The Rainy Season (20 page)

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 pajamas 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.

She sat on the bed, her mind running. Uncle Phil apparently had no idea what these things in the jar were, but
somebody
had known what they were. Somebody had picked them out of the weeds around the well, just as the priest had done tonight. Somebody had sealed them into this jar and kept them safe in this house.

Leaving the lamp on, she climbed tiredly into bed, listening to the rain, remembering the way the bed felt from the last time she was here, and she tucked Pooh and Piglet in, sharing the pillow with them. For a long time she lay there listening to the swish and scrape of the windblown pepper tree against the balcony beyond the window, and to the creaks and groans of the old house settling for the night. And some time later she was awakened from a dream about water by the sound of the telephone ringing downstairs, and there came into her head the fleeting idea that someone was calling about her mother, but the lamplit room around her reminded her of where she was and of why that couldn’t be true, and before her mind had a chance to dwell on things, she closed her eyes and pictured the place she had found in her interrupted dream—a quiet and grassy place by the still waters of a clear pool.

WHEN THE PHONE
rang in the middle of the night, the first thing that Phil thought was that this was another prank call, but then he remembered the woman asleep upstairs, the entire mystifying evening, and he answered the phone, ready to hang it up again. It was hard to determine the age of the man on the other end of the line, but Phil was certain that he was speaking to Betsy’s priest. Somewhere in his mind, even in sleep, he had been waiting for the inevitable call. For some reason the man hadn’t wanted to be seen tonight, but it was unimaginable that he would remain silent for very long.

“Can I have a name to go with the voice?” Phil asked.

“A name? Right now that would be awkward. Call me Father Brown if you want to. I can’t tell you my name. I’m sorry about that. I’m not just being mysterious.”

“All right. But you’re actually a priest, then?”

“Actually I am.”

“Uh-huh,” Phil said to him. “Well look, I don’t want to lecture you about your responsibilities, but it seems to me to be a little bit out of line for a priest to be trespassing, breaking into a man’s garage, and involving a nine-year-old girl in a lot of mysterious trouble. She was in the house for exactly three hours tonight before she was up to her ears in this. So why don’t we start with an explanation?” Phil realized that he probably sounded more mad than he was, but to heck with this priest, what right
did
he have?

“I’m
terribly
sorry,” the priest said. He was obviously sincere, and Phil felt bad that he’d reacted so hard. “And I don’t mean to be facetious when I say that I’ll make a full confession, although as I said, I can’t tell you my name, and I apologize for that. I’ve been on your property several times, day and night both. My only purpose was to watch for the arrival of the woman whom you met tonight, and that meant that I had to watch the old well. It
is
your property, as you say, but the well is … let’s just say it isn’t anybody’s property. Still, that doesn’t give me the right to be sneaking around, and I do apologize. Can I ask you if Jeanette’s all right? She’s settled in?”

“She seems fine. I’ve put her in an upstairs bedroom. Some of my mother’s things were still in the closet, and I found her a robe and nightgown. So she’s settled in okay, I guess. She was exhausted, though, and she fell asleep without saying anything.”

“Good, good. Thank you immensely. I hope you understand that I couldn’t simply let her … that she needed someone to be there when she arrived. I couldn’t abandon her.”

“I have no problem with that, although I don’t really know what you’re talking about. What’s my part in this? What can I do for her, exactly? What can I give her?”

“Comfort from the storm. That’s all.”

“That’s all?”

“I certainly hope so. These things have had a way of working out. I’ve got a great deal of faith.”

“All right. Why me?”

“It’s your house. I wish it had merely been me, but that’s not possible. And by the way, I didn’t at all mean for it to involve … to involve your niece, although it was a great pleasure to make her acquaintance. It was purely accidental, though. Betsy found Jeanette before I did. I had no idea on earth that the little girl was staying in the house here, and even if I had, I couldn’t have guessed that she’d be outside at that time of night. And there were reasons that I couldn’t wait for you. It’s important that Jeanette knows as little about me as possible. There’s no reason to mention me at all. Can you promise me that?”

“Only if
I
know something about you.”

“Fair enough. You tell me something, though. I don’t mean to pry into your personal affairs, but tonight you had a visitor, a woman named Elizabeth Kelly.”

“And you told Betsy to have me get rid of her. That was hospitable of you.”

“I’m afraid I had to. I don’t want that woman or the man she works for to know about Jen’s arrival.”

“That woman, as you call her, might drop in at any moment. She has that habit. Not being a priest myself, I don’t have anything against that kind of thing. I’m not crazy about throwing her out like that, either. I can’t see that she deserved it.”

“I appreciate that, and I certainly can’t say what anyone
deserves,
but I’m determined to protect Jeanette.”

“From Elizabeth?”

“From whomever might constitute a threat to her. I can’t tell you what to do, but please humor me in this. If you honestly believe that Elizabeth Kelly will be a visitor to your house, and that there’s no way to prevent her from knowing about Jeanette, then I’ll make arrangements for Jeanette to go elsewhere—in the morning if I have to. I can tell you, though, that she’ll be more comfortable with you, in that house. Her arrival will have been … disturbing to her. She’ll need a few days to rest, perhaps weeks to acclimate.”

“Weeks,” Phil said flatly. He sat for a moment listening to the wind. The night outside was patchy with moonlight, and through the window he could see the shadow of the grove in the distance. “She’s welcome here. Of course she is. It’ll be hard to keep her hidden once she’s up and around, though. I mean, what if she goes outside for a walk? And if there’s any danger to Betsy, then I’m afraid we’ll have to move your friend out as soon as she’s up to it.”

“Thank you. Of course.”

“Let me ask you something. The other night, Thursday, you weren’t lurking around, were you, back in the eucalyptus trees, along the arroyo?”

“Along the creek? No, it must have been someone else. I’ve stuck pretty close to the garden shed. What did the man look like? I assume it was a man.”

“I can’t tell you,” Phil said. “I saw him from a distance—just a shadow. I can’t even say for sure that it was a man.”

“But Elizabeth Kelly was with you at the time? It couldn’t have been her?”

“No, it couldn’t have been her. What you’re telling me now, though, is that Elizabeth is a threat?”

“A threat? I don’t know. But I can tell you truthfully that Elizabeth Kelly has been awaiting Jen’s arrival as eagerly as I have.”

“Arrival from
where?”
Phil asked. “You keep using that word. Where’d she arrive
from
exactly, outer space?”

“From the past,” the priest said evenly.

“From the past? Not from a place?”

“No, not from any place other than the old well. Jeanette waded into the well on your property nearly a hundred and fifteen years ago. Tonight she found her way out of it again.”

“Okay,” Phil said. “It’s going to take me a little time to come to grips with that one.” The thought came to him that he should burst into laughter, but somehow he wasn’t inclined to. “Let me ask an idle question. She said she knew my mother, who was a friend of hers. What surprised me was that she knew my mother’s full name. She didn’t hear it from Betsy, or at least that’s what Betsy tells me. So Jeanette must have heard it from you. You knew my mother?”

There was a momentary silence. “Yes. I knew your mother. I knew
you
, in fact, although you were too young then to remember now. But since you’ve promised not to mention my existence to Jeanette, of course you won’t have any occasion to tell
her
any of that.”

“Even if she asks me about you?”

“If she asks you … I can’t tell you to lie about it. But I think that you might be able to answer her truthfully without lying. And I will say that sometimes the whole truth, in all its particulars, doesn’t make anybody happy anyway.”

“I’ll agree with you there. So
you
told her my mother’s name?”

“No, I didn’t have to, Phillip. Your mother, May, waded into the well on the same day that Jen did.”

“Which would make her what … ?” Phil asked in a deadpan voice, “About a hundred and forty when she died?”

“In a manner of speaking,” the priest said. “One hundred and thirty-nine years old, if you want to be entirely accurate. Jen is one hundred and thirty-six. She was three years younger than your mother.”

Now Phil was silent for a moment. Part of him wished that he thought all of this was rubbish, that the priest was talking nonsense. But he suspected that it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. His mother’s history had always been a mystery to him, her references to it evasive. And it was impossible to argue with the existence of the woman upstairs, dressed as she was. Still …

“And another thing,” the priest said. “You asked me if there was a danger to Betsy, and actually there is. It’s imperative that you keep Betsy away from the well. Children especially are attracted to water. She mustn’t play around it. She can’t be allowed to climb on the stone ring.”

“I’ll cover it,” Phil said, suddenly fearful. “I’ve got enough plywood and two-by-fours to build a cover. It’s almost never filled with water, so the issue’s never come up before.”

“You can’t cover it. For the immediate future don’t do anything to it at all. If you pay the slightest attention to it, they’ll suspect that Jen’s arrived. If we can keep her existence hidden from them until the well can be neutralized, we can rest easy for her. Just be careful of Betsy, that’s all.”

“Neutralized?” Phil asked. “How do we neutralize it? Pour baking soda into it?”

“We’ll need a dowser,” the priest said. “Are you familiar with dowsing?”

“Yes, of course. Why do we need a dowser? We already know where the water is. We don’t need more; we need less.”

“We’re not dowsing for water,” the priest said. “We’re dowsing for bones.”

BEFORE GOING BACK
to bed, Phil opened the top drawer of his dresser and got out the envelope with his mother’s note in it and the old daguerreotype photo. He stood looking at the photo, at the faces of the four people, the clothes they wore, the wood railing of the porch they stood on. One of the women, he saw clearly now, was the woman from the well. The other woman, of course, was his mother. She was young, and there was a certain distortion in the photo, but he knew it was his mother. He wondered about the identity of the two men, whether they’d been left behind in that distant day, or had also found their way into the future somehow, waking up on a rainy night in a friendless and unfamiliar world.