Every Year, Rain is an in-progress, serialized supernatural thriller. This is Chapter Four. Click HERE to start at the beginning.
In Chapter Three, Everett followed the only lead he had to a carnival and received a cryptic warning from a fortune teller, then discovered Malmacchío’s book in the hands of an enemy.
In this chapter, Everett tries to retrieve the book and reconnects with Daniel’s wife, Chandra.
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“King // Thief”
I don’t think it occurred to Jess that we were not in fact “nearly engaged” until the night I left.
That revelation must have fallen like a match guttering in the vast chasm that separated my past from the intimacy she craved. A match that blinked out with my brake lights disappearing into the darkness. Though blind to all I had withheld, Jess was no fool. No one chases even their last match into a bottomless pit. And when it burns your fingers before it descends, well, good riddance.
What else could I have done? There are things you cannot share with a woman as she sits in the shade of freshly-leafed cottonwoods, relishing the soft almond paste of a croissant. Or as she witnesses the burning globes of hot air balloons rising into the sky like prismatic starlings for the hundredth time, still receiving them with undiminished wonder. Every ghost has a past, and they rage for there are none to whom it can be told.
The desert had been my grave, and standing in Brent’s living room staring at the goatskin notebook spread on the bar beneath his hands, I knew I never could go back.
Crouched over the book, Brent watched me like a preacher preparing to pounce on an unrepentant sinner, and the other guests, attentive as congregants, were silent. I couldn’t know how much he’d read since I’d seen the book in Malmacchío’s hands at Daniel’s funeral. I imagined Malmacchío’s book contained plenty of unfavorable passages concerning Brent. That’s probably why Malmacchío gave it to him. If he could quote my thoughts, chapter and verse, he wouldn’t hesitate to condemn me before that gathered host.
Brent snapped the book shut without warning and cupped his hand around his mouth.
“All hail the king!” he shouted. “He comes to us in beggar’s dress, but don’t be fooled. Surely, a king of old is standing in our midst.”
Sam and the other guests chuckled as Brent marched around the bar, his hands articulating around the valves of an invisible trumpet. He didn’t let up his charade until he’d marched across the room and gripped my shoulder too hard. I was pinned like a rodent the house cat is enjoying too much to kill. He leaned toward his audience conspiratorially.
“But maybe he’s a wicked king. It’s been some time since he has shown his face. The desert is refuge to princes who have shed another’s blood. Have any of you suffered at his hand?”
Brent perked up and scanned the room for my detractors. The twins, Mary-Beth and Viv, sat beside their husbands on the couch with their mouths hanging open in dumb amusement. Brent looked at me warily.
“It seems your reputation’s safe for now, my lord. Onward to your merry court.”
The furniture in his living room was arranged at right angles around his television. A prison cell. As warden, he escorted me through the geometry of the furniture and stood me before a chair with black leather backing and mid-century curves.
“Take your throne, my liege.”
I wasn’t sure what game this was but knew I didn’t want to play. I looked to Nick for help, but he was enjoying the show. Brent frowned at my hesitation.
“Come now. A king too proud to take his throne is one in need of humbling. Don’t you agree?”
He fixed me with the same haughty smile he’d always worn upon rising behind the referee after a dirty slide tackle. I could feel my jaw clenching. In another life, I would have put him on his back, brought my weight to bear on his chest, and gotten him to cry uncle. The pulse of pain in my thigh and hands pleaded against my trying. Assuming my body cooperated, humiliating him wouldn’t shut him up. Losing a fight had never stopped the trash-talk his mouth dispensed.
The swinging screech of the storm door broke the silence. The knob turned, and the front door crept ajar with the measured slowness of a cat burglar entering the room of a sleeping babe. Cool air and the patter of rain on asphalt swept in, and when the door was a quarter of the way open, the great brown braid of Chandra’s head spilled into view as she peeked into the house. Her reception was warm but subdued compared to Nick and Sam’s, the room’s enthusiasm strangled somewhat by the bitterness of grief.
“There she is,” said Brent, dropping his theatrics.
The tension in my jaw dissipated as Chandra meekly stepped inside. She wore a black belt cinched around the waist of a green dress. Brent kissed her cheek, and she blushed as he took her by the arm and led her toward the counter. My eyes shot to the notebook, but Brent passed beyond it to a brass liquor caddy.
“Apéritif? Or something harder? I have some Tanqueray if you’re in the mood for a G&T.”
As Brent shuffled bottles around on the cart, the twins went back to whispering to their husbands, and Chandra’s gaze drifted around the room. I waited for her eyes to find mine, and something like surprise tinged her sadness when she spotted me. She mouthed, Hey, allowing herself a quizzical smile. I thought she looked happy to see me, anyway. Brent drew her attention to his liquor stock, and I sank into the mid-century chair.
Sam sat on the couch and whacked my thigh with the back of her hand, sending a shock that made my abdomen clench.
“Don’t be such a stick in the mud,” she whispered.
“What’s with the jester act?”
She shrugged a single shoulder.
“Something for a play. He likes to get into character.”
“It’s a bit much,” I said.
Sam leaned toward me with a reproving look.
“You’ve been here five minutes.”
The door swung open again, and people swarmed in like black ants carrying sustenance to their nest—liquor bottles with white labels. It was almost impossible to distinguish an individual among them, though I knew them all by name. Recognized their faces despite the thinner hair and duller skin. Brent threw his arms in the air and shouted welcome. He slipped an arm around Chandra, and she stumbled beside him as he rushed her toward the mass of people. He grabbed a lanky blond man by the shoulders in a pantomime of shock, marveling apparently at the red glow of bourbon in the man’s hands. The twins and their husbands rose from the couch, and Sam swept across the room to hug a girl we’d known since high school.
I was alone in the lounge area. The notebook sat untended on the bar, there for anyone’s taking.
The path beside the couch backs and the chittering guests was narrow. Between the gray walls and the dark attire of the latest arrivals, I passed through gloom. The only color was the green of Chandra’s dress. She tugged nervously at its skirt as the man with the bourbon turned a pitying gaze upon her. I willed myself into obscurity, hoping my former friends were sufficiently distracted and I could hobble by unnoticed.
At every moment, I expected Malmacchío to rise from behind the bar with his coyote grin, laughing and drawing everyone’s attention to me as he recounted my crimes. To my surprise, I closed the distance to the vellum notebook. It did not flee or vanish as it had the night Malmacchío invited me to bathe in flame. It almost seemed harmless sitting there on the bar. The singeing of its cover had effected a worn-out quality. It looked like a tired old man who no longer had energy for the mischief of his youth.
As I laid my hand on the book, someone shouted, “Hey!” and my insides curled up like the thousand legs of a millipede.
With my hand still touching the cover, I turned to the accoster. No one looked at me. The shout had greeted yet another guest wandering through Brent’s open door.
I slid the book off the bar and into my jacket, keeping my hand in my pocket to hold it in place. I walked to the liquor caddy, bent down, and pretended to peruse Brent’s stock. The book’s rough-cut pages brushed against my fingers as I reached across my stomach to pull it out. Just then, a hand slapping my rear yanked me upright. Brent winked at me as he grabbed a pair of highball glasses from the caddy.
“I haven’t forgotten about you, Mr. King,” he said, handing a glass to the man with the bourbon. “We have a lot to talk about. You want a drink?”
“I’m all set.”
Amber liquid spilled into one highball glass and then the other, and Brent and the blond man raised their glasses in salute and brought the glasses to their lips. Brent closed his eyes, raised his chin, and shook his head thoughtfully.
“Who’s better than you?”
The other man smiled.
The guests dispersed from the doorway, seeping into Brent’s house in black clumps and sequestering in any corner or nook where one might have hoped to find a moment’s privacy. My bandaged hand struggled to maintain its awkward grip on the book through my pocket. Beyond the brass caddy, a sliding glass door led to an empty porch, but I doubted I could slip out to read the book without provoking inquiry.
Across the room, Chandra stood just inside the front door with Sam and another girl. Brent’s eyes lingered on her.
“That dress,” he said. “It has intentions I want to uncover.”
“Definitely,” said the other man.
“It’s speaking to me. And I’m all ears.”
Brent took another sip of the bourbon and grunted his satisfaction. He jostled the glass in my direction.
“You sure you don’t want a drink?”
“So, it’s not just Chandra you’re trying to get drunk tonight. No, I’m good. I feel like being sober.”
“In a room full of drunks, it’s the sober man you have to look out for.”
“Maybe. But somebody has to keep an eye on the man handing out the drinks.”
Brent smiled into the rim of his tilted glass. A stream of red disappeared behind his lips, and he wiped his arm across his mouth.
“Since when are you such a saint, King?”
“A man was buried today.”
His eyes widened, and he pointed a finger at me, and I knew I had provoked something that could not be undone.
“Yes,” he said. “You’re right.”
Brent smacked his hands together and walked to the bar. Everyone’s head turned at the sound of his percussive claps. I pressed the book against my body, but he didn’t seem to notice its absence from the countertop. Satisfied he had everyone’s attention, Brent leaned against the bar and let the silence hang.
“I’ve invited you all here for a reason,” he said finally. “A man’s life was taken from us. Stolen, truly. We gather to grieve the injustice of an innocent man losing his life. Yet the thief roams free. He’s here, in this room, waiting to steal again. How much more are we willing to let that thief take?”
He paused and stared at Chandra with determined sympathy until she dropped her eyes. The furrows of Sam’s forehead seemed an impossible crumpling of her china-white skin, and Nick tapped his chin thoughtfully with his thumb. On the couch, the twins looked stunned, as though their host were preparing to undo his bathrobe and they couldn’t look away even if they weren’t particularly interested in what was being uncovered.
Brent seemed determined to make eye contact with every guest, and when his gaze had circumnavigated the room, he winked his left eye at me, hidden as it was from the other guests.
“Death took Daniel’s life. It’s true, but we cannot let him steal tonight. That’s exactly why I’ve spent the past week working on a musical tribute to Daniel.”
The twins threw their hands to their chests and breathed a sigh of relief, then joined the applause of the rest of the room. Nick looked at me, rolled his eyes, and gave a few half-hearted claps.
“To the studio!” Brent shouted. “Let’s pry off the many masks of grief and dance into the future!”
Brent spun around the bar and resumed his trumpeting charade, marching the guests toward a back room like some tone-deaf pied piper.
As everyone filtered out of the living room, I inched closer to the sliding glass door. No one noticed as I eased it open, stepped outside, and slid the door shut, finally alone.
A confusion of muddy footprints formed a path across the glossy white boards of the covered porch. The walls were white, along with the rafters, so that the whole area incandesced subtly with the ambient light from inside. I dragged myself to the far edge of the porch and stood with my back to the house. In the glow of the porch gloss, the notebook had an eerie quality. It was a portal to distant parts of me I had excised and taken care to lay to rest, an amulet that had already awoken something within me before I’d even beheld its words of power. The ramifications of cracking open its pages I could not know.
Faint lettering adorned the cover, nearly illegible. As I drew closer to inspect the words, the rafters ignited with light, engulfing me in a white blaze. Suddenly, bulb lights illuminated the recessed spaces between the roof’s two-by-six supports. The sliding door huffed open and shut behind me, and I scrambled to force the notebook into my jacket pocket as I turned around, though it wouldn’t quite fit.
Just outside the door stood Chandra. The green of her dress and brown of her hair were the first formations of an artist’s masterwork amid the glaring blank-canvas white. Dipping her head, Chandra let her hair veil her face as she sketched a line toward the railing opposite the door.
“Doing some light reading?” she said with a glance at the book, which still stuck halfway out of my pocket.
There was no hiding it. My heart raced as I swung the book in front of me and shrugged.
“Just a notebook, full of my thoughts.”
“Oooo… Be careful where you leave a book like that. I’m not bold enough to ask, but I’d be tempted to take a look.”
“It’d probably read like nonsense to anybody else.”
“Probably,” she said. “Understanding a person takes work, no matter how much they mean to you.”
She leaned over the railing and looked up at the night sky.
“It feels like the moon hasn’t moved in a week,” she said.
I limped forward and leaned beside Chandra. Water droplets collected at the edge of the corrugated roofing, descended silently to the grass below. The clouds, backlit like a lampshade, cloaked the moon. Its presence hanging like an accusation.
Chandra sighed.
“I can’t tell you how many times I nearly turned around on the way here. Nothing has felt right since Daniel died. No one’s pity can change that. But that’s all anyone has for me lately. When I saw you in Brent’s living room, I thought, there’s one person who won’t pity me at least.”
“The whole thing is surreal. If someone had told me that you and I would be standing on a back porch at a memorial for Daniel, I never would have guessed the porch would be Brent’s.”
Chandra looked at me over the gentle wave in the ridge of her nose and tightened her lips.
“You were gone,” she said.
A bassline thumped out of Brent’s studio, shook through the house, and barked into the night sky like a massive dog defending its territory. Brent’s vocals whinged indistinguishable melodies over the arrangement. With a wince, Chandra crushed her eyelids shut.
“I don’t know how any of this happened,” she said. “Standing over his grave, I couldn’t make sense of it. Only the dirt sprinkled on the casket felt right. The rest was too polished. Like it was trying to imitate life. But that’s never how it was.” She glanced again at the book in my hands. “If Daniel had kept a notebook like that, I would have read it in a second. You and him have always been, I don’t know. Enigmatic.”
“I never got the sense you didn’t understand him.”
“Before we were married, I thought I did. I thought if I could just see him from the right perspective I’d be able to make sense of the past’s brushwork, maybe add a few strokes of my own. Tease out his form from the light and the dark. You were still around then. Who knows? Maybe you were the key to understanding him. It’s funny how the absence of one person can change the trajectory of a life. I guess that’s how you end up a widow standing on the porch of someone like Brent.”
“I wish it could have been different.”
“Couldn’t it have? Daniel lost something when you left. It was five years being married to a ghost whose unfinished business I could never figure out.”
I passed the notebook to my other hand, further from Chandra. I knew I had been living like the dead, but I never imagined Daniel skulking through life with Chandra at his side.
“If it’s any consolation, it was agony for me too.”
Chandra fidgeted, slid her hand toward me, and found the tips of my fingers past the bandages.
“I know,” she said.
Her touch made my stomach churn, and I gripped the notebook even tighter. Death must have set in the instant Daniel had lowered himself upon that throne, his life drifting away as steadily as his place in the minds of those through whom he’d be survived. We’d been living a second life, coeval with death. A tarnished existence that could finally be revoked, repudiated in a manner befitting all things that would have been better off never having been. We’d taken a wrong turn. If I could subdue the past, we could reclaim the course we should have walked all along.
“Do you see much of Cate Heck?”
Chandra spit out a laugh and shook her head.
“You and Daniel really are the same. No, I don’t see much of her. She dreamed up this documentary project about, in her words, ‘the latent monasticism’ of homeless communities. She thought poverty had inherent spiritual power. Leave it to Cate to let wretchedness seduce her. She found something greater than herself alright, and she went from filming the destitute to being one of them.”
“Her obsession with the occult was more than a little unhinged, even at the best of times.”
“The last month or so, Daniel kept slipping off in the night, going down to that old warehouse on Mill St, to visit her. He said he found her once camping under an abandoned overpass that was supposed to connect to I-84. Who knows how she got there. She came to the funeral, actually. She looked and sounded like hell.”
“You talked with her?”
“I wouldn’t say that. She managed to croak out that she had something to tell me about Daniel. I half-expect to find her waiting at my door tonight.”
I really couldn’t catch a break.
“Sounds ominous,” I said. “Remember, vampires can’t come in unless they’re invited.”
“I’ll have to extend her an invitation then. My husband was a mystery, and Cate’s my only bridge to the dead. Unless you have something in that notebook of yours.”
I tried again to force the book into my pocket, only succeeding as it curled out of shape.
“If there’s something you want to know, ask. I’m an open book.”
“Everett King, an open book? That’s funny,” Chandra said. She drummed her fingers on the railing. “I can’t say I don’t envy Sam. There’s no guesswork with a guy like Nick. The surface reveals the whole. Happiness can’t be far off when you know exactly what you’re getting into. And yet, I find myself drawn to more opaque personalities. I want to see what nobody else can.”
She looked at me with sorrowful expectation. There was mourning but the possibility of a future too. Some other evening.
Brent’s song faded to its conclusion. We both turned to the sliding door, waiting for everyone to pour into the living room from the studio. A few moments later, another song shook the house. I suspected no one would leave that room without hearing the entire corpus of Brent’s unreleased works.
I wanted to savor that moment with Chandra, but the book weighed heavily in my pocket. I needed to read it. Alone. I needed to know what Cate was planning to reveal.
“I’d better get going,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking showing up here in the first place.”
“That makes two of us.” Chandra looked away and swept her braid over her shoulder. “You know, if you’re going to be around, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of you. Maybe you can tell me how you got that limp.”
“Maybe I will.”
She squeezed my fingers and let me slip across the porch, back into the house where Brent’s music assaulted my ears, and out the front door. Cars lined both sides of the road now, glistening damply in the streetlight. Through the rain-spattered windows, my rental’s interior lights illuminated the steering wheel and the back of the headrest. The last thing I needed was to go begging for a jump. I hurried into the driver’s seat and fitted the key in the ignition. The car turned over without a problem.
With no further hesitation, I peeled the vellum notebook open. Blank pages filled the back of the book. More than enough to accommodate a full life. I flipped toward the front until I found writing scrawled in list form down a page: Muddle 1/2 tsp vanilla, 3/4 tbsp sugar, and blkberries. Add 1/2 oz lemon, 1.5 oz Vodka. Stir until dissolved. The preceding pages were filled with similar lists of ingredients and recipe instructions. Dark splotches of fruit, liquor, or some combination of the two marked pages at random. The very first page titled the work as The Master Mixologist and was signed by Brent.
This story will be continued in Chapter Five…
It keeps me wanting more!