Folly (47 page)

“There’s a lot of technical information here. Do you want me to read it to you?”

“Save your throat. Why don’t you overnight it—Ed can bring it when he comes back on Tuesday. What about the other two bullets?”

“The other two are from a different gun, also an older handgun. These two were too badly damaged for the lab to see any distinctive marks, but numbers four and five had a sixty percent match on the striations—I’m reading this, not exactly sure what it means—and number three, while too misshapen to retain any marks, weighs approximately the same number of grams as four and five. Is that all clear? Rae? Are you still there? Oh, damn this connection, anyway!”

Rae woke to the voice in her ear, told her lawyer she’d be in touch, and jabbed the
END
button on the still-squawking telephone.

It was one thing to suspect, to play with the possibilities as if she were Petra constructing one of her stories for Bella’s entertainment, but in the glaring light of day—

Deep in thought, Rae turned blindly down the hill, and somehow made it back to the campsite without mishap. She found Ed drinking his ritual coffee, a pair of garish red half-glasses perched on the end of his nose and a book by a man called Spencer in his hand. He looked up as she approached, and pulled off the reading glasses.

“Any luck?” he asked. She handed him back the tiny instrument.

“Sure—all I have to do is climb to the top of the mountain. I think I’ll wait to get a cell phone until the technology improves a little.”

“Good idea. Can I offer you some of your own coffee?”

She took the cup he poured and allowed his conversation to beat against her ears, making responses in more or less the correct places. She even managed to pull herself together enough to give him her list of supplies and milling dimensions for her tower stairway, which would enable her to get that going a week sooner.

She barely noticed when he left. Instead, she reluctantly made her way up to the house to stand before the chip in the fireplace where twenty-two days earlier she had dug out bullet number three.

The bullets she had labeled numbers one and two were those she had pried from the wood of the front door.

Number four, which the lab had paired with number three, was the lump of lead she had taken from between the bones in the cave, the loose bullet that had been left behind when the tiny scavengers had finished their work on Desmond Newborn’s remains.

Five she had shot herself into a soft log on the beach, then dug out and dropped in its bag. A bullet from the antique pistol inherited from her father, the gun with the rosewood grip that Rae had brought to the island as her own last escape.

Rae’s Journal

June 5

I feel so peculiar, as if I am coming down with the flu—feverish, restless. Nauseated.

I guess revelation will do that to you.

When I came here, my only intention was to occupy myself with building a house. In the back of my mind was the vague hope that I might learn something about Desmond, the life that brought him here, what happened after he left this place.

I did not imagine that I would discover that he had not left at all.

Five bullets. Two of them fired from a handgun into the heavy door, by someone standing near the fireplace. From the pitted, rusty lump of metal that seventy years later made me think of an old soldier, scarred but potentially deadly.

Two, then, from Desmond’s gun.

Three other bullets. All from a second revolver. One lodged in the fireplace, the second in Desmond’s body, the third fired into a spongy tree trunk by me as a sample.

Three from William’s gun.

And I thought I was being melodramatic, fantasizing a shootout in the cabin. Even now it feels absurd to write that sensational word. What could “shootout” have to do with William and Desmond Newborn, one brother a building tycoon, the other a holder of the Great War Croix de Guerre?

There is, however, no doubt in my mind: Desmond Newborn was killed by the gun now resting in my knapsack. Desmond Newborn was killed by his brother.

I imagine it happened like this:

Desmond has spent the day entertaining his brother—or rather, submitting grimly to his brothers disapproving inspection. He rows William back to Roche Harbor in the afternoon, not returning to Folly until sunset or later. Too late to do any work, too late even to bother changing out of the suit he’d put on to face William. Desmond merely takes off the jacket and the stiff collar, stirs up the fire against the cool September evening, and sits in his easy chair with a glass of whiskey, allowing the island peace to creep back in and soothe his badly shaken nerves.

He dozes in his chair. Or perhaps he rouses to cook himself a meal, or even takes a walk before returning to the hearth. In any case, the evening passes.

By the time his brother William steps back onto the shore of Folly that night, either self rowed (in the skiff that went missing that same night, which the
Journal
article attributed to the island burglar?) or brought by a hireling, Desmond is preparing for bed. His feet are bare, his suspenders looped down off his shoulders, the buttons on his good white shirt undone. He sits down before the fire with his journal, uncaps his pen to write about the day’s events, but gets no further than three short words before the noise at the door has him on his feet, a soldier’s instant and unthinking response.

What did Desmond hear moments before William burst in? It may have been merely the working of the latch that he had mounted that very day, the latch I removed from the door all those years later. It had no locking mechanism; William would merely have laid his hand on it and pulled the heavy door open far enough to fire around it. Did he catch Desmond in the act of going for his own gun? One of William’s shots went wild and buried itself in the fireplace. Others may have missed their mark as well, but one did not. It struck Desmond dead center, passing through the unbuttoned shirt to sink into his lower left abdomen: There were no holes in the shirt itself.

Desmond had his own gun by now and returned fire. Did he know who his attacker was? Had he perhaps looked into William’s eyes in that last moment? In any case, he fired back in the direction of the dark outside his door. Two of his bullets hit the door—entering the wood at different angles, perhaps because it was pushed open by the impact of the first shot. Bitter irony: Desmond’s attacker protected by the defensive thickness of the builder’s own front door. I imagine William beat a hasty retreat into the night— uninjured, as far as I know. No neighbors heard the sounds, since the same orientation that baffles phone reception on Folly would have channeled the echoes of gunshot off in the direction of distant Vancouver Island.

Desmond abandoned his gun (which was empty when I dug it up), and his uncapped pen had flown away with his first lunge, but he managed either to retrieve or to retain his diary, and thrust it into his breast pocket. He crawled through his secret door, bleeding terribly, knowing all too well what such a wound meant. He made it through the woodshed and into the cave, where I believe the end must have come fairly soon; there was no sign of any first-aid attempt, no indication that he had even tried to stanch the wound. By the position of the skeleton, Desmond just put his right hand inside his shirt, rested his head back against the wall, and died.

The house, meanwhile, was burning. Accident—an oil lamp knocked to flames by a stray bullet or Desmond’s dive across the room? Or deliberate effort? I can’t imagine that Desmond showed William his secret escape route, which meant that William (God, I can’t believe I’m writing this—William!
Grandfather!
) would have believed that setting the house on fire would either destroy its occupant or drive Desmond out into vulnerability. In either case, Folly and its owner were wiped out. William Newborn left the island, sinking or taking his brother’s rowing skiff with him to introduce the possibility of Desmond’s escape, and he went home to Boston, inventing a letter two years later, but never saying a word of the truth to anyone.

Fantasy? No doubt, but how else to explain the facts? My grandfather’s gun killed Desmond Newborn.

But why? Granted, even as an old man Grandfather was a furious man, fueled by resentments and the supreme joy of doing his enemies in the eye. The only thing that really mattered to him was the acquisition and maintenance of power, chiefly through wealth. Work, friendships, even family left him cold: Supreme authority, over all he surveyed, was what really mattered. He would have sold his only child, my father, had the offer come in high enough.

Could the shooting have been a money dispute gone bad? Desmond demanding his portion of their inheritance, and William losing his temper?

I do not know. All I am sure of is, the scenario in my mind is very clear.

My grandfather murdered his brother, the brother whose handiwork I have come here to lift up again.

A simple plan, carefully worked out, and a bare minimum of outside help. Elegant, is what they called it. And when The Thief goes missing, or turns up drowned, no one will be too surprised.

In less than a month, Rae would have houseguests—whether she had a house or not. She had water and a rudimentary shower, she had walls that were raw and unfinished but of sufficient solidity to reassure city dwellers, and she had a capacious privy, the use of which would no doubt be good for her guests’ spiritual development.

Three things she needed, though, before her daughter and son-in-law arrived to entrust the sole surviving member of the family’s next generation to the madwoman’s mercies: a roof, more seating, and a way to hide the cave.

The chairs in a pinch she could always buy from Friday Harbor or fashion from stumps, but the roof was urgent for everyone’s physical comfort, and concealing the cave was every bit as important for her psychological comfort. Why, she did not exactly know, but the idea of Don Collins poking disdainfully into the cave where Desmond had died filled her with revulsion.

During the days, she tackled the roof. Because she had no photograph of the inside of the house, she had no way of knowing how Desmond had supported his gable roof, but she doubted, considering the building sensibilities of his age, that he had done anything with the upper floor but finish it with a triangular attic space above for future storage.

Rae, however, craved height and light in her upstairs room. She would keep the ceiling open to the rafters and put a (historically
inaccurate) window into the south-facing gable wall. Therefore her wood counted, needed to be beautiful as well as structural: cedar again.

It was a chore getting all the lumber up and through the wide upper east window, but it was her only choice. Standing outside, she would work the rope up the pulley, lifting two or three boards at a time, each bundle bumping and teetering its way up the house’s outside wall. Then she would go inside, climb the ladder in the tower, and swing the boards onto the floor.