The Rainy Season

by James P. Blaylock

  Her heart pounding, Mrs. Darwin shifted into drive and sped out of the gas station, turning east onto Chapman. Clearly the man was insane. She picked up the wadded newspaper, intending to pitch it out into the street, but instead she pulled over to the side of the road, got out of the car, and cleaned the spittle off the windshield, dumping the paper in the gutter afterward. Southern California—the land where even homeless bums threw away good money! This was evidence of everything she had come to suspect. Everyone wanted something for nothing. Everyone was ready to take what they wanted without asking, Phil Ainsworth included. Well she’d see about that. She’d damned well see about that.

  She headed east into the foothills, spending half an hour simply driving around, acclimating herself to the area. She didn’t know the country, and that might be a bad thing, depending on what happened. She discovered that there were only a couple of highways leading away from the Ainsworth house, which was out on the edge of town, and before long she began to develop a feel for what the lines on her road map actually meant. The afternoon was wearing on when she drove back down Santiago Canyon, straight past the old Ainsworth house before she knew she’d missed it. She turned around farther down the hill, waited for a long break in traffic, and set out uphill again, driving past slowly and looking up the driveway.

  There was Betsy! Walking across a little plot of grass in plain sight! Mrs. Darwin nearly stopped the car right there in the road, and it was all she could do to drive on, up to a turnout above the house where she reversed direction again, then parked the car for a moment in order to catch her breath. There was another car parked at the turnout, empty, perhaps broken down. She wondered what Betsy would say if she simply strode up the driveway, out of the blue like this. Here comes the cavalry, she thought, and she pictured herself throwing her arms open and Betsy running to her and hiding beneath her coat, and the two of them walking away forever like a pair of mismatched Siamese twins!

  Instead she drove on down the hill again, but this time, when she passed the driveway, Betsy was nowhere to be seen. Phil himself stood on the patch of lawn, and he had a woman with him, an easy flyer from the look of her. He might at least have waited a decent length of time before he brought in … before he brought in his women! Mrs. Darwin thought suddenly of the empty car in the turnout, and it occurred to her that the car might belong to this woman, who couldn’t park on the property for some reason. What sort of illicit relationship was he hiding, and from whom? This whole thing stank to high heaven, as if it wasn’t rotten enough to begin with. She nearly turned around again and went back. If nothing else, she could break up this little tête-à-tête just for the sake of spoiling something for him.

  But that would be unwise. She would tip her hand, and right now she wasn’t quite sure what kind of cards she held. It was better, perhaps, to wait and watch. But by God if she had to walk in there and take that girl out wholesale, she’d do it! She spotted a TraveLodge with a vacancy sign, and she pulled into the parking lot, anxious to clean up and settle in. For today, aside from a little bit of telephone activity, she would be patient and bide her time.

  42

  “I LEFT IT up at the turnout again,” Elizabeth said when Phil mentioned her car. “I pulled off to look at the view, and the day was so beautiful that I just walked down. Getting out of your driveway is a pain, by the way, because of that curve going downhill. There’s always someone coming out of nowhere. How’s Betsy, by the way? She seems pretty peppy. We had a nice talk.”

  “She’s doing fine,” Phil said. “Last night she was feeling a little bit down. Sorry to chase you off like that.”

  “I fully understand.” She smiled at him and hooked her arm through his. “You still haven’t given me a tour of your house,” she said. “I’d love to see it. I was looking in the historical records in the library basement, and it turns out that this very house is one of the oldest houses still standing in the area.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Well, then show me around. What do I need, an E-ticket? What if I told you I was friends with the owner?” She set out toward the porch, hauling him along, patting his hand. “If you still have what’s left in that bottle of wine, we could celebrate something.”

  “I’d love to celebrate something,” Phil said, “but I can’t. I was just going out. I’ve got to see about getting Betsy into school.”

  “Right now? School must be about over for the day.”

  “I have to go down to the district office. Then we were going out to buy school supplies. She’s starting fresh, so she needs fresh stuff—notebooks, pencils. You know how kids are.”

  “I guess I do.” They stood outside the porch now, and from what Elizabeth could see, the living room was empty. Betsy must have gone upstairs, which is exactly where Phil wasn’t going to take her. “You’re not trying to avoid me, are you, Phil? I think I come on too strong sometimes, especially when I find an attractive man. There’s not a lot of guys like you left in the world, you know.”

  His grin was as much embarrassment as anything else, but she could see that he wasn’t going to cave in.

  “Honestly,” he said, “I’m not trying to avoid you. This whole thing with Betsy came right out of nowhere.” He shrugged, turning his palms up as if none of this was his fault, but before he could detach himself from her, she leaned up and kissed him on the cheek.

  She let go of him and stepped back a pace. He was blushing so brightly that she almost burst into laughter. He didn’t look angry, though. “Next time I’ll call first,” she said. Halfway down the drive she looked back, guessing correctly that he was still there, watching her go. She smiled and waved, then continued up to the street and around the corner. It was possible that he had watched her leave because he liked the look of her in tight jeans. It was equally possible that he wondered what the hell she was actually doing there. And in that case, she could hardly hang around and make him any more suspicious. She hadn’t gotten anywhere with Betsy, either.

  But she sure as hell wasn’t going to drive away again, like she had last night. Appleton was right. There was no time to be subtle. At the turnout she climbed into her car, started it up, and headed downhill, honking the horn as she passed the drive, although she didn’t see him outside anymore. Twenty yards farther down, a street turned off to the right, into a neighborhood. She pulled over at the end of this street, which dead-ended where a trail led down into Santiago Creek and the arroyo beyond. She set out down the trail toward the back of Phil’s property, past a stand of eucalyptus and into the back of the avocado grove.

  If Phil was telling the truth about going out with Betsy, then this would be a prime opportunity to have a little bit of a look around. If there wasn’t an unlocked door in the house, then there would probably be an unlocked window. It wouldn’t hurt, if nothing else, to take a quick peek into Betsy’s room in order to investigate the book bag secret. Of course if Phil was lying about going out, then … hell, she’d have a look around anyway.

  She felt in her pocket for the Spanish coin and realized that she had promised to Appleton to report in. He would be highly interested in the coin. And that alone was a good enough reason not to tell him about it. She kept to the edge of the grove, along the redwood fences and backyards of the neighborhood, and when she got through the trees she darted across the open ground between the grove and the back of the tower, where she settled in to wait, standing where she could see Phil’s car in the drive if she looked around the corner of the tower. If anyone came out, she would hear them, since Phil had the slammiest screen doors in creation.

  The lousy liar, she thought after fifteen minutes. School! He wasn’t going anywhere. He had wanted to get rid of her. To hell with him. She edged around into the garden shed where she slid open the window that Betsy had crawled through earlier. There was still plenty of sunlight for her to have a quick look around inside. She boosted herself over the low sill, swiveled around, and sat up in the window, hauling her legs in and dropping to th
e floor. If she heard the screen door slam and the car pull out, then she could give up the tower and break into the house.

  She stood for a moment, getting her bearings in the shadowy room, listening to the heavy silence. There was a pressure in the tower that she could feel in her ears, and the air seemed almost dense, as if a storm were pending. She realized then that the silence wasn’t complete. She listened intently, hearing something that sounded like the distant crying of a child. A television on in the house? She closed her eyes and focused on the sound. It seemed now to come from no single direction, but from all around her at once, or rather from within her, as if she were hearing it in her memory. Something else, too—a deep rushing sound like hearing the ocean in a seashell. She closed her eyes and listened more intently to the crying, which rose and fell as if it carried on the wind. And then, for a long moment the crying differentiated itself from the background noise, and it seemed to her to come from directly in front of her, right here in the room. A chill ran through her, and she opened her eyes, seeing at once the dark bundle beneath the stairs—an old blanket partly fallen open over a heap of debris, from which shone a dim, diffused light.

  There was a stirring within the bundle, a faint clacking like the sound of chopsticks knocking together. She took a step toward it, bending over to see more clearly what it was—a human skull, scattered bones, more of the old coins. A misty glow wreathed like smoke from within the blanket, coalescing and hovering beneath the dark stairs—the image of a child, curled, it seemed to her, into a fetal position. She breathed heavily, fighting the desire to climb back out the window.

  The idea came to her that she would take the whole bundle: there was money on the line here, and the thought of it cleared her head. Surely she had found something that Appleton wanted, something he had been waiting for.

  A rusted weed claw hung from a nail driven into the wall. She took it down, then bent in under the stairs to look into the bundle itself. The light that emanated from it bathed her arm and face, and she could actually feel it, like the coolness of a shadow in sunlight. Gingerly she picked up a corner of the blanket, exposing the bones within. She sorted through the debris with the weed claw. There were more coins and rosary beads, but more interesting than either was the glowing crystal object that lay within the framework of still-attached ribs. It was green, a pure enough moss green so that no one would mistake it for the sapphire blue of the object mentioned in the Dealer ad. The shape was wrong, too. This was almost an oval, misshapen at one end, which gave it the indistinct appearance of an owl.

  Time to go. The last thing she needed was for Phil or Betsy to come out here now, horsing around, only to find her climbing through the window with a sack of bones on her back. She looked for a box or a bag, anything to put the piece of glass into, but there was nothing. Her sweater would do just fine. She took it off, slipped her hand into the sleeve, and grasped the piece of glass through the knitted wool, carefully pulling the sleeve inside out and over it. She sure as hell wasn’t going to touch the glass, not after her experience with Appleton’s trinket.

  She tied off the sweater sleeve with the crystal trapped inside, then folded the sweater around it a couple more times to make a ball, which she stuffed into a clay flowerpot. The light was hidden now, and she could no longer hear the sound of crying or the rattling together of the bones. She set the flowerpot in among the bones, draped the edges of the stadium blanket back over all of it, and tied the bundle off tightly with a piece of garden twine. She went straight to the window, pushing it open and leaning out far enough to see the corner of the house before reaching the bundle through the window and lowering it to the ground, then climbing out after it, sliding the window shut behind her.

  A movement off toward the house caught her eye, and she pressed herself into the shadows, thinking furiously of excuses, of what she would tell Phil when he caught her playing Santa Claus with his bag of bones. But she saw no one at all on the lawn. Puzzled, she stood there for another moment waiting, just to be safe. The limbs of the old pepper tree grazed the lawn, swaying heavily in the breeze, casting moving shadows—

  There it was again; she saw it now: someone climbing in the tree itself. It was Betsy, the little minx. The girl had apparently come out through the attic window, which stood open onto a small balcony. Hell, Elizabeth thought, the girl was probably sneaking back out here to the tower.

  Elizabeth backed up, taking the bones with her, slipping behind the tower and out of sight. Betsy had stopped, though. Apparently she wasn’t climbing down after all. Elizabeth had a clear view of her through the willowy foliage of the pepper tree. She was doing something, meddling with her book bag. After a moment she climbed higher into the tree again, and Elizabeth watched as she stepped over the low balcony, glanced down into the yard, and went straight back into the room and pulled the windows closed behind her.

  Elizabeth waited for another minute, but nothing stirred in the afternoon calm. The smart thing to do, probably, would be to wait until dark and then have a look into the tree, except that she didn’t have an hour or two to spare right now. Better to come back later. Things were moving—their “liaison” had arrived, just as Appleton had guessed, the old bastard. He was very carefully telling her nothing at all.

  43

  WHEN PHIL LOOKED in on Jen in the morning, she seemed to him to be a different person. For two days she had sometimes seemed vacant, gazing unfocused at the windows, and as far as he could tell, she had rarely gotten out of bed or eaten anything unless Betsy had insisted. She had spent most of her time asleep, which wasn’t surprising. This morning, though, she had told Phil that she’d had enough languishing in bed, that she had been asleep for over a hundred years, and that she was suddenly ravenously hungry and curious.

  He found himself cooking happily, throwing chopped salmon and chives into the scrambled eggs, cooking bacon for the first time in years, spooning out a dish of apricot preserves for the toast. He opened fresh coffee even though he had half a pound already open in the refrigerator, and he laid the whole breakfast out on a tray along with antique cups and plates and glasses. Halfway up the stairs he realized that what was appealingly old-fashioned to him might seem run-of-the-mill to Jen, who herself was the most authentically old-fashioned woman in the world. But then it occurred to him that nice things, including eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee, were timeless, as was the very idea of breakfast, and that some things, all the really important things, never went out of fashion.

  And Jen seemed happy enough with the food. She ate with perfect manners, but she ate steadily, apologizing for being so greedy. When there was nothing left but a tablespoon or so of jam, she set the tray aside and got up to pull back the curtains. The sun shone through the foliage of the pepper tree, and when she pushed the window open, the breeze carried the sagey scent of the spring hillsides. There was warmth in the wind for a change, and immediately Phil thought of spring and of the weather turning, and he realized that from where Jen sat once again in bed, the view from the east-facing windows was virtually unchanged from her day. Through the west-facing windows, however, lay a vast suburban sprawl in which there were arguably only a couple of hundred buildings still standing that had been standing at the turn of the century. Unlike bacon and eggs, mother nature had largely gone out of style in suburban southern California.

  “Look at this,” she said to him. “Something else that Betsy brought in.” She handed him a color brochure of Disneyland with rockets spinning against the snowy backdrop of the Matterhorn Mountain and with the old Skyway cars still running over Fantasyland. “She has some idea that you’ll take us to this place. I see it’s in Anaheim.”

  “It very nearly is Anaheim,” Phil said.

  She shook her head wonderingly. “Anaheim was the German colony and grape vineyards,” she said.

  “Disease wiped out the vines in 1886, and after that it was all citrus groves for about eighty years.”

  “But not anymore?”

  “Th
ere’s no more agriculture, really. Only a few acres here and there. Land’s too valuable to farm.”

  “What happened to the citrus groves?”

  “People.” He gestured at the brochure that she still held. “Disneyland took out hundreds of acres all by itself. An orange tree can’t compete with a make-believe mountain.”

  “I’d be astonished if it could,” she said. “I like this make-believe mountain. It sounds wonderful. Betsy tells me that one travels through the interior of the mountain on little cars. Apparently they absolutely race along, just like sleds. It sounds …” She shook her head, unable to express it.

  Phil shrugged. “I guess there’s some debate about how wonderful it is.”

  “I think you’ve seen too many wonderful things,” she said. “You’ve gotten tired of them. Look what else Betsy’s brought me.” She pointed to the bedside table, at a ballpoint pen with a likeness of Donald Duck floating in the clear plastic shaft. Beside it sat a flat, circular piece of cardboard with a hologram fish on it. There was a tiny cassette player, too, with a pair of earphones, and a flashlight big enough to contain a single AA battery. Phil had seen the stuff lying there, but it had meant nothing to him; he hadn’t noticed the objects until Jen had pointed them out. All of it must be amazing to Jen, though—space-age amazing, a handful of small miracles. “Betsy has undertaken to educate me,” she told him.

  “And she wants to start at Disneyland?”

  “It says here that it’s the happiest place on earth. These colorful pictures … it’s all so wonderful.”