Folly by Laurie R. King Read Free Book Online

postcard.
    The date is a private joke. Alan would have appreciated it, if he were here, but then Alan living would drain the joke of meaning.
    I first saw the island five years ago, a few months after my father died. When his estate was divided up between myself and various distant relations, for some reason he had specified that the island be left to me. I knew vaguely that there had once been a house here, built by my mysterious Great-uncle Desmond, but no one I knew had ever seen it. So that summer, Alan and I decided to take a look at what I had inherited before putting it on the market. It was actually more an excuse for a holiday than anything else. Bella came with us. She was four and a half then, and I was just back from London, triumphant and exhausted. I know I must have looked as tired as I felt, because while we were here three different people referred to Bella as my granddaughter. Alan was livid, but really, how many women have babies at the age of forty-two? Talk about an April Fool …
    Anyway, we hired a boat in Roche Harbor to bring us out here. It’s calledSanctuary Island on all the maps and deeds, and that’s the only name I had ever heard for it, but when I told the old guy in the boathouse where we wanted to go, he scratched his head for a minute and then said, “Oh—you mean Folly.”
    Alan was delighted. He’d once spent a summer with a college fiend whose family had a Victorian folly in the grounds of their country house, a fake ruin, forlorn and more than a little ridiculous, but appealing. The island’s nickname came from the house that once stood here, although I’ve never known if it was because the house had something quirky about it, invisible in the only photograph I have, or because in ruins it looked like the fake in the garden of Alan’s fiend. More likely the latter. But in either case, Folly it was called, by the locals and, from then on, by us.
    The house—the folly—that I intend to rebuild, those stones that I plan on reclothing with wood and plaster, was built and burned in the Twenties, and was long since jungle by the time we saw it. We came, Alan and Bella and I, and we saw, and we fell under its lonely spell. Our planned quick survey of the island stretched far into the afternoon, cut short only by Bella’s hunger. We hiked around the surprisingly large island, found a beach and a fresh, clear spring and eagles’ nests and trees and even a sort of mountaintop (well, hilltop) clearing where the world stretched on to infinity.
    No, we determined, we would not be selling off this part of my inheritance. When Bella was a little older, when Alan and I had less pressing schedules, it would be a retreat, not only a glorious summer holiday place but a building with personality, a folly in its truest sense of extravagance and irrationality (madness in one of its more amusing manifestations). We began the lengthy preliminaries—legal wrangles, engineer’s inspections, restoration permits.
    Three and a half years later, before we could return to the island, they were both dead.
    I am here instead.
    Newborn’s Folly.
    Only Alan would appreciate the joke.

Five

    With reluctance, Rae closed the leather covers of her journal and laid it to one side, next to the old revolver and its six bullets arranged tidily on the corner of the makeshift writing desk, that they might keep her company as she wrote. She leaned back against the reassuring lumps of the tool belt, taken off only when she sat down at the desk, then rubbed absently at the surgical scar along her left forearm, over the metal plate that made her arm ache when fatigued, when cold, and whenever else it damn well felt like it. She took her hand away and gathered up the bullets. The six of them fit neatly into a fist; six bullets that made a lovely dull metallic rasping sound when rolled around in a closed hand, like a mouthful of wet pebbles. She poured them into her other palm, and picked one out. Soft, warm, gray lead at