The Rainy Season (10 page)

He was seized with a sudden terror of drowning. His throat constricted and he looked above him where the flat circular surface of the pond was rapidly receding, as if he were falling away down a hole. He kicked his feet wildly and futilely, aware that he was sinking at an alarming rate, borne out of the sunlit surface water into the green abyss as if in a downward-sweeping current. A dark shadow swirled past him and he grabbed for it, but it was too far away, spiraling into the depths. The thought came to him that it was Alex, and he thought of May and Jeanette, but already all thoughts were obscured, as if in a dream—worries that were already diminished by time and distance and his own drowning.

The water was suddenly colder, numbingly cold. The pain in his chest and lungs drained out of him, and there was the rushing sound of his own blood in his ears and the sound of his heart pounding. Abruptly he gave himself up to it, to the drowning, and all sound and sensation grew slowly and comfortingly distant and quiet. He drifted slowly downward now, barely conscious, falling away into deep shadow, vaguely wondering if he
were
in a dream, where drowning was an easy thing after all—as easy as sleep. He thought about his life passing away: faces and images reeled through his mind, but they seemed not even to be his own after a brief moment, but were of people and places and incidents utterly foreign to him, faces that he couldn’t recognize—had certainly never known—as if he were literally falling into a vast well of memories as inseparable from each other as were the droplets of water in the green expanse around him. And he knew, again with a sleepy and dreamlike certainty, that the limitless darkness below held an immense secret, a secret hidden by the black depths of the water as if in the bottom of an ancient padlocked trunk.

THE OLD MAN
who sat at the wooden desk in the office of an antiques store in downtown Orange had a slack look on his face, as if he were either drugged or mortally tired. The desk itself was cluttered with junk, with glass trinkets and paperweights and ceramic objects like the dumped-out contents of a curio cabinet. There was no paperwork visible on the desk or enough clear space to work at anything in particular, as if the desk, like the rest of the antiques shop, was merely a catchall for bygone things. A jeweler’s loupe lay amid the rest of the clutter, as did a long pair of tweezers. A lamp with a copper base and a pair of cone-shaped split bamboo shades stood on the corner of the desk, one of the two shades illuminating the desktop and the second shining out into the shop, which was otherwise nearly dark.

His elbows had pushed things aside at the very front of the desk, and he put his head in his hands now, staring out through the glass windows of the cubicle into the dimly lit interior of the shop that he had owned since 1952. The shop had been closed since five in the evening, but he often stayed in the office until late, sometimes all night, sleeping in the office chair. It was true that he owned a house in a nearby neighborhood, close enough to walk to, but the house felt no more like home to him than the shop did. In his life he had done too much moving, had chased too many phantoms, only to come to realize that the passage of time would make an end to him and everything he coveted, no matter how quickly or how often he moved.

And tonight he particularly felt the passage of time. He could almost hear it, like the sighing of wind or the creaking of a rusted hinge, and the things around him in the shop, dusty relics of a past time, seemed each to contain a little piece of that faded world. Taken all together they were like the ghost of a cluttered landscape, and sometimes, very late at night, as he considered the fantastic shapes of their overlaid shadows, he wondered if he might simply stand up out of his chair and walk away into those shadows as if into another country.

There was a photograph on the wall over the desk—a looming old mansion with an octagonal tower and a horseshoe-shaped carriage drive in front and barren-looking rose gardens. To the side of the structure stood an immense leafless walnut tree. One of the shutters on the front of the mansion was broken and hanging, and the entire place was in disrepair, evidently long abandoned. The place was torn down now. He had driven out there twenty years ago, but hadn’t been able to establish, positively, where the house had stood. The place was a warren of residential apartment houses and stucco tract homes. He had made his way down to the river in order to get his bearings, but that hadn’t helped much—the old bridge was long gone, the landscape changed utterly, even the riverbed had been diverted.

He had hoped to find at least the familiar ghost of what had been, some fragment of orchard, a vacant lot where the house had stood, the culvert that had drained the property. And in fact he had found what must have been that culvert, although rather than the willow-lined, rocky streambed that he remembered, there was now a concrete-walled, fenced-off ditch with scummy water in the bottom, no longer meandering past windbreaks and empty land, but running north and south between adjacent suburban backyards and emptying into the waterless Santa Ana River through an iron grate.

He opened the office desk and peered into the back of the drawer, where there lay half a dozen yellowed newspaper clippings, one of them displaying the same photo that hung on the wall. The article that accompanied the photo was about the razing of the old mansion, and recounted, inaccurately, information about the Societas Fraternia, the kind of people who made up the Societas, the utter inability of the local population to understand them. That the Societas had gone on for decades after Appleton’s disappearance was evidence that there was something solid there. He had found, though, that his recollection of those years was simply nostalgic now—memories of his daughter, memories of the theft and betrayal. …

There were other articles in the drawer, published years earlier. One that he had found in the special collections section of the county library dated back over a century spoke of the drowning. After Appleton’s disappearance, a rumor-enflamed mob had descended on the property and had found his daughter’s body buried in the gardens. They’d found the casket in which she had passed away, the rope and tackle. A doctor had found water in her lungs. …

The article suggested that Appleton had fled, along with several other local people, which wasn’t far from wrong, although most of the fleeing had been stumbling stupidity. His own hadn’t been. It had been done with a sense of resolve that had strengthened itself over the years.

Beneath the papers in the desk lay a blue steel .38 caliber revolver. He kept it loaded, holding onto it, as he liked to think, for a rainy day. The winter storms that had poured over thirty inches of rainfall onto the county this season were abating, and with the falling away of the waters would come a falling away of hope. By the end of next week, if not sooner, this final pursuit would be at an end, for better or worse, and either he would have his poor lost daughter with him again, or he would blow his brains out.

AT A QUARTER
to ten at night the streets around the plaza were quiet, the stores closed and dark, the coffeehouse open but nearly empty of customers. Elizabeth slowed the car as she passed the dimly lit window of the antiques shop where she worked, and swore unhappily when she saw that the store wasn’t empty, that the office lamp was on, which meant that the old man, Hale Appleton, was loitering in the shop. She wanted to take some money out of the safe, which was something she did on a fairly routine basis, and it would be
so
much easier not to have to argue about it or ask for it.

Not that old Mr. Appleton would stop her from taking the money, or nearly anything else that she wanted. She I would always think of him as
Mr
. Appleton, since that’s what he had told her to call him when she’d gotten her first job at the shop nearly four years ago. He was alone in the world—no relations, no debts, no friends, not even a pet. She had become a stand-in for his lost daughter, which was an easy enough way for her to gain access to more than the cash that he paid her each Friday afternoon. It seemed to her that he was such a witless, sentimental old coot that he would believe almost any kind of deception if she flattered him or acted in any way sincere, which was fortunately typical of many of the men she met, although she wasn’t entirely sure about Phil Ainsworth, who wasn’t easy to read. …

She parked in a place where she could watch the shop. He rarely stayed past midnight. She knew exactly what he was doing at his desk, what his secret habits were. In fact, she had begun snooping in the old man’s desk within months of going to work for him, pilfering the cash that he left lying around, looking through his things. She had taken odds and ends from the store shelves, too, which she resold to shops in Los Angeles. He had repaid her with kindness.

Over time they had done a lot of simple talking, about themselves, their families, where they had come from, and it had begun to seem to her that there were too many unaccountable things about him. He simply didn’t have enough history, and what he did have was patchy and inconsistent. And he couldn’t keep dates straight—not even his own age. He talked wistfully about his drowned daughter, although at first it was impossible to know whether she had in fact drowned or had simply disappeared or even whether he had any daughter at all, dead or alive. He was laden with guilt, and yet he talked about her returning to him.

What was he hiding? The question had consumed her, and she reasoned that she could find some profit in the answer. At first she had imagined that he had some sort of criminal past. But there was no evidence of it. Background checks, credit checks, pervert lists, DMV checks—all of them had been simple to do, and yet she could recover almost nothing about him. The stuff he had squirreled away in the office desk was more interesting, especially the newspaper articles about the drowned girl and the old house out in Placentia, torn down, apparently, in the 1930s. His own name, Hale Appleton, had figured into all of the articles, and yet, given his apparent age, he couldn’t have been ten years old at the time. The name might have been a reference to his grandfather, although if that were the case then his namesake grandfather would have had a drowned and disappeared daughter himself—a nearly impossible coincidence.

He had a business account at the bank across the street, a minimum balance so that he could cash checks and run his little business, but he took all the profits out of the account, leaving in only the same small sum. He gave discounts to cash customers, bought and sold estates with cash, and was probably the only merchant left in the world who wouldn’t take credit cards. She had studied his books, which were haphazard, and that, of course, made it easy to steal from him. He spent nothing on himself. His drove a big, ten-year-old Cadillac, which he had bought for next to nothing from a widow whose children were moving her into a nursing home. At first she had thought he was laundering money, but for whom? In the several years she had worked for him, she hadn’t seen any evidence that he had any business connections at all. He was the most solitary, disconnected man imaginable.

Not long ago she’d had the good luck to find out about the trinkets. She had stopped into the shop after hours, come in quietly through the rear door, and caught him fondling the trinkets at his desk. He had behaved as if he were drugged, responding with shocked surprise, sweeping them into the open desk drawer and locking it. They appeared to be castaway junk, the kind of thing you might find if you dug up old garden dumps behind farmhouses. Later, when she had managed to open the desk drawer, the trinkets were gone from inside, but she’d found the newspaper clippings in an old envelope, and had sneaked them out to photocopy them. She’d also found a loaded gun, which changed her perception of Hale Appleton just a little bit.

It was a year before she had accidentally shoved the office carpet aside and found the removable pieces of flooring. Hoping to find money, she had found the trinkets instead. Appleton had been at the counter helping a customer. Disappointed but curious, she had picked up one of the trinkets, a bit of black iron bric-a-brac that looked superficially like a small bear. A wave of nausea and vertigo had passed through her when the trinket touched her palm. The lights had dimmed, then come up again, and before her eyes was the rain-glazed brick of a moonlit wall. She felt and smelled a night wind. A man stood before her, a stranger, small, almost hairless, dressed in rags, his face a rictus of avid rage. He was half lost in the shadow of a moving tree, and within the shadow she seemed to see a ghost of the office—the desk, the safe, but she had only a hazy notion of what these things were. He lurched forward, reaching toward her, and she fell backward, cracking her head, dropping the bit of metal from her palm. …

Instantly the office resolved itself. The man was gone. Appleton stood over her, and for a moment she confused the face in the dream with his face. But then she saw her mistake, and the dream itself dwindled, faded from her mind.

“I must ask you not to touch my things, Elizabeth,” Appleton said to her.

“I moved the rug, and I saw the cutout in the floor. I was curious, but I had no idea …”

He helped her to her feet. She had a dull headache, like a hangover headache. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to meddle.”

She had begun to cry, and had made up a story right on the spot, a story about her own past, about the death of her father and mother, about coming out alone to California, where he had taken her under his wing.

He had put the trinkets away in the floor again, replaced the rug, locked the shop and, as the rain began to fall in the darkening evening outside, he had begun to talk—about the weather first, the rainy season each year, watching the skies in October for early storms. The story of his daughter came out bit by bit, her wasting away from some sickness, the ritual drowning in a last-moment effort to keep her with him, the loss of the crystal object that had contained her memory. But there was something in this rainy season that gave him hope, and she had found herself asking to help him, to share his grief and his hope.