Folly (34 page)

“Is that where you found the bottle?” Nikki asked.

“Bottle?” asked Rae, after a brief but telltale hesitation.

“Of wine. That you were carrying when you came stumbling down the hill looking like my little brother when he tried to dig to China.”

“Oh, the wine. Yes, it was up behind the house. It must’ve belonged to Desmond. I don’t suppose it could still be any good.”

“Was it lying on its side? If the cork stays wet, wine lasts a long time.”

“It was, yes.”

“Is it red or white? Red lasts longer.” She glanced at Rae. “I have a brother-in-law who’s into wine. ‘Raspberries in the nose’ and all that. Drives us crazy at Thanksgiving.”

“I don’t know—what color it is, I mean. Let me look.” But Nikki was already holding the dusty bottle up to the light.

“It’s red,” she pronounced. “And the cork looks fine. Are there any more? They could be worth something.”

“I don’t know,” Rae said again, and then kicked herself for not saying, No, that’s the only one. Nikki was on it in an instant.

“Let’s go look,” she suggested, all but wagging her tail in eagerness. “That would be cool, to find a stash from the Twenties. The historical society would love it. You could—”

“I’ll let you know if any more turn up.”

“But I’m—”

“Nikki.”

The ranger broke off, belatedly aware that the easygoing owner of Desmond’s Folly was sounding remarkably like Nikki’s ferocious and generally disapproving old grandmother, the Irish matriarch who ruled the clan’s holiday dinners with an iron tongue.

“I’ll let you know,” Rae repeated, now that she had the other woman’s full attention. “This is my treasure hunt, not a community project.”

Chastened, even hurt, and looking very like her small son, Nikki put the bottle down and subsided into her chair. “Okay. Sorry.”

“Hey. I know you’re just trying to help out, and I appreciate that. But at the moment, I’d rather do it myself. I don’t want to give your bosses
the least reason to poke their noses in.” It was a feeble excuse, since Rae had full faith in her lawyer’s ability to keep governmental hands away from Folly, but Nikki was nodding sadly. “Thanks anyway, for the offer. And for the doctoring.” She held up her hand. A spot of red had come through the bandage, but it was not spreading very fast. “By the way, was there anything you wanted here? I never did ask if you had some reason for dropping by.”

“No. Just in the neighborhood, and I wanted to see how far you’d gotten on the walls.”

One of the drawbacks of being a part of the community, Rae reflected, was that you had the responsibility to respond to your neighbors. You had to allow them to intrude, to nibble at your time and attention, even when your temptation was to throw them off the island. So when she got to her feet, to indicate that the visit was at an end, she also gave Nikki a smile, albeit a rather forced one. “That’s fine. Don’t think you have to bring me a bag of food as an excuse to come.”

Nikki returned the smile. She allowed Rae to walk her back to the boat, but once aboard, she turned for a parting shot. “I hope you at least think about the historical society,” she urged. “With the wine, I mean. They’d love to add a bottle of Folly wine to their display.”

Desmond Newborn’s
Journal

August 22, 1921

For two years and four months I was a sojourner across the face of the land, from the still night I crept away from my family home until the glorious morn eight weeks ago when I set foot on this island. For eight hundred and fifty-two days I was a man without a home, a vagabond whose worldly goods were on his back and in his pockets, one untrustworthy, unsavory figure among the many who move on the fringes of society.

I belonged with those other outcasts, too. I felt at home with their rootlessness, felt relieved that they demanded no more of me than a handful of half-spoiled vegetables for the communal pot and a pair of watchful eyes against the railway guards. Not that I was always comfortable with the degree of drunkenness and crudeness and the constant peril from the truly insane, but the simplicity of the demands made by the homeless brotherhood is soothing to the troubled soul. If I cried out in my sleep, my neighbor would do no more than curse me and kick my leg to silence me; he would not make earnest inquiry into the troubles I bore, for they were much the same as his.

Still, even before the violent episode in Yakima, I was growing fatigued of the life, restless in a manner that wandering could no longer assuage. Returning to Boston might be impossible, but the
thought of returning to the confines of any city at all made it difficult to breathe. And yet I found myself stopping to admire the lines of houses, the solidity of their stones, the promise they held of shelter and permanence, a stage on which the future of one’s life might be lived out. Hovel and redbrick mansion alike, all spoke to my growing desire for walls and a roof, to stand between me and the elements.

Memories of childhood summers by the sea, long sun-drenched hours of freedom and companionship, no doubt drove me ever farther west, until I ran out of land—and even then I continued, across these lovely, blue, scattered islands in a gently flowing sea.

It comes to me that this is an ironical enterprise, when one considers Williams chosen manner of expanding the family fortunes by building houses and factories, railway stations and huge blocks of offices for others. He would laugh at his younger brother’s idea of “building.”

Foolishness, perhaps, but my only other choice is to continue moving west, either on the sea or into it. Here I will stop, here I will build and live. And God willing, after finding peace, here I will die.

Forty-eight hours went by, the remainder of Saturday and all of Sunday, while Rae came to terms with both the physical bones and the reconstruction of her past that they entailed.

Not that she spent the days staring off into space; far from it. Saturday she worked on her boat dock, keeping busy away from the house and the cave, thinking of nothing in particular but the job at hand. Saturday night she constructed a squirrel-and raccoon-proof food safe out of scavenged branches, deliberately rough-looking but tight enough to thwart the increasingly clever hands of her furry neighbors. And Sunday, although she returned her attention to the house, she was mostly hauling lumber and framing the first-floor walls, mechanical labor made awkward by the bandage on her hand.

All the while, however, the back of her mind was occupied with her options concerning Desmond’s remains. Gradually, the choices came together, and the decision was made.

On Monday morning, fresh coffee to hand, Rae sat down and wrote a letter:

It was, she decided, looking over the fifth and final attempt at the letter, nothing more than the truth. If anything, in the three days she had lived with the knowledge of her cave’s remains, she had come to think of them as a larger version of Desmond’s crude wooden figurine in the foundation. Were she any less automatically and unfailingly law-abiding, were she not certain that sooner or later she would break down and admit to Nikki or Petra or someone else that she was concealing human remains, Rae would have been tempted merely to cover them over and leave them there.

Still, secrets had a way of coming out at the most awkward moment possible. Besides which, other than the temporary upheaval of her daily rounds, she did not see what harm would come of bringing Jerry Carmichael in.

Having written the letter, however, there was something Rae needed to do before she placed it in Ed’s hand the next morning. On Monday night, the first floor framed in and her hand nearly healed, she ate an early dinner and then, when she was certain that no one was going to drop in on her unannounced, she walked in twilight up to the house and through the stud wall, entering for the third time Desmond Newborn’s final resting place.

She had not been back to the cave since Nikki’s precipitate arrival on Friday morning, although looking back, she thought that her mind had been on little else. Images and questions and decisions had all whirled their way around and around, and one of the decisions she had reached was that, of the myriad questions about Desmond’s presence, there were few that she would care to share with outsiders.

The questions all boiled down to one:
Why was he here?
How Desmond had died, when he had done so, and the reason why his family had believed him to be in Arizona—all these puzzles fell into line behind the one big question: How had Desmond Newborn come to crawl into the earth, there to die?

Rae had no doubt the coroner would have some idea what had killed Desmond, even if it was just old age. But tonight would be her last chance to have him on her own, to allow his remains to tell her what they would. She felt strongly, for reasons she could not have explained even to herself, that she owed him that chance: She owed the builder of Folly the opportunity to speak privately to the one person who might hear. She had never had a last moment alone with either Alan or Bella. Both of them had been whisked away from hospital to morgue to crematorium before Rae knew what she wanted. With Desmond, she would take her time to say good-bye.

Plus, she had to know what was in the metal box that she had flung back into the darkness.

The spare lamp and the flashlight were both where she had left them, just inside the narrow entrance. She lit a match and set it to the mantle, which thankfully lit without the small puff that invariably proved fatal to the delicate membrane. Instead, it began instantly to glow, filling the passage with light. She replaced the glass hood, and shuffled forward on her knees down the stone floor.

Hello, Desmond
, she said silently.
Not long now.

From here on, whatever she did would be obvious to the police. There would be no way to conceal her passage into Desmond’s cubbyhole, no way to replace the disturbed dust on his clothing. Well, she would face that problem when she came to it. It wasn’t exactly a crime scene she was disturbing, after all.

Unless …

Only one way to find out. She didn’t know if she should reassure the spirit that she was about to lay the body to its long-delayed rest or apologize for disturbing its peace, but she pushed forward until the knees of her jeans brushed the delicate foot bones, scattered on the ground like some ancient runic consultation of the oracles. Then she sat back on her heels and raised the lamp, sending weird shadows fleeing across the rock.

After the house burned, enough debris had covered the cave opening to allow only the smallest of scavengers access. Nothing larger than a rat
could have reached the body, which meant that Desmond was more or less intact, if somewhat… relaxed. However, she doubted very much that even a large rat would have taken away articles of clothing, yet Desmond had nothing on his feet, not even stockings. His leg bones disappeared up into a pair of dust-draped trousers of some heavy black fabric. Good, thick woolen cloth, she judged, rather than workman’s pants. He wore neither jacket nor waistcoat, only a long-sleeved shirt that was white beneath the stains, with the sort of neck band designed to button into a high, stiff collar. The collar itself was missing, as was his necktie, but behind the shirt she could see the neck band and a few inches of undershirt, draped across the breastbone. The lower section of the undergarment was ragged, either rotted or chewed away. He also wore a pair of suspenders, but not over his shoulders: Both sides were down around his waist, one actually looped underneath his thighs. Most telling of all, the buttons down the front of his shirt were all undone, obvious even considering the amount of nibbling something had done to the garment.