I went to school in the afternoon, sat through two classes that were so tedious my brain turned to cement, and headed for the Olde Gold. Dad was in the office, bent over a ledger.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Hi, kiddo. What’s new?”
“Not much.”
“How’re the new digs?”
“Digs?”
“Your place at Silverwood.”
I made up some stuff about how peaceful it was out there, then I asked if he’d heard from Mom.
“Yeah, she called yesterday morning. Said she was trekking inland with a camera and another pen in a jeep to find some of the refugees. She says hi.”
The way Dad talked, there were no people with Mom — just pens and cameras and tape recorders. Mom was a pen, too. He tried to make light of things, but I could tell he was worried.
I spent the next few hours taking inventory of all the loot from the Maitland estate, noting what should be cleaned and polished, refinished or repaired. Then I wrote up a schedule that prioritized the work. I showed the schedule to Dad.
“Great work,” he said. “Let me take a closer look at it tomorrow. Right now, what say we put on the old feed bag at the Chinese buffet?”
I figured he meant dinner. “Sounds good,” I said.
“Okay. Let’s pull up stakes, podnah.”
“Let’s do that.”
We caught a movie after we had eaten — a remake of a movie from the fifties that had been based on a play written in the thirties — and I dropped Dad off at the house and headed out to the trailer. Once inside, I put on a Bill Evans CD and read for a while in the living room. It was hard to concentrate, though, with my mind jumping from the crying woman to Raphaella, to the men in my dreams and back to Raphaella again.
What was her mother’s problem? I wondered. I had met lots of controlling parents, but she turned overprotectiveness into sheer paranoia. Did she expect Raphaella to ignore males for the rest of her life? The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. She seemed to want Raphaella under her thumb, yet Raphaella was working on the musical with OTG. I had nothing against theater types, but some of them weren’t the most conventional people in the world. And most protective parents were strict about attendance at school. Raphaella came and went as she pleased.
Maybe it was some sort of religious thing. There were lots of brands of religion in Orillia — statistically, we had a church for every two thousand people — and a few of them were pretty extreme. Raphaella hadn’t mentioned anything about her mother’s religion, but then again, she was close-mouthed about all family matters. She herself had never struck me as religious. Spiritual, yes, but not a rule follower. I concluded, not for the first time, that figuring out what made people tick wasn’t one of my strong points.
About eleven o’clock I put my book down, turned off the CD and called it a night. A soft spring rain began to fall just as I was crawling between the sheets. I lay there listening to it hissing on the flagstones of the patio, thinking about dreams. The nightmare with the men’s voices had scared me, but not in any deep, bottom-of-the-soul way, I reassured myself, not enough to make me afraid to sleep. And the woman calling and crying, well, that was not much more than a nagging mystery. It wasn’t exactly an added attraction for the neighborhood, but it seemed no one else in the park could hear it, so maybe it was a freak noise produced by the wind. That was probably the explanation.
That was how I reasoned things through just before I fell asleep, and I didn’t really believe a word of it.
I heard her at the usual time. At first, all I could make out over the hiss of the rain was a low moan, then I heard crying, faint but unmistakable, then only the rain. I decided to run a test. I set the clock radio for three-fifteen and went to sleep again.
Music woke me. Piano music, Liszt, on “Late Night Classics.” In the background the roar of heavy ran. I dressed quickly, grabbed a flashlight and an umbrella and stepped out onto the deck. It was a warm rain, falling straight and hard through the still air, bouncing off the planks and splashing my calves. I walked to the edge of the trees and stopped. A curtain of water poured off the edge of the umbrella. I checked my watch: 3:25.
Logic dictated that I shouldn’t hear anything above the rain. But, to my left, someone was panting heavily, as if running in full flight, each sobbing breath like a saw rasping back and forth.
Joo-ball! The word was torn from a throat gasping for breath. Joo-ball, help me!
She passed me quickly this time. I heard only her panicked gasps, no footfalls thumping on sodden ground. But her fear set my blood thundering in my ears.
Forcing myself to move, I took several steps forward into the bush and heard something that froze my blood.
Deep in the trees, the voices of men, angry, afraid, as if arguing. They were moving fast, their words like nails pounded into my skull. I held my breath, knowing what would come.
Go back!
No!
The men passed me, voices in violent conflict. And then, from farther away in the bush, Help meeeee!
Her cry rose above the roar of the rain.