Folly (37 page)

“Ms. Newborn,” he said. “Could I by any chance interest you in a bite of dinner?”

Jerry Carmichael moved quietly, Rae noticed, as some big men do, so as not to frighten lesser humans—or to step on them by accident. Alan had moved that way. Alan had lived that way. And why was she thinking about Alan?

“I’m pretty tired,” she answered. “I was heading for the inn Nikki Walls arranged for me. She said it was quiet.”

“Is that the one her aunt owns? It’s a good two miles out, and she doesn’t serve dinner. We could eat and I could drop you there in the time it’d take you to walk it.”

If his attitude had been even faintly pushy, Rae would have said a polite thanks and continued on around him, but Carmichael seemed content to go by her decision, offering an alternative rather than coaxing. She found herself folding her map away.

“I’d like dinner, thanks.”

It did not occur to her that “dinner” meant anything but a quick burger, so it wasn’t until they were inside the door of the restaurant that she came to a halt.

“I’m not really dressed—” she began, but was cut off by the approach of a young blond woman with a gold loop through her left nostril, a wide smile on her face, and a pair of menus in her hand.

“Good evening, Sheriff. Two tonight?”

“Thank you, Sara. That corner table’d be good.”

It was early, so only three or four of the twenty or so tables were taken. Rae wavered, on the brink of demanding to be taken elsewhere, then decided that at this hour, it was not likely that anyone would look askance at a woman who was dressed for a hike in the woods sitting down to white linen and sparkling crystal. She did, however, excuse herself to scrub irritably at the day’s accumulation of dust, salt spray, and newsprint. When she got back to the table, the sheriff rose, an old-world courtesy that also reminded her of Alan. She plunked down in her chair,
yanked her intricately folded napkin onto her lap, and told the attentive Sara, “Wine. Red.”

The waitress was new enough to the job to blink at Rae’s brusqueness, but the man seated across from Rae suggested a variety and a maker, and Sara went off to fetch it.

Rae applied herself to the menu, aware of the gaze of a pair of all-seeing eyes on her, but unwilling to be drawn out of her sulk. When the wine came she swallowed two large gulps without tasting it. This had been a long day filled with unaccustomed demands and revelations, following a sleepless night, and she could feel the restless stir of energies, pushed deep down. She needed quiet and solitude; she’d told the sheriff as much, yet he had still brought her here; let him deal with a difficult dinner companion.

What she failed to reckon with was the sheriff’s long experience with hostile witnesses. After a moment, she became aware of a large, callused hand with nicely shaped nails being held across the table in her direction. She looked up.

“My grandmother would turn me over her knee for my manners. I believe you’ve met my alter ego, Sheriff Carmichael,” he told her. “My own name is Jerry, Jerry Carmichael.” Rae looked at the extended hand, and her mouth twitched, not so much at the humor of the introduction as at the picture of any woman turning this man over her knee. She took his hand over the table, and felt her own work-hardened hand completely enfolded in the delicate grasp of a vise, a vise of great precision as well as strength.

“Rae Newborn,” she said in response, and he let her go.

“Nikki tells me you’re a woodworker,” he said as he picked up his menu. “Furniture and tables and things.” They seemed to be starting from scratch—not only with new introductions, but they’d covered the question of her profession at least once already. She took another swallow of wine, thought,
What the hell
, and responded in the same way she had two weeks before.

“I used to be,” she corrected him. However, Carmichael seemed to be more interested in the choices before him than in her faults and failures. She lowered her own eyes to the menu, and was suddenly ravenous. He made comments about a couple of items, suggesting an appetizer that sounded unlikely but that, in his words, “went down a treat.”

Rae made her choice, Sara materialized and took their orders, and
Rae reached out for her glass, which had somehow been refilled while her attention was on the menu. The sheriff raised his glass to her, and sipped.

“You seem to come here a lot,” she commented.

“Oh, I own two of the tables.”

“You own …?” Was this some kind of San Juan tradition? she wondered, but suddenly his habitual expression of quiet watchfulness gave way to an eye-crinkling smile.

“When Rafe and Sally were first starting the place, I put up ten percent of their costs, and told them I’d take repayment in meals. I think I’m down to about one and a half tables now. Rafe’s my cousin.”

“Everybody on the islands seems to be related,” Rae commented. “Talking to Nikki, she has a brother or an aunt or someone she went to school with in every corner.”

“Well, Nikki probably does. She’s one of nine kids, and her parents between them have … oh, let’s see, twelve, no—thirteen brothers and sisters.”

“They must have to go off the islands to find a spouse they’re not related to.”

“Yeah, most of ’em have found someone at college. We bring ’em in during summer vacation, you understand, when the weather is good. That way, by the time winter closes in, they’re already hooked.”

“And you—were you hooked, or born here?”

“Born and bred on Lopez. You been there?”

“When I was here a few years ago. They wave,” she recalled suddenly. “All the drivers who go past you, they wiggle their fingers to say hello.” As an anthropological phenomenon, it had entertained her and Alan for hours, and Bella had adopted the custom, waving with enthusiasm at puzzled Californian passersby.

“The Lopez wave. It’ll probably die out in a few years, but yeah, it’s a rural community. You assume it’s your neighbor going by.”

“Even if the car has California plates.”

“Yeah, well, we’re willing to let county borders stretch a ways.”

Rae was startled to find herself laughing along with him. Laughter over a glass of good wine with a … well, a handsome and intelligent man was probably the last thing she would have expected of this tumultuous day.

“Are you married?” she asked, then realized how abrupt it sounded,
and how intemperately she’d been drinking. She changed the question to “I mean, did you go away to college and hook someone home yourself?”

“I found a native,” he said. “But we moved off the islands, lived on the mainland for nearly ten years before she died and I came back.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Long time ago.”

“Does that matter?”

“Sometimes,” he replied, gazing down into the depths of his wineglass. “Sometimes it matters. Mostly when I try to remember what she looked like.”

Rae felt the tears prick at her tired eyes. “There are times I can’t remember my daughter’s face,” she admitted, and was abruptly appalled. She pushed away the glass and grabbed for a less loaded subject. “Other than that ten years, you’ve lived here your whole life?”

“College, the army, and a few years of living far from the water was enough. I’ve got the sea in my blood. Spent my childhood in a boat, practically. In fact, I spent a lot of it right on your island.”

“Folly? What, living there?”

“Oh no, just picnics and the occasional campout. Exploring the woods, fishing and digging clams for dinner, picking berries. Mountain man stuff, great for a kid—although you can’t let kids have that kind of freedom these days.”

“Did you have your fire pit in the same place mine is?”

“The very same.”

“My granddaughter tidied it up a bit, but it looked like people had used it over the years.”

“Not for a while. Truth to tell, my family once owned Folly, long time ago. It was called Minke then.”

“Really? When was this?”

Jerry looked uncomfortable, as if regretting that he’d told her this, and reached for the bottle to refill their glasses. “My granddad sold it in the Twenties. Must’ve been to your great-uncle.”

“Good heavens. I had no idea.”

“Yep. I always had the fantasy of rebuilding it myself, when I was young. My dad tried to buy it back, but of course by that time it was a sanctuary and nobody could quite sort out who owned it. Not that he would’ve had the money, of course.”

He had not looked up from his glass and plate during this entire tale.
Was he embarrassed at the regret, and the tinge of resentment, that edged into his voice? Or did he fear that his audience might be embarrassed at the revelation? Rae couldn’t decide.

“My grandfather would have owned it,” she told him. “From the late Twenties until he died.”

“Yeah, I know. Dad tried to get a court case up, but again, it was too much money.” At last he raised his head, a crooked smile on his mouth. “So as you can see, I have a proprietary interest in the place.”

“Well, any time you want to camp in the clearing and dig clams on the beach, feel free.”

“So,” he said. “Tell me about woodworking.”

“I used to be good,” she said, as if speaking of someone else. “I’m more of a rough carpenter now.”

“That workbench of yours testifies to the fact that you’re more than that.”

“Turned out okay, didn’t it?”

“That little shaving of cedar you put into the one leg. Did you do that because it’s the same color as the madrone bark overhead?”

“You have a good eye, Sheriff.” The detail had been fairly subtle; most people who noticed it would take it for an echo of the bench top.

“You going to do some stuff like that in the house itself?”

And so Rae began to describe her plans for the inside of Newborn’s Folly, the Japanese (or perhaps Shaker) shelf-wall next to the black fireplace, the floating steps winding up the two towers, the bedroom and work areas on the upper floor with the incomparable view, the balance between drama and comfort and the difficulty of restraint. At some point Rae suddenly realized that a magnificent entrée was lying half eaten on her plate and that she had been talking earnestly about the personality conflicts between teak and zebrawood to a man whose idea of wood was probably limited to logs for the fire or 2×4s for the wall. She flushed.

“Sorry to get so carried away.”

“I’d say—not sure, you understand, it’s just a guess—but I’d say maybe you could still call yourself a woodworker.”

She felt herself returning his slow smile. “I’d say maybe you’re right.”

Letter from Rae to
Her Granddaughter

May 23

Dear Petra
,

I wonder if you’ve done any research yet into the far-off, distant past of our island? Before the peoples came here, before the nomadic tribes crossed the frozen Bering Strait or paddled with the Pacific currents, when the land itself was being laid down?

A person sees everywhere the immense pressures and incomprehensible tensions that accumulated here, shoving and wrenching the landmasses around like a pizza crust. There’s a layer of light-colored sandstone that runs through Folly, folded back on itself in some places, twisted in with the darker bedrock. How much pressure must it take to
fold
rock? Can you begin to imagine something like that? I can’t.

The other huge force acting on this placid-looking group of islands was ice. The last glaciers began to retreat up the Georgia Strait to the north around 13,000 years ago, scouring the strait, grinding and eroding the crests of the folded rock, but when they passed, the layers of sandstone and bedrock underneath them rose, jutting up into the air sometimes nearly perpendicular to the current sea. When the weight of 3,000 feet of ice—three thousand!—lifted, the release of pressure caused some of the land beneath to, as they call it, rebound. Incredible to think of, the earth
bouncing
back after that, isn’t it? But the unevenness of the postglacial rebound, following the grinding of
the glaciers, broke Folly and her neighbors away from the larger landmasses, crumpled them as they rose, and twisted them into the shapes of islands.

Huge tensions, incomprehensible pressures, ripping and heaving at the land; such sweet beauty at the end.

Love
,
Gran