The Rainy Season (11 page)

If she herself hadn’t held one of the trinkets, she would have thought he was simply insane. But all of it—the trinkets, the newspaper articles, his own murky past—all of it was simply too intriguing for her to ignore, especially the unmistakable smell of money. …

The old crank still sat at his desk in the shop. He had put her to work on Phil Ainsworth, trying to pick up the scent of the crystal, and she had been out in the rain drowning while he dozed off in the shop. Half of her doubted the very existence of the crystal, except that Appleton was so clearly driven. What she didn’t doubt was that the old man had money somewhere. She started the car and pulled away from the curb, heading west.

Santiago Canyon
1958

MAY SAT NEAR
the window, looking out into the night. Off and on she heard the sound of undifferentiated roaring from out in the direction of the road, and this afternoon she had seen an airplane in the sky overhead, heard its lonesome droning, waited for the heavy-bodied thing to plummet out of the sky despite Colin’s assurances. There was something about the sound in the sky that recalled the roaring darkness of the well, and when she closed her eyes she felt a momentary vertigo, the sensation of spinning away into a watery darkness. She had a horror of going outside, into a world changed out of recognition. Even her memory was altered. There were dark places in it, like missing pages from a book. Colin had explained to her that this was the cost of traveling, as he put it, through time. He had talked to her about the rain, about drowned children buried near underground water, about what had happened to them on that day near the sycamore grove. He had learned so much in the years since, enough so that he was quite simply a different man than he had been.

The house was hung with calendars—something that Colin had apparently been obsessed with—and each was left open to the month of December. The calendars dated from 1940, the year he had arrived, and each December had rainfall totals penciled into the boxes that enclosed particular dates, with running totals and commentary at the ends of months.

The calendar on the wall nearby stood open to December 1958, and the sight of it had been even more jarring to her than had the age betrayed in the lines on Colin’s face. He lay asleep on the bed now, the bedclothes pulled loosely around him. His face was still strong, but it was careworn, his hair gray at the temples. She calculated his age: forty-five, give or take a year—twenty years older than she. Her mind grappled with the idea of that, but she couldn’t quite grasp it. He wasn’t the same man whom she had known then, but then she was hardly the same woman, either. The distance she had come along dark rivers was unfathomable to her, but she easily understood Colin’s desperate loneliness, heightened by the long years that he had waited. And although making love to Colin this evening had betrayed her friendship to Jeanette, they had managed to convince themselves that Jeanette quite simply didn’t exist.

Now, sitting in the darkness, that kind of thinking seemed like a monstrous rationalization to her, despite its being close to true. The waters in the well were receding. Jeanette wouldn’t come to them, not this season. When
would
she come, if ever? Ten, twenty, thirty years? May couldn’t bear to think about it, to picture it. Since the day before yesterday a lifetime had fled away in the blink of an eye. In last night’s darkness, what had she and Colin to hold onto besides each other?

He had told her about the years that had gone by: how her father’s house had been torn down in 1942, how he, Colin, had bought the furniture left in it, the dishes, the knickknacks, most of it remaining from the days that her family had lived there. The attic above them in this very house was full of that old furniture, the wardrobes and bureaus that only yesterday had held her things, the chairs that her family had sat in around the dinner table, the desk that her father had built and beneath which she had played as a child. This house had sheltered these relics of her life for sixteen years now, years that she had been away. Some small part of her had been living here in this house all that time, waiting for the rest of her to catch up, and through those years Colin hadn’t forgotten her, even though the world had.

And the world had kept spinning, taking them all along. There had been wars, famines, floods. The sun had risen and set without her thousands of times. Towns had disappeared; others had sprung up. She had been alive in Colin’s memory even when she had barely been alive in her own. Or perhaps she flattered herself to think so. Colin obviously hadn’t been waiting entirely for her all these years, after all. He had been waiting for Jeanette. Jeanette and the glass dog. …

But it wasn’t Jeanette who had arrived first in this strange place; it was her, May, returned from the dead, looking out now into a darkness so profound that she could see nothing beyond the windowpane, only her pale reflection staring back at her. As for the glass dog, she had come to the conclusion in the past half hour that the world, and Colin, would have to go on waiting for it. Colin still didn’t know she had it, that she had taken it out of the basket and carried it with her into the depths of the well. There seemed to be something in Colin that coveted the dog, despite his assurances that he wanted only to return it to the mission. Perhaps he believed that about himself.

She stood up now and moved to the door where she waited for another moment, watching him sleep. Quietly she went out into the hallway and down the stairs. The walls of the house seemed more than mere shelter to her, and she waited by the porch door for a long time before pulling the small chain that hung from the ceiling and switching on the light. The bright yellow glow of electric light was less comfortable than the mellow haze of gaslight, but it was brighter, bright enough to shine out onto the lawn and the water tower. But beyond the dwindling circle of light the night was desperately dark, and it recalled to her the darkness from which she had only recently emerged.

She looked around her for a candle, for anything to carry with her into the open night. Along the far wall sat half a dozen oil lamps, four of which she recognized from her own past. One of them, a cut glass globe with a lilac-tinted shade, had sat in her very own bed room, in the house that had long since been torn down. She’d grown up with it, had filled it with lamp oil herself not a week ago! And yet here it sat in this foreign house, three-quarters of a century removed from that world, like an artifact dug up out of a burial mound. She found a wooden match in a drawer and lit the lamp, wondering if the oil within it was the oil she had poured with her own hand.

Steeling herself, she opened the door and went outside. She saw her breath hovering in the air, but she didn’t feel cold, and it seemed to her that the sensation of cold and hot hadn’t entirely returned to her yet. Pieces of her memory were gone, too. She wondered how many pieces were gone as she walked through the wet grass, looking anxiously into the lamp lit darkness around her. The rusted knob of the tower door turned easily in her hand, the door swinging quietly open. She glanced behind her at the dark window of the second-story bed-room that she had just left, then stepped inside the tower, § which now was apparently a repository for garden tools. Bags of lime lay piled on a heap of dirty sand, and there were clay pots stacked beside it. Along the far wall lay a scattering of dismantled machinery. The still air smelled of dirty oil, and the windows were obscured by dust. Her feet scuffed loudly on the wooden floorboards. To her immediate right, narrow wooden stairs led steeply upward. With her free hand she lifted the hem of her dress and, looking up into the dim recesses of the tower, she began to climb, holding the lantern out before her.

OVER THE PAST
month, Elizabeth had gone over every inch of the shop, the floor, the walls, the cabinetry, but had found no stash of money in the shop. Appleton had told her that the crystal object was worth more than ‘any ransom to him, and she was willing to take him at his word. That being true, if he thought that a “reward” would satisfy her—by which he meant a couple of hundred dollars—then he was deranged. She didn’t give a damn for the memory of his daughter, or for whatever thing it was that he thought lay within the crystal. She parked around the corner from his house and walked down the dark sidewalk. It was too late for people pie to be outdoors, especially with the weather threatening. She walked boldly up the drive and through the back gate, where she unlocked the door with the key he had given her. Recently he had bought an estate—too many items to take to the shop—and he was store housing it at home. His idea was for Elizabeth to fetch things from it, which is why he had given her the key to his house. He was very trusting, she thought, turning on a lamp, which would look less suspicious to a neighbor than would the moving beam of a flashlight. The blinds were pulled anyway. As she had done in the shop, she searched for places where someone might hide a serious amount of money. She looked into cupboards, shuffled through the pages of stacked newspapers and magazines, uncapped jars and opened cartons.

There was no phone in the house, no television or radio. He subscribed to
Scientific American
and to the
Reader’s Digest
, and from the look of things he never threw outdated issues away. There were cardboard boxes of estate sale junk, but much Of it was subpar, thrift store trash, which was no doubt why it still sat in here in dusty boxes. None of the boxes contained money. In the bedroom she looked into the small refrigerator that he used as a nightstand, and opened the few drawers in the bureau. She was careful not to disturb things, not to do anything to tip him off. His mattress wasn’t stuffed with money, and there was nothing under the bed. She had a wild urge to find a knife and slash the upholstery on the tattered old wingback chair, but she didn’t.

She cursed under her breath, looking around at the pitiful room. There was simply nothing here—neither money nor a checkbook nor a second set of ledger books nor anything else. The only thing she knew absolutely after looking around the place was that he lived like a miser out of a storybook. So it was reasonable to assume that like all misers he had a sackful of gold
somewhere
. She gave up and headed for the back door again.

Ransom. Reward. Money. She muttered the words as she walked through the house. Two of them sounded overly abstract to her. Only money had a smell and a feel and a color to it that she trusted. It would be
so
easy if she could simply take what she wanted and walk away. He was hardly in a position to follow her. Off the kitchen lay another small bedroom, more of an overgrown pantry. There were more boxes, and she moved them apart and looked into each. Nothing: books, crap. One held canned goods, corned beef hash and beef stew. Shit, the old man was a survivalist! There was a small closet, and she opened it up, seeing more of the same. She took out a cheap suitcase, cardboard and vinyl, and opened it up. A couple of flannel shirts lay inside, and she removed them and laid them on the floor. There was a divider in the center of the suitcase, fixed in place with elastic straps. She slipped them off their hold-downs and folded back the divider.

Money.

Here it was, just like that.

She sat down on top of the shirts and looked through it, thinking hard now. Take it? Why not? Take it and walk away! To hell with him, with the crystal, with Phil Ainsworth. To hell with southern California …

But she closed the divider, fastening the straps, slid the shirts back in, and shut the suitcase. Appleton would Call the cops. There was no reason he wouldn’t call the cops. She had nothing on him, nothing to threaten him with. If she was certain he had killed someone, or … any damned thing at all. But there was nothing. He was just an eccentric old nut who owned an antiques shop and had entrusted her with a key. They’d put her away in an instant.

She would bide her time, she told herself as she drove back down toward the shop, empty-handed again. She would play his game, at least for now. Ransom would have to do as long as simple theft was out of the question. But then nothing was out of the question forever.

APPLETON PICKED UP
the long tweezers from his desktop, moving trinkets aside until the tiny saucer lay alone before him. He had a second sense about these objects, and although he sometimes made a mistake, most often he could anticipate whether the memory an object contained was safe to tamper with. Through the jeweler’s loupe he peered at the stain in the porcelain—a tiny human face traced in thin, blue lines. There was something unnaturally organic about the veinlike lines against the pale white of the background. He looked out through the front window at the rainy night, then down again at the saucer. Slowly he shut his hand over it, pressing it into his palm, into his fingers, careful not to bear down too hard and crack it. He closed his eyes, rocking forward in his chair with the jarring sense of disconnectedness that hit him …

… and abruptly he found himself within a grove of trees on a sunny summer evening. A woman approached along the edge of the trees, following a trail, and he felt a rising passion within him. She wasn’t yet aware of his presence there in the shadows. She hurried along, closing the distance between them, her arms crossed in front of her. …

Then the world seemed to slip, and for one disorienting moment he seemed to float above himself, aware of the saucer, of its hard edge and slick surface, aware that he was two people and not one. He looked down on the scene as if from a high and windy place, utterly aware that all memory, emotion, and perception were borrowed in this place, and equally aware that he was desperately and illicitly in love with this woman. He grasped the object even more tightly, driving out of his mind any thoughts of himself, allowing himself to become the man who stood within the shadow of the trees, and with that he slipped back into the persona within the trinket, losing himself utterly.

He had been there waiting for some time for her to arrive, and his rising passion had distilled until it occupied him so completely that he could scarcely breathe. He heard her footsteps, a confusion of footsteps, although the path she walked on was packed dirt He waited, timing her approach, and then, swept away with emotion, he stepped out onto the path and stood before her, watching the dawning of recognition in her eyes. …