The Rainy Season (7 page)

“I’m not sure …” Colin began. “Transferred?”

“I mean to say that Mr. Appleton wants a living daughter, not a block of crystal. He’s quite likely been thwarted in a way that our friend Alejandro doesn’t begin to understand.”

The priest pressed his shoulder momentarily before turning and reentering the chapel. Colin stood for another few moments thinking about this. He glanced around him to make sure he was alone, and then he removed the glove from his pocket and pushed the sea-shell out of it until he could see it in the sunlight. He was surprised to see that the seashell was apparently chipped and deformed. What had looked like a human figure now appeared as a mere superficial streak, like dried blood.

He returned it to his pocket, took one last look at the quiet mission grounds, and stepped into the garden to pick a pomegranate. He broke it open, idly eating the seeds as he walked into town, lost in the unsettling notion that a lifetime of memory, through an alchemy of water and death, might be transmuted into a misshapen curio small enough to be locked away in a drawer, or held in the palm of one’s hand.

THE CIRCULAR GLOW
of the flashlight hovered like a firefly in the rainy night. Phil watched it for a moment from the edge of the grove. Elizabeth stood at the well, her back to the tower. She was bent forward at the waist, and although in the darkness her movements were indefinite, she held the flashlight in the air with one hand and seemed to be reaching for something in the water with the other.

He walked out from among the trees, his footfalls nearly silent on the wet ground. When he drew nearer, he saw that aside from the flashlight Elizabeth held what appeared to be barbecue tongs, which she dipped into the dark water within the circle of yellow light. She was intent on what she was doing, on something she saw beneath the surface, and she didn’t look up even when he reached the opposite side of the well and stood in silence watching her. The rain was a heavy mist, and the wind rustled in the shrubbery, but the surface of the water, protected from the wind by the stone wall, was calm. Phil watched the steel tongs, which shined in the beam of the flashlight as she worked them slowly toward an outcropping of rock, careful not to disturb the surface and lose sight of whatever she was after.

Something glinted there—something small that lay on the smooth granite stone. The wind gusted, lifting dead winter leaves and scattering them across the surface of the well, which was illuminated by the moon again, the clouds overhead torn and scattered, the night sky suddenly full of stars between the parted clouds. The reflected moonlight hid the depths of the pool, and Elizabeth paused for a moment, tilting her head as if she might see more clearly on the periphery of her vision. She plunged her hand into the water, reaching downward until her elbow was submerged, keeping the flashlight near the surface, straining to see past the reflected moon and stars, which danced on the disturbed surface of the water now. After a moment she drew the tongs out, moving them slowly, as if they held some desperately fragile thing, and she held the object up in the glow of the flashlight.

It appeared to Phil to be a piece of silver, perhaps a tiny spoon, small and delicate like a child might use, or like one of the souvenir spoons in the rack on the kitchen wall. Elizabeth brought it closer to her face, staring at it, still holding it with the tongs. Phil stepped toward her, and she looked up, apparently startled at the sudden movement, jerking the tongs upward as if in surprised fear that he would take them from her. In that moment the spoon slipped out of the grasp of the tongs and fell back into the well with a tiny splash. Elizabeth gasped aloud, leaned forward, and plunged the tongs into the water, making a wild, futile effort to retrieve the spoon. Phil watched as it sank away into the depths, still glinting in the moonlight and somehow magnified by the clear, moonlit water.

Ripples spread across the well, casting a hundred shifting shadows, the lines of light and shadow swirling together, crisscrossing in geometric confusion. Phil impulsively stepped back away from the edge, struck with an uncanny and indefinable premonition. He shivered, feeling a mournful presence on the wind, hearing a voice that whispered through the dead winter grass. He glanced at Elizabeth, who stared intently into the depths, her mouth partly open, as if she wanted to speak but couldn’t quite.

And then there was a sudden and inexplicable shift in the motion of the well water, an instant in which the wind died and the water itself stood still. He looked into the moonlit depths, and there came into his mind the idea that for the past few moments he had been watching something in a mirror, but that now he could see
through
the mirror, and the moonlight shone from out of a starry sky that lay somewhere beneath the water itself. Just then the moon became one with the silver oval of the still-sinking spoon, and until it sank away utterly and disappeared, he was certain that what he saw was not the reflection of the moon at all, but the pale face of a child, its eyes closed in sleep or in death.

Vieja Canyon
1884

THE WIND GUSTED
through the oaks along the narrow road into Vieja Canyon. At two in the morning, the night was dark and cold, the sky cloudy. Colin had begun to regret confiding in Father Santos at the mission. Offering to recover the crystal obligated him to recover it, and right now he felt the weight of that obligation, mainly as fear. But, as the saying went, it was too late to turn back, and he walked along toward the Solas ranch house at a quick, careful pace. His borrowed horse and buggy were tied up at the crossroads a mile below, and it was a mile more to the ranch, which would be I deserted, the Solas family having gone out visiting. If his source of information was correct, they wouldn’t return until the day after tomorrow, and by that time the crystal—if in fact he would find it in the house at all—would be safe at the mission. If he couldn’t find the crystal, then perhaps he would have to live with the failure.

He had been to the Solas ranch twice before, when he had first met Alejandro, and he had spent the night there both times. He could easily picture the interior of the main house—the rooms on both floors, the broad stairs, the French windows letting out onto the sleeping porches.

The roadside oaks dwindled, and the land opened up. There was a pasture to the right, the winter grass blowing in waves like a black ocean, and on the left, the ranch house itself, sheltered by sycamores on the west and south sides. There were no lamps lit, no sign of movement. The bunkhouse and barn lay several hundred yards beyond the main house, but they were also dark. Colin walked straight up the graveled path to the wooden porch, where he took off his boots and set them together by the stairs. The house wouldn’t be empty; there would be servants inside, long asleep. He walked up onto the porch, slipping past uncurtained windows, listening to the silence.

Alejandro’s rooms lay on the west side of the house, isolated, open to the porch through a half-dozen long windows. He tried the windows one by one, but all were latched, probably against the winter weather. There was a single door, though, that led, as he recalled, into a long hallway. He stood listening outside this door for a moment, then grasped the knob and turned. The door whispered open, revealing a deep darkness. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him, and then stood still for a moment, listening. A clock ticked somewhere within, and almost as soon as he became aware of the ticking, the clock chimed the half hour. Two-thirty now: nearly three hours of darkness left to him, but only an hour or so of safety before men would be stirring, looking after the stock. And he would have to be back down the road out of the canyon before the first light. He couldn’t afford to be seen by anyone.

He followed the hallway to the first door he came to, which he opened, stepping inside and shutting it behind him. He took a candle from his pants pocket, fixed it into a pewter holder, lit the candle, and held it overhead, casting a flickering glow all around him. He was in Alejandro’s bedchamber. It was an austerely decorated room: dark wood paneling, heavily carved furniture in the Spanish style, a bureau, a bed, and two large chests that stood side by side on the floor. There were two paintings on the wall, both of rugged seacoasts. He set the candle on the bureau and opened the top drawer, moving things aside gingerly. Alejandro was obsessively neat, and he would notice immediately if his things had been disturbed.

He reached into his coat pocket and removed the cowry shell, which he still carried in the glove. He pushed the fabric of the glove away from the shell, being careful not to touch it, and he watched it intently for the telltale glow. The shell sat inertly on the folds of white cloth. One by one he opened the drawers in the bureau and shut them again. There was no hint of illumination in the seashell. He moved on to the chests on the floor, opening the first of them and looking into the interior. The contents were hidden by a blanket, which he lifted to reveal what lay beneath. There were photographs, books, what might be clothing, all of it arranged in such a way as to suggest that it had lain undisturbed for a long time. The contents apparently had no effect at all on the cowry, and he wondered abruptly if Father Santos was absolutely certain that the shell would respond, whether he had intended for Colin to depend on it utterly, or whether it would come down simply to ransacking the room. He opened the second chest, discovered nothing, and closed both of them up again. After a last quick glance around the room, he picked up the candle and went through a second door into the library.

It had been in the library that Alejandro had entertained them months ago. Somehow Alejandro had struck Colin as dashing and interesting then. He had seemed to have no knowledge of the books in his own library, something that he had been obscurely proud of, and in the course of the evening he had tossed a book now and then into the fire, suggesting that the books burned more brightly than oak logs, laughing when both Jeanette and May had protested. Colin had pretended to find his cavalier attitude amusing, something that he recalled now with a sense of shame.

The drawers in the library desk were nearly empty. He didn’t need the cowry to see that there was no crystal hidden inside. The books on the library shelves also apparently hid nothing. He heard the clock chime again: three o’clock now, and suddenly the time seemed short. He hastened around the room, the house seeming suddenly vast to him. And there was no reason at all to believe that Alejandro hadn’t taken the crystal with him. This entire search was quite possibly entirely futile, in which case risk was senseless, worse than senseless.

He went out into the hall again, found a third room, and entered, carrying the candle. It was a parlor, but it had a closed-up feel to it, and aside from some stiff-looking chairs and simple wooden tables, there was little furniture in it—nowhere, certainly, to hide anything. He wandered around the room anyway, filled with a growing futility, looking impatiently into two narrow drawers in a tobacco table. Why he had ever thought that Alejandro would leave the crystal unattended, he couldn’t any longer recall, and he hurried back into the library, rejecting the idea of going through the rest of the house. All of this looked to him now like monumental foolishness, senseless risk. Surely the crystal wouldn’t be in the kitchen, say, or in any other room used by the rest of the household. It might easily be buried in the garden, or in Alejandro’s saddlebags in the barn, or at the bottom of a jar of molasses. It might be on the moon, for all the good it would do him.

But then, just as he made up his mind to get out, he saw that the cowry was glowing. At first glance he took the glow to be candlelight, but clearly it wasn’t. The shell itself appeared to be restored—not the weathered and streaked object that he had seen in the mission courtyard and had been carrying from room to room, but the pristine shell that Father Santos had first shown him in the cellar. The glow came from within the shell, illuminating the wreathing smoke, which seemed actually to move now, languidly, the shape undulating slowly as if in a breath of wind.

He looked around him, but there was no apparent hiding place nearby aside from the fireplace itself. He lay the glowing seashell on the mantel and pushed at the stones, running the candlelight over the mortar between them. With the fireplace poker he pushed at the burnt logs in the grate, sliding the cowry into the firebox itself. If anything the glow diminished within the stone confines of the box, but glowed doubly brightly on the mantel. He felt along the wooden edges, looking for a hidden latch. Finally, in desperation, he pushed against the front of the mantel itself, and the entire wooden structure of the thing depressed inward and then sprang back out, the front face opening away from the rest of the mantel. The cowry tumbled backward, falling into the opening, and without thinking he snatched at it, catching it with his fingers and closing his hand over it. …

… and at once he felt as if he were falling, headfirst down a dark well. Then, with a sudden jolt, someone J stood before him—a bearded man, scowling, holding a narrow stick in his hand. He knew it was a stick without seeing it—he
remembered
that it was a stick—and recoiled even as the man swung it at him. He felt the sharp pain of the stick hitting his wrist, and in that instant he dropped the cowry, heard the clatter of the object falling on stone and the clang of metal against metal. He staggered backward, caught himself on the desk in the room, and found himself staring at the fireplace tools, which lay now on the hearth next to the fallen cowry. His mind was clouded with confusion, and he put his hand to his forehead, recalling the racing fear that had filled his head only moments ago, the loss of himself, the presence of someone else’s mind within his own. …

Groggily, he picked up the iron tools, hanging them on their rack and listening again to the house. He heard what must be a door creaking open and the sound of low voices, and he stood up and groped in the darkness of the hidden space within the mantel. He found the glove, but continued to search until he found, pushed toward the back of the space, a leather bag with something solid inside. He took it out, glanced at it hastily, and slipped it into his pocket, then picked up the fallen cowry with the glove, shoved it into another pocket, and pushed the mantel closed before going straight out into the hall.