Folly (21 page)

Rae had to stand up and move away. If she hadn’t, she would have burst into tears. As it was, her eyes filled and the salal bush in her vision wavered, but she could at least keep her voice steady.

“I do, occasionally, have … well, hallucinations. I hear whispers, smell things that aren’t there. If I take medication, they fade, but the meds make me feel so awful I’d really rather have the odd voice than drug myself. It’s just…” She stopped, drew a deep breath, and went on. “Yesterday I was up at the spring, around the side of the island, and I thought I saw what looked like a footprint. In the mud near the pond. It wasn’t mine.”

“Like Robinson Crusoe, eh? Only you’d rather Friday stuck to his own island and left yours alone.”

“I know it probably wasn’t a footprint. I thought at the time that it looked like one of those lug soles on a hiking boot, but there was just a little corner of it, and thinking about it, the mark could as easily have been made by a couple of deer. I just… lost it, that’s all.”

Then came the sound of the wooden chair creaking.

“Let’s go see,” he said.

Rae was so startled she raised her face, without a thought for the ravage of tears.

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated. “Because I’m the sheriff of San Juan County, and if someone’s trespassing on a designated wildlife refuge, I should know about it.”

Rae squinted up at him. “Tell me—do you also sit by the roadside waiting to catch people littering?”

The slightly forbidding lines of his face relaxed for a moment. “Only in the wintertime, when I’m really bored.” He half-turned to call over his shoulder, “Nikki, will you and Caleb be okay here for a while? Ms. Newborn needs to show me something.”

“Sure,” Nikki shouted back. Caleb’s jeans lay folded on a driftwood
log while he went wading in the cove, the top of his boots a fraction of an inch from being inundated, his small body bent over so that his nose almost touched the icy water.

“Lead the way,” the sheriff suggested.

Rae hesitated, then started up the hill in front of him, but the sound of his boots close on her heels proved more than her nerves could take. She stepped to the side and gestured up the hill.

“You go first. The path is fairly obvious.”

Now it was the sheriff’s turn to hesitate, but only briefly. Rae trailed behind, and it soon occurred to her that law enforcement personnel probably had their own reasons for not wishing to turn their backs on strangers.

The trail was narrow and Carmichael set a brisk pace, so they spoke little on the way up. Halfway up the hill the sun began to strengthen and Rae shed her jacket, leaving it on a branch to collect on the way back. Before long she was wishing she’d left her long sleeves behind as well. When they got to the lower pool she knelt down to splash her face with water and run wet fingers through her hair. The sheriff stood for a long moment looking at the view, which was framed by branches but none the less dramatic for it. The rocks in the water off the island made for a lot of turbulence in the surface, and buoys marked more hidden dangers. This particular bit of water looked to Rae more like the wild water off Big Sur than the calm friendly coastline of the San Juans.

“Too bad your man didn’t build his house up here,” the sheriff said. “Great view.”

“Bit of a trek to carry groceries, though,” Rae countered, and walked up to the higher pool. “It was over here.”

The fern fronds had uncurled a fraction more, the moss was just as green, the intrusion of two large humans seemed to jar the placid air, and the boot mark was still there.

If it was a boot mark. The ground had softened even more during the night; had it looked the day before like it looked this morning, Rae might not even have noticed it. She told him so.

He was bent over the indentation, as intent as young Caleb had been with his undersea creatures. After a couple of minutes, during which he’d done everything but stand on his head and sniff the soil, he rose, brushed off his hands, and placed his own boot a foot or so away from the mark. He bounced up and down a couple of times, then took a step back. Now they were both staring intently at the ground.

“It could be a Vibram sole like mine,” he said finally, “but you’re right, it could be a number of other things as well.” The mark his boot had left in the tender moss was unpleasantly close to what she had seen the previous afternoon. But then, the strike of a mallet would look much the same, or the scratch of a hoof or something dropped from a great height or—

“I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to figure this one out today,” Carmichael said regretfully. “If it was summer, I’d guess you had a trespasser, but this time of year it’s not as likely. And it’s rained since Easter vacation, when we had the last big bunch of tourists around. Besides, you were on the island for most of that vacation; you’d have noticed someone walking through your campsite.”

“I wouldn’t have seen them if they came from the other side of the island,” Rae pointed out.

“That’d be one determined trespasser.”

“Why is that?”

He looked around at her in surprise. “Haven’t you ever seen your shoreline?”

“Bits of it, between the cove and here, and the other side from a distance when I was here five years ago. I do understand from Ed that the currents are difficult to navigate.”

“Typical Ed De la Torre understatement. The little cove where you’ve made camp is the only beach on the whole island, and just offshore from the spit is the only really safe mooring. You’ve either got cliff faces down to the sea or reefs like sharks’ teeth. Plus that you’re smack in the middle of the worst set of currents in the San Juans, Speiden Channel meeting Haro Strait. Riptides, eddies, you name it. You’d have to be a cross between Captain Ahab and a mountain goat to climb onto Folly anyplace but through your front yard. I know—I’ve sailed these islands all my life and I’ve only known two idiots who would try it on a bet, and one of those lost his boat in the process.”

“I didn’t realize. It’s reassuring to know that I won’t have to keep throwing people off my property.”

“Put up a big new No Trespassing sign with a picture of a shotgun, you won’t have too many problems. In fact, you should talk to Nikki about that. She’s actually the one whose job it is to worry about trespassers on a bird sanctuary.” He cast a final look out over the water, and turned away to retrace the path down to the campsite. Rae made to follow him, then turned back to kneel and scoop some water onto the twice-dented moss.
She was not sure if she was attempting to speed the moss’s recovery, or trying to cover over the mark of Jerry Carmichael’s boot.

Carmichael led more slowly going downhill, stopping to study Rae’s work on the water line, asking intelligent questions about the original construction. When they came to a bend, Rae picked up a scrap of the old cedar line and gave it to him. He turned it around in his big hands, his fingers exploring the shape, and listened to her conclusions about the changes that burying the line would make to the configuration.

“Quite a project you’ve got here for yourself” was his only comment.

“You’re not going to tell me it’s too much for a woman?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, even if it showed some signs of being true, which I can’t see that it does. Actually it’s been my experience that when women get into a thing like this, they run into fewer problems than men do, because their expectations are more realistic. And you’ve obviously got experience.” He tossed the scrap of wood into the bushes and started down the hill again.

His last comment had sounded faintly like a question, so Rae gave it an answer.

“I’ve done a certain amount of building over the years—everything but the wiring. Electricity makes me nervous. I even spent a couple of summers with a building crew when I was young, rough-framing tract houses. By profession I’m a woodworker.”

“I know. One of my deputies recognized your name.” Too much to ask, Rae supposed, that the Big Man himself would know her reputation. The sheriff, oblivious, went on. “You might want to get that No Trespassing sign up pretty soon, you know, unless you want your neighbors lined up outside your cove. It’s kind of surprising that they’ve held off this long.”

“Oh, I hardly think I’m
that
famous,” she protested.

He stopped to look back at her. “Here? You’ve got to be kidding. You’re a local celebrity.”

Rae, astonished, stared at him, but before she could begin to preen at the idea of having been dropped into the midst of an entire community of woodworking connoisseurs, he went on. “Everybody on the islands knows there’s someone come to restore Folly.”

Rae deflated rapidly, and then, to her own surprise as much as his, began to laugh. “Is that why Nikki wanted to meet me?”

“Sure. Although she knows your work, too.”

That was something, anyway. “Who is Nikki?” she asked.

“Nikki? A park ranger, didn’t I tell you? Oh, you mean in relation to me?” He turned back to the path, speaking to her over his shoulder. “She’s a friend, although she’s also a sort of distant cousin by marriage. Most of us on the islands who aren’t newcomers are somehow related. Nikki’s my older brother’s ex-wife’s younger sister. She’s a single mom— married a guy who turned out to be abusive, stuck with him until he hit Caleb, when she came back here. They’re doing fine now, but it’s hard for a woman to raise a boy on her own, so I take her and Caleb out sometimes. A boy needs men in his life, seems to me. Nikki—well, you saw with the boat, she tends to be a little overprotective.”

Rae did not think the young woman had demonstrated an overly protective attitude toward her son. Nor was she convinced that the sheriff’s interest in the redheaded pair was as strictly avuncular as he would have it.

“By the way, I was just joking about the shotgun,” he told her. “Not the picture of one—hell, a little threat never hurt anyone—but I’d hate to see you actually use one. Or even that pretty revolver of yours. Have you thought about getting a cell phone?”

“I don’t think they work here, not at the cove anyway.”

“The satellite kind would. They cost an arm and a leg, but—”

“No.”

“Okay. What about a radio?”

“I thought I’d try to do without one, for a while,” Rae told him.

“At least get yourself a flare gun. That way, if you start having problems, you can shoot it off. If one of us doesn’t see it, your neighbors will, especially if it’s dark. Not as good as a radio, by any means, but it’s better than nothing. Ed could pick one up for you in Friday Harbor. Just be sure to shoot it out over the water, so you don’t burn up your island. And, er, try not to use it unless you’re really sure. That there’s some threat, you know?”

Rae smiled wryly, hearing evidence of his conversation with Escobar in his words. “So I don’t call out the troops because of bumps in the night, you mean?”

Something in her voice made the sheriff turn around fully to study her. “Ms. Newborn, you were under a hell of a lot of stress when you made those false-alarm calls. I’d hate to think that you’d put off calling for help here because you were afraid to be embarrassed. You of all people should know that just because you sometimes hear things that aren’t there, that doesn’t mean there’s
never
anything there. I’d guess, in fact,
that’s one of the reasons you’re here, to prove that you can tell the difference. Prove it to yourself, if nothing else.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, then turned and continued on his surefooted way down the hill, leaving Rae to gape for a long minute at the retreating uniform. Jerry Carmichael would have made one ferociously effective psychiatrist, had he chosen to police humankind’s minds instead of its actions.

They walked the rest of the path in silence. At the clearing, Carmichael paused to admire the emerging towers while Rae continued on around the tent to the cooksite. Caleb was sitting in the canvas chair, his legs dangling free of the ground, searching inside the white paper bakery bag. Nikki was bent over the cook table, her back to them.

“Looking for something?” Rae asked.

The young woman jumped as if she’d been stung, dropped the plastic snap-top box of kitchen tools with a clatter, and whirled around, her hand over her heart.

“Damn, you startled me!”

“Did you need something?”

“Well, I was just thinking I might put away those knives and things that we used, but they didn’t seem to go in here.”

“No. Silverware is in that other box.”

“Oh, I see—”

“But don’t bother putting them away,” Rae told her. “I only keep the can openers and stuff in there because they rust. The silver is stainless.”

“Okay. If you’re sure.”

Nikki abandoned her project with a suspicious alacrity and went to help her son sort through the big white bag for enticing edibles. Without the diffuse light of the morning fog, both looked more substantial, the fairy’s wings traded in for a denim shirt. Nikki looked up as the sheriff came around the tent, and grinned at him.

“It’s been a whole hour and a quarter since breakfast,” she explained. “Caleb thought it was time for a little brunch.” She found a rather flat chocolatine, and held it out to her son.

The three adults watched the boy take an enormous bite of the squidgy pastry. His mouth disappeared in a dark smear.

“You like the chocolate ones?” Rae asked the child. More accepting now of her presence, he nodded vigorously. “My—” She stopped short.
My daughter liked them, too.
“Well,” she said briskly. “I’ve got a ton of work to do. Thank you for the breakfast—it was a real treat.”

“Nikki,” the sheriff said to his brother’s ex-sister-in-law. “I was telling Ms. Newborn you people might be able to arrange a big new No Trespassing sign for her before summer. So boaters have no excuse.”

“Good idea. It’ll take a while to process it, so I’ll get it started this week.”

“And if you happen to be out here one day, you might swing Ms. Newborn around her island, point out the sights. Since she doesn’t have a boat of her own yet.”

Rae started to protest, but Nikki’s face had lit up.

“I’d love to,” she said, practically wriggling with enthusiasm. “And in fact, I’m going to be working around this end of the county tomorrow. Would that be a good day?”