The Rainy Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

thinking about the weather. His coat and outer shirt were drying in front of the fire. The road outside was a muddy torrent. His horse was stabled in the barn, which is where he had planned to sleep tonight.
    “We believe that he intends to sell it back to Hale Appleton,” May said. “He’s talked about little else but Appleton’s money for a month now.”
    “I wonder if he won’t simply keep it,” Colin said. “Owning it would give him a certain esteem, wouldn’t it?” He wondered if he himself would sell it. Almost any man would have ambivalent feelings about giving up such an apparently magical object, money or no money. There was something enormously attractive about the idea of losing oneself in the memory of a child. He recalled places in his own memories of childhood where he might easily reside, perhaps forever. …
    “It would quite likely get him shot,” Jeanette said.
    “What?” Colin asked. “I’m sorry … what would get him shot?”
    “Keeping the crystal,” May said. “Appleton will take a dangerously narrow view of this.”
    Colin looked into the; fire, which had flared up. He could hear the wind outside, blowing through the eaves of the cabin. “Why would Alejandro care about Appleton’s money?” he asked. “His family owns thirty thousand acres.”
    “Perhaps because he’s dependent on his father,” May said. “He’s a layabout, and everyone’s aware of that. It rankles him. And there’s very little risk, you see, of ransoming the crystal. If Appleton drowned his own daughter in order to save her, as Alejandro put it, then Appleton could hardly charge Alejandro with a crime. He wouldn’t go to the sheriff. And I don’t believe he would harm Alejandro in order to retrieve it, because that would be the end of him unless he fled. The Solas family is too powerful. Alejandro understands all of this. He knows Appleton will simply pay the ransom if it’s within his power to pay it.”
    “You should have heard him talking,” Jeanette said. “He knows everything about Appleton—how much he’s worth, to the penny. He’s unbelievably smug and confident about it all, even though there’s already been a man murdered because of the theft. Alejandro had an associate inside the Societas. Surely you read about the murder?”
    “The dead man in the river?” Colin asked. A man’s body had been pulled from the Santa Ana River near Placentia not even two days ago. He had been shot twice. The newspaper had said that his identity was unknown. “Appleton murdered him for helping Alejandro?”
    “So Alejandro told me. He was very bold with the details. He had paid the man some small sum to steal the crystal, and shortly after that the man was murdered. Alejandro seemed to consider the man’s death simply a loose end tied up.”
    At least a dozen oil lamps were lit around the room, and the effect of the lamplight and firelight and coffee was cheerful and sustaining, entirely at odds with what Jeanette had told him about the drowning of the child, about Alejandro’s stealing the crystal object that supposedly contained the girl’s cast-off memory, about the murdered man in the river …
    “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Alejandro himself shot the man,” May said after a moment. She looked seriously at Colin. Her suggestion was dangerously likely. Alejandro was no doubt capable of the basest sort of betrayal, including murdering his associate.
    “Describe the object to me,” he said to Jeanette.
    “It’s a bit of bluish crystal, like misty glass, shaped vaguely like a crouching dog. That’s what it immediately suggested to me, although I can’t quite say why. It was rather like a shape you see in the clouds and that sets off your imagination. But I still have the distinct notion that it had that shape, if I make myself clear.”
    “How large?”
    “You might hold it easily in the palm of your hand. The length of a pair of spectacles, I’d say. The thickness of a book