THE AVOCADO GROVE COVERED a little more than two acres on the sloping rim of Cinnamon Canyon. Carmen parked her car on the crest of a hill and got out, shading her eyes to survey the land below her. In the distance, smoke rose above the horizon, the latest in a string of fires burning their way toward Valle Rosa. Last night, the blaze had destroyed six homes and killed a teenaged girl who had apparently slept through the warnings to evacuate. In the middle of the night, Carmen visited the neighborhood with a camera crew. The people looked exhausted. “Don’t know how much more of this we can take,” one woman said into Carmen’s microphone.
Carmen had slept poorly after that midnight outing, haunted by the vision of the fire fighters dragging the charred body of the girl from the ruins of one of the houses, so she had been awake when Jeff started his car in the driveway of the adobe. It wasn’t quite five o’clock. She put on her robe and looked out the bedroom window to see his tail lights disappear around the first curve in the road. Her curiosity wouldn’t allow her to go back to sleep. She got dressed and drove to the warehouse, stopping the car a block away to watch as Jeff and Rick pulled the two flatbed trucks out into the street. She followed them at a distance as they drove to the grove, then used her car phone to call the station, requesting they send a camera crew to this little corner of Cinnamon Canyon as quickly as possible.
Rick had parked his truck at the south end of the grove, closest to where Carmen stood, while Jeff had parked his to the north, a good distance away. The arrangement of the trucks seemed important, and the men had shifted them back and forth on their respective roads in a peculiar pas de deuxbefore being satisfied with their resting spots. It wasn’t until Rick got out of the truck that Carmen realized they were communicating with one another by two-way radios. Rick spoke into the little box in his hand, and Jeff waved to him from the other side of the grove.
She wished she had binoculars. From this distance, each truck looked identical. Each carried what appeared to be something like a satellite dish, surrounded by three tall, broad white cylinders. There were several black boxes on the floor of the trucks, boxes which must have had buttons or knobs on them, because Rick and Jeff knelt next to them, pressing or pulling or turning things, talking all the while into the radios in their hands.
Suddenly, Rick turned around, and Carmen knew she’d been spotted. Jeff stood on the flatbed of his truck, one hand on his hip, the other holding the radio. Obviously, he and Rick were discussing her presence. In another minute, Rick jumped off the back of his truck and started walking up the canyon toward her, working his way through the thick, leathery chaparral. She was glad it was Rick she would have to deal with and not Jeff.
The News Nine van arrived on the road behind her just as Rick neared the crest. Jake Carney and Toby Wells sauntered lazily out of the van, laughing.
“They only sent two of you?” she asked, disappointed. No one was taking this very seriously.
“Right,” Jake said, opening the rear of the van for his equipment. He stopped to wipe his forehead with a red bandana pulled from his pocket. “Christ, it’s hotter than blazes out here already.”
“Well, come on,” Carmen said. “We’re going to have to try to get closer.”
“You can’t.” Rick skirted a withered scrub oak on the ridge and came to a stop in front of her. He was winded. Sweat matted his blond hair to his forehead. “Jeff says for you to keep your distance.”
“What exactly are you doing?” Carmen asked.
Rick looked across the grove at Jeff, as though wondering how much the older man would want him to say. “It’s an experiment.” He spoke with cautious apprehension, but the boyish excitement in his eyes was unmistakable.
“I’d like the cameras to get a little closer, please,” Carmen said. “We need a better look at the trucks.”
“No,” Rick said with some force in his voice. “You can’t come any closer than this. It’ll interfere, okay? This is delicate stuff.” He started walking back toward the canyon.
“What if one of the cameramen came down on foot?” Carmen called after him.
Rick faced her again with a groan and an exaggerated slump of his shoulders. He said something into the radio, then took a few steps toward her, holding the little box in front of him. “He wants to talk to you,” he said.
She took the device from Rick’s hand and held it to her ear. She looked to the north, where Jeff stood facing her from the truck. “Hello?” she said.
“Do you want to see rain fall over Valle Rosa, Carmen?” Jeff’s voice crackled in her ear.
She thought she could actually feel his eyes locking with hers across the expanse of the grove.
“Yes,” she said.
“Then stay right where you are. No closer. All right?”
“All right,” she said, defeated.
Rick took the radio from her hand, and as he made his way back into the canyon, Carmen turned to Jake and Toby.
“We’ll film it from here,” she said.
“Film what from here?” Toby asked.
“Typical Valle Rosa footage,” Jake said, sitting down on the crest. “Blue sky, yellow sun, dead avocado trees.” He pulled the red bandana from his pocket again and wiped it across his forehead.
An hour later, Jake and Toby were sprawled on the dusty earth, sweating profusely and drinking orange soda out of cans. Carmen had refused their offers of something to drink, although she was very hot. Her blouse was stuck to her back with sweat; she wished she could roll up the long sleeves. Walking back and forth along the rim of the canyon, she watched as Rick and Jeff fiddled with their equipment, spoke into their radios, and gestured to one another with broad sweeps of their arms.
“Nice little wild goose chase, Carmo,” Jake said, yawning. The van radio sputtered behind them, and Toby slowly got to his feet. He paced back to the van, and a few minutes later came to stand next to Carmen.
“We’re wanted in Escondido,” he said. “Four alarm fire and they—”
“Shh!” Carmen held her hand up to stop him. She raised her chin, turned her head, struggling to hear… what? Something different, something very faint. A high-pitched hum. Soft, but growing louder, so loud that Jake got up off the ground to join them on the ridge, staring in the direction of the trucks.
And then it happened. At first it was a mere hint of gray in the sky over the grove. Carmen thought it was her imagination, but then the gray deepened—and spread. Rick spoke into his radio, and he and Jeff knelt next to their black boxes, pressing buttons, turning knobs, as the blue of the sky between the two trucks gradually gave way to the thickening gray shadow.
“Holy shit,” said Toby.
“Get the cameras!” Carmen ordered, and in a minute the phenomenon was being caught on film. The cloud spread across the sky, slowly, like syrup, its color now an opaque, ominous near-black. There was a churning at its core, a slow-moving, dark tumble of mist, suspended directly above the center of the grove. The churning spread as the ends of the roiling cloud reached toward the trucks, and the grove was blanketed in thick, cool shadow.
And then the rain began. Not a mist, not a shower, but a pelting, teeming rain that beat against the dying leaves of the avocado trees, while Carmen and Jake and Toby stood awestruck on the sunlit ridge of the canyon.
Carmen told Toby to film her as she took a few steps into the canyon. When she’d reached the rain, she turned to face the camera, laughing out loud, holding her arms out to her sides, palms up.
“This is Carmen Perez,” she said to the camera. “I’m standing on the rim of Cinnamon Canyon, where a small miracle is taking place.” She brushed a thick, wet strand of hair from her cheek. “On what is otherwise a typically dry, sunny southern California day, rain is falling over this heat-ravaged avocado grove behind me. In an experimental test of their rainmaking technology, Valle Rosa’s mystery man, Jeff Cabrio, and his assistant, Rick Smythe, have succeeded in producing rain. So don’t believe whatever weather reports you heard this morning. It’s pouring in Valle Rosa!”
CHRIS LEFT HIS OFFICE around eleven the morning after the experiment, a stack of phone messages for Jeff in his shirt pocket. He had fielded most of them, thanking the callers for their congratulations, putting off those who wanted to know how they could get in touch with Jeff. Could he come to their drought-worn town next? Could he teach others to do what he was doing in Valle Rosa? Chris explained to each of them that, for now, Jeff was working only for Valle Rosa, but he assured them he would pass along their messages.
Even Sam Braga had called with a guarded apology. “I’ll hold my fire until I see what else Cabrio can do,” he said.
Chris was glad Carmen had followed Jeff and Rick out to the avocado grove the day before, glad she had gotten that mesmerizing footage of the mini-rainstorm, because if he had heard about it only from Jeff himself, he wasn’t at all sure he would have believed it.
As he drove through one of the residential tracts of Valle Rosa, he spotted the first umbrella. It was bright yellow, open, and it hung upside down from a mailbox next to the street. He thought little of it until he saw the second, this one blue, hanging from the limb of a manzanita tree in the yard of the house next door. There were three umbrellas hanging in the third yard, and a huge red-and-white striped umbrella hanging from the porch of the fourth. Chris felt a chill up his spine. Somehow this symbol of hope had taken hold of Valle Rosa overnight, as though everyone had awakened this morning after dreaming the same dream.
News vans lined the street across from the warehouse, and Chris had to park around the corner. A group of children and a few adults sat on the retaining wall by the side of the warehouse, probably hoping to steal a glimpse of the rainmaker. A couple of young men were trying to peek in the high windows, but even standing on one another’s shoulders, they couldn’t get a good look inside.
An alert cameraman must have recognized him, because he started his camera rolling as Chris walked quickly toward the front door of the warehouse.
“All right, Mayor Garrett!” someone called out, and a smattering of applause broke out among the spectators.
Chris let himself in with his own key. Inside, he gave his eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light before walking toward the rear. Rick was on one of the trucks, Jeff at the computer. He looked up as Chris neared him and smiled.
“How did you like our little squall yesterday?” he asked.
Chris shook his head as he sat down across the table from him. “Incredible,” he said.
“We made friggin’ history.” Rick leaned against one of the vats on the truck.
“And everybody wants a part of it.” Chris pulled the stack of phone messages from his pocket and set them on the table. “Fifty calls this morning from people who want to interview you, or pick your brain, or have you come to their town next.”
Jeff lifted the top message and read it, his face sober.
“And there are umbrellas hanging from mailboxes and tree limbs. Everyone’s caught up in what you’re doing. Everyone believes you can do it.” Chris pursed his lips together in something of an apology. “And I’m afraid the vultures are outside.”
Jeff raised wide eyes to his. “What do you mean?”
“Reporters,” Chris said. “Fans. The excited citizenry of Valle Rosa. They’re all waiting for a glimpse of you.”
Jeff groaned and leaned back in his chair. “You’ve got to help me, Chris. Please. Do whatever you can to keep them away from me.” He pushed the stack of messages back across rhe table. “And is there anything you can do to get your ex-wife off my back?”
Chris remembered Carmen on TV the evening before, for the first time in many years, the undisputed star of News Nine. He’d felt a mixture of relief and profound joy as he watched her shine. He had nearly forgotten that her success was at the expense of the man sitting across the table from him.
“She’s on a roll now,” he said. “I’ll talk to her, but I doubt there’s much I can do to stop her.”
“I’m afraid she might stop me.” Jeff stood up and stretched. “I need another month,” he said. “I’ll move in here if I have to to avoid the press, and I’ll send Rick out for food.”
Chris shook his head. “No. I’ll hire some security.” He had made that decision earlier that morning. “The equipment should be watched when you’re not here anyway.” Chris took a small notepad from his shirt pocket and set it on the table. “What more do you need in the way of supplies?”
Jeff studied the map on the back of the bookcase. “One more truck should do it.”
“That’s all?” Chris was almost disappointed. “I mean, you only covered a tiny area with the two.”
Jeff smiled again. “Did you hear that Rick?”
Rick laughed. “You better fill him in on the facts.”
Jeff turned from the map to face him. “We were only using about two percent of our power, Chris,” he said. “You’d better make sure your flood insurance is paid up.”