The Rainy Season Page 2

  And then he saw that something lay in the weeds on the ground near the edge of the well, something that glowed faintly against the mossy stones. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a glove, and slipped it over his hand. He parted the weeds and found the object—what appeared to be a tiny glass paperweight, unnaturally heavy for its size. He took out a penlight and switched it on, shining the beam of light into its center. There was something frozen inside the oval of moonlit glass: a painting of a face, barely human in appearance, distorted as if from some strong and unpleasant emotion.

  As if by reflex movement, he tossed the thing out into the center of the well where it sank, glowing a faint and misty green that dwindled in the black depths until it passed out of sight, and then, feeling bone weary and shivering in the damp night, he trudged tiredly back up toward the road.

  4

  BETSY HAD FALLEN asleep twice and awakened again in the night, both times to the thought that the house didn’t sound right. She lay in bed listening to the muttering of voices in the living room—the television turned down low: laughter now, followed by applause, and then talking again. Her mother had generally gone to bed earlier than Betsy did, and it was Betsy who had gone into her mother’s bedroom to kiss her goodnight and to tuck her in. So it simply felt wrong that the television was on. Everything had been wrong today, but she hadn’t known how wrong until she had gotten home from softball and found her teacher, Miss Cobb, sitting in the living room along with Mrs. Darwin and a woman whom Betsy had never seen before.

  It had been Mrs. Darwin who had told her about her mother. Miss Cobb had cried, and that had started Betsy crying until her throat hurt. The first time she had awakened after she had gone to bed, she had cried herself back to sleep, thinking about kissing her mother goodnight, about her mother tucking her in. She quit thinking about it now, and lay there listening to the television.

  Abruptly it occurred to her that this was nearly her last night in this house in Austin, Texas, in this room and in this bed. Mrs. Darwin was sleeping over tonight and tomorrow night, but after that … Betsy’s mother had told her that her Untie Phil in California would be her guardian if anything ever happened. Mrs. Darwin had said that Betsy would simply move in with him. This was confusing, but tomorrow Uncle Phil was coming, and they would work it out. What it meant, either way, was that her room wasn’t hers anymore.

  She got out of bed, took her Winnie the Pooh flashlight out of her bedside stand, and opened the door, slipping noiselessly into the dark hallway. She heard snoring now—Mrs. Darwin asleep on the couch. She thought about going in and turning off the television, but that might wake her up. She stood there for a moment watching the nearly dark living room: the shadowy piano with the jumble of music and wooden metronome on top, the vase with its peacock feathers, the plant stand with its fern. Her mother had bought the fern last week—a bird’s nest fern, she had said. It was a pretty shade of green, but it didn’t look like a fern and it didn’t look like a bird’s nest. Already it was turning brown and getting wilted-looking.

  Betsy turned quietly and walked farther up the hall, past the open bathroom door to her mother’s bedroom. She pushed the door open and walked in, sitting down on the bed, listening to the night sounds of the dark house, smelling the wet air through the half-open window, the scent of rain mingling with the perfume smell of the bottles on the dresser. Her throat tightened, and she blinked hard, standing up and crossing to the dresser, opening the top drawer, where her mother kept her socks. She felt in the socks, pushing them aside and shining her flashlight in among them until she found a tin box with a little lid on a hinge. The box said Pear’s Soap on the lid, and there was a picture on it of an old-fashioned woman in a bonnet. She opened the box and took out the velvet bag inside, feeling the hard glass object inside through the soft cloth.

  She held her breath now, listening again for the sound of Mrs. Darwin’s snoring. Hearing it, steady and louder than ever, she left the room carrying the bag and went back into her bedroom, shutting the door and flipping on the light. Immediately her eye was drawn to a ceramic angel on her windowsill, and she shook out the contents of the velvet bag onto the bedspread—a misshapen glass inkwell about two inches high, the glass cloudy, like glass that had been through a fire. She slipped the angel into the bag, turned the light out again, and went back down the hall and into her mother’s room, anxiously putting the bag back into the tin box and the box in the drawer. She rearranged the socks, sliding the drawer shut. The clock in the living room chimed, and at the sound of it she was suddenly full of an urgent fear, and she hurried back to the darkness of her own room, where the inkwell still lay on the unmade bed, catching a ray of moonlight through the partly open curtains.

  5

  PHIL LAY IN bed thinking, although his thoughts were disconnected. He felt the lonesomeness of the old house, which was somehow made more lonesome by Marianne’s death. Light from the stairwell lamp faintly illuminated the hall outside the open bedroom door, and the muslin window curtains caught a suffused light. In the slight draft they shifted like airy ghosts. He closed his eyes, but in his mind he could still see the shadowy lumber of furniture in the room and the pale moving curtains. He got out of bed finally, dressed, and started toward the stairs to the attic bedroom, which would be Betsy’s bedroom in a couple of days. It had only begun to settle into his mind that his solitary life was a thing of the past, and that he would suddenly have a child around the house. The idea of it was exotic. Softball and piano lessons? School—he’d have to get her into school. He remembered the asphalt playgrounds and tetherball poles and weedy baseball diamonds of his own childhood, suddenly part of his life again.

  An idea came to him, and he returned to his bedroom and took a shallow cardboard carton off the closet shelf. He went out into the hallway again, climbed the stairs, and set the carton on the bed in the attic, switching on the bedside lamp. Next to the lamp sat a mason jar that had belonged to his mother, and he stood for a moment regarding it. Inside the jar lay several trinkets, like old-fashioned carnival prizes. The lid of the jar had been dipped in wax, although there was no liquid in it and nothing in the jar that would spoil. There was an old pocketknife inside with a handle that might have been carved out of antler, although it might as easily have been chipped out of petrified wood. There was a thimble, too, misshapen and decorated with a tiny smudged picture, and a hatpin with a lump of red glass knob on top like a piece of slag. There was a thumb-sized iron animal, perhaps a horse, and a cut crystal shot glass so small that it couldn’t have held more than half an ounce of liquid. He wondered for a moment if he should put the jar away, but it was the sort of thing that Betsy would like, so he set it now on a shelf near the window before switching off the light again in order to get a view of the moonlit night. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the clouds were ragged and windblown.

  From the window there was a view of the grove of avocado trees behind the house and of the creek and arroyo beyond that. A path skirted the lower edge of Santiago Creek, along the back edge of the grove. …

  He was startled to see someone—two people?—moving along the path in the light of the moon. And then, almost as soon as he noted the two shadows, they disappeared, which meant that they had either slipped into the grove itself or—not as likely—had descended the wall of the muddy creekbed. He waited, barely breathing, but they didn’t reappear. The arroyo beyond the creek was overgrown with wild bamboo and willow scrub, thousands of acres of marshy bottomland that stretched away toward the foothills in the north and the park in the east. Now, in the moonlight, the scattered rocks of the sandy arroyo shone chalky pale, and the skeletons of late-winter castor bean and mesquite stood out starkly against the white ground.

  In the hundred years since the house had been built, the property had never been fenced, and although it was common for people walking along the trail to pick avocados at the edge of the grove, there was something unsettling about the idea of strangers lurking among the shadowy t
rees at night. And for the last few weeks, since the groundwater had risen with the constant rains, nighttime visitors had been strangely frequent lurking in the darkness of the trees.

  Nothing was moving now, either on the path or in the arroyo. Clouds scudded across the moon again, casting the landscape into darkness. It occurred to him that it might easily be homeless people, perhaps, with shelters in the woods, and he turned away from the window and switched on the light again, trying to see the room as Betsy would see it. The place could use curtains, maybe shutters on the windows. A new rug would help, too—something bright. But it was a comfortable place with its old bed and rocker and dresser and with its wooden ceiling angling away overhead and two tall gables looking out over the grove. A narrow balcony stood outside the windows, and it was possible to climb out over the sill of one of the windows and walk along the balcony to the other—something he and Marianne had done more than once when they were children.

  A backyard pepper tree grew at the edge of the balcony, and when he was small the branches had just reached to the balcony railing. Now the balcony was nearly swallowed by the enormous tree, and if it grew any larger he would have to think about pruning it back in order to save the last of the view. He was only now getting comfortable with the idea of making any changes in the house and grounds. When his mother had died, he had driven down from where he lived in Sonoma, to find the house empty, closed up, and locked. In the attic he had found an old daguerreotype print, sitting on the sill and tilted against the edge of the window as if to catch the light. It was easily a century old, of four people, possibly in their early twenties, although the stiff poses and washed-out quality of the print made it difficult to tell. Beside the photo had sat the mason jar with the trinkets inside.

  Marianne had already had a house full of her own things by that time, and although she had talked about sorting through the stuff in the house and having her share of them shipped to Texas, she had never gotten around to it. Phil had done nothing to encourage her. He had simply left everything as it had been, although he had moved the old photo to a safe place.

  He opened the box that he had brought with him—odds and ends of things that had belonged to his sister when she was a child, and he sorted through them, reminded of the past. There was a framed photo of her in a girl scout uniform when she must have been about Betsy’s age, and another photo of their mother standing beside the stone well in the backyard. He set both the photos on the nightstand now, took them down again, then set them up once more. Betsey looked a lot like her mother and like her grandmother, too. He had no idea how she would react to the photos, but he decided to leave them there. He closed the half-full box, slipped it into the dresser drawer, and sat down tiredly in the rocker, gazing at the photos, his eyes closing with sleep. And right then, as he tilted back in the rocker, the front doorbell rang.

  Placentia, California

  1884

  6

  THE SOCIETAS FRATERNIA, a spiritualist cult that thrived in late-nineteenth-century rural Orange County, was lodged in a three-story wooden mansion in the small town of Placentia, which bordered the north bank of the Santa Ana River. The mansion had an octagonal room at its southeast edge, and this room as well as the long dining room had curved walls to discourage spirits from hiding in corners. In lean years, malnutrition plagued the vegetarian cult—known to skeptical neighbors as “the grass eaters”—and the malnourished dead were buried in shallow graves in the gardens and groves in the dark of night. The cult disbelieved in coffins, but preferred that the decaying corpses return to the earth as hastily as possible, enriching the fruits and vegetables, especially the avocados, which the cult considered its meat.

  In 1884, a year of particularly heavy rains, the spiritual leader of the cult, Hale Appleton, ordered an artesian well to be dug in the gardens. The work was done by hand with a three-inch carpenter’s auger, and the gush of spring water that poured forth cascaded twelve feet into the air for weeks following the drilling, flooding the rain-saturated gardens and the neighboring farms with a torrent of mud and unearthed human bones. It was in the winter of that year that Appleton’s own daughter lay near death in the octagon room. …

  THROUGH THE SKELETAL branches of leafless trees, the mansion was dim and ghostly despite candles in the windows and oil lamps on the front porch and carriage drive. The late-evening air was chilly, with wind from the northeast, and the night was starry and moonless. Alejandro Solas stood next to his horse, waiting for an escort. He was fortunate to be here at all, at the “baptism” of Appleton’s dying daughter, and so he had to be patient. And there was little doubt but that his stay would be brief. He had an acquaintance in the Societas, who had vouched for him—for a sum of fifty dollars. Shortly, if things went well, Solas would pay him two hundred more. …

  Solas knew a little bit about this sort of baptism, but what he knew he had picked up from stories told to him by the vaqueros who worked his father’s ranch in Vieja Canyon—how in the early days drowned children had been buried in seasonal springs during magical rites. The idea of ritual infanticide had intrigued him rather than frightened him, and now, all these years later, he was going to see the ritual first-hand, especially because he had found a way to profit from it. …

  The practice had long been suppressed by the church, but several of the magical springs were rumored to exist even now, coming to life in the rare seasons of heavy rain, perhaps once every score of years. It was said that the dying child cast off its memory in the form of a crystal stone, a potent magical object. Solas had seen such a stone himself, in the house of a brujo where his grandmother had taken him as a boy. There had been something about it that had fascinated him immediately, perhaps its murky, animalistic shape like an ancient totem or idol, or the almost greasy feel of the thing, or the faintly garlicky smell of it.

  He had found a way to be alone with the object on that strange afternoon, had handled it, even licked it. And while he was there, in the dim evening light, holding the object in his hands, he had seen something hovering like a ghost in the air before him—a vague and glimmering reflection that he could still picture in his mind these fifteen years later. He had seen, cast against the whitewashed adobe of the wall, a broad beach, with the ocean beyond and a ship standing out to sea. He had heard the echoing cry of shore birds, the sound of the breakers, and on the air of the room he had smelled salt spray and the sea wrack drying in the sun of that phantom seashore. …

  He was distracted from the memory when a man stepped out of the shadows of the porch and approached him. Solas recognized him, read the uneasy look on his face, and handed him the agreed-upon fifty dollars, then followed him silently around the side of the mansion, past a scattering of wood-and-glass rain gauges and into the yard behind, where two dozen people stood in a circle around a well ringed by a cut granite wall some four feet high. Water bubbled up in the center of the dark pool, agitating a reflected moon and stars and spilling through a rectangular notch cut into one of the granite slabs in the top row of stones. The overflowing water cascaded down into a rock-lined culvert. Irrigation ditches with wooden dams angled off from the culvert, in order to carry water into the gardens and groves when the dams were opened.

  A rough wooden box lay on the granite wall next to where Appleton stood intoning Latin phrases, and it dawned on Solas that the box was a small casket. Its lid, hinged like the lid of a trunk, stood open. A man with a burning stick lit an oil lamp that hung from the eaves overhead, and the sudden light fell on Appleton’s dark-bearded face. Solas saw that the man had his eyes shut, as if he couldn’t quite stand what he would see if he opened them. Solas moved closer to the well, past the backs of onlookers dressed in the flour-sack clothing of the cult. In the casket lay the body of the child, emaciated, pale in the lamplight. A rosary had been draped like a wreath across her chest, and within the circle of beads lay several gold coins, which glinted in the moonlight. Another coin was caught in the crook of the child’s elbow.

&nb
sp; Solas studied the child’s face, which was composed and natural. Then he saw the child’s eyelids flutter, and he saw that her chest rose and fell with her rapid breathing. The sudden certainty that the girl was alive sent a thrill through him, and it occurred to him that he would be more solidly comfortable if his horse were closer. The necessity for rapid and immediate flight seemed entirely likely. …

  Appleton fell suddenly quiet, and Solas became aware of the chirruping of crickets. There was another sound, too, a low moaning noise that he couldn’t at first identify. Then he knew that it was the sound of weeping, and that it issued from Appleton’s own throat. The man was crying now with his mouth closed and his head bowed, as if he were ashamed of his own emotion. He bent over and kissed the nearly lifeless lips, gave a signal with his hand, and two men set the lid of the casket, quickly driving home screws already started in the four corners of the lid. One of the two men now slipped a rope through a pair of iron rings in the end of the box, and Appleton himself tipped the casket over the side of the well, letting it carefully down into the water by the rope. It sank slowly out of sight, inching downward until it came to rest, the rope going slack. Appleton muttered something, and lifted the box off again, working it farther out into the well until it moved past whatever had obstructed it and descended again. He played out what looked to be ten feet of rope before the casket stopped again and he tied the rope to a stake driven into the ground.