The Rainy Season

by James P. Blaylock

  She sat on the bed, her mind running. Uncle Phil apparently had no idea what these things in the jar were, but somebody had known what they were. Somebody had picked them out of the weeds around the well, just as the priest had done tonight. Somebody had sealed them into this jar and kept them safe in this house.

  Leaving the lamp on, she climbed tiredly into bed, listening to the rain, remembering the way the bed felt from the last time she was here, and she tucked Pooh and Piglet in, sharing the pillow with them. For a long time she lay there listening to the swish and scrape of the windblown pepper tree against the balcony beyond the window, and to the creaks and groans of the old house settling for the night. And some time later she was awakened from a dream about water by the sound of the telephone ringing downstairs, and there came into her head the fleeting idea that someone was calling about her mother, but the lamplit room around her reminded her of where she was and of why that couldn’t be true, and before her mind had a chance to dwell on things, she closed her eyes and pictured the place she had found in her interrupted dream—a quiet and grassy place by the still waters of a clear pool.

  30

  WHEN THE PHONE rang in the middle of the night, the first thing that Phil thought was that this was another prank call, but then he remembered the woman asleep upstairs, the entire mystifying evening, and he answered the phone, ready to hang it up again. It was hard to determine the age of the man on the other end of the line, but Phil was certain that he was speaking to Betsy’s priest. Somewhere in his mind, even in sleep, he had been waiting for the inevitable call. For some reason the man hadn’t wanted to be seen tonight, but it was unimaginable that he would remain silent for very long.

  “Can I have a name to go with the voice?” Phil asked.

  “A name? Right now that would be awkward. Call me Father Brown if you want to. I can’t tell you my name. I’m sorry about that. I’m not just being mysterious.”

  “All right. But you’re actually a priest, then?”

  “Actually I am.”

  “Uh-huh,” Phil said to him. “Well look, I don’t want to lecture you about your responsibilities, but it seems to me to be a little bit out of line for a priest to be trespassing, breaking into a man’s garage, and involving a nine-year-old girl in a lot of mysterious trouble. She was in the house for exactly three hours tonight before she was up to her ears in this. So why don’t we start with an explanation?” Phil realized that he probably sounded more mad than he was, but to heck with this priest, what right did he have?

  “I’m terribly sorry,” the priest said. He was obviously sincere, and Phil felt bad that he’d reacted so hard. “And I don’t mean to be facetious when I say that I’ll make a full confession, although as I said, I can’t tell you my name, and I apologize for that. I’ve been on your property several times, day and night both. My only purpose was to watch for the arrival of the woman whom you met tonight, and that meant that I had to watch the old well. It is your property, as you say, but the well is … let’s just say it isn’t anybody’s property. Still, that doesn’t give me the right to be sneaking around, and I do apologize. Can I ask you if Jeanette’s all right? She’s settled in?”

  “She seems fine. I’ve put her in an upstairs bedroom. Some of my mother’s things were still in the closet, and I found her a robe and nightgown. So she’s settled in okay, I guess. She was exhausted, though, and she fell asleep without saying anything.”

  “Good, good. Thank you immensely. I hope you understand that I couldn’t simply let her … that she needed someone to be there when she arrived. I couldn’t abandon her.”

  “I have no problem with that, although I don’t really know what you’re talking about. What’s my part in this? What can I do for her, exactly? What can I give her?”

  “Comfort from the storm. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I certainly hope so. These things have had a way of working out. I’ve got a great deal of faith.”

  “All right. Why me?”

  “It’s your house. I wish it had merely been me, but that’s not possible. And by the way, I didn’t at all mean for it to involve … to involve your niece, although it was a great pleasure to make her acquaintance. It was purely accidental, though. Betsy found Jeanette before I did. I had no idea on earth that the little girl was staying in the house here, and even if I had, I couldn’t have guessed that she’d be outside at that time of night. And there were reasons that I couldn’t wait for you. It’s important that Jeanette knows as little about me as possible. There’s no reason to mention me at all. Can you promise me that?”

  “Only if I know something about you.”

  “Fair enough. You tell me something, though. I don’t mean to pry into your personal affairs, but tonight you had a visitor, a woman named Elizabeth Kelly.”

  “And you told Betsy to have me get rid of her. That was hospitable of you.”

  “I’m afraid I had to. I don’t want that woman or the man she works for to know about Jen’s arrival.”

  “That woman, as you call her, might drop in at any moment. She has that habit. Not being a priest myself, I don’t have anything against that kind of thing. I’m not crazy about throwing her out like that, either. I can’t see that she deserved it.”

  “I appreciate that, and I certainly can’t say what anyone deserves, but I’m determined to protect Jeanette.”

  “From Elizabeth?”

  “From whomever might constitute a threat to her. I can’t tell you what to do, but please humor me in this. If you honestly believe that Elizabeth Kelly will be a visitor to your house, and that there’s no way to prevent her from knowing about Jeanette, then I’ll make arrangements for Jeanette to go elsewhere—in the morning if I have to. I can tell you, though, that she’ll be more comfortable with you, in that house. Her arrival will have been … disturbing to her. She’ll need a few days to rest, perhaps weeks to acclimate.”

  “Weeks,” Phil said flatly. He sat for a moment listening to the wind. The night outside was patchy with moonlight, and through the window he could see the shadow of the grove in the distance. “She’s welcome here. Of course she is. It’ll be hard to keep her hidden once she’s up and around, though. I mean, what if she goes outside for a walk? And if there’s any danger to Betsy, then I’m afraid we’ll have to move your friend out as soon as she’s up to it.”

  “Thank you. Of course.”

  “Let me ask you something. The other night, Thursday, you weren’t lurking around, were you, back in the eucalyptus trees, along the arroyo?”

  “Along the creek? No, it must have been someone else. I’ve stuck pretty close to the garden shed. What did the man look like? I assume it was a man.”

  “I can’t tell you,” Phil said. “I saw him from a distance—just a shadow. I can’t even say for sure that it was a man.”

  “But Elizabeth Kelly was with you at the time? It couldn’t have been her?”

  “No, it couldn’t have been her. What you’re telling me now, though, is that Elizabeth is a threat?”

  “A threat? I don’t know. But I can tell you truthfully that Elizabeth Kelly has been awaiting Jen’s arrival as eagerly as I have.”

  “Arrival from where?” Phil asked. “You keep using that word. Where’d she arrive from exactly, outer space?”

  “From the past,” the priest said evenly.

  “From the past? Not from a place?”

  “No, not from any place other than the old well. Jeanette waded into the well on your property nearly a hundred and fifteen years ago. Tonight she found her way out of it again.”

  “Okay,” Phil said. “It’s going to take me a little time to come to grips with that one.” The thought came to him that he should burst into laughter, but somehow he wasn’t inclined to. “Let me ask an idle question. She said she knew my mother, who was a friend of hers. What surprised me was that she knew my mother’s full name. She didn’t hear it from Betsy, or at least that’s what Betsy tel
ls me. So Jeanette must have heard it from you. You knew my mother?”

  There was a momentary silence. “Yes. I knew your mother. I knew you, in fact, although you were too young then to remember now. But since you’ve promised not to mention my existence to Jeanette, of course you won’t have any occasion to tell her any of that.”

  “Even if she asks me about you?”

  “If she asks you … I can’t tell you to lie about it. But I think that you might be able to answer her truthfully without lying. And I will say that sometimes the whole truth, in all its particulars, doesn’t make anybody happy anyway.”

  “I’ll agree with you there. So you told her my mother’s name?”

  “No, I didn’t have to, Phillip. Your mother, May, waded into the well on the same day that Jen did.”

  “Which would make her what … ?” Phil asked in a deadpan voice, “About a hundred and forty when she died?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” the priest said. “One hundred and thirty-nine years old, if you want to be entirely accurate. Jen is one hundred and thirty-six. She was three years younger than your mother.”

  Now Phil was silent for a moment. Part of him wished that he thought all of this was rubbish, that the priest was talking nonsense. But he suspected that it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. His mother’s history had always been a mystery to him, her references to it evasive. And it was impossible to argue with the existence of the woman upstairs, dressed as she was. Still …

  “And another thing,” the priest said. “You asked me if there was a danger to Betsy, and actually there is. It’s imperative that you keep Betsy away from the well. Children especially are attracted to water. She mustn’t play around it. She can’t be allowed to climb on the stone ring.”

  “I’ll cover it,” Phil said, suddenly fearful. “I’ve got enough plywood and two-by-fours to build a cover. It’s almost never filled with water, so the issue’s never come up before.”

  “You can’t cover it. For the immediate future don’t do anything to it at all. If you pay the slightest attention to it, they’ll suspect that Jen’s arrived. If we can keep her existence hidden from them until the well can be neutralized, we can rest easy for her. Just be careful of Betsy, that’s all.”

  “Neutralized?” Phil asked. “How do we neutralize it? Pour baking soda into it?”

  “We’ll need a dowser,” the priest said. “Are you familiar with dowsing?”

  “Yes, of course. Why do we need a dowser? We already know where the water is. We don’t need more; we need less.”

  “We’re not dowsing for water,” the priest said. “We’re dowsing for bones.”

  BEFORE GOING BACK to bed, Phil opened the top drawer of his dresser and got out the envelope with his mother’s note in it and the old daguerreotype photo. He stood looking at the photo, at the faces of the four people, the clothes they wore, the wood railing of the porch they stood on. One of the women, he saw clearly now, was the woman from the well. The other woman, of course, was his mother. She was young, and there was a certain distortion in the photo, but he knew it was his mother. He wondered about the identity of the two men, whether they’d been left behind in that distant day, or had also found their way into the future somehow, waking up on a rainy night in a friendless and unfamiliar world.

  31

  THE GUEST BEDROOM on the ground floor of the house wouldn’t have worked for Jeanette, so Phil had put her in one of the two empty rooms upstairs instead, and had moved his own stuff downstairs for the sake of propriety. The arrangement wasn’t ideal, but it seemed best to him, what with his new guardianship of Betsy and all, that he give the women in the house as much privacy as possible. And beyond that, the ground floor guest bedroom, which was accessed through the darkroom, functioned as Phil’s workroom. There was a cube refrigerator in it, full of film, and plastic bins of filters and lenses and pieces of tripods. There were four filing cabinets full of finished prints, and a computer that he had only recently bought with the idea of loading it with thumbnail-sized images of his slides, which he could categorize and access at the push of a button. So far he hadn’t put anything into the computer except the photo software program, but one of these days, when he had nothing better to do with his time than sit at a desk for a few days …

  He hung some shirts up in what room was left in the closet, and moved photo magazines and books off the bed and onto the shelves, thinking about last night’s conversation with the nameless priest. Elizabeth had clearly invented the story about the madwoman simply to learn whether he was aware of any oddly dressed female stranger. And later in his conversation, when the priest had mentioned the blue glass curio, other things had become clear. Phil himself had mentioned Elizabeth’s advertisement to the priest—how much money was being offered for the piece of glass—but the priest already knew about it. Clearly there was nothing spontaneous about Elizabeth’s behavior, nothing innocent in her questions.

  On the other hand, Phil couldn’t be certain that Elizabeth was merely using him, no matter what her motives were. She was an antiques dealer, and there was a fabulously valuable lump of ancient glass—or, as she insisted, sapphire—somewhere around town. Why shouldn’t she want to find it? It was her job to find it. And so what if she thought she had found him in the process? The priest’s motives seemed to be noble, but then it would be easy to cook up noble motives when there were hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.

  The back door slammed, and he heard Betsy’s footsteps crossing the kitchen floor. He went out through the darkroom and found her in front of the open refrigerator in the kitchen, and somehow the mere sight of her standing there made him instantly happy.

  “Muffin?” he asked.

  “Okay.”

  He took out an English muffin, pried it in half with a fork, and put the halves into the toaster. “What do you want on it?”

  “Honey and butter” she said, closing the refrigerator after taking out a carton of orange juice.

  He was instantly reminded of Marianne, who used to put honey on everything—pancakes, cottage cheese, toast, cold cereal. “Honey’s in that cupboard over there,” he said. Betsy opened the cupboard and took it down, and when the muffins were toasted, she fixed them herself.

  “I could make you one,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said. He’d already eaten breakfast, but there was something in the offer that he couldn’t refuse. “You want to play catch later?”

  “Okay.”

  “So you never pitch?”

  “Uh-uh. I’m first base or shortstop.”

  “The school’s just down the road, on the other side of the neighborhood. We should probably go down there to play, where there’s a backstop. I’ve got a glove, but not a bat. We’ll have to buy a bat, and I can hit you some grounders. I think there’s a winter league that plays around here, but I don’t know when they start.”

  “I think it’s too late,” Betsy said. “Can I play your piano?”

  The shift in conversation made him smile. “Of course. Everybody always asks me to play, but they always want the same song.”

  “Which one?” Betsy asked innocently.

  “They always want me to play ‘Far Far Away,’ ”Phil said, grinning at her.

  Betsy nodded. The muffin popped up in the toaster, and she squeezed margarine on it. “I never heard that one.” But then, before he had to explain his joke, she grinned at him and rolled her eyes. “That’s dumb,” she said.

  Phil shrugged. “It’s the only music joke I know.”

  “I’ll make one for Jen,” Betsy said, taking a muffin out of the bag and working at it with the fork. She found a plate, and when the muffin was toasted and buttered, she squeezed honey on it, too. Phil followed her upstairs.

  “Jen?” Phil asked. “You call her Jen, not Jeanette?”

  “She said she likes Jen. I was in there this morning already. I showed her where things were.”

  “How did you know where things were?”

>   “I looked.”

  “Good,” he said. “You’re taking good care of her.”

  Betsy knocked softly on her door, then pushed it open a crack and peered in. “She’s awake,” Betsy whispered. “Should I go in?”

  “Go in,” Phil said. “See if she wants company.”

  Betsy tiptoed in, closing the door softly behind her. In a moment she returned. “She says come in,” she said, holding the door open now.

  Jeanette was sitting up in bed. His mother’s nightgown and robe fit her perfectly, and she looked entirely at home in them. This morning he was once more struck by her beauty, by her full black hair and dark eyes. She was younger than he had thought she was last night, although there was something pensive in her eyes that suggested a depth of understanding beyond her years. She stared out the window now as if her mind were wandering in some less happy place. Outside, the day was windy and clear. The distant foothills stood out in stark clarity against the morning sky.

  On the bedside table lay a scattering of objects including several small toys. There was a finger ring with a hologram eye on a plastic disk, and two Winnie the Pooh plastic action figures with moveable arms and legs. A dollar bill folded up into an origami bow tie sat tilted against the lamp, and it occurred to Phil that the lamp itself might be the most fantastic sort of magical lantern to her. Did they have electric lamps in 1884? Certainly they didn’t have hologram eyeballs. …

  “I showed her these things,” Betsy said, sitting down in the chair by the bed. “She wanted to know about things when she saw my watch. They didn’t have watches like this.” She held up her wrist. The watch was digital, with the time simply stated in a box at the bottom of the face.