The Rainy Season Read online

  She looked around her for a candle, for anything to carry with her into the open night. Along the far wall sat half a dozen oil lamps, four of which she recognized from her own past. One of them, a cut glass globe with a lilac-tinted shade, had sat in her very own bed room, in the house that had long since been torn down. She’d grown up with it, had filled it with lamp oil herself not a week ago! And yet here it sat in this foreign house, three-quarters of a century removed from that world, like an artifact dug up out of a burial mound. She found a wooden match in a drawer and lit the lamp, wondering if the oil within it was the oil she had poured with her own hand.

  Steeling herself, she opened the door and went outside. She saw her breath hovering in the air, but she didn’t feel cold, and it seemed to her that the sensation of cold and hot hadn’t entirely returned to her yet. Pieces of her memory were gone, too. She wondered how many pieces were gone as she walked through the wet grass, looking anxiously into the lamp lit darkness around her. The rusted knob of the tower door turned easily in her hand, the door swinging quietly open. She glanced behind her at the dark window of the second-story bed-room that she had just left, then stepped inside the tower, § which now was apparently a repository for garden tools. Bags of lime lay piled on a heap of dirty sand, and there were clay pots stacked beside it. Along the far wall lay a scattering of dismantled machinery. The still air smelled of dirty oil, and the windows were obscured by dust. Her feet scuffed loudly on the wooden floorboards. To her immediate right, narrow wooden stairs led steeply upward. With her free hand she lifted the hem of her dress and, looking up into the dim recesses of the tower, she began to climb, holding the lantern out before her.

  18

  OVER THE PAST month, Elizabeth had gone over every inch of the shop, the floor, the walls, the cabinetry, but had found no stash of money in the shop. Appleton had told her that the crystal object was worth more than ‘any ransom to him, and she was willing to take him at his word. That being true, if he thought that a “reward” would satisfy her—by which he meant a couple of hundred dollars—then he was deranged. She didn’t give a damn for the memory of his daughter, or for whatever thing it was that he thought lay within the crystal. She parked around the corner from his house and walked down the dark sidewalk. It was too late for people pie to be outdoors, especially with the weather threatening. She walked boldly up the drive and through the back gate, where she unlocked the door with the key he had given her. Recently he had bought an estate—too many items to take to the shop—and he was store housing it at home. His idea was for Elizabeth to fetch things from it, which is why he had given her the key to his house. He was very trusting, she thought, turning on a lamp, which would look less suspicious to a neighbor than would the moving beam of a flashlight. The blinds were pulled anyway. As she had done in the shop, she searched for places where someone might hide a serious amount of money. She looked into cupboards, shuffled through the pages of stacked newspapers and magazines, uncapped jars and opened cartons.

  There was no phone in the house, no television or radio. He subscribed to Scientific American and to the Reader’s Digest, and from the look of things he never threw outdated issues away. There were cardboard boxes of estate sale junk, but much Of it was subpar, thrift store trash, which was no doubt why it still sat in here in dusty boxes. None of the boxes contained money. In the bedroom she looked into the small refrigerator that he used as a nightstand, and opened the few drawers in the bureau. She was careful not to disturb things, not to do anything to tip him off. His mattress wasn’t stuffed with money, and there was nothing under the bed. She had a wild urge to find a knife and slash the upholstery on the tattered old wingback chair, but she didn’t.

  She cursed under her breath, looking around at the pitiful room. There was simply nothing here—neither money nor a checkbook nor a second set of ledger books nor anything else. The only thing she knew absolutely after looking around the place was that he lived like a miser out of a storybook. So it was reasonable to assume that like all misers he had a sackful of gold somewhere. She gave up and headed for the back door again.

  Ransom. Reward. Money. She muttered the words as she walked through the house. Two of them sounded overly abstract to her. Only money had a smell and a feel and a color to it that she trusted. It would be so easy if she could simply take what she wanted and walk away. He was hardly in a position to follow her. Off the kitchen lay another small bedroom, more of an overgrown pantry. There were more boxes, and she moved them apart and looked into each. Nothing: books, crap. One held canned goods, corned beef hash and beef stew. Shit, the old man was a survivalist! There was a small closet, and she opened it up, seeing more of the same. She took out a cheap suitcase, cardboard and vinyl, and opened it up. A couple of flannel shirts lay inside, and she removed them and laid them on the floor. There was a divider in the center of the suitcase, fixed in place with elastic straps. She slipped them off their hold-downs and folded back the divider.

  Money.

  Here it was, just like that.

  She sat down on top of the shirts and looked through it, thinking hard now. Take it? Why not? Take it and walk away! To hell with him, with the crystal, with Phil Ainsworth. To hell with southern California …

  But she closed the divider, fastening the straps, slid the shirts back in, and shut the suitcase. Appleton would Call the cops. There was no reason he wouldn’t call the cops. She had nothing on him, nothing to threaten him with. If she was certain he had killed someone, or … any damned thing at all. But there was nothing. He was just an eccentric old nut who owned an antiques shop and had entrusted her with a key. They’d put her away in an instant.

  She would bide her time, she told herself as she drove back down toward the shop, empty-handed again. She would play his game, at least for now. Ransom would have to do as long as simple theft was out of the question. But then nothing was out of the question forever.

  APPLETON PICKED UP the long tweezers from his desktop, moving trinkets aside until the tiny saucer lay alone before him. He had a second sense about these objects, and although he sometimes made a mistake, most often he could anticipate whether the memory an object contained was safe to tamper with. Through the jeweler’s loupe he peered at the stain in the porcelain—a tiny human face traced in thin, blue lines. There was something unnaturally organic about the veinlike lines against the pale white of the background. He looked out through the front window at the rainy night, then down again at the saucer. Slowly he shut his hand over it, pressing it into his palm, into his fingers, careful not to bear down too hard and crack it. He closed his eyes, rocking forward in his chair with the jarring sense of disconnectedness that hit him …

  … and abruptly he found himself within a grove of trees on a sunny summer evening. A woman approached along the edge of the trees, following a trail, and he felt a rising passion within him. She wasn’t yet aware of his presence there in the shadows. She hurried along, closing the distance between them, her arms crossed in front of her. …

  Then the world seemed to slip, and for one disorienting moment he seemed to float above himself, aware of the saucer, of its hard edge and slick surface, aware that he was two people and not one. He looked down on the scene as if from a high and windy place, utterly aware that all memory, emotion, and perception were borrowed in this place, and equally aware that he was desperately and illicitly in love with this woman. He grasped the object even more tightly, driving out of his mind any thoughts of himself, allowing himself to become the man who stood within the shadow of the trees, and with that he slipped back into the persona within the trinket, losing himself utterly.

  He had been there waiting for some time for her to arrive, and his rising passion had distilled until it occupied him so completely that he could scarcely breathe. He heard her footsteps, a confusion of footsteps, although the path she walked on was packed dirt He waited, timing her approach, and then, swept away with emotion, he stepped out onto the path and stood before her,
watching the dawning of recognition in her eyes. …

  In that moment he felt the saucer slip from his grasp. The trees and the sky and the woman vanished, the powerful emotions drained away. He lay across the desk, breathing heavily, getting his bearings. He was aware that a person stood there looking down at him, and after a moment, when his head cleared, he looked up. It was Elizabeth, but for a passing moment she had the face of the woman he had just left behind, and the confusion between the two made him reel with dizziness.

  “ARE YOU ALL right?” she asked, holding onto him until he was steady again. “You looked like … like you were in serious trouble.” She grasped his wrist. “Your heart’s racing. Try to calm down.” She set down the tweezers that she’d used to take the saucer away from him. He picked them up, lifted the saucer from where she’d set it, and slipped it into a manila envelope. “I wish you wouldn’t use these,” she said, gesturing at the desktop, using the urgent, frightened voice that she knew would move him.

  “I don’t use them.” His own voice was a croak, and when he tried to smile at her, the corner of his mouth twitched so badly that he turned his face away.

  “You have a duty to your daughter, you know.”

  “Don’t lecture me,” he said tiredly. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head to clear it.

  “I won’t,” she said, placating him, “But you have a duty to me, too. You sent me out in the rain tonight to find the crystal, and I’ll probably catch my death of cold from it. If I’m working hard on your behalf, you have to do your part, too. You know that, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “What frightens me is that you won’t hold up, that you’ll do something foolish, and I’ll be left alone. I don’t have the means to save your daughter, even if I find the crystal. You know that. What is this?” she asked, tapping the manila envelope. “Is it new?”

  “I received it tonight, from my … from my boys.”

  “I’m not comfortable with that at all, Mr. Appleton. What you’re doing is far too important to depend on boys. And you give them far too much money.”

  “How did you fare with our Mr. Ainsworth?” he asked, ignoring her statement.

  “He doesn’t know a thing. He’s innocent. I looked around for trinkets, like you asked. I don’t think he’s hiding anything.”

  “And there was no indication that anything’s happened? No mention of the woman?”

  “Nothing’s happened.”

  “Something must happen, my dear,” he said.

  “Soon.”

  19

  UNTIL NOW, AUSTIN had never struck Phil as being a particularly dreary city. But now, in late winter, on a never-endingly gray and rainy morning, and with the lower deck of 1-35 flooded and traffic stop-and-go halfway back to the Red Lion Hotel, there seemed to him to be gloom everywhere he looked. He put on his blinker, edged through traffic, and exited onto the access road at Seventh, past the police station and the city jail. He turned right on Sixth Street, heading downtown, looking for an older-generation three-story brick office structure with a cafe called “Pecan Street” downstairs. A pedestrian jaywalked in front of him, right out from between two parked cars, and in that moment the first of the two cars pulled out into the street, taking advantage of Phil’s stopping for the jaywalker. Phil saw the Pecan Street sign then, right behind where the car had pulled out, and he cranked the wheel over and slid into the now-empty spot against the curb. There was a small brass sign on the building that read Benner and Girardi.

  The idea that Marianne had a lawyer would have been almost exotic, given her receptionist’s income, except that she had worked for George Benner long enough for the two of them to have become friends, and in the years since that time, Benner had looked out for her interests. Phil was happy for it now—happy to let someone else decide what was what. Marianne’s death had opened a door in his life, which, all else being equal, he never would have opened himself. But nothing was ever equal, Nothing that mattered, and he had fallen into the dead center of something that would change everything, for Betsy even more than for himself. So under the circumstances, a friendly lawyer was a relief.

  He had talked to Mr. Benner over the phone again yesterday, and he liked the man, if only because he seemed honestly concerned with Betsy. He was also anxious to clear up what he had called “entanglements” with Mrs. Darwin, although how Mrs. Darwin was involved beyond being a helpful neighbor Phil couldn’t right now say. Soon he would find out, though, because Mrs. Darwin was due at Benner’s office in half an hour.

  He strode across the sidewalk and in through the street door, out of the downpour in seconds, climbing the stairs to the third floor where he found Mr. Benner’s name on another brass plate next to a wood and glass door. He walked into the office and introduced himself the secretary, who announced him into an intercom phone and motioned to a chair. He hadn’t sat for ten seconds before Mr. Benner’s door opened and the man himself came out, extending a hand. He was tall, heavily built, with white hair that was too thick to stay combed. He might easily have been seventy, although he seemed quick and spry for a man that age and size.

  “My condolences on the death of your sister,” Mr. Benner said to him. “Marianne and I were friends. I’m really very sorry.”

  “Thanks.” Phil shook his hand and followed him into the inner office.

  Mr. Benner started to shut the door, then swung it open again and said to the secretary, “Luanne, when Mrs. Darwin arrives, go ahead and give us a few minutes notice before you show her in.” He shut the door again “Marianne worked for me for about four years,” he said, slumping into his desk chair.

  “She told me about you,” Phil said. “About the job and all. It was obviously one of the happier times in her life.”

  “She had a rough time in the years after Richard was killed and the mess that turned into, which I guess you know, and she finally took some time off work. I hired Luanne to take her place. Marianne seemed to get back on her feet, though, after a couple of years, and I managed to find her a job with Johnson Construction. I thought she was pretty happy with her work there, too.”

  “That’s what I thought. She talked like she was. I guess you never know.”

  “That’s the sad truth,” Mr. Benner said. “I’ve been a lawyer for nearly forty years, and it seems to me that I know a hell of a lot less now than I did back when I started. Nothing stands to reason in this world, Phil, especially human behavior. That’s the one thing I do know.”

  “Tell me something,” Phil said. “Was there any possibility of suicide? I hate to ask that, but I’d like to know everything about this. If I’m going to be of any use to Betsy, I’d better know the truth. And I don’t mean to say that she ought to know. Sometimes kids are a hell of a lot smarter than we think they are, though, and I don’t want her fighting with something that I’m unaware of.”

  “All right. Honestly, I don’t know what Betsy; knows. Marianne died of a stroke, pure and simple; that’s the official line. The only questionable part of it was that she was taking drugs to combat her depression when I talked to her a week or so ago, she said she was taking something called Nardil, which is another category of antidepressant, something called a Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor, an MAOI. Apparently they work wonders for some people, but they’re risky. They used be more popular than they are today, because they’re tried and true, unlike Prozac, say, which doesn’t work for some people, although it’s safer. Lots of doctors won’t prescribe MAO inhibitors.”

  “What’s the risk?”

  “Elevated blood pressure. She shouldn’t have been “taking them, given her medical history.”

  “I didn’t know Marianne had any problems with blood pressure.”

  “Apparently she did. It got in the way of her getting life insurance when I first hired her, which meant it was fairly high and was probably chronic.”

  “So what are you telling me? That she took an overdose of these pills in order to prompt a stroke? Who would t
ry to kill themselves with a stroke, for God’s sake?”

  ‘I don’t know. There’s no evidence that she did any such thing. But a person doesn’t need an overdose of them to get into trouble. They can apparently react with certain foods, and so they have to be very strictly controlled. That’s what makes doctors leery of them.”

  “And her doctor prescribed these things?”

  “Apparently he did not. This was a matter of self-medication. Somebody gave her some bad street-corner advice.”

  “Who gave her the pills?”

  “You can get anything you want nowadays, pretty much. And they’re still prescribed. It’s not like they’re contraband. And even if they were…” Benner shrugged.

  "This isn’t evidence of suicide, then.”

  “Not that I can see. It’s more likely carelessness Anyway, I don’t think Betsy has an opinion on it one way or another. Apparently she spent that night at a girlfriend’s house, and by the time she got home, he mother had already died. Mrs. Darwin had called an ambulance.”

  “Good,” Phil said. “This is complicated enough for Betsy.”

  “How complicated is it?” the lawyer asked after a moment. “Forgive me for being candid right now, but I’ve got to ask you something serious. Are you having second thoughts about Marianne’s will?”

  “No.”

  “You’re aware of what you’re agreeing to, in the long run?”

  “I knew exactly what I was signing.”

  “You’ve read a copy of it?”