Folly (62 page)

In the meantime, her mind was racing. Measure twice, cut once— only this time it was not a piece of lumber she was risking, but her granddaughter’s life. And her own, which over the past weeks she had come to value once more. She had made a mistake in leaving the flashlight behind; she had made a risky choice in opting for silent escape; they could afford no more mistakes or risks. She had to be clearheaded.

The tools at hand were: a handgun, which now held four bullets; a flare gun and three flares; a kerosene lamp with five or six hours’ worth of fuel, more if they kept it burning low; seven dusty wine bottles filled with near-vinegar; a freestanding shelf unit of spongy wood; a drip of water every minute or so; a climbing harness and rope; and whatever Petra had in her pockets. Rae asked her, and came up with a crumpled tissue, a broken seashell, and some black-purple lipstick.

Rae grimaced, and then her eyes lit on the other thing she had left in
the cave, the only thing of real value she had brought with her to the island, deposited here to keep it safe from marauding trespassers: her toolbox with the Japanese chisels.

And, Rae reminded herself, they had their own minds and muscles. Not that she was about to launch a frontal attack on an armed man, but she might be able to go around him. Allen Carmichael had said something about soldiers who couldn’t get over Vietnam having found ways to go around. Maybe she and Petra, too, could circle around the enemy until help arrived. (Surely someone would investigate that pair of gunshots they’d just loosed? Why, it was possible that even now, some irate tourist with an in-range cell phone was complaining to the local emergency dispatcher about the wild and irresponsible natives …)

Rae pulled her thoughts back together to the tools they had, the skills they possessed.

Sharp tools and wood; mallet and chisels. Those were what she knew, the core of Rae Newborn’s identity. They were the key.

She smoothed her granddaughter’s arm with her hand and thought her options over, measuring twice, three times, before moving to cut. And when she had done so, she sat up and told Petra what they were going to do. Well, mostly what Rae was going to do, since Petra would remain in the cave. But, with the gun.

“I need to go and set off a flare,” Rae ended by saying, for the third time. “You and I are going to hide in here until help comes. The man won’t stick around once the flare goes up, but I need you to sit here and let me back in when I knock.” She broke open the garish plastic flare gun, dropped the cartridge into place, and snapped it shut again.

“But who
is
he?” Petra wailed. “What does he want?”

It was asked with no more expectation of an answer than any victim’s cry of Why me? However, Rae knew it was no random sociopath out in the darkness, knew in fact who it had to be. And once the man’s identity was known, everything else fell into place.

“I think the man out there is Alan’s son. His name is Rory—you’ve never met him. He and Alan didn’t see much of each other. I saw him out there: He looks too much like Alan to be a stranger.” For a moment Rae paused, hit afresh by the shock of seeing her dead husband walking up the hill in the moonlight. “It must have something to do with money.”

She watched Petra struggle with the idea, watched the puzzlement and glimmer of relief dawn on the young face, and moved to crush it
brutally. “Rory’s trying to kill me, Petra. I have no doubt he’ll kill you, too, if he finds you here. If he breaks down that door, you’re going to have to shoot him.” Rae’s heart cried out at the effect that statement was going to have on the child’s mind, but there was no way around it. “It would be awful, to do such a thing; it’s terrible even to ask you to think about it. If I could pretend everything was going to be okay, I would, but that would be dangerous for both of us. Rory came here to kill me. If he breaks down the door, aim carefully and get him first.”

Petra had actually shot a gun before, Don’s belief in the necessity for family self-defense overcoming Tamara’s distaste for the activity, and the child quickly saw how the old revolver worked. She could use the weapon, but Rae was not at all certain that she would, not with a human target. However, Rae didn’t see what more she could do to encourage her. She hugged Petra, then went over to the toolbox, took out the one-inch flat chisel and the smallest V-shaped one, plus the wooden mallet, and closed and latched the top of the box.

Then she went over the whole thing one last time with Petra. Not that there was much to it aside from: When I’ve gone, latch the door and sit with the gun in your hand and the lamp shining on the entrance, and wait for me to go shoot up a flare, after which I’ll tap three times for you to open up. And for God’s sake be careful not to let the lamp spill.

She kissed Petra again and hugged her hard. “Don’t worry if it takes me a while. I’ll have to make sure he’s nowhere around first. You can do this, Petra, my little rock. We’ll get out of this okay.”

Measure twice, cut once
ran through her head in a maniacal loop as she crawled out of Desmond’s side cave and down the entranceway to let herself out into the woodshed. The protective whisper of the lamp vanished with the door; she waited to hear Petra slide the inside lock before going cautiously down the rough wood to the door leading out.

There she took several deep breaths. He would have heard her. Rory would be standing right outside the woodshed door, gun in hand, waiting for her to open up. She put the fingers of her left hand on the two-way latch and eased it back.

It let off a treacherous
click
, and she made a face, then pushed the door open.

The narrow space between house and rock was every bit as black as the interior of the woodshed. It could have held ten men, with bazookas. Beyond the corner of the house, however, the hillside was light, and the
narrow swath of sky so brightly lit, the stars were dim. Rae leaned the right side of her body out the door, pointed her hand up at the sky, and pulled the trigger.

With the sound of a clap, the flare
whoosh
ed up, clearing the house and trees, dropping into a slight curve that put it out of sight over the house. She knew it was there, though, because the stars suddenly faded a few degrees more. Tearing her eyes from the sky, she tore the hot cartridge from the gun, slammed in another, and sent it, too, winging skyward.

Then she closed the door and locked it the only way she could, by taking her mallet and driving the beautiful tempered steel of her precious Japanese chisel through the wood and into the floor to wedge it shut. Two hard blows, and the razor-sharp tool had the door secure against anything short of a battering ram. She patted around for the smaller chisel, and shuffled over to the other hidden door.

The doubled point of the honed steel V sliced through the cedar boards with barely a whisper. Had Rory been standing just inside the hidden door he might have heard something, but not otherwise. Rae dug around with the chisel until a slight change in the pressure of the cut told her she had broken through. She laid the tool down and put her eye to the hole.

At first, all she saw was the pale rectangle that was the front door space, slightly overshadowed by an uneven shape that, after a minute, she identified as a portion of her tool belt, inches away, the twin fingers of the hammer claw just below eye level. Then she felt movement, an unaccustomed shivering through the bones of her house, somewhere out of sight. She peered to the side, and suddenly a light entered the room from the direction of the tower, a light and a pair of legs.

He walked in front of the fireplace, playing the beam up and down the fitted boards. The flashlight was in his left hand, and for an instant the light caught the shape he carried in his right: his gun, looking a far more dangerous weapon than the one Petra was clutching, back in the cave. No doubt this one had more than four shots in it as well. When he reached the west wall he continued around the perimeter of the room, searching, she thought, for the source of those two claps and the chisel-driving thuds, but he could not tell where they came from. He circled back to the stairway, pausing there, and then a dark shape startled Rae by flying, batlike, across her line of sight to land with a plop: the square of ratty carpeting that she’d laid down to hide the crawl space door. She and Petra had rumpled it, passing over it in the dark with their cots and
sleeping bags; maybe he thought they were hiding underneath it. He hunkered down to examine the trapdoor’s edges.

The flashlight illuminated his features clearly now, and Rae had to wonder if he had grown the beard and chosen those glasses in a deliberate imitation or a subconscious one, still on some level seeking the approval of a father alienated long before. It hardly mattered: Despite the uncanny physical resemblance, with that expression on his face, he looked no more like Alan than Petra did.

A thin breeze was blowing through the hole straight against her eyeball, making her eye water. The flashlight beam came up and Rae jerked back, blinking away the dazzle, hearing his boots approaching the fireplace, directly up to the hidden entrance, stopping so close that, but for a one-inch layer of cedar, she could have reached out and touched his boot. She fumbled frantically to load the third shell into the flare gun before the small door crashed open. There was a bump against the stud on the other side of the wall, a rattle and a bump, and then she had the gun snapped shut over its cartridge and was holding it out in both hands, ready to fire it straight into his face. But the door did not burst open. After a last rattle she heard footsteps—half a dozen retreating footsteps, then silence.

Rae swallowed convulsively and lowered the gun. After a minute, she wiped her mouth with unsteady fingers, then leaned forward again, to put her eye gingerly to the hole.

He was back at the subfloor access, kneeling with his back to her, the gun lying on the floor beside his knee. She thought he might be about to risk a look under the house, even knowing that his prey had a gun, but then his body shifted and his right arm rose out of the flashlight’s beam, a motion Rae knew instantly, having performed it so many thousands of times over recent weeks. The arm fell, the hammer—
her
hammer; oh, that utter
bastard
!—drove into a nail, a dozen or more times. He tossed her beloved tool to one side with casual scorn and got to his feet, picking up flashlight and gun. He had nailed the crawl space door shut, assuming that she was hiding down there. He’d been upstairs, he knew that she—and another, there being two cots—had been there, but he had also seen the drop out of the tower window and concluded that a middle-aged woman could not have managed the jump to the woodshed without giving herself away. Where else could they be but under the floor? (Rae was visited briefly by a vision of the two wooden figures and their murderous spearhead, watching over the empty space.)

And with that, he left the house, flicking off the flashlight he carried and pausing at the doorway to let his eyes adjust to the darkness outside.

Rae knew he would see the flares the instant he stepped out. It was amazing he had missed the light and sound of their passing, but he must have already been making his way down the tower stairway, and heard only her final thuds.

If he had any wits at all, he would fling himself onto his black rubber dinghy and make for his boat at all speed, then weigh anchor and slip away before someone turned up to investigate the two lights hanging over the island. Rae prayed for his sense of self-preservation, urged him soundlessly to flee, to run away and live to kill another day. An eternity passed, with no darkening of the light rectangle of doorway, but before she could begin to relax, before the first threads of relief could take hold, he was back.

He came up the front steps in a hurry and stopped there, an object outlined in his hand that Rae despaired at, although she had known since he nailed the trapdoor shut that it would appear, had suspected it would come to this for what seemed like hours now. The feeling settled over her that she had lived with the inevitability of this moment from the very beginning, long weeks before, when she had freed the first charred wooden remnants of Desmond’s house from the vines; known that it would come to this.

A full kerosene lamp thrown into a wooden structure.

Rory Beauchamp and William Newborn were in no way related, except under the skin. When faced with armed foes locked in a building, you don’t go in after them, you burn them out. Or up. Rory was doing it thoroughly, taking the lamp apart to sprinkle the kerosene where it could do the most harm.

Rae knew she had one sensible chance: to retrieve Petra and escape through the woodshed, up the rocky hillside and into the trees. The fire would be seen for miles, even at four in the morning; the phone in her pocket would come alive; Rory would not hang around.

But she couldn’t do it. In an agony of conflicting loyalties, Rae peered through her tiny hole at the figure hurrying to destroy her house, Desmond’s house, intent on his puddles and the way the flames would feed into her walls, and she was simply unable to stand back and let him do it. If she failed, Petra would still be terrified at the sound of flames, but she would be safe. There was air enough in the cave and its entrance was sheltered on three sides by rock; by the time the slow-burning plywood
of the woodshed had caught, the fire department would be here, and find her. Petra was safe.

Without further thought, Rae’s hands picked up the slim chisel, screwed it into the narrow gap between door and siding, and leaned hard against the handle. The beautiful steel bowed; the invisible wood fastener held. Rae shoved with all her weight, grunting with the effort. The chisel gave slightly, resisted a moment longer, and suddenly the wood splintered and broke. The door slapped open into her knee and Rae’s knuckles smashed themselves bloody against the rough siding, but without waiting for the brain’s instructions her legs were already up and carrying her forward through the opening. Her invader, the destroyer, was standing in the doorway now, as William before him had stood; he was turning with a box of matches in his hands when Rae, still half crouched, reached the middle of the room.