Folly (23 page)

No motors this morning, though, just a gradual, pleasing discord of smells and sounds, raising her spirits and her anticipation until the crescendo came with the appearance of the sun.

Sunrise was a little after six. At nine o’clock Rae reached the back wall of the foundation, where she made a pair of interesting discoveries that she had no time to investigate because just then a new and unfamiliar engine intruded itself into her consciousness. She stood up and saw a Parks Department launch entering her cove, at its helm a petite figure with a cap of gleaming red hair. Rae looked down at herself, patched clothes caked with dirt, and sighed. Then she looked at the object she was holding and decided that, since the first time she’d met the woman she’d had a gun in her hand, maybe this time it would be better to be empty-handed. She dropped the corroded hunk of metal that had been Desmond’s pistol back to the ground, kicked some soil over it, and climbed out of the foundation.

At the tent, Rae stood scrubbing the soil from her hands and watching Nikki Walls approach. She wore her ranger’s uniform today, and looked like a pixie with a gun belt; all Rae could think was, How had this enticing creature managed to remain a single mother for as much as two weeks? Nikki was, granted, too fey for conventional beauty—her extraordinary looks, Rae knew, might even work against her, considering what conservative souls men were—but she was also neat, intelligent, and bursting with energy. Rae suddenly felt old and clumsy, like something that ought to crawl back under its rock.

“Morning,” Nikki called, and held out a paper bag, its neck gathered in her child-sized fist. “I brought you that bird book you asked for, and also some apples. Last year’s, of course, but they’ve been in cold storage and they’re still good. I hope you like pippins. Knowing Ed, he doesn’t bring you much fruit.” She put the small bag on Rae’s table, her quick
gaze flicking into the nooks and crannies of the campsite as she did so. “I know I’m a little early, but I got to thinking that I wasn’t sure about the depth of your cove, and there’s a big minus tide around three. I’d hate to get stuck. It looks really bad when Parks Department employees screw up that way.” Nikki’s heart-shaped face ended in a pointed chin below a slightly secretive mouth that radiated innocent mischief when she smiled, as she did now.

Rae nodded. “Probably a sensible precaution. Do we have time for me to change?” She wanted to get out of her work clothes, but God forbid she should delay so long that she found the inquisitive redhead trapped on Folly until the next high tide freed her boat’s hull.

“Oh, sure. Shouldn’t take us more than an hour to make the circuit.”

Rae ducked into the tent to drop her filthy clothes in a heap on the grubby canvas, exchanging them for something several degrees less disreputable. She came out to find Nikki carefully scrubbing the apples under the water tap, one of Rae’s bowls from her storage boxes sitting ready to receive them, and not one book, but three (birds, trees, and wildlife of the San Juans) stacked to one side. Rae couldn’t decide if Nikki was just chronically overhelpful or if she was expressing puppylike devotion to the owner of Folly Island. Whatever it was, it was beginning to make her nervous. Maybe she should have asked Ed to buy her a bird book, instead.

However, Rae had to admit that the apples looked good in the blue bowl; more than that, they looked appetizing, smooth and green and glistening with drops of water. She picked one up as she headed down to the boat, and crunched into it. Almost too tart for comfort and crisp as if it had just come from the tree, the fruit made her whole mouth feel alive. How long since she had tasted something that intense? How long, come to think of it, since she had actually tasted anything at all?

She climbed into the boat after Nikki, most of her attention on the apple. As soon as they were clear of the cove mouth, the ranger opened throttle, and they roared out to sea. Rae sucked the last juicy scraps from the core and dropped the remains overboard.

“Thanks,” she told Nikki. “That was good.”

Nikki just grinned at Rae, balancing herself on the balls of her feet with the bumps and sway of the boat, openly inviting Rae to make fun of the pride the boat’s captain felt over her abilities. And they were considerable—Rae could feel that, even if all they were doing was speeding
in a straight line away from the island. Nikki was a natural, an extension of the boat; she would also be absolutely fearless.

“Why’d you become a park ranger?” Rae asked, shouting over the engine noise.

Nikki throttled back a bit and veered the boat to run parallel to the island’s shore before she answered. “Basically, for the fresh air. I go nuts if I don’t get outside regularly. I was born here, moved to L.A. to go to college, came back when Caleb was little, and swore I’d never live in a city again. I’ve been posted various places, managed to wangle this assignment a year and a half ago. With Caleb small and needing my family, I could plead hardship. I try not to let them know how happy I am here, or they’ll send me to Yakima or Olympia, or have me designing computer programs somewhere. What happened to your arm?”

Rae glanced down at the arm braced against the boat’s motion, its sleeve creeping back from the wrist. It was not the three scars on the inside of her wrist that Nikki had seen, but the straight surgical scar along the side. One of the surgeons had suggested plastic surgery to make it and the other scars less prominent, but tidy skin was not at the time high on Rae’s priorities.

“I broke my arm a year and a half ago; they had to put a plate in it to hold it straight.” Not that it was any of Nikki’s business. Then Rae remembered the sheriff saying that Nikki had married a violent abuser. Maybe this was her way of asking if Rae too belonged to that sorority?
No
, thought Rae,
let’s nip these personal revelations in the bud.
“Where are you taking me?”

“Just a circle. Jerry said you didn’t know why your island is so difficult to get close to. You see those ripples?” She pointed to one patch of rough water among many, this one offshore of some scrawny trees.

“Er, rocks?”

“Bad reef. Great if you’re into skin diving, but not if you want to get close in. It wraps around the point up there before going out. The divers anchor offshore, don’t try to swim through it. Not more than once, anyway, and they usually only stay a couple hours at a time, around slack water. Current gets strong once the tide gets under way—it’ll pull a light anchor right up.”

To her passenger’s relief, Nikki kept well clear of the reef, and around the point came the other barrier the sheriff had mentioned, a sheer cliff face that dropped like a highway retaining wall into the sea. The boat’s
powerful engines throbbed at low power as they chugged along against the full flow of the retreating waters, Nikki pointing out landmarks as if she owned them. They saw a bald eagle perched in a half-bare tree over the cliff face, Nikki spotting it as soon as they came around the bend, although it took a while before Rae could make out its white head against the foliage, even with Nikki’s massive binoculars. Rae could see the lightning-split tree over the spring, and showed it to Nikki as one of her two contributions to the tour.

The bare cliff face ended sharply in a forested spit that came out into the water like a bent arm, a miniature version of her campsite promontory, only this one was covered with huge, low-limbed cedars that brushed the water. To the right, a delicate waterfall marked the entrance of the spring waters to the sea. In front of the wooded arm, Nikki pointed out another submerged reef awaiting unwary hulls and wetsuits, and gave it wide berth. As they turned to follow the island’s north shore, the sun shifted from their backs to their right sides. Rae closed her eyes and raised her face to the warmth.

“I saw that show,” Nikki said abruptly. Rae reluctantly turned her head and opened her eyes. “That traveling show a couple of years ago? Women woodworkers, something like that.”

“Women in Wood.” The summer before the end of things.

“Right. Your big piece just blew me away. The small one, too, but especially the figure.
Lacy
something—
Lacy Runner
, that’s it.”

Rae had to smile at the subtle difference it made to put the emphasis on the second word, as Nikki had, rather than on the first as Rae herself did. The piece had taken her the better part of a year, and at the end had become something far more than the wooden figure in running shoes that she had originally envisioned. Its very submission into the show had been cause for heated debate and protests by those who saw it as being too close to conceptual art, even containing elements of performance art, for a dignified show of fine woodworking techniques.

The figure was that of a slightly larger-than-life woman in running shorts and a stretch top. She was a portrait of Rae’s grandmother, wife of the tyrant William, who had died when Rae was six years old, less than a year after Rae and her newly widowed father had returned to the family mansion in Boston where he had grown up. Rae had rendered Lacy in woods as light as she had been in life, birch and yellowing white pine, with mother-of-pearl for her eyes.

The name of the piece, as far as most people were concerned, came from the arch over the runner’s head, an intricate lace table runner that had belonged to the woman herself. Only Rae’s family and close friends knew about the play on words, since Lacy’s name had not been mentioned in any of the promotional material about the show. Rae had stiffened the lace into rigidity with a plastic resin and curved it on a frame, so that it resembled a garden arch—or a finish line. The key element of the piece was that the woman herself was composed entirely of drawers, large and small, of myriad shapes and angles. With all the compartments in place, the figure was simply a runner with a wide band of lace arched over her upper body. When the drawers were all removed, from the side she remained the same, a running profile veiled by a lace archway, but from the front she was revealed as empty, a ghostly presence made of delicate wooden lace. Some of the drawers also had objects in them, inlaid or fastened down or lying loose—again, several of them had personal meaning for Rae alone, having belonged either to Lacy herself or to Rae’s mother. Every day, the gallery would transform the wooden woman at least once, removing and replacing the drawers and changing the objects they contained. A person could see
Lacy Runner
a dozen times and never catch the same exact figure twice.

“I went to see it four times,” Nikki told her. “Drove all the way to Seattle twice. I even bought the catalogue, just for that. I … well, I’m really glad you came here. And if there’s anything I can do, just say. Please.”

Good heavens
, Rae reflected;
the woman actually is a fan.
And she thanked her.

The northern corner of the island was a less precipitous rock face than the western side; heavy splashes of guano testified to its long history as a nesting site for a dozen varieties of bird. Nikki handed over the binoculars again and described each type of nest, its occupant and the bird’s habits. The Parks Department had participated in a banding the spring before, it seemed, and Nikki had been the first to volunteer.

“I hope we can continue to do it,” she told Rae abruptly. “I mean, this is your island, no matter what my bosses say—I’ve seen the legal agreement, and you have every right to throw us off. But I hope you don’t. We need every sanctuary we can get. For the birds, I mean.” The ranger had the grace to look uncomfortable, aware that the hand of friendship she had extended might well now be seen as the proposed handshake of a business agreement.

“Nikki, I don’t intend to throw anyone off, although my lawyer would have a fit if she heard me admit that. There’s not enough sanctuary in the world; I’d hate to rob the birds of theirs.”

“That’s great, especially because there’s some very interesting wildlife on Folly—a big pigeon guillemot rookery come June, river otters, and the like. Have you seen the eagle nest?”

“I saw one when I was here several years ago. I don’t know if it could be the same one.”

“Sure to be. Eagles use the same nest for years and years. Yours was here when I was a kid, though it was probably the current one’s parents’. There it is. See?”

They had now reached the western flank of Mount Desmond, its sheer wall rising nearly a thousand feet straight out of the sea. Here and there, trees had attempted a foothold, and on one of the dead snags near the water perched a massive tangle of sticks. Nikki looked at it hopefully, although there was no sign of nesting activity that she could see. A little farther around, a glimpse of the bald mountaintop gave Rae her second opportunity to offer information, because Nikki had never heard there was a hut on its summit, long derelict or otherwise. The ranger thought it more likely to have been a birder’s blind than an armed forces watch-tower, and Rae did not argue with her, although as she remembered it, the hut had been far too heavily built to be the work of a casual bird-watcher.

Three quarters of the way around the island, rock face gave way once more to forest. Just before the trees began, another water source leaked down, darkening the rock and causing green growth to crop up vigorously on the ledges below. Rae asked Nikki to pause so she could study this seepage through the binoculars, but she eventually decided that the quantity of water staining the rock was much less than that of her primary spring.

“Too bad,” Nikki sympathized. “It would be a lot shorter to bring that water over.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Rae agreed ruefully. “There’s even a cave it’s started to carve out.”

“Probably just softened the sandstone enough to let the rain wear at it. That layer of rock pops up here and there, and often brings water and little caves with it. Soft sandstone between harder stone, you see? That’s where the water goes.” She powered up the engine again, and in a few minutes Rae’s tent came into view.

The tide was still going out, but Nikki nudged the boat up to the rickety dock so gently the fenders barely compressed, and held it there with the casual skill born of a lifetime on water while she and Rae finished their conversation.