The Rainy Season Read Online Free PDF

MURDERED THE girl. They drowned her. Alejandro seemed to be amused by it when he described it to me.”
    Colin O’Brian finished the coffee that Jeanette had poured into his porcelain teacup, and he sat for a moment looking blankly at the grounds in the bottom of the cup. His life so far had been spent being tempted toward monastic life while actually becoming a schoolteacher and falling in love with Jeanette. Murder and dark magic were utterly foreign to him and, he would have thought, foreign to the quiet ruralism of Orange County. “He was trying to irritate you,” Colin told her finally. “That’s what he finds amusing.” He had only known Alejandro for six months. The man’s superficial charm had worn thin after about three of those months. Still, he was surprised at what Jeanette was telling him.
    She got up and went to the stove, taking up the coffeepot and pouring Colin and her friend May another cup. “He pretends to find everything amusing, but I don’t believe that the man has ever been honestly amused.”
    “Perhaps Alejandro was making all this up,” Colin said hopefully. “What do you think, May? It would be typical of him to try to impress either of you with a lie.”
    Colin regarded May’s face in the lamplight. She was three years older than Jeanette, more experienced, already slightly careworn, although she was only in her mid-twenties. “I wish he were lying, because there was a time when I considered him a friend.”
    “Before you knew him,” Jeanette said. “Before any of us actually knew him.”
    May nodded. “I’m certain he’s telling the truth. The mere fact that he lies doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do other despicable things. It makes it even more likely that he does. I believe now that the man is capable of anything. His charm is a veneer, Colin.
Very
thin.”
    Colin found himself abruptly thinking that if he weren’t already in love with Jeanette, he could easily be in love with May. There were things in May’s past that she didn’t talk about, nor did Jeanette betray her friend by revealing those things to Colin, but in some regard that mystery simply made May even more appealing.
    She noticed that he was looking at her now, and he looked away. A moment later, when he glanced at her again, she was looking down at her hands. He purposely stopped his mind from running and paid attention to Jeanette, who said, “Colin, I
believe
what he said about the crystal object. I saw it. I can’t explain it very well, but it had … ghosts. There was
something
of that little girl in the crystal. That much is certainly no lie. I don’t think he’s lying about any of it.” Jeanette’s cheek was shaded with a faint bruise where Alejandro had struck her. The idea of it made him furious, more furious than Alejandro’s being mixed up in an alleged murder. Jeanette had struck Alejandro back with a fireplace shovel. The blow to Alejandro’s pride would eat him alive, which would make him dangerous. What Colin would do about it, what he would do about any of this, was uncertain, but he would have to act quickly, before Alejandro was driven to some craven act of revenge.
    “What do you mean, ghosts?” he asked. Part of him, he realized, waited with an unhealthy fascination for her answer, and he pushed his curiosity back down into the darkness.
    “I could see something. At first like moving shadows, and then something more—a picture on the air. I could hear things, the neighing of a horse, a girl’s laughter.
    “And it was from the girl’s memory, you think?”
    “Only because there’s no reason to think anything else. He wouldn’t lie about
that
, would he? I had a sense at first of being in an open space. I could smell sage, wet vegetation. Then there was sunlight, moving grass. I even saw beehives. It was on a meadow. Then Alex put it away. It was absolutely haunting—frightening.”
    Rain drummed on the roof now, and Colin glanced at the window and the darkness beyond,