The Rainy Season Read online

  He bowed his head as if in prayer, and the rest of the onlookers followed suit. Solas watched their earnest faces, caught the eye of his friend, who nodded at him implacably, as if to affirm that Solas had gotten his money’s worth, which in fact he had not. Very soon he would know that the girl was dead—if Appleton had enough courage to let her drown—but it wasn’t the girl’s death that interested him particularly. As was true of Appleton himself, Solas was interested in the crystalline memory that would live on after her death.

  Moments passed while the crowd stood mute and the ripples died away on the surface of the well, leaving the still reflection of starlight on the black water. The night was silent except for the sound of water overflowing the stones, as if even the crickets were waiting. And then the water was suddenly agitated again, and a pale, white light issued from deep within the well, as if someone had unhooded a lantern beneath the water, and Solas heard Appleton gasp. The glow faded slowly, until there was nothing but the dark, calm water again, and Solas thought briefly of the now-dead girl, the shock and fear of drowning in a cold, enclosed space, and he wondered if even that memory, the drawing near of death itself, would find its way into the crystal, and what Appleton really wanted with such a thing, how he thought he could bring those memories to life once again.

  With any luck, Solas’s two hundred dollars would very soon deprive Appleton of the chance. Of course, Solas would give him the opportunity to buy it back at a slightly elevated price—an opportunity which, given the circumstances of Appleton’s crime, the man could hardly refuse.

  7

  AT THE SHADOW-DARK edge of the trees the two boys stopped and looked into the windy darkness, hesitating before moving any deeper into the grove. Both of the boys were twelve, dressed in dark clothing, including sweatshirts with hoods. The path along Santiago Creek was visible in the moonlight behind them, twisting away down the hill toward the neighborhood where they lived. Overhead, windblown clouds drove across the sky at a frantic pace.

  “You go, but I’m not,” the taller of the two boys said. “I’m waiting here.”

  “The hell you are, Jeremy.”

  “I’m not going over there. I’m not stupid.”

  Nothing grew on the ground in the heavy shade of the trees, and so the floor of the grove was a black plain broken by patches of filtered moonlight that shifted slowly as the heavy limbs moved with the wind. A soft, pervasive rustling filled the air, along with the faint creaking of branches. Water dripped onto dead leaves and root-packed dirt.

  “If I find something, I’m not sharing the money with you, so don’t even ask me to.” Saying this, the boy switched on the flashlight and walked forward alone into the trees.

  Jeremy hesitated for a moment and then came along after him. “Nick, wait up,” he said.

  “You hurry up.”

  “Give me those barbecue tongs, and I’ll come with you.”

  “You don’t even know what we’re looking for. You just have the bag ready. I’ll take care of the tongs.”

  “I do too know what we’re looking for. He said a glass thing.”

  “That isn’t what he said. He said like a glass thing. Small things, like somebody would drop. It might be anything. It might be a bottlecap or a coin.” Nick played the flashlight across the ground, shining it into dark, still places, watching for the telltale glint of light on glass or metal. “And remember what he said about the woman.”

  Jeremy didn’t respond, but looked around them nervously.

  Fifty yards ahead of them, beyond the front edge of the grove, a light shone from the attic of an old three-story farmhouse. They had often seen the house by day, but at night it looked different—bigger, strange with shadows, old. Beyond the house lay Santiago Canyon Road, which ran up into the empty, undeveloped foothills. Fifty feet of lawn separated the old back porch from a high turretlike water tower, and the dark corner of the tower itself loomed in the distance now. Adjacent to the tower stood a rock-walled well. They came to the clearing at the edge of the grove and stood looking at the tower. Its sheer wooden walls had windows in all three stories, and outside the bottom window stood an open lean-to shed. The tower windows glowed with dusty moonlight, and there were the ghosts of ragged curtains behind the glass.

  The stone well, some fifteen feet across, more an enclosed pool than a well, was supposed to be haunted. Two days ago it had been a dry well, but now it was brimming with water. The boys started across the clearing toward it, both of them hunching over to keep out of sight.

  “Remember what he said about how it might glow,” Nick whispered.

  “He said only in the moonlight.”

  “There is moonlight, Jeremy. Look at the sky. And watch for her, too. Footprints, anything.”

  At the edge of the well they sat down, hidden from the house by the rock wall. Nick swept the weedy ground slowly with the flashlight. “This is where we’ll find it,” he said. “Somewhere around here. Look for anything, especially metal or glass.”

  “How can it glow?”

  “Never mind. Just look for something.”

  The rocks at the base of the well felt damp when Nick laid his hand against them, and there was water seeping out along the perimeter of the well. Clumps of broad-leafed clover and tendrils of new vines grew out of the damp ground, pushing up urgently around the mossy stones. Nick stood up enough to see over the wall. The reflected shadow of his own face stared back out at him from a glassy field of water and stars. The ivory moon and a bank of gray-black clouds floated on the dark surface.

  Right then he felt the tongs sliding out of his back pocket. He slapped his hand against his pants and spun around, but Jeremy already had them and was moving farther away. Jeremy clanked the tongs shut over his head, making a face at him, and then slid them into his own back pocket. Nick shrugged. To heck with the tongs. Jeremy bent over peering at the moonlit ground.

  Nick turned back to the well, twisting the tip of his flashlight to narrow the beam, which illuminated a few inches of water at the surface. He moved the light along the rocks right at the waterline, and almost at once, directly opposite where he stood, the light glinted for a moment on something, just a pinpoint of light winking on and then off again.

  A coin? He tried to find it again with the light, but right then Jeremy made a noise, as if he had found something himself, and Nick turned around sharply and shined the light in his direction. “What?” Nick asked.

  “Look.” Jeremy pointed at something on the ground, a faint glow, like a firefly in the weeds. Clouds covered the moon just then, and the glow vanished. It started to rain—just the first few windblown drops—and in that moment there was the sound of a metallic clank from somewhere behind Nick. He ducked behind the edge of the well and swept the beam of the flashlight toward the corner of the tower, where he thought he saw the form of someone standing, half-hidden, nothing more than the shadowy outline of a shoulder and part of a face that had disappeared when the light had moved past.

  Nick glanced uncertainly back at Jeremy, who was bent over at the waist, reaching for whatever it was that lay glinting there in the moonlight, the tongs still shoved into his back pocket. “Wait!” Nick said, starting forward, trying to stop him from picking the thing up with his hand, whatever it was. He was too late: Jeremy picked the thing up and held it in his open palm. It was round and flat, like a tiny plate, a saucer for a doll’s tea set. He remained bent over as if he had frozen there. Nick glanced again at the edge of the tower, but there was no one there. It was time to go. …

  There was the sound of a low moan now—a human voice, but not Jeremy’s, and not coming from the direction of the tower, either. Nick backed up against the rock wall of the well, shining the light at his friend’s face, which was stretched and contorted into a visage that only faintly resembled Jeremy’s natural face.

  “I. … don’t. … want. … ,” the voice uttered—not Jeremy’s voice at all, but it was coming from Jeremy’s mouth. At first Nick thought he meant
the thing in his hand. But he seemed to be oblivious to the pale saucer, which he held in his fingers like a playing card now; he seemed instead to be looking at something in front of him, something that he recognized with a terrible dismay, that he had a fear of. But there was nothing there, no shadowy stranger, nothing but the night and the tower standing alone in the weeds. Nick stepped forward, stretching out his hand to take the tongs out of Jeremy’s pocket. He had to get the object away from him, whatever it was, take it out of his hand without touching it himself.

  Jeremy screamed then. He looked Nick in the face, a blank look, his eyes unfocused, seeing something that wasn’t there, a ghost, something in the wind. Without another thought Nick threw himself forward, ducking his shoulder, slamming into his friend just above the waist and knocking him sideways, the tongs spinning away, the saucer falling into the sandy dirt.

  Peralta Hills

  1884

  8

  “THEY MURDERED THE girl. They drowned her. Alejandro seemed to be amused by it when he described it to me.”

  Colin O’Brian finished the coffee that Jeanette had poured into his porcelain teacup, and he sat for a moment looking blankly at the grounds in the bottom of the cup. His life so far had been spent being tempted toward monastic life while actually becoming a schoolteacher and falling in love with Jeanette. Murder and dark magic were utterly foreign to him and, he would have thought, foreign to the quiet ruralism of Orange County. “He was trying to irritate you,” Colin told her finally. “That’s what he finds amusing.” He had only known Alejandro for six months. The man’s superficial charm had worn thin after about three of those months. Still, he was surprised at what Jeanette was telling him.

  She got up and went to the stove, taking up the coffeepot and pouring Colin and her friend May another cup. “He pretends to find everything amusing, but I don’t believe that the man has ever been honestly amused.”

  “Perhaps Alejandro was making all this up,” Colin said hopefully. “What do you think, May? It would be typical of him to try to impress either of you with a lie.”

  Colin regarded May’s face in the lamplight. She was three years older than Jeanette, more experienced, already slightly careworn, although she was only in her mid-twenties. “I wish he were lying, because there was a time when I considered him a friend.”

  “Before you knew him,” Jeanette said. “Before any of us actually knew him.”

  May nodded. “I’m certain he’s telling the truth. The mere fact that he lies doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do other despicable things. It makes it even more likely that he does. I believe now that the man is capable of anything. His charm is a veneer, Colin. Very thin.”

  Colin found himself abruptly thinking that if he weren’t already in love with Jeanette, he could easily be in love with May. There were things in May’s past that she didn’t talk about, nor did Jeanette betray her friend by revealing those things to Colin, but in some regard that mystery simply made May even more appealing.

  She noticed that he was looking at her now, and he looked away. A moment later, when he glanced at her again, she was looking down at her hands. He purposely stopped his mind from running and paid attention to Jeanette, who said, “Colin, I believe what he said about the crystal object. I saw it. I can’t explain it very well, but it had … ghosts. There was something of that little girl in the crystal. That much is certainly no lie. I don’t think he’s lying about any of it.” Jeanette’s cheek was shaded with a faint bruise where Alejandro had struck her. The idea of it made him furious, more furious than Alejandro’s being mixed up in an alleged murder. Jeanette had struck Alejandro back with a fireplace shovel. The blow to Alejandro’s pride would eat him alive, which would make him dangerous. What Colin would do about it, what he would do about any of this, was uncertain, but he would have to act quickly, before Alejandro was driven to some craven act of revenge.

  “What do you mean, ghosts?” he asked. Part of him, he realized, waited with an unhealthy fascination for her answer, and he pushed his curiosity back down into the darkness.

  “I could see something. At first like moving shadows, and then something more—a picture on the air. I could hear things, the neighing of a horse, a girl’s laughter.

  “And it was from the girl’s memory, you think?”

  “Only because there’s no reason to think anything else. He wouldn’t lie about that, would he? I had a sense at first of being in an open space. I could smell sage, wet vegetation. Then there was sunlight, moving grass. I even saw beehives. It was on a meadow. Then Alex put it away. It was absolutely haunting—frightening.”

  Rain drummed on the roof now, and Colin glanced at the window and the darkness beyond, thinking about the weather. His coat and outer shirt were drying in front of the fire. The road outside was a muddy torrent. His horse was stabled in the barn, which is where he had planned to sleep tonight.

  “We believe that he intends to sell it back to Hale Appleton,” May said. “He’s talked about little else but Appleton’s money for a month now.”

  “I wonder if he won’t simply keep it,” Colin said. “Owning it would give him a certain esteem, wouldn’t it?” He wondered if he himself would sell it. Almost any man would have ambivalent feelings about giving up such an apparently magical object, money or no money. There was something enormously attractive about the idea of losing oneself in the memory of a child. He recalled places in his own memories of childhood where he might easily reside, perhaps forever. …

  “It would quite likely get him shot,” Jeanette said.

  “What?” Colin asked. “I’m sorry … what would get him shot?”

  “Keeping the crystal,” May said. “Appleton will take a dangerously narrow view of this.”

  Colin looked into the; fire, which had flared up. He could hear the wind outside, blowing through the eaves of the cabin. “Why would Alejandro care about Appleton’s money?” he asked. “His family owns thirty thousand acres.”

  “Perhaps because he’s dependent on his father,” May said. “He’s a layabout, and everyone’s aware of that. It rankles him. And there’s very little risk, you see, of ransoming the crystal. If Appleton drowned his own daughter in order to save her, as Alejandro put it, then Appleton could hardly charge Alejandro with a crime. He wouldn’t go to the sheriff. And I don’t believe he would harm Alejandro in order to retrieve it, because that would be the end of him unless he fled. The Solas family is too powerful. Alejandro understands all of this. He knows Appleton will simply pay the ransom if it’s within his power to pay it.”

  “You should have heard him talking,” Jeanette said. “He knows everything about Appleton—how much he’s worth, to the penny. He’s unbelievably smug and confident about it all, even though there’s already been a man murdered because of the theft. Alejandro had an associate inside the Societas. Surely you read about the murder?”

  “The dead man in the river?” Colin asked. A man’s body had been pulled from the Santa Ana River near Placentia not even two days ago. He had been shot twice. The newspaper had said that his identity was unknown. “Appleton murdered him for helping Alejandro?”

  “So Alejandro told me. He was very bold with the details. He had paid the man some small sum to steal the crystal, and shortly after that the man was murdered. Alejandro seemed to consider the man’s death simply a loose end tied up.”

  At least a dozen oil lamps were lit around the room, and the effect of the lamplight and firelight and coffee was cheerful and sustaining, entirely at odds with what Jeanette had told him about the drowning of the child, about Alejandro’s stealing the crystal object that supposedly contained the girl’s cast-off memory, about the murdered man in the river …

  “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Alejandro himself shot the man,” May said after a moment. She looked seriously at Colin. Her suggestion was dangerously likely. Alejandro was no doubt capable of the basest sort of betrayal, including murdering his associate.

  “Descr
ibe the object to me,” he said to Jeanette.

  “It’s a bit of bluish crystal, like misty glass, shaped vaguely like a crouching dog. That’s what it immediately suggested to me, although I can’t quite say why. It was rather like a shape you see in the clouds and that sets off your imagination. But I still have the distinct notion that it had that shape, if I make myself clear.”

  “How large?”

  “You might hold it easily in the palm of your hand. The length of a pair of spectacles, I’d say. The thickness of a book of middling length. He was quite cavalier with it, swinging it on its drawstring as if it were a bag of rocks. He suggested that the crystal actually contained the girl’s soul along with her memory. The girl had apparently been baptized in the church.”

  “I thought that Appleton was some variety of spiritualist,” Colin said uneasily.

  “He’s apparently a lapsed Catholic,” Jeanette said. “Alejandro found that amusing, too. What he said was that he might not sell the crystal back to Appleton at all, that he might sell it to people who would put it to uses that would horrify Appleton no matter how thoroughly he had lapsed. That’s when I lost my temper. I told him what I thought of him, how insulted I was that he thought so little of me that he’d suppose this kind of evil filth would amuse me, too. He struck me in the face without giving it a thought, as if it were the most natural reaction in the world.”

  Colin shook his head but remained silent. The enormity of the crime confounded him, and he was ashamed of his own curiosity for the crystal, although at the same time these added dimensions made the object itself all that much more fascinating. Who was to say that the girl’s soul wasn’t contained within the crystal? Evidently some living part of her had been preserved. He stood up and stepped across to the fire, where he stood for a moment to dry out. He had changed his decision to sleep in the barn. He had to do something, and whatever it was wouldn’t wait for clear weather, not in a rainy season like this one. But what would he do?