of water on wood and the rhythmic rustle of Steven’s clothing as he pulled at the oars.
Holmes stiffened first, then Steven’s oars went still, and finally I too heard it; a distant deep thrum of engines off the starboard side. It was not the boat we had come on, but it was approaching fast, much too fast to outrun. Steven shipped the oars without a sound, and the three of us folded up into the bottom of the skiff.