Touch of Rain

by Teyla Branton

  “Except for today,” I said.

  He grimaced. “We were searching for Inclar. I told Korin it was time to turn him over to the police, if he was still around, or at least tell them he’d been here. It was too dangerous having him scaring people and possibly attacking you again. But of course Korin didn’t like the idea of the police snooping around. He wanted to make sure Inclar was gone and then forget it.”

  “Guess we know why,” I muttered.

  No one replied. “Look,” I said, fishing the key out of my bra. “Inclar put this under my door in Portland. Hold out your hand. I don’t want to touch it after it’s unwrapped.”

  Harmony held out her hand. “Then it’s true what Korin said about you being able to see things from certain objects. No wonder he was so interested in you.”

  Her tone implied a strange sort of satisfaction that Korin still loved her best, and only my talent had attracted him. I supposed every woman had some level of vanity, even a woman like Harmony, who had given her whole heart to her husband.

  I set the small bundle on her hand and pulled the end of the cloth until we could see the key. Harmony shook her head. “We don’t have any locks here, except the safes, and it’s the wrong size for those.”

  “Unless . . .” Gabe trailed off and began looking around. “This cellar seems smaller than I remember. Normally you only want cellars just big enough for all the food because it keeps better that way. But we have a lot of vegetables, and we needed room for the canned fruit, so we planned to make them larger. This cellar is near the orchard, and we thought we might also use it for apples. Or maybe even have a place to hide things in case of natural disaster. Or war. We all agreed it’d be good to be prepared. Maybe it’s the shelving that makes it look small in here, but there isn’t enough room here for the barrels of apples we harvest.”

  “Are you saying there might be more to this place than we’re seeing?” I scanned the walls, but the darkness revealed nothing to me except the glint of Harmony’s light off the chicken wire.

  “I don’t know for sure. It just seems smaller now. Add that to the fact that I’ve been over the entire immediate area of the farm on foot today, including all the cellars, and I’ve been out on horseback searching further. Inclar was nowhere to be seen. If he’s dead, as you say he is, I don’t know where else he could be.”

  I saw where he was going. “Except in a hidden room somewhere. Maybe one down here.”

  Gabe met my gaze without confirming or denying the statement.

  “But you own hundreds of acres,” I said. “Korin could have taken Inclar anywhere.”

  Harmony shook her head. “Korin hasn’t disappeared for any long stretches since he arrived yesterday. In fact, he’s been hanging around constantly. I thought it was because he knew I was worried about Inclar, but maybe he was afraid I’d find something out.”

  “Probably just trying to hit on you,” Gabe muttered.

  “Don’t be angry.” Harmony leaned against him. “You’re the only man I’ve ever loved or ever will love.” Her voice was solicitous, the age-old tones of a woman reassuring her man. Yet there was an underlying note that gave me pause, though I didn’t know for sure what it was. They were in their own world again. Gabe lifted his hand to her face and rubbed his fingers the length of her scar.

  “It’s okay,” she murmured. “My father’s long gone. He can’t hurt me now. Thanks to you.” They hugged as I tried to ignore how uneasy the words made me. Gabe might not have killed Inclar, but that didn’t mean he was incapable of murder.

  “Korin could have had one of his men dispose of the body,” I said. “But let’s assume he didn’t. Let’s assume he kept Inclar close to make sure no one found him. Harmony, can I use your flashlight?”

  Harmony started, as though she’d forgotten I was there. She extended the flashlight to me, and I noticed it was the same one I’d broken the previous night. Apparently she had a supply of bulbs. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  Retrieving the cloth that had been around the key, I wrapped it over the handle of the flashlight before taking it from her, not wanting to relive the scene with Inclar or the romantic moments she’d shared with the man I now knew must have been Gabe.

  “I’m thinking what if this cellar really was bigger at one time?” I started running the flashlight slowly along the walls. “What if Korin uses it to hide things? Or people? He could even have hiding places in all the cellars.”

  Harmony sucked in a breath, but she didn’t say anything. She and Gabe watched the trail of light over the walls. Nothing but the chicken wire and boards and dirt. Closer to the ceiling were more wood beams, and the ceiling itself was a maze of them. Standing on the shelves, I ran the light over the beams near the ceiling, but there was nothing unusual, so I jumped down and worked my way along the walls to the base of the stairs, where a two-foot section of the wall was entirely made of wood. No chicken wire. When I banged on the boards, they echoed hollowly, instead of with the thump of a solid wall. “Hello,” I said.

  “What is it?” Gabe asked. Harmony jumped to her feet and came over.

  “Look.” I showed her the keyhole in the door. It was at hip level, low enough not to be noticeable unless you were really looking.

  Gabe limped over to us. “Try the key.”

  Harmony started to hand the key back to me, but I shook my head. “You do it.” I couldn’t hold both the key and the flashlight without more cloth, and I couldn’t touch that key with my bare hand unless I wanted to risk passing out.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “Why are you holding your side?”

  “I tried to get away. I think they broke a rib or two.”

  She murmured dark words under her breath that I was too tired to decipher, but it had something to do with how Korin would suffer if she ever laid hands on him. Her hand trembled as she inserted the key. “It goes in but it won’t turn.”

  “Might be rusted. Let me take a look.” Gabe jiggled it this way and that, finally turning it with obvious effort. He pushed the wooden section inward to reveal a damp space so dark it was impossible to get a sense of its size from where I stood.

  I angled the flashlight around. “Bigger than out here,” I said. The room smelled like an outhouse.

  “Oh, no,” Harmony said softly.

  The light had fallen on a thin figure under several tattered blankets. Next to the figure was a blue forty-gallon water barrel, a large basket, and what looked like an unlit lantern. At first I thought the figure was Inclar, because it was about the same size, but then I recognized the scene from my sister’s drawing.

  “Marcie!” In seconds I was kneeling beside her, wincing as the movement sent agony through my ribs. Was she dead? No, she was moving now, sitting up, her eyes squinting against the light. A putrid stench wafted up from her wasted body. In her arms she clutched a rolled up blanket like a baby.

  “I don’t want to leave the farm. Really, I don’t. Can we come out now? I promise I’ll be good. Please. I’ll do whatever you want. I just want to take care of my baby.”

  “Are you Marcie?” I asked.

  She blinked. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a friend of Ethan’s. Your brother.”

  “No,” she murmured faintly. “Don’t bring him here!” Her eyes went past my face, trying to see who was with me. I flashed the light toward Gabe and Harmony.

  “Rubin!” Marcie cried, one hand reaching out toward Gabe, the other hugging the bundle to her slight chest. “I’ve been praying you’d come for me. Kayla has missed you, and so have I!”

  Rubin and Kayla, I remembered, were Marcie’s dead husband and baby daughter, which indicated how far she’d gone from reality.

  Harmony gave her husband a little shove, and he knelt beside me, taking Marcie’s hand. “It’s going to be okay,” he murmured. To me he added, “I had no idea she was still on the farm. Korin told me she changed her mind and went home.”

  “How long ago was that?”

 
Gabe looked to Harmony for verification. “A month, I think. But she was different before that. In January she disappeared for two weeks.”

  “She was probably here.”

  “From how hard it was to get in,” Harmony added in a fragile voice, “she isn’t visited very often.”

  I bit my lip. “Korin must have another key, though. Inclar left here months ago with this one.”

  Marcie cried while we watched helplessly, a soft, heart-wrenching sound. I wished there was something more I could do for her, but even breathing hurt my chest. Finally, Harmony moved around to Marcie’s other side and gathered the woman in her arms. “Shush, now. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  Things weren’t exactly okay, but what else could we say?

  The basket near Marcie was filled with dried meats, shriveled fruit, and rotting vegetables, though from the looks of Marcie’s thin frame, she wasn’t much interested in food anymore. The water barrel had a spigot near the bottom and several quart-sized glass jars to drink from. They were empty, and I wondered if she’d grown too weak to turn the spigot.

  Gabe picked up the lantern near Marcie. Unlike the others I’d seen at the farm, this one was battery operated with two thin fluorescent light bulbs, but it gave out only a dim glow when he turned it on. My hatred for Korin increased tenfold. How could he treat someone this way? No wonder Essence had taken refuge in drugs.

  We sat without moving or speaking for several long, silent moments. I had no idea what the others were thinking, but I was contemplating pulling off the chicken wire and trying to dig our way out with pieces of wood from the potato crate. If we started at chest level and worked up, we might eventually get out—if Korin didn’t come back and kill us first.

  “You’re not Rubin.” Marcie’s eyes were open and staring. “You’re Founder Gabe.” She gave a desperate cry. “I’m not dead, then. I’m still here, and he’s going to come back.”

  “Korin will not hurt you again,” Gabe said, standing. He made a forbidding figure in the dim light. “I promise.”

  I didn’t know how he could promise that, short of killing either Korin or Marcie, and I didn’t bet on his chances for the former.

  “Help is coming,” I told Marcie. “Your brother’s been looking for you. That’s why I’m here. I came to find you.”

  “Ethan?” She gazed at me, but we’d already lost her again. Her eyes were wide with terror, and her body shook uncontrollably. If there had been a baby in the blanket, it would have smothered by now. Harmony stroked her hair and murmured comforting words in a low voice. She seemed unmindful of Marcie’s stench or the dirty blankets that held who knew what kinds of small critters.

  I moved slowly and carefully to my feet. “We have to get out of here,” I whispered to Gabe. “Let’s look around. See if we can find something to help us pull off the wire so we can dig. This flashlight isn’t going to last long. Once we start digging, we’ll have to turn it off to save the battery—even if that means digging in the dark.”

  Gabe stared at me for a moment, perhaps surprised at my initiative. “Good idea,” he said finally, his voice low. For my ears only. “I think neither of us can pretend that Korin will ever let us out of here alive.” His gaze went from his wife to the unseeing Marcie, his expression dark with poorly concealed fury, as though he could already imagine Harmony degenerating to Marcie’s condition.

  In silence we walked to the wall and began searching for a likely place. At one point, Gabe picked up a piece of broken two-by-four from the ground. “Better than fingers for digging.”

  I was glad he wasn’t afraid of hard work. “Look, more blankets,” I said. “Probably more than one person was down here at a time.” Had Victoria been here at one point? Or had Korin only showed her what might happen to her if he was denied his will?

  We hadn’t found a place for waste yet, though there had to be one because of the ever-increasing smell in this direction. Maybe covering it with a blanket would help.

  What I found next was worse than any latrine. The light fell on a scuffed slip-on shoe, and I followed it up a thin, short leg to the torso and at last to the narrow face I recognized only too well. The loose right eye was still rolled up in terror, perhaps in realization that his beloved brother had killed his wife and was about to murder him.

  We’d found Inclar.

  Chapter 23

  Inclar’s body looked decidedly worse for wear. I jiggled his leg with my foot and found it stiff with rigor mortis, but that’s as far as I was willing to go to check out his condition. Luckily, the latrine was just beyond him, because three seconds later I lost the potato I’d eaten and all the vegetables from the field. Heaving over the pit, I tried not to pass out from the pain in my ribs.

  “Marcie,” Gabe said, once my heaving had ceased. “What happened to Inclar? Do you know?” He took a few steps toward her and Harmony.

  For a moment, Marcie didn’t answer, her chin tucked near her chest as she lay in Harmony’s arms. Finally she gave herself a little shake and began speaking. “Inclar was out there.” She sounded lucid again, and her high, thin voice carried easily in the small space. “He called to me through the door. Said he wanted to let me out, but he’d given someone else the key, and he’d have to come back. I was afraid to answer at first, but then I did. After that Korin came, and they were arguing.”

  “About what?” Harmony asked.

  “About me, about what really happened to Inclar’s wife. Inclar was going to turn himself in, lead the police here, ask some psychic to read the chain that strangled Sarah. He ran away, and Korin went after him. They brought him back a few hours later. At first I thought he was unconscious, but he wasn’t breathing.”

  That meant she’d spent the night and day alone in a tomb-like pit with a dead man. Marcie was quiet again, clutching her blanket baby and turning to push her face into Harmony’s shoulder like a frightened child. Harmony rocked her gently.

  Gabe walked back to Inclar and squatted down, gently turning Inclar’s head with the two-by-four. “I think he died from a blow to the back of the head.”

  That fit with what I’d seen in the woods. “I guess Korin didn’t have time to move him right when it happened.”

  Gabe stood after his perusal of the dead man, his face tight. “Look here.” He pointed to a place where the chicken wire had run out along the wall and the builders had instead tied wires to span the gap between the beams. “Some of these will be easy to undo, and we can stretch out the others with this two-by-four. We’ll have to move the body first to get to it.”

  The body. It was sad to see a man so reduced to such a description. What a waste! Inclar should be with his beloved Sarah, both alive and in good health, and Marcie should be in the comforting arms of her brother. Inclar was beyond any help, but I’d darn well make sure Marcie had a chance.

  A noise from the other room shattered the sudden silence. We froze for a precious half-second before we scrambled to the other room. Marcie moaned as we left, but we had to see what was happening.

  Maybe Korin had come back to finish us off. “We may have to jump him,” I murmured.

  Someone was already coming down the stairs, and my heart lightened when I saw by the thin light filtering in from several flashlights above, that it was a woman. Spring, in fact.

  We were saved!

  She crouched suddenly, and the door behind her slammed shut, leaving us again in total darkness. “Autumn?” Spring called with a sob.

  “I’m here,” I said. “Just come to the bottom. Carefully.” I directed the beam of the flashlight over the stairs and us so Spring could see where we were.

  “I was trying to find you, and I couldn’t, and then I went to talk to Korin and he said you’d left. I couldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t have left without telling me.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I told him I was going to leave for a little while to see a doctor about my allergies and talk to my mom. He said I couldn’t and that if I tried, he’d take L
ittle Jim and hand him over to his father, and I’d never see him again.” She was crying in earnest now, and I had to go up a few steps to help her down.

  Spring latched onto me tightly, and I gasped with pain, but she was too upset to notice. “How could he take my baby?”

  “Where’s Little Jim now?” We’d dropped the pretense of calling him Silverstar. Those days were over.

  “He gave him to Misty, the girl from the kitchen.”

  “Then he’ll be fine,” Harmony said. “Misty loves children. She’ll take good care of him. Now, let Autumn go before you break another of her ribs. We’ve got a plan. We’re going to dig our way out.”

  “Maybe we should try the radio again,” I said, returning Harmony’s flashlight. “My friend might have just been gone for a while.” Harmony eagerly opened the flashlight and handed over the batteries, but there was no answer.

  “I don’t think the signal’s getting through,” Gabe said.

  “We dig then.” Biting back bitter disappointment, I followed the others back to Marcie’s prison. Spring gasped to see her and began to worry again about Little Jim. Ignoring everyone, Gabe grabbed hold of Inclar’s feet and moved him to the other side of the latrine. I was glad he didn’t ask for help. I didn’t think I could bring myself to touch the rigid corpse.

  From Marcie’s supply basket, I removed one of the glass jars that had held water, hoping to use it to dig. The imprints came suddenly and unexpectedly—bright, terrible flashes of aching thirst and helplessness that seared me. Terror, need, want, loneliness. Oh, the soul-killing loneliness! With a cry, I let the bottle fall to the ground, where it clinked against another bottle, knocking it over and breaking it.

  “What is it?” Harmony’s flashlight blinded me for an instant.

  I shook my head, blinking back tears. “Maybe one of you can use the bottle. I can’t.”

  Thankfully, Harmony didn’t question me but picked up an intact bottle and a large, knifelike piece of the broken one and strode toward the wall.

  “We have to do this tonight while they’re sleeping at the farm,” Gabe said. “In the morning it might be too late.”