The Rainy Season

by James P. Blaylock

  “I’ll walk you out,” he said as she opened the door.

  “I can manage. You see what’s up with the niece. Here.” She handed him a business card, turned over. The letters AAFF were hand-written in red ink. “Always available for fun,” she said, and walked away up the driveway toward her car. The phone rang again, but he decided that he wouldn’t answer it.

  He stood there until she had driven away before closing and locking the door and turning toward the kitchen again, the phone still ringing. He couldn’t bear to let a phone ring. He saw Betsy then. She was standing on the side porch in the dark, watching the driveway through the window. There was silence on the phone again, and he hung up immediately. He walked out onto the porch again and switched on the lamp.

  “I think she’s gone,” Betsy said. He could see the tail lights of Elizabeth’s car swing around onto the road and disappear. “Are you in love with her?” she asked.

  “No,” Phil said. “What kind of talk is that?”

  “I think she’s hot for you.”

  “Hot for me? You didn’t talk that way around Mrs. Darwin, I hope.”

  She looked away, back out the window again, into the darkness, as if the mention of Mrs. Darwin’s name had killed her enthusiasm.

  “Sorry about that,” Phil said, although he wasn’t entirely sure why he should be. There was apparently “unresolved stuff” between Betsy and Mrs. Darwin that he couldn’t begin to understand. “So what’s the deal? What have you got to tell me? I’m sorry I ditched you tonight. I didn’t know she was going to drop by. Do you want to play a game of cards or something? Monopoly? It’s late to start Monopoly, I guess.”

  “There’s a woman in the garage, and there’s a priest, too.” She stood looking at him seriously, apparently having delivered her message.

  “In the garage?” He waited for her to say something more, since what she was telling him was obviously nuts. “Is it the famous madwoman?” he asked.

  “Probably,” she said. “I guess it is.”

  “You’re not kidding?” he asked. “There’s really a woman in the garage?”

  “And the priest, too. The priest said I had to get rid of Elizabeth.” She opened the door then and walked out onto the wooden steps. He flipped on the outside lamp and followed her.

  The woman in the garage sat alone on one of his beach chairs. There was no priest to be seen. Given the madwoman’s sudden appearance, though, a priest was easy to believe in.

  He heard the sound of shoes scuffing on the drive outside, and he went back out the door to catch up with the alleged priest, whoever he was. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Betsy. “Wait here.” He hurried around to the front of the garage, to where his car was parked, but by the time he arrived there was no sign of any priest, nor was there anyone on the street. He might easily be hidden, of course—in among the roadside trees, in the brush on the hill on the opposite side of the street. The moon was high, and it was light enough to see all the way to the curve in the road at the top of the hill. It wouldn’t take a minute to run up there to see whether there was a car parked on the turnout.

  But he couldn’t leave Betsy alone. He turned back, hurrying again, going around to the back of the garage and through that door. He recalled the intruders in the grove now, on the night that Elizabeth had run out of gas—the man he had seen in among the shadows of the eucalyptus trees down the creek. Had that been the priest … ?

  Inside the garage, Betsy stood by the woman’s chair. The woman herself was perfectly still, sitting frozen, looking at her hands. Phil saw now that her hair was wet. Her clothes were wet, too—soaking, and water had pooled around her feet. The garage was cold, and the woman was pale, shivering.

  “She was in the well,” Betsy said. “That’s why she’s wet.

  “She fell in the well?”

  “You know the priest who was here? He told me she came out of it, from somewhere else.”

  He nodded. “From somewhere else.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Actually,” he said, “I think I know who this is.” He whispered. There was no point in saying something out loud that might insult the woman who had found her way into his garage. “Elizabeth told me about her a few days ago. I think we’ll have to call somebody.” This certainly looked like a madwoman—the way she was dressed, the shoes. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  She looked at him for a moment. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “My name’s Phil, Phil Ainsworth.”

  “Where is this place?”

  “This is my house—my garage, actually.”

  “No, I mean where is it.”

  “Technically it’s in the city of Orange, but it’s close to a place called El Modena. Is that what you mean? What city is it?”

  “Orange? What else? Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “Well … I don’t know. It’s off Santiago Canyon Road …”

  “Santiago Canyon?”

  “Yes. Santiago Creek runs right above us. Right there.” He pointed toward the door and toward the grove and the arroyo beyond.

  She looked around her now, as if she was starting to get her bearings, and she crossed her arms and hugged herself, shivering. If, as Elizabeth had guessed, she’d been living back in the arroyo, back in the jungle, then she’d likely know the name of the creek, no matter how disturbed she was. She looked up at him now, and he was struck by her beauty. He had always been certain that he could see madness in a person’s eyes, but he couldn’t see any in hers. Confusion, perhaps. Wariness. Fear.

  He heard the phone ring inside the house.

  “There’s a bell … ,” she said.

  “Inside the house. It’s just the telephone. We’ll let the answering machine pick it up.”

  She stared at him. “There are two people,” she said then. “I think … I think they might be around here. I think that if I’m here, they must … they might be here, too.”

  “You see anybody else?” Phil asked Betsy.

  “No. I saw her after she got out of the well. I thought she was like—drowned, maybe. I went to help her, and then the priest came out.”

  “Their names are Colin O’Brian and May Leslie,” the woman said carefully.

  Phil stood in silence for a moment. “Maybelle Leslie?” he asked.

  “Maybelle Ainsworth Leslie,” she said, staring hard straight ahead now and looking frightened, as if she was less sure of herself every second.

  “That was my mother,” Phil said, barely able to get the words out. After a moment the woman began to cry, her chest heaving with the sobs. Betsy stepped back, suddenly frightened, and Phil put his arm around Betsy’s shoulders. “Tell me again what the priest told you,” he said.

  28

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS the middle of the night, Mr. Appleton was waiting on a customer when Elizabeth came in, and immediately she knew what kind of a customer it was. He was a small man, weasly-looking, furtive, probably deranged. Appleton had a half-dozen trinkets out on the counter, lying atop a velvet pad behind a tilted glass barrier. He didn’t want his customers snatching at the goods and getting goofy there in the shop.

  When he saw her, Appleton hastened to put the items away. There was money on the counter—Elizabeth couldn’t see how much—and Appleton slid the money away along with the leftover trinkets, hastily enough so that it was clear he didn’t want her to know anything about the transaction. The man at the counter turned and walked past her out of the store, looking at her with such undisguised lust that it shocked her.

  She wondered what sort of thing it was that Appleton had sold him, what kind of person, male or female, had cast away that particular scrap of memory as a result of traveling through the well. She hated his trinket customers, although fortunately they were rare, perhaps one or two every year or so. She supposed that he sold the trinkets that he had tired of, since he protected his little collection of them so fiercely.

  “How did you fare?” Appleton asked her, h
aving put the money and trinkets away in the desk.

  “Not too well,” she said. “Phil’s got a houseguest, his niece, from Austin.”

  “Does he?” Appleton said, cocking his head. He stood looking at her for a moment, as if this news had sidelined him. “How old?”

  “I guess eight or nine,” she said. The question struck her as creepy. There was an eager look on his face that appalled her, and once again it occurred to her that perhaps she didn’t really know Hale Appleton at all, what he was capable of. “Why do you ask?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment, but stood staring out at the front window. “No reason,” he said finally. And then he said, in a theatrically sincere voice that immediately put her on edge, “Are you happy, Elizabeth?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I be happy?” She smiled at him.

  “You’ve been very loyal, working here with me. I’d like to give you a little something.”

  “You know you don’t have to pay me for my loyalty,” she said, wondering what he had in mind.

  “I want you to take this.”

  He handed her a wad of money, which, it occurred to her, must be the money that he’d just taken from the man who’d bought the trinket.

  “You don’t have to give me this, Mr. Appleton,” she said, although she held onto the money. “You’ve done more for me than you can know.” She wanted to count it, but of course she couldn’t. “Here.” She put out her hand now, as if to give the money back to him, but already he was turning away. He picked up the glass panel from the countertop and stepped into the office with it. She looked at the money hastily, spotting the fifty on top, seeing that there was another beneath it! “Honestly,” she said. “I can’t take this.”

  “Can you befriend the girl?”

  Here was another abrupt shift, cutting off any more reference to the money. She slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. “I guess so. Why? What should I do, just … make friends?”

  Rain was falling again, and the nighttime sidewalks were dark and empty. It seemed to her that Appleton was anxious tonight, as if he knew something more than he was saying, as if he knew something was coming to pass.

  “Just make friends with her. That’s enough.”

  Enough for what? she wondered. “Phil tells me that she plays softball. I used to play a little Softball myself. I can talk softball with her.”

  “Perfect,” he said. “Would he trust you with her? Could you gain custody of the girl?”

  “Custody?”

  “For an afternoon, say? For a friendly game of ball, a movie.”

  “Without Phil coming along? That’s a good question. I’m not on a sure enough footing for that yet.”

  “Perhaps you could find the footing.”

  She thought about the money in her pocket, what it suggested. It wasn’t merely a gift.

  “All right,” she said. “If he’ll let me in. He’s very solitary. I think he’s had a bad experience with someone, you know. He’s not quick to start up a relationship.”

  “Unfortunately we don’t have time to be subtle, Elizabeth.”

  Here was another stunner. Was he asking her to be a whore? Why? In order to get at the little girl? Appleton had suddenly gotten pushy.

  “I want you to know something, Elizabeth. It’s important that you and I are utterly truthful. I … It was necessary for me to kill a man once, many years ago. It was most unfortunate. I’ve told you the story about the man who stole the crystal and asked me for money. That was before … before the traveling.”

  She nodded.

  “I would have paid him, happily. Money is quite frankly the last of my concerns. He wanted a good deal, but it was nothing for me.”

  Good, she thought.

  “He lacked a certain subtlety, though. He was a vain man, and he talked too much, and before he was successful in extorting the ransom money from me, he lost the crystal himself. Years later, after the traveling, as I said, I discovered that he, too, was still looking for the crystal. That’s when I was compelled to kill him. I don’t offer any apologies, but I will say that he was in the act of threatening someone, that my action might easily have prevented a murder.”

  “Then you can feel good about yourself,” Elizabeth told him.

  He stared at her.

  “I mean that you can’t blame yourself. You were justified in doing what you did.”

  “I needed no justification then, and I desire none now. My sole desire is to recover my daughter, to restore her. That will justify nearly anything, Elizabeth. See what you can do with the girl, will you? What’s the child’s name, by the way?”

  “Betsy,” Elizabeth said.

  “Betsy.” He turned away, sitting down at the desk and ignoring her now. She heard him mutter the name under his breath, and she tried to think of something more to say, something to keep him talking. She had realized in the last few minutes that she had no idea at all what he wanted, what he was really up to.

  The cagey bastard, she thought—the money, the implied threat in his telling her about his killing a man. His use of the word “restore” struck her suddenly as strange, but she could hardly ask him what he meant. She had underestimated him all along, and it seemed to her now as if he were entirely capable of selling her out. With his daughter “restored” his pseudo-fatherly interest in her would be gone.

  “I showed Phil the advertisement, by the way. He didn’t react to it at all. Like I said, I don’t think he knows anything about any of this. But what if … what if he had the crystal? I mean, what would we do?”

  “Why, we’d pay the man.”

  She nodded.

  “The sum is an indication of my seriousness, you might say. The stakes are very high, my dear.”

  His voice had taken on a flat tone, as if he were telling her something that was absolutely obvious, or as if there were some absolutely obvious implication to his words. She chanced one more question. “So we can pay him?”

  “Cash on the barrelhead, if it comes to that. But don’t worry about that aspect of things, Elizabeth. Just see what you can do about the girl.”

  She nodded. She wasn’t going to get anything out of him except a show of temper if she kept up with the questions.

  Then, abruptly, she wondered why Phil had gotten rid of her tonight. She cursed herself for being a fool. Something was going on. She had been in the thick of it and had driven away. For a moment she considered saying something to Appleton, but to hell with Appleton. She would pick and choose what she told Appleton. He was certainly doing the same to her.

  “Well, I’m done in,” she said, heading for the door. “I’ll head back out there in the morning.”

  “Will you lock up on your way out?”

  “My pleasure.”

  She turned the key in the lock, leaving the old man at his desk, and hurried through the rain to her car. Everyone was lying to her. Phil had lied to get her out of the house. Appleton was lying to her every time he opened his mouth. She drove back up Chapman Avenue into the foothills, and when she got up into Santiago Canyon she slowed down, drifting nearly to a stop in front of Phil’s driveway. The house lights were off, only a single lit window in the attic. Phil had gone to bed. Rain thudded down on the car now, eradicating any desire in her to have one last snoop around. She had missed her chance.

  29

  BETSY LOOKED AT her wristwatch. It always made her happier to look at her wristwatch, because there was a picture of Pooh and Piglet on the face of it, walking hand in hand. Piglet was her favorite of the two of them, because he was small and because baby pigs were her favorite animals, but Pooh and Piglet together were best, because they were such friends. She hadn’t changed the time on her watch. It was one o’clock Austin time, which was two hours wrong. For a moment she wondered if she wanted to change the time at all.

  She turned the hands of the watch to eleven o’clock, straight up, and then popped the little button back in with a reassuring snap. Then she found her Pooh p
ajamas in her small suitcase and put them on, singing to herself the blustery day song from the Disney film.

  From the window she could see beneath the canopy of the pepper tree. Moonlight no longer shone on the windowsill, and it was raining now, but the lawn and the well and tower were visible in the glow of the back porch lamp, which had been left on. Her book bag still lay on the lawn where she had dropped it, and it was getting wet. She hadn’t wanted to go back after it because Uncle Phil might notice, and might start thinking about the tree and the balcony and what the bag was doing out there in the first place. Still, for that same reason she would have to get it before he went outside in the morning, before he went outside and found it there.

  She bent over a little bit in order to see down into the foliage of the tree. She could just make out the curved shadow of the hollow in the trunk, and although the inkwell box itself was invisible in the darkness, the sight of its hidey-hole made her instantly more comfortable. The box wouldn’t be out of her sight, not entirely, not as long as she was in the room, and it would only take about a minute to go out after it if she needed it.

  Then, as she was watching, something moved in the darkness below, and she stepped to the edge of the window in order to be out of sight. It was a man, moving along the wall of the old well … the priest. It had to be him, the way he was dressed. He was stooped over, searching the ground, although he didn’t have a flashlight. Betsy thought she knew why, and she watched in anticipation to see if he would find what he was looking for. He stopped a few feet from the edge of the well and bent over to pick something up, and she waited, holding her breath, for him to react to it. But then she saw that he was wearing a glove on his hand.

  She let out her breath in a rush, wondering what it was, exactly, that he had found, what kind of memory trinket had lain there in the weeds. Surely it had belonged to the woman from the well! The priest had known that she would lose one, and had come back looking for it when the house was dark.

  She realized that he was gone, around the back of the tower, probably, to keep hidden. She looked at the mason jar on the sill of the adjacent window. Without the help of the moonlight, its glow was utterly gone, and the things inside, even in the light of the bedside lamp, appeared to be old and deteriorated now, as if they had been lost a century past, and had lain buried in dirt. The knife was dark with rust, its handle bent, and the thimble was deformed, its painted roller-coaster a blur like smeared blood. The red glass of the hat pin might have been dull red stone.