The Rainy Season

by James P. Blaylock

  Betsy nodded.

  “Your Uncle Phil is a young man, Betsy. That’s something you’ll come to understand. And young men have … interests, I guess I would say. He and I talked about that this morning. He’s a little worried about taking care of you. He doesn’t feel … adequate. I guess I can tell you that, because you’re old enough to cope with it, and because your mother wanted what’s best for you. That’s why she wrote this. What I’m trying to say is that Phil and I came to a kind of agreement about the will, and about his needing his space. We agreed to do something called shared custody. Do you know what that means?”

  “My best friend had that,” Betsy said.

  “Well good for her, because that’s the best way for a child to have a mother and a father both. I’m so happy you understand, because you and I will be spending some time together starting right now. I didn’t drive all the way out to California just to take you shopping, you know. I’ve got some of your clothes from home, and of course the things we bought today. We’ll be staying at my hotel tonight, and your Uncle Phil will join us in the morning. I promised him that I’d watch over you while you got used to the whole idea of it. He was busy tomorrow morning, but he’s going to try to squeeze us in. We’ll make all our plans then. We have so much to discuss, Betsy, that I can hardly tell you. I think this is simply wonderful.” She shook her head sincerely, watching Betsy’s face, which hadn’t really changed expression.

  “Why did you tell Uncle Phil that I stole the inkwell?” Betsy asked suddenly.

  The question took Mrs. Darwin by surprise, especially the cheeky tone of it. She mastered her anger, though. “I never said you’d stolen it,” she said. “Is that what he told you?”

  “You told him it was your inkwell, and that maybe I had it.”

  “Honestly, child, I thought you might have it. Do you have it?”

  Betsy shook her head.

  “Well …” Mrs. Darwin sighed heavily. “Do you know what I think? I think we got off on the wrong foot with this. I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to tell me the honest-to-goodness truth. We both know that the inkwell belonged to your mother. I know that because she showed it to me once. She let me hold it, Betsy. And what she told me, was that if anything ever happened to her, and I became your adopted mother, I was to take care of it for you. It’s much too … much too dangerous for a child to possess. When I was organizing your mother’s things, I searched for it, and it wasn’t where it had been. Something else had been put into her drawer to replace it, as if someone was trying to play a trick.” She waited for a moment to let this sink in. “Did you take it?” she asked. “You can tell me, child. I’m not an ogre. This … this inkwell is what’s causing the trouble between us, isn’t it? We’ve got to get it out in the open now. We’ve got to make things plain if we’re going to be a family again. So you can tell me, was it you who took it from your mother’s drawer?”

  “Yes,” Betsy pulled her milk-shake glass out of the way so that the waiter could set down the lunch plates.

  “Well! That clears the air. I’m sorry if Phil mistakenly thought that I said it belonged to me. If I had known he would tell you that, I would have asked you myself. This whole thing has been a grand mistake. You brought it along with you from Austin, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good! Now I know it’s safe! I’ve been so worried. Aren’t these delicious hamburgers? Ketchup?”

  “Uh-huh.” Betsy dumped ketchup onto her fries and then sprinkled them with salt and pepper.

  “Well,” Mrs. Darwin said. “What a beautiful day! And so the inkwell is safe at Phil’s house?”

  “No.”

  “You have it with you? You don’t carry it around, do you? You’ll lose it that way.”

  “Usually in my book bag.”

  Mrs. Darwin glanced at the book bag, which lay on the seat next to Betsy. The three stuffed animals were crammed into it, with their heads sticking out. “You have it with your friends in the bag?”

  “I don’t have it now. I think someone stole it.”

  “Who stole it? Betsy, let’s not start this up again. …”

  “No, it’s true. Someone took it.”

  “Do you know who it was? If you do, tell me, and we’ll get it straight back. Who was it?”

  “That lady. Elizabeth.” Betsy pointed across the street, at the antiques shop again. A woman stood in the doorway now, watching the traffic circle the plaza.

  “Why on earth would this Elizabeth woman have stolen our inkwell?”

  “She wanted it, I guess.”

  Mrs. Darwin looked across the street again. The woman in the doorway turned and walked back in, and with a shock of recognition, Mrs. Darwin knew who she was—the chippie whom Phil had been talking to outside his house yesterday afternoon. That damned Phil Ainsworth! She should have known that he’d be up to some kind of monkey business. He wasn’t satisfied to take Betsy. He wasn’t satisfied to take Betsy’s money. He had to take Betsy’s possessions too, him and his lowlife women. What the hell was his game here? She was damned well going to find out.

  “Finish your lunch,” Mrs. Darwin said to Betsy. “We’re going antique shopping.”

  47

  IT WAS WELL past noon and Appleton hadn't yet arrived at the store. Elizabeth had opened up at ten, the regular time, and had spent nearly three hours fretting, going out onto the sidewalk, watching for his arrival. They’d had exactly two customers all morning. The bones and crystal lay in an old leather satchel, which now sat on the office floor.

  Yesterday evening, by the time she had gotten to the plaza, the shop had been closed up tight. She had driven past his house, past the local eateries, waited outside the store for an hour, but he hadn’t returned. Finally she had gone back out to Phil’s and had another look around, half-expecting to find the old man himself out there. She had managed to confirm a few suspicions, including getting a look at Phil’s houseguest, who was very pretty, about her own age. She had climbed her first tree, too, and found a hidden treasure, and had managed to rip the hell out of her blouse in the process. Appleton could buy her a new one. Ten new ones.

  She leaned on the counter, making up her mind what to do if he simply never came back. But then he appeared at the door, nodded at her as he made his way into the office. “What news?” he asked. But he didn’t wait for an answer. He sat down at the desk and opened the drawer, taking out his box of trinkets. Irritated, she stepped across and locked the shop door. She wanted a piece of his time—no interruptions. She went into the office and picked up the satchel, which he looked at over the top of his glasses, a gesture that she loathed.

  “I found this,” she said, angling the open satchel toward him, watching for a reaction. Inside the suitcase the bones lay in a heap, the beads scattered among them. The crystal lay among the bones, glowing faintly like a cloud-veiled moon. He stared at it for a moment and then went back to his trinkets, shaking his head slightly, as if he were disappointed in her somehow. “Is that all?” he asked.

  “All? Yes,” she said. “That’s all. Isn’t that enough for one right now? I would have thought you’d find this interesting.” She fought to keep her voice level, to sound vaguely hurt instead of annoyed.

  There was the sound of rattling from the desktop now, and she saw that the trinkets on top were agitated as if by an earthquake. All of them were illuminated as if a light shown through them, and there was a faint aura now around the open mouth of the satchel. The rest of the items on the desk—the jeweler’s loupe, the tweezers, a coffee mug—lay still. Again she felt a pressure in her ears and heard the low rush of seashell sound. Appleton reached across and shut the satchel with both hands. The trinkets lay still again, the light having gone out of them.

  “What do you think?” she said. “Honestly.”

  “What do I think about what?” he asked her calmly.

  “Well … You saw the crystal.”

  “The crystal is quite valueless to me. I assum
e it was with the exhumed bones. I really wish you hadn’t taken it, Elizabeth. The bones, any of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, my dear, I wanted to be subtle. This kind of senseless theft puts everyone at risk. And why on earth would you want such a thing as this?”

  “Why would I want it? I thought we could offer it for sale,” she said. “I’m happy to take a percentage.” She held her hands out in a gesture of resignation.

  “A percentage of what?”

  “You sold that trinket for over a thousand dollars,” she said, trying hard to keep any show of anger out of her voice.

  “My usual customers would hardly be interested in this. You might try inquiring at Capistrano, at the mission. There was a time when the church offered a bounty on these objects, although I don’t believe they’ve done any business along those lines for a number of years. It’s been such a long time since any have turned up. He began clearing the top of the desk, laying the trinkets and instruments into a lidless cigar box, which he set on the floor.

  “You really don’t understand, do you? You’ve never quite grasped what it is I want.”

  “Are you the only one that’s allowed to want something? I don’t mean to sound greedy, and I understand that you’re interested in your daughter and all, but I’ve got myself to think about.”

  “Of course,” he said after a moment. “You’ve got yourself to think about. Here, let’s take a look at your crystal.” He smiled at her now in a fatherly way. He opened the suitcase again and reached inside, picking the crystal up bare-handed and holding it in his palm. She waited for him to react, but he still simply smiled, hefting the crystal once and then laying it on the desktop. He bent over and picked up the doorstop that lay beside the office door, a cast-iron hedgehog the size of a grapefruit. Before she could react, he raised the heavy weight and brought it down on the crystal, smashing it into fragments. The glow went out of it, and the pieces of crystal lay there inert, like dull green pieces of old bottle glass. “There,” he said. “Now it’s a dead issue.” He laughed at his own joke.

  She stood staring at him, working to control herself.

  “You’ve gotten very anxious,” he said. “What you want will come to you in the fullness of time. We all have to make our own way. I’m not in the least interested in any other crystal, no matter whose memory it contains. My trinket customers aren’t either. They would have no notion of how to access the memory even if they possessed the crystal. Evidently you believe that I’m trying to cheat you, Elizabeth, which is painful to me. But I’ll tell you that it’s even more painful to think that you’ve become rapacious about money. Are you in debt? In particular need?”

  “No. I only thought that—”

  “Please let me do the thinking, then.”

  There was the sudden sound of someone at the door, rattling the door in its frame, trying to get in. It was apparently a customer, a short, heavyset woman and a little girl. The woman stepped back and focused on the store hours, which were printed on the door. Elizabeth abruptly recognized the little girl. “Hell,” she said.

  “You know them?” Appleton asked.

  “It’s the girl,” she said. “Phil’s niece.”

  “Why on earth … !” Appleton looked at her in astonishment.

  The woman banged on the door again, and now she shouted something through the mail slot.

  “Leave this to me,” he said. “Entirely to me. Out the back with you!”

  She did as she was told, leaving the satchel of bones and going out the back door of the office, into the hallway that ran out to the rear courtyard. She stopped to listen before opening the back door. Faintly she heard voices. He had let them into the shop.

  She opened the door, and then, remaining inside, banged it shut again. Quietly she tiptoed back down the dark hallway.

  48

  MISSION SAN JUAN Capistrano lay a mile off the freeway, ten minutes out of their way, what with afternoon traffic and finding a place to park near the train station. Jen was fascinated with nearly everything, but especially with how so much of things had really stayed the same. The train still ran on steel rails, the ties were wooden, and the roadbed was laid with crushed rock. Phil asked her if the sleek silver Metrolink cars hadn’t lost something of the charm of old passenger cars, but the whole idea of “charm” was something she had never considered in regard to trains. “I think they’re thrilling,” she said.

  The tracks behind the mission were lined with sycamores, large enough to have been growing there for a 150 years, and although most of the adjacent neighborhood had been built early in the century, the wood-sided houses that made it up were familiar enough to her, with their tilting front porches and casement windows and flower gardens. There were no sidewalks in the neighborhood, and there was a haphazard, unplanned look to the place that was uncharacteristic of the rest of the county, but entirely characteristic of what the place had been a century or so earlier.

  She had seen the mission itself only once, and the adobe buildings were resolutely the same now as they had been—sleepy and quiet, with the sound of gurgling water from the fountains and the smell of age. Perhaps because of the pending storm, there were few people on the mission grounds, and the very quiet of the place gave it a solemn and holy quality.

  “I want to tell you something before we go inside,” she said.

  Phil prepared himself for whatever it was: that she loved this Colin O’Brian. That she was grateful to him, but that she was moving on now that she had found someone more … more her type.

  “Betsy found this,” Jen said. She held out a bluish crystal object, and Phil knew at once what it was—Elizabeth’s so-called sapphire.

  “Where?”

  “In the tower. May hid it there, I suppose. I brought it because I hoped I could give it to … to Colin.”

  “All right,” Phil said. “I’ll take your word for it. I was told that it was very valuable.”

  “I have no idea. I wonder what you mean by valuable. It’s caused a lot of grief.”

  “Then give it away,” Phil said.

  The doors to the chapel stood open, but the chapel itself at first glance appeared to be empty, and when they walked in, their footfalls echoed on the worn wooden floor. But then Phil saw that the chapel wasn’t empty after all, that an old priest stood near the altar. He had apparently been putting cut tulips in a vase, and he stood still now, looking back at them, but with his hands still outstretched toward the flowers, unmoving.

  The priest looked steadily at Jen, who returned his gaze, and it was the priest this time who began to weep. It occurred to Phil that Jen had already known—not of Colin O’Brian’s existence, but of the likelihood that he would not be the man she remembered. Time had passed for him. Phil’s own mother had lived a second life, had borne children, had passed on, all in the years that Jen was away; there was no reason to believe it would have been different for this man. Jen hadn’t been looking for the man she loved so much as the man she had loved. His very existence was for her like water in a country of dry hills. He looked to Phil to be about eighty, his lined face betraying both sorrow and hope.

  Phil turned around and walked out into the sunlight again, leaving the two of them alone. He sat down on a garden bench and waited by himself. The priest’s face had been instantly familiar to him, and he took out of his pocket the old photo that had been among his mother’s effects, and studied again all four of the faces in the picture, no longer just gray ghosts on old paper.

  THE PRIEST HIMSELF stood in the chapel doorway watching him, and Phil wondered how long he had been there. When the two of them reentered the chapel, Jen was nowhere to be seen.

  “She’s stepped out for a moment,” the priest said, “to give us time to talk.”

  “All right,” Phil said. “I’m Phil Ainsworth. I’m happy to meet you finally. My niece had nice things to say about you.” They shook hands.

  “Colin O’Brian,” the priest said. “But you knew t
hat already.”

  “I guess it was you who sent Mr. Dudley out with the divining rod.”

  “It was. And you were successful?”

  “We found an old barrel with a human skeleton inside along with some other things, coins and beads. There was an elongated piece of polished green glass—a mossy green, maybe some kind of gemstone. I don’t know how many coins and beads. We put the whole bundle into the water tower and locked it up. I would have brought them out here to you myself, except …” He paused, gesturing futilely. “… except that someone stole them, probably within a couple of hours after I locked them into the tower. I’m sorry about that, too.”

  The priest shrugged. “Perhaps we can recover them.

  Do you have any idea who might have stolen them?”

  “A woman you already know: Elizabeth Kelly.”

  The priest nodded. “Of course. Possibly I’ll hear from her.”

  There was a silence now, and it seemed to Phil that Colin was uneasy, as if he were trying to find the words to say something. The silence lengthened, and finally Phil said, “You know, I was a little jealous when I found out who you were. Jen’s … easy to be around. She’s like … therapy or something.”

  The priest smiled vaguely. “I guess I’m a little jealous of you, too. Jen and I knew each other a long time ago, another lifetime.”

  Phil nodded. “She couldn’t stand waiting around the house. You said she might take weeks to acclimate, but I don’t think so. We went out into the country today, and I realized that she had to go her own way, that she couldn’t go on waiting on account of my hesitation. That’s why we’re here. She wanted to find you, and we’ve found you. It was easy to do.”

  “She couldn’t stand waiting,” Colin said. “I understand that. I’ve been waiting a long time myself, but I guess I’m through with it now. Don’t you ever make the mistake of waiting.”

  “It’s a mistake I’m familiar with, too.” Phil looked out through the chapel door and saw that Jen was sitting on the same bench he’d been sitting on, as if they were taking turns. “I don’t have any real excuse for it, though, not like the two of you.”