Folly (49 page)

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I have been, at different times in my life, severely depressed, suicidal, and even delusional. My postpartum depression after my daughter Tamara was born nearly killed me. When my husband and other daughter died eighteen months ago, I ended up in a locked ward after another suicide attempt. Basically, Jerry, Don has a point: My foundations are not very stable. Don’t build a house on me.” It was a small joke, but it was also a warning, and Jerry Carmichael heard it clearly.

“But you were also attacked,” he noted, as if she might have forgotten.

“I was so wrapped up in my depression and my delusions that I forgot the world is a dangerous place, yes.”

“So you’re saying it’s your fault you were attacked.”

“Not my fault, no, but—”

“But you feel like maybe it was.”

“I suppose I do,” she replied slowly.

“Because you were delusional?”

“Because I was out of control.”

“Not violent?”

“No.”

“Hearing voices?”

“Yes. And movement, and footsteps, and—”

“Why are you so sure those were delusions?” he asked calmly, and Rae gaped at him, as stunned and breathless as if he’d punched her in the stomach.

“But… they were,” she said stupidly.

“Were they different somehow from real noises, or was it you that felt different because of the state you were in?”

“I … Jesus, Jerry, I don’t know. But look, the sheriff and his deputy came up several times, and there was nothing there. I
was
hearing things. And,” she added suddenly as the thought came to her, “why are you asking me this? Because if you’re trying to convince yourself and me that I wasn’t stark raving nuts just because in the end two guys actually attacked me, I’m sorry, but I was.”

He picked up her iron fireplace tool and poked irritably at the burning wood
before blurting out, “Somebody’s been calling around the island about you. Asking where you are, when you’re coming back.”

“Well, a lot of people know I’m here, but don’t know exactly where. The woman whose gallery I sell through in New York, for example. A couple of friends. My wood man in California.”

“A gallery… oh, right. I didn’t know they sold furniture in galleries.”

“My kind of furniture they do,” Rae said, and added with asperity, “I make furniture that wins awards and sells for a lot of money. I’m really very well known.”

They both heard the plaintive protest in her voice, but Rae chuckled first.

“So there,” she told him. “Look, are you planning on cooking those steaks? ’Cause in another minute I’m going to eat mine raw.”

Their actions turned to the preparation and then consumption of food, but their thoughts were fixed on Jerry’s news. Once the peaceable hiatus of the meal was over, Rae turned back to what he had told her.

“Are you trying to frighten me?”

“By suggesting that someone’s looking for you? Someone who may or may not have attacked you in California last year?”

“Yeah.”

“I suppose I am.”

“Shit, Jerry, thanks a lot.” She got up and began to slam dishes into the plastic dishpan, not a satisfying noise.

“I’m just suggesting that you—”

“Might come and stay with you?”

“No, actually I was going to suggest Nikki, or her aunt’s inn.”

Rae just snorted.

“Only at night. One of us, or Ed, could run you over during the day.”

“No.”

“Rae—”

“No! No. Nobody’s after me, nobody’s coming out to Folly to attack me. I told you, Jerry, this is my last stand. If I can’t make it here, I’ll—”
Shoot myself
, she did not say. “I won’t make it anywhere.”

“I understand,” Jerry said after a long minute of watching her furious back. It might, Rae thought, even have been true. “Keep your handgun with you,” he said abruptly.

At that she did turn around. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I have a permit?”

“I’d rather know if you have bullets.”

“I do.” Five now, which would not stop a charging grizzly but would no doubt send a hired attacker fleeing.
Like William, into the night
, her treacherous mind noted. “I also have the flare gun that you sent with Nikki. Now: You want some coffee?”

“Are you changing the subject?”

“Yes, damn it, I’m changing the subject.”

“Then yes, I’d love some coffee.”

The mood had changed, the growing tendrils of mutual awareness hacked off at the root. As he left, the launch motor seemed to fire unevenly, as if in displaced frustration. Rae retrieved the pistol and the flare gun from the locked box in her tent, and vowed to keep them both at arm’s reach at all times. She would be responsible for her own protection.

Desmond Newborn’s
Journal

September 30, 1921

I clear ground, stripped to the waist on all but the coldest morning, and meditate on the nature of fear.

The link between the two activities may sound unlikely to the civilian ear, but any font-line soldier knows well the logic of it. Green troops only panic and flee if they are allowed to rest in their advancement, given time to think about the approaching sounds of battle. Any sergeant knows that assigning the body a task, no matter how small, distracts the mind from its dread and allows the unseasoned soldier to learn how to master himself. If the task can be both mindless and physically demanding, so much the better.

For fear can be mastered; more, it can be used. In one small step, terror transforms into rage, and rage is as powerful a weapon as anything a man’s hands might grasp.

However, rage exacts a price from a man’s life force. When I came back from France, I felt as if the core of me had been emptied out, as if I were one of those ancient, center-dead trees, huge of girth but possessed of scarcely enough life to maintain a handful of leaves at the ends of its barren branches. Cut me down, and a person would have found a circle of wood surrounding a great hollowness.

When life began to return, it was as painful as blood penetrating a dead limb. Many times, I wished devoutly to die. I was instead husbanded back to craggy life, and promptly misused my strength. It was terror, though, not guilt that drove me out onto the road, cold, sweating fear that would have
rooted me to the spot like a frightened rabbit had I not kept moving, fear that I both embrace and keep at bay here on Sanctuary.

Keeping the terror at bay absorbs all of my limited energy. If I work to exhaustion, dig and haul until the ache in my left shoulder fills my universe, then I am granted sleep; but if I quit for the day merely pleasantly tired, I am sure to wake at night with a scream clenched between my teeth.

This preoccupation with my internal demons seems to have rendered any degree of social intercourse almost beyond my capabilities. No sooner did I move onto the island than my mind lapsed into a near-animal state. For weeks now I have found words difficult to retrieve and to use around others. I grunt at my grocer, I point and scribble my order, I nod and duck my head and smile like an imbecile. Indeed, I should not be surprised if my neighbors believe me to be mentally deficient.

I tell myself it is the long accumulation of terror, that like a poison takes time to work its way out of the body. There are things the human eye was never meant to see, the spilled viscera of the human spirit. There are things the human mind and body were never meant to do—easy murder, casual betrayal, the theft of what is most precious.

So I grunt, and put out a few stunted leaves at the ends of my branches, and spend my days sweating hard and meditating on the nature of fear.

In the days that followed, Rae applied herself to the roof, nailing boards across the rafters with a climbing harness securely around her waist. It was hot, tedious work and she was grateful when the fog lingered or the clouds blew over, grateful but equally worried that a summer rainstorm would catch her unprepared.

Early in the mornings, however, and last thing during the lengthening evenings of summer, Rae went to the back of the house to rebuild Desmond’s woodshed, the structure that would hide the cave once again.

That job went fast, once she had brought the lumber over, and was so cool and undemanding compared with the roof that it felt like a holiday entertainment. Sophisticated joinery, she had decided, was a luxury she could ill afford on a woodshed no one would see. The notches Desmond had chipped out of the rock face fit her supports adequately, and she even used plywood for the floor.

The only tricky part was hiding the small door from the house into the shed. The door’s edges she placed behind studs and its top behind a fire block, so that all she had to do was whittle a latch for the back of the left-hand stud that fastened with a sliver of wood—which, because it could only be worked from inside, did not compromise the security of the house. She tapped the sliver into place and stood back. From two feet away, it just looked like a rough spot in the wood; when she hammered a casual eightpenny nail up on the bare stud above it and draped her carpenter’s belt over it, the door became invisible.

Then she went inside the shed and repeated the process to make the door to the cave, at the far back of the shelter, invisible as well. Unless a person knew it was there, that door, too, looked like part of a wall. And finally, for the large external opening used for filling the space with wood, Rae spent an evening fashioning a wooden latch that could be worked from either side, both as a source of amusement and for the security of knowing that her house would have a back exit.

Then she returned to her roof.

The roofing paper went down the first day of summer, a cold and gloomy, fog-bound morning that kept her firmly tethered to the climbing harness lest her foot hit a damp patch on the sloping surface. It was with a heartfelt sigh of relief that she let herself back onto the solid ground inside, unbuckled the harness (which pinched and chafed like a cross between a rock climber’s rig and a chastity belt), and flung the contraption onto the growing pile of discards blocking the empty front tower. The roofing paper would keep out the rain for a while, and she was seriously leaning toward hiring a team of professionals to put on the shingles.

Ten days until the first of July, when Tamara, Don, and Petra were due to arrive, and Rae could not bring herself to spend the time constructing rough benches for their comfort. Instead, she took out the dauntingly lengthy list she would put in Ed’s hands the following day and wrote down (underneath such unusual requests as a battery-powered camp light and four six-packs of Heineken) “six folding wood-and-canvas director’s chairs.” They were ugly and flimsy, but they would keep her guests’ bottoms off the ground. She could always use them for firewood when her guests had departed.

She glanced over the list, wondering what gaping hole in her provisions she had overlooked. She had written Petra to bring any “personal items” she might need, and hoped the girl would realize that tampons and Clearasil didn’t grow on trees. Toilet paper: check; an extra flashlight: check; a couple more beach towels: check. Rae’s eyes traveled down the list, caught on an item that had gone onto it following a warm-afternoon visit to the privy, and she took the pen and scratched it out. An aerosol spray can of air freshener in the woods was too absurd to contemplate.

Rae anchored the list back under its rock, satisfied. Her family’s rear ends would be cushioned by nice clean canvas. Hell, with that many chairs she could throw a party. So now, instead of constructing some rough imitation furniture, she could begin her stairway.

She had been hungry to do so ever since Ed had brought that tower of thick cedar triangles milled for her in Friday Harbor. Rough, dull, and crudely sawn, they were pure potential, awaiting their magical transformation. When she had first stacked them up in the house she had not been able to resist licking her thumb and wetting the dry wood into color: orange, like the freshly scrubbed stone walls of the tower, like the morning light that would pour down the stairway from the high windows.