The Rainy Season (15 page)

“I don’t have it,” May said. “Jeanette had it. It’s in the well, Alex, like Colin said.”

There was the crack of gunfire. May screamed and stood up out of her chair, throwing herself across Colin, who lurched sideways, his own chair tipping over and slamming down onto the tiles of the hearth. Something hit her in the middle of the back and then clattered to the wooden floor, spinning to a stop in front of her face. It was the pistol.

Alex lay sprawled across the chair she herself had just been sitting in. She heard the rasping sound of someone trying to breathe, and realized that it was Alex, that it was he who had been shot and not Colin. There was no other sound; no one had entered the house. The porch door was still open. Alex shuddered, rattling in his throat, and then lay still and silent. She listened to the sound of Colin’s breathing, and she realized that Colin was waiting just like she was, but long moments passed before they finally stood up.

IT WAS THREE
in the morning before Colin had finished burying the body beneath the clay floor of the carriage house. A foot or so down the clay had given out, and beneath it lay the sandy soil of an old river bottom. Colin had buried the body deeply, tamping the soil back in around it, breaking up the surface clay and stamping it solidly over the grave, raking it smooth and tamping it down again. He was pale and haggard, and his clothes were filthy, and despite the shivering cold he was running with sweat. The pick and shovel work had blistered his hands, which were bloody, and he worked now to clean the blood off the wooden handle of the spade with a wet rag.

“I covered his body with lime,” he said, explaining to May. His voice was husky.

She leaned tiredly against the closed side door of the garage. “I guess I don’t want to know any more about it,” she said.

“Who shot him, though?”

“Maybe it was our guardian angel. Alex would haves killed you, you know. I thought he had, at first.”

“Well, it was hardly our guardian angel,” he said. “Guardian angels don’t carry guns. Whoever it was killed Alex in order to kill Alex, not to save us. Somebody followed him here.”

“This is a little like a dream to me, Colin. I guess it’s because I’m new to this world, but I can’t care very much who shot Alex or why. What he said was true. I have no family, no friends besides you. I don’t exist—not in any real sense. You’ve had twenty years to get caught up in things again, and that makes you more solid. I’m just a ghost, like Alex said.”

Colin stopped working with the rag and stared at his hands, as if he hadn’t been listening to her. She wondered suddenly if he were thinking about Appleton’s bit of glass, if he were utterly caught up in it, as Alex had been. Everyone seemed to have been waiting for the season of rain that would return it to them. None of them, apparently, had been waiting simply for her, or for Jeanette either.

In fact May
had
lied about the object when Alex had asked her. Alex had been right enough about her hatred of lying, but a hatred of lying didn’t necessarily make a person stupid. In effect, she had begun to lie hours ago when she had hidden the object in the tower. And she would go on lying, silently. Colin didn’t need the object any more than Alex did. And even if he were serious about returning it to the mission, nearly a hundred years late, what virtue was there in that? For now the damned thing could rest in peace.

“… and so we know that his car will be around here somewhere,” Colin was saying. May realized that she hadn’t been listening to him. “I’ll look for it while it’s still dark,” he said. “I don’t know what else to do with it besides leave it somewhere and walk away. There’s no reason to think anyone would trace it to us. None at all.”

She nodded. Clearly he thought that she would be concerned with this, but she couldn’t pay any real attention to what he was saying. It sounded extravagant to her—a lot of plotting and planning that signified nothing. She recalled Colin hefting the piece of glass in its bag as if he coveted the thing every bit as much as Alex had coveted it, as if Colin had fallen under the thing’s spell, and his life was now defined by the object and his part in its story. The years had changed him just as they had changed Alex, and right now she felt even more alone than ever, and was filled with a cold regret at ever having arisen from the fleeting, silent darkness of the old well.

And now, picturing the stone ring outside, where the waters were slowly disappearing into the ground, she asked herself why she hadn’t simply thrown Appleton’s glass curio into the water earlier this evening—made it vanish the way her own world had vanished. But perhaps there was something irreverent about the very idea of disposing of such a thing, of thinking that it was hers to give, or hers to take away.

She felt in her pocket for the velvet bag that contained her inkwell, and she found that she could picture in her mind every blemish and crack in it, as if she had spent hours studying it—the way the glass was discolored, the way the piece was malformed and yet somehow beautiful, like the living shape of a memory transmuted into cloudy glass. She searched her mind for it, for the memory itself, but what she recalled about her bearing her child was incomplete, like a painting half sketched-in. The missing parts lay in this inkwell. And she wondered then if memories ever went entirely out of the world, or whether they weren’t all caught up together somewhere after they were lost, finally washed clean of any claim of ownership, glittering like gold dust in a sandy creekbed.

THERE WAS A
swing in the elm tree in the front yard, and Phil watched through the window as Betsy listlessly kicked herself back and forth under a cloudy Austin sky. She wore her softball glove on her left hand, and now and then she took the softball out of the pocket, tossed it in the air as she swung backward, and caught it again when she swung back. She was usually easy to talk to, but today she hadn’t said six words to him. The sidewalk and the street were dry, but water still glistened on the lawn, and the wind blew down out of the hills. It was another lonesome morning. Last night Mr. Benner had asked Betsy what it was that she wanted to do, even though she didn’t have any real choice in the matter. Still, Phil had to know. The future was uncertain, it was always uncertain, and if there had ever been a time when he needed to know how things stood in the moment, it was now.

Betsy had said, without coaxing, that she wanted to go to California. She wanted to live with Uncle Phil. She didn’t want to live with Mrs. Darwin. That made Phil happy enough, except that it would make Mrs. Darwin so unhappy. And he still wondered why Betsy was so certain, but he only wondered idly, because now that things were decided, he didn’t really want to know more about Mrs. Darwin than he had to. Carrying her troubles with him to California wouldn’t help any of them. It certainly wouldn’t help Mrs. Darwin.

Betsy twisted in the swing, then spun around in reverse, then half-spun back again. She glanced across the yard at Mrs. Darwin’s house, craned her neck just a little as if she were looking for something in particular, and then stood up out of the swing and stepped across to the base of the old elm tree. She peered into a deep hollow in the trunk, darted a glance next door again, then put her hand into the hollow for a moment before removing it again and moving back over to the swing, evidently simply waiting for time to pass. She tossed the ball in the air but didn’t catch it this time, and when the ball fell onto the grass, rolling across the sidewalk to the parkway, she let it lie there.

She was tall for a nine-year-old, and thin, and she looked more like her father than like Marianne. She had her father’s auburn hair and a scattering of freckles across her cheeks. Her eyes were dark, like her mother’s, but they had a crinkly, cheerful quality to them, whereas Marianne’s eyes were perpetually sad. Her father had laughed easily, and Betsy had that quality, too, but Phil had always thought that Betsy had something solid about her, some real depth. Her father had used the easy laughter to brush the world off, and Phil had always thought that he had brushed Marianne off that same way. Betsy lost herself in books, and he would have felt slightly better if she had one in her hands right now, because she looked utterly alone to him, as she sat in her swing in the wind, waiting to leave.

The back seat and the trunk of the rental Thunderbird were full of luggage. Phil had shipped half a dozen big boxes of Betsy’s things this morning. There were more boxes to pack and ship, but Mrs. Darwin had insisted on doing the rest. Their plane departed in three hours, and, for the moment, there was nothing left to do but wait, which Phil hated above almost anything else. He looked at his watch, realizing that he would rather be at the airport waiting than to be under the ever-watchful eye of Mrs. Darwin. All morning long she had been hustling around the house, familiar with every part of it. She intended to separate out any of Marianne’s belongings that she thought Betsy might want, and ship them just as soon as she could, since rent on the house was paid only through the end of the month. Betsy had already pointed out a few of her mother’s knickknacks that she wanted: a couple of Hummel figurines, some framed photographs, some books, most of Marianne’s jewelry. Mrs. Darwin would use her own judgment on the rest, and what was left over, the furniture, the clothes, the plates and glasses and pots and pans—all of it was going at an estate sale that Mrs. Darwin had already placed an ad for.

Phil had told her to keep the money from the sale, along with a commission on the money from the sale of Marianne’s Mazda, which would amount to another three or four thousand dollars, give or take, but Mrs. Darwin had put up a fight, refusing absolutely to profit even a penny from Marianne’s death. All of it, she had said, belonged to Betsy, which of course was true. He was probably overly sensitive, but once or twice, when the subject had come up, she had seemed to imply that Phil shouldn’t try to make her feel better by trying to pay her off. And, what was worse, that he was acting a little high-handed with Betsy’s inheritance.

As of this morning Mrs. Darwin had apparently shaken off the sorrow that she had felt at Benner’s office yesterday. Probably she was putting up a front. Phil respected her for that. She was making it easier on Betsy, and on him, too. Once or twice he had caught what had appeared to be a resentful glance, but this assessment was quite possibly due to his own sense of guilt. Even if it was authentic resentment—as was her comment about Betsy’s inheritance—he could hardly blame her. But the sooner he was out of here, the happier he’d be.

The doorbell rang now, and when he opened it, Mrs.

Darwin stood there on the concrete stoop, holding a cardboard carton and wearing an apron over her house dress. Betsy still sat on the swing, and Phil saw her glance at Mrs. Darwin and then look away. Maybe the girl was already missing her, having second thoughts about moving away from Austin.

“Just a word with you, Phil, if you don’t mind?”

“Of course I don’t mind. And you don’t need to ring the bell. Just come on in. You’re family.”

“I
was
family, Phil. Let’s not be coy about it. The family that I knew is broken up. This has been a second home for me. I didn’t realize how much so—how I needed Betsy as much as she needed me. I have some … some photographs here, and some mementos. They’re not rightly mine.”

In the box lay a framed photograph of Betsy, taken when she was five or six. There were a number of paintings and drawings, too, the sort of thing that children turn out in elementary school classes and that end up stuck to the refrigerator.

“I can’t take what’s not mine,” she repeated.

Phil’s first thought was that she was kidding in some impossible way, but the look on her face checked him. “I’m sure you were
meant
to keep these,” he said.

“Marianne lent me the photo, although the frame is mine. But I don’t guess I’ll have any use for an empty frame. The rest of it I thought you might want. It’s almost like a record of Betsy’s growing up.”

“You know what? You’ll appreciate them more than I will. And I’ve got plenty of photos. There was a box of them with the stuff we shipped this morning.”

“Still,” she said sadly, and shook her head, “they’re Betsy’s property now.”

“Seriously, Mrs. Darwin. These are yours to keep. If some time in the future Betsy asks about any of this, or says she wants any of it, I’ll let you know. Right now, though, I just couldn’t take any of it.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m sure you know best.” She stood looking at him for a moment, bit her bottom lip in a gesture that Phil had grown familiar with over the last twenty-four hours. “There was something else. I don’t really know quite how to put it,” she said.

“Go ahead,” Phil said. “Like Mr. Benner told us, this is a good time to tell the truth.”

“Well, yes. So it is. There was one item that’s missing.”

“Missing? From the house here?”

“No, not exactly. This is difficult, and I don’t mean to be making accusations, but there’s a little glass inkwell, small enough so that you could nearly hide it in your hand. It’s missing from my house, actually—from my hutch.”

“Okay. Do you think we might have shipped it by mistake?”

“I can’t see how. I mean, it didn’t belong to Marianne. It was never out of my hutch until the last couple of days. At least I think it’s only been in the last couple of days. I had some men in to paint the kitchen a month ago, and one of them might have taken it, but I don’t know why they
would
have. It’s just an old glass trinket. It’s not valuable, even as an antique, and it was in a bag, a purple velvet bag, and they could hardly have known what the bag contained.”

“So you think it was stolen?”

“I don’t like to use the word.”

“Borrowed.”

“All right.”

“By … Betsy?” Phil asked. There was clearly nothing else the woman could mean, unless she was accusing
him
of having taken it.

“I’m not suggesting that,” she said, shaking her head. “Betsy was entirely at home in my house. She might easily have taken it as … as a memento of her own, of the time we spent together. I almost didn’t bring it up at all, except that it’s rather special to me, if you understand. If she had asked for something else, I would have given her nearly anything. But this inkwell … Let me say that it was given to me by my husband Al, who’s been dead these ten years. It had belonged to him when he was a child. His father had made him a quill pen, you see, and he drew wonderful pictures with that pen and with the ink that he kept in that inkwell. When he grew older he gave it up, which was a pity. He said it was a child’s dream, drawing pictures with a special pen. Sometimes, in the years before his death, he wondered out loud what it would be like to fill the inkwell and sharpen that old quill pen, and put his hand to paper again.”