The Rainy Season (27 page)

She felt in her pocket for the Spanish coin and realized that she had promised to Appleton to report in. He would be
highly
interested in the coin. And that alone was a good enough reason not to tell him about it. She kept to the edge of the grove, along the redwood fences and backyards of the neighborhood, and when she got through the trees she darted across the open ground between the grove and the back of the tower, where she settled in to wait, standing where she could see Phil’s car in the drive if she looked around the corner of the tower. If anyone came out, she would hear them, since Phil had the slammiest screen doors in creation.

The lousy liar, she thought after fifteen minutes.
School!
He wasn’t going anywhere. He had wanted to get rid of her. To hell with him. She edged around into the garden shed where she slid open the window that Betsy had crawled through earlier. There was still plenty of sunlight for her to have a quick look around inside. She boosted herself over the low sill, swiveled around, and sat up in the window, hauling her legs in and dropping to the floor. If she heard the screen door slam and the car pull out, then she could give up the tower and break into the house.

She stood for a moment, getting her bearings in the shadowy room, listening to the heavy silence. There was a pressure in the tower that she could feel in her ears, and the air seemed almost dense, as if a storm were pending. She realized then that the silence wasn’t complete. She listened intently, hearing something that sounded like the distant crying of a child. A television on in the house? She closed her eyes and focused on the sound. It seemed now to come from no single direction, but from all around her at once, or rather from within her, as if she were hearing it in her memory. Something else, too—a deep rushing sound like hearing the ocean in a seashell. She closed her eyes and listened more intently to the crying, which rose and fell as if it carried on the wind. And then, for a long moment the crying differentiated itself from the background noise, and it seemed to her to come from directly in front of her, right here in the room. A chill ran through her, and she opened her eyes, seeing at once the dark bundle beneath the stairs—an old blanket partly fallen open over a heap of debris, from which shone a dim, diffused light.

There was a stirring within the bundle, a faint clacking like the sound of chopsticks knocking together. She took a step toward it, bending over to see more clearly what it was—a human skull, scattered bones, more of the old coins. A misty glow wreathed like smoke from within the blanket, coalescing and hovering beneath the dark stairs—the image of a child, curled, it seemed to her, into a fetal position. She breathed heavily, fighting the desire to climb back out the window.

The idea came to her that she would take the whole bundle: there was money on the line here, and the thought of it cleared her head. Surely she had found something that Appleton wanted, something he had been waiting for.

A rusted weed claw hung from a nail driven into the wall. She took it down, then bent in under the stairs to look into the bundle itself. The light that emanated from it bathed her arm and face, and she could actually feel it, like the coolness of a shadow in sunlight. Gingerly she picked up a corner of the blanket, exposing the bones within. She sorted through the debris with the weed claw. There were more coins and rosary beads, but more interesting than either was the glowing crystal object that lay within the framework of still-attached ribs. It was green, a pure enough moss green so that no one would mistake it for the sapphire blue of the object mentioned in the
Dealer
ad. The shape was wrong, too. This was almost an oval, misshapen at one end, which gave it the indistinct appearance of an owl.

Time to go. The last thing she needed was for Phil or Betsy to come out here now, horsing around, only to find her climbing through the window with a sack of bones on her back. She looked for a box or a bag, anything to put the piece of glass into, but there was nothing. Her sweater would do just fine. She took it off, slipped her hand into the sleeve, and grasped the piece of glass through the knitted wool, carefully pulling the sleeve inside out and over it. She sure as hell wasn’t going to touch the glass, not after her experience with Appleton’s trinket.

She tied off the sweater sleeve with the crystal trapped inside, then folded the sweater around it a couple more times to make a ball, which she stuffed into a clay flowerpot. The light was hidden now, and she could no longer hear the sound of crying or the rattling together of the bones. She set the flowerpot in among the bones, draped the edges of the stadium blanket back over all of it, and tied the bundle off tightly with a piece of garden twine. She went straight to the window, pushing it open and leaning out far enough to see the corner of the house before reaching the bundle through the window and lowering it to the ground, then climbing out after it, sliding the window shut behind her.

A movement off toward the house caught her eye, and she pressed herself into the shadows, thinking furiously of excuses, of what she would tell Phil when he caught her playing Santa Claus with his bag of bones. But she saw no one at all on the lawn. Puzzled, she stood there for another moment waiting, just to be safe. The limbs of the old pepper tree grazed the lawn, swaying heavily in the breeze, casting moving shadows—

There it was again; she saw it now: someone climbing in the tree itself. It was Betsy, the little minx. The girl had apparently come out through the attic window, which stood open onto a small balcony. Hell, Elizabeth thought, the girl was probably sneaking back out here to the tower.

Elizabeth backed up, taking the bones with her, slipping behind the tower and out of sight. Betsy had stopped, though. Apparently she wasn’t climbing down after all. Elizabeth had a clear view of her through the willowy foliage of the pepper tree. She was doing something, meddling with her book bag. After a moment she climbed higher into the tree again, and Elizabeth watched as she stepped over the low balcony, glanced down into the yard, and went straight back into the room and pulled the windows closed behind her.

Elizabeth waited for another minute, but nothing stirred in the afternoon calm. The smart thing to do, probably, would be to wait until dark and then have a look into the tree, except that she didn’t have an hour or two to spare right now. Better to come back later. Things were moving—their “liaison” had arrived, just as Appleton had guessed, the old bastard. He was very carefully telling her nothing at all.

WHEN PHIL LOOKED
in on Jen in the morning, she seemed to him to be a different person. For two days she had sometimes seemed vacant, gazing unfocused at the windows, and as far as he could tell, she had rarely gotten out of bed or eaten anything unless Betsy had insisted. She had spent most of her time asleep, which wasn’t surprising. This morning, though, she had told Phil that she’d had enough languishing in bed, that she had been asleep for over a hundred years, and that she was suddenly ravenously hungry and curious.

He found himself cooking happily, throwing chopped salmon and chives into the scrambled eggs, cooking bacon for the first time in years, spooning out a dish of apricot preserves for the toast. He opened fresh coffee even though he had half a pound already open in the refrigerator, and he laid the whole breakfast out on a tray along with antique cups and plates and glasses. Halfway up the stairs he realized that what was appealingly old-fashioned to him might seem run-of-the-mill to Jen, who herself was the most authentically old-fashioned woman in the world. But then it occurred to him that nice things, including eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee, were timeless, as was the very idea of breakfast, and that some things, all the really important things, never went out of fashion.

And Jen seemed happy enough with the food. She ate with perfect manners, but she ate steadily, apologizing for being so greedy. When there was nothing left but a tablespoon or so of jam, she set the tray aside and got up to pull back the curtains. The sun shone through the foliage of the pepper tree, and when she pushed the window open, the breeze carried the sagey scent of the spring hillsides. There was warmth in the wind for a change, and immediately Phil thought of spring and of the weather turning, and he realized that from where Jen sat once again in bed, the view from the east-facing windows was virtually unchanged from her day. Through the west-facing windows, however, lay a vast suburban sprawl in which there were arguably only a couple of hundred buildings still standing that had been standing at the turn of the century. Unlike bacon and eggs, mother nature had largely gone out of style in suburban southern California.

“Look at this,” she said to him. “Something else that Betsy brought in.” She handed him a color brochure of Disneyland with rockets spinning against the snowy backdrop of the Matterhorn Mountain and with the old Skyway cars still running over Fantasyland. “She has some idea that you’ll take us to this place. I see it’s in Anaheim.”

“It very nearly
is
Anaheim,” Phil said.

She shook her head wonderingly. “Anaheim was the German colony and grape vineyards,” she said.

“Disease wiped out the vines in 1886, and after that it was all citrus groves for about eighty years.”

“But not anymore?”

“There’s no more agriculture, really. Only a few acres here and there. Land’s too valuable to farm.”

“What happened to the citrus groves?”

“People.” He gestured at the brochure that she still held. “Disneyland took out hundreds of acres all by itself. An orange tree can’t compete with a make-believe mountain.”

“I’d be astonished if it could,” she said. “I like this make-believe mountain. It sounds wonderful. Betsy tells me that one travels through the interior of the mountain on little cars. Apparently they absolutely race along, just like sleds. It sounds …” She shook her head, unable to express it.

Phil shrugged. “I guess there’s some debate about how wonderful it is.”

“I think you’ve seen too many wonderful things,” she said. “You’ve gotten tired of them. Look what else Betsy’s brought me.” She pointed to the bedside table, at a ballpoint pen with a likeness of Donald Duck floating in the clear plastic shaft. Beside it sat a flat, circular piece of cardboard with a hologram fish on it. There was a tiny cassette player, too, with a pair of earphones, and a flashlight big enough to contain a single AA battery. Phil had seen the stuff lying there, but it had meant nothing to him; he hadn’t noticed the objects until Jen had pointed them out. All of it must be amazing to Jen, though—space-age amazing, a handful of small miracles. “Betsy has undertaken to educate me,” she told him.

“And she wants to start at Disneyland?”

“It says here that it’s the happiest place on earth. These colorful pictures … it’s all so wonderful.”

“Uh-huh. I guess sometimes I can’t help regretting what we gave up in order to have a make-believe mountain.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, but I’ve been thinking a great deal about regret. I don’t recommend it. It’s morbid. I was being a little too morbid until Betsy stopped in last night. Children are too healthy to be morbid.”

“They don’t know what we’ve lost.”

“Betsy’s lost a good deal herself, hasn’t she? She told me a little about her mother.”

“Of course she has,” Phil said. “I guess I wasn’t thinking of that kind of loss.”

Jen sat silently for a moment. “It’s all the same loss, really. It’s time passing, things and people passing away.”

“Did
you
leave someone behind?” Phil asked abruptly, but as soon as he said it the question struck him as too bold, and he waited awkwardly to see how she would respond.

She looked at him for a silent moment. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I don’t know where he is. It’s difficult to explain, but there’s the chance that I
didn’t
leave him behind. He might be here as easily as I’m here. I’ve been wondering what that would mean, what I would regain if I found him. I’m afraid I’ve been dwelling on it. It’s as if I’ve taken a journey on a ship full of strangers, and then suddenly conceived the notion that there might be a friend on board.”

“What was his name?”

“Colin O’Brian. He was a schoolteacher. He was a great friend of May’s, of your mother. I fancy that she was a little bit in love with him, too.”

“And you were in love with him?”

“Were? That wasn’t so long ago. Have you ever fallen asleep, and then woken up with the idea that a great deal of time has passed, only to find out that you’ve only slept for a few minutes?”

“Fairly often, actually.”

“Perhaps you even dream while you’re asleep, and the dream itself seems to have occupied an age, and yet it couldn’t have.”

He nodded.

“That’s how I feel, you see, as if all those silent, passing years are collected inside me, a century of shadows—so much time that I can’t readily distinguish the dreams from that distant life. I saw him last when I was drawn under in that deep pool. It was as if hands clutched my ankles and dragged me under. I was quite swept away, utterly helpless, and that was the last I saw of him, struggling in shallow water. But in the darkness I was certain that I wasn’t alone, that he was following, he and May and perhaps Alex, too. I can’t tell you how I knew this, but I knew it. And then when I learned that May had indeed come through …”

“You hoped that Colin had also.”

“Of course I did.”

He found that he was remarkably disappointed, although he had no right to be. Jen was in his temporary custody, but that wouldn’t last long. She’d been a resident of the twentieth century for two days, and already she wanted to visit Disneyland, ride on the Matterhorn bobsleds. Inside of a week she’d have a driver’s license and a credit card. He wouldn’t be able to hold her. That’s why he felt such disappointment. It was regret again. He had only just found her, and already he was full of regret over losing her. He put the thought out of his mind. “I’ll help you look for him,” he told her abruptly. “But I want you to know that this isn’t a ship full of strangers, Jen.”