Before the Rain Falls: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY CAMILLE DI MAIO

  The Memory of Us

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Camille Di Maio

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503939974

  ISBN-10: 1503939979

  Cover design by Rachel Adam

  A story about sisters would not be complete without dedicating this to my own sister, Catherine Remmert. She was the best Christmas morning present ever and continues to be a daily gift to me.

  Others come to you later in life, and through the blessing of marriage, I am grateful to my sisters-in-law, Sarah Vogt Remmert and Julie McCall Di Maio, for their love, support, and friendship.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.

  —Lucretius

  PROLOGUE

  Hidalgo County Courthouse, Texas—March 1943

  Observers in the standing-room-only gallery fanned themselves with newspapers, fidgeting and grumbling as they waited for the decision. Sketch artists scratched away at their canvases, shading with their pencils, rubbing with their fingers until they’d created adequate representations of the scene.

  Whirl click. Whirl click. A lopsided ceiling fan cut through the air, its four blades drooping from years of deep southern heat. Tick tick tick tick. The second hand of the defense attorney’s wristwatch crawled around the numbers. One . . . two . . . three . . . four. Before it began a new minute, the wood-paneled door squeaked open, and the jurors filed out, collapsing into their seats on the platform. Twelve men, twenty-four unsympathetic eyes.

  Della Lee Trujillo sat in the low-slung chair, its slats cutting into her back. Slow-spreading dampness gathered behind her knees, and the chafe of the shackles left her wrists raw. The death of her younger sister, Eula Lee, had dominated the headlines for weeks.

  Beautiful Songbird of Puerto Pesar Murdered!

  The tiny border town was devastated, for the second time, by the Lee family.

  She knew Tomas was sitting in the first row behind her, his fingers chapped from gripping the railing as the arguments played out. He’d been there every day, every moment, abandoning what few crops and livestock were left on the homestead. She could feel his eyes boring into her now-stringy hair. They’d been married only four hours when it happened, their newly minted future ripped apart by an ivory-handled knife.

  Tomas said he understood why she’d done what she did.

  The door at the front of the courtroom groaned open. “All rise,” the bailiff announced.

  Della struggled to her feet, using her elbows to push herself off the arms of the chair. Her court-appointed attorney offered no assistance, much the way the whole trial had gone. In contrast, the prosecutor acted as if the murder presented a personal affront, so dogged was he in his determination to win.

  Judge Fuego, filling every inch of his otherwise billowing black robes, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and sank into his leather chair.

  Whirl click. Whirl click. The fan kept pace with Della’s heartbeat. She closed her eyes and remembered.

  Wedding dress. Lace. Eula’s long brown curls fell in a fan-shaped pattern. Red pooled on white, growing, spreading.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” the judge asked.

  The foreman stood, clearing his throat before speaking. “We have, Your Honor.” He handed a slip of paper to the bailiff, who placed it on the desk. The judge opened it and nodded, handing it back.

  The man continued. “We, the people of the jury, in the matter of the death of Eula Lee, find Della Lee Trujillo . . .”

  Everyone leaned in.

  “Guilty.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Puerto Pesar—Today

  Della had trouble sleeping.

  It was surreal being back in the place that had consumed her memories through seventy years in prison. The homestead had been almost mythological, as if it existed for a different woman altogether. She had the same arms, hands, feet, toes of the girl who long ago ran barefoot in the natural grasses. And yet they were not the same. They were wrinkled, spotted, fragile.

  A new person carved from the same material.

  Tomas had lived in the house for a few years until going off to war, but he’d had the foresight to take care of all the legal bits that Della never had the chance to consider. It had been rented out over the years to several long-term tenants, the rents covering the cost of a property manager. By the looks of things, the landlord had maintained the bare minimum, put the agreed-upon amount into savings for her each month, and kept the rest for himself. The roof was in disrepair, easy to see even with her aged eyesight. Paint cracked, wood rot plagued the porch.

  There was also a little money left over in an aging bank account Tomas had set up, and she supposed after enough interest over enough years, she’d have some to live on for a while. But not enough for work to be done on the house.

  It surprised her that even some of the furnishings were the same. New in their day—Mama wanted the best—but antique now.

  The feather bed was too soft, and the dust on it made her sneeze. Her frail body, nearing the end of its ninth decade, had grown used to the thin mattress provided by the Texas Department of Corrections. It had been cheap, surely purchased from the lowest bidder, its sole purpose to fit the minimal requirements of humane treatment during incarceration. But Della never had trouble sleeping there, not once. Not when the whooping cough struck in 1949. Not when everyone was edgy about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not even when the parole board told her that she was going to be a free woman. It wasn’t until she returned today to her childhood home that phantoms and memories stirred her, making it impossible to rest.

  Everywhere she looked was a reminder of a time when her skin was sun-kissed, when she could swim in the lake naked without catching a chill, when her heart clenched every time she watched Tomas work in the fields.

  The Before Days, she called them, when she dared to think about them at all.

  She looked around a
t the house, still solid, built with the kind of craftsmanship that few could have afforded at the time. A stone fireplace reached to the ceiling, with niches thoughtfully made to accommodate matches and firewood. Fossils and pebbles found on long-ago childhood walks with Eula and their mother were placed sporadically into the mortar, a notion Papa had had when his girls came home with their treasures. Thick beams lined the ceiling in a perpendicular pattern that created not only a support system but a subtle nod to the money it took to produce such things primarily for their aesthetic. Front and back porches offered shade in the brutal Texas heat and maximized the respite that could be found in even a gentle cross breeze.

  Nearly everything was in its logical place, arranged by the property manager before her return. But the mattress lay forgotten, and she doubted that she had the strength to beat it until the dust left. She found the tobacco tins in the shed along with other things that would probably be considered junk to an unemotional eye. Like the red and green toy top, whose sides had rusted and whose tip was bent. But they weren’t junk. The top had entertained Eula for hours and hours, as Della spun it for her without tiring. The tobacco tins were what they’d used for lunch boxes, and their proper place was in the kitchen cupboard. Hers had been mustard colored, and Eula’s was red. Della had actually preferred the red one, but Eula had thrown a tantrum until her sister gave in. Papa shot holes in them for ventilation so the food wouldn’t spoil, and Della packed them with dried jerky and bread and hog lard.

  The crucifixes were all gone. They’d hung above every door, mostly little ones, almost unnoticeable but always present.

  Some things were unfamiliar—left over, she supposed, by tenants. A museum of sorts, curated by one family after another. Strangers who must have made their own memories in this home. Were there births, deaths, marriages, joys, sorrows that were absorbed into these walls over the years? Did their ghosts mingle, along with those of Herman, Eva, Tomas, and Eula, all watching her, this old woman in an old house?

  Unchanged was the lavatory, an addition Papa made to the house when Mama insisted. By today’s standards it was surely outdated, but it had been quite the talk of the town at the time—the first one for years to come. Della was just happy that it was in working condition and afforded the kind of privacy that was nearly nonexistent in prison.

  In the Before Days, Della and Eula would sprawl out on the floor with sugary Abba-Zabas in hand and flip through pages of Sears and Roebuck catalogs, imagining what it would be like to have bosoms that fit into the kinds of brassieres in the pictures. When they grew the bosoms later on, Eula’s were much bigger. And although she complained that they were hot in the summer and hurt her back, she did not miss an opportunity to pull down her blouse a bit when she left the house, letting a little of the line between them show. Their mother would have been appalled if she hadn’t run away with the painter, and Papa was oblivious to all the ways that his girls were growing into women.

  The portraits were definitely not where they belonged. They had hung over the bed, side by side, the two girls immortalized by the painter at the seaside. Now there were two spots of floral wallpaper, patches of brightness surrounded by faded print on the rest of the wall. Della’s painting was likely in the shed somewhere, and the other was said to hang in the church, in a little shrine made to the town’s beloved girl. She’d heard some nonsense about it crying. Well, if it was, there was a lot to cry about.

  In the morning, she planned to go to the church itself—Our Lady of Guadalupe. Her first foray into town. She’d found an old hat with a black veil, fashionable in its time and perfect for whatever anonymity she could retain. She did not yet know if her notorious celebrity of the forties was still of interest to anyone today, but it felt too soon to find out.

  She looked forward to venturing out. To breathe in fresh air, to see the sky and the trees and the clouds and the birds. The yard at the penitentiary was vast but surrounded by tall brick walls and taller barbed wire that blocked the scene. Besides, one had to look out, not up, and be mindful of theft from fellow inmates and groping from the restless hands of the guards. Though that last part had not been an issue for her in the past few decades.

  Funny how she could view her life in ten-year spans. The forties—when she learned to be a champion catcher of greased pigs. The fifties—when she discovered a love of reading. The sixties—when she sabotaged her chance at parole. And so on. How long they all were. And yet they seemed like yesterday. Time was a droll companion when looked upon with such distance.

  Those were the After Days, the ones that comprised most of the years of her life. More than most people lived. The days in which her sister was no longer the belle of Puerto Pesar, drawing crowds from around the county to the little church on Sunday mornings. The days, instead, when Eula resided six feet below the parched soil in the churchyard.

  Della didn’t know what to call this new time. The Freedom Days, perhaps, but that didn’t seem quite right. It wasn’t enough that she could now walk around without bars to block the view. That was only one kind of freedom.

  It was the freedom in telling your secrets before it was too late. Like the confessional of her youth, whispering things to Fr. Medina that she told no one else. About how she missed her mother. Her guilt over not being a good enough caregiver for her sister. Della had a story, and she was ready to tell it.

  She would think of this time as the Truth Days. That was it.

  The Truth Days.

  And it would start by visiting Eula.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Puerto Pesar—Today

  Mick Anders exited Highway 77 in a cheap red rental car, wondering if the narrow road really led to where the map said it did. He couldn’t get a signal, just one measly bar on the phone, so GPS was out of the question. He was stuck with a flimsy map he’d bought at a gas station, the kind that required an engineering degree to refold. It was already starting to tear at the creases, dampened by the oppressive heat.

  He looked up. There was nothing around him save for a weathered billboard advertising a Buc-ee’s road stop a hundred seventy-five miles to the west. But he pressed on. Scant homes appeared on the endless horizon. Boards covering broken windows. Rusted bars covering the boards.

  It reminded him of the place he’d grown up. Across the tracks from a moneyed East Coast prep school. Single mom living in a trailer, cleaning toilets in smoky bingo halls in exchange for tuition. Those long-ago playground voices had revisited his dreams lately. “Mr. Nobody,” they’d taunted.

  He ignored them. He’d worked his ass off trying to make something of himself. Politicians elbowed one another for his attention. Colleagues envied his bylines.

  Until things went wrong.

  Just a few miles farther, the GPS kicked in, and the houses improved somewhat. Builder-grade starters. But they were tidy, at least, even if they were plain. They lined the main road, heralded by a lone, dangling stoplight. To the right was his destination: La Palma Inn, the only lodging in Puerto Pesar. No rewards points to earn on a platinum card.

  Mick stepped out, the sunburned remnants of grass shattering into fragments beneath his leather slip-on shoes. He shut the car door behind him. It echoed a sound of finality, the proverbial nail in the coffin, just as his editor’s door had as it slammed behind him. Had that really been only three days ago?

  “You need to lie low for a while, Mick,” he’d said. “The owners are breathing down my neck to fire you, and I have to at least look like I’m a good company man. We’re in enough hot water with circulation down and every two-bit blogger thinking they’re the next William Randolph Hearst.” He’d leaned in closer, enough that Mick felt the warmth of his cigar-saturated breath. “You’re a good guy. I know you did what you thought was right. But this fiasco with the senator isn’t the only reason you should go.”

  Mick had flinched at the truth in it and braced himself for what his editor might say next. Craig was known for his crackpot ideas as much as he was known for being r
ight about them.

  He leaned back and used his sausagelike index finger to slide a manila envelope across the desk. “Look. This was going to be a joke, a little laugh for your birthday. But after this week, well, I guess the joke’s on me. I had an intern research the screwiest story possible, and she dug up a gem from a Podunk paper, a few months old. Who knows? Work your magic and turn it into the next Pulitzer winner. But more important, get out of town, go to Texas, and clear your head until this blows over.”

  This reeked of stupidity. But Mick didn’t have any other choice. His editor had given him an ultimatum: two weeks of leave. Find a knockout story. Or you’re finished.

  Of course, there was no per diem, since it wasn’t a real assignment, so Mick had decided to forgo the airline seat he would have preferred and hit the highway in a rental. Stephanie had taken the keys to the Lexus and kicked him out of their Copley Square condo. No doubt she was already on the prowl for the next man whose ambition rivaled her own.

  He hadn’t fought her over any of it. The condo was bought at the top of the market and had little equity. The Lexus had been hers to begin with, a present from her parents for her twenty-seventh birthday. Not even a milestone one like thirty. What would they buy her then? A dealership? Just like the kids he’d gone to school with. He never had an expensive car to park in the student lot. He and his mom took the city bus in—he with his Goodwill backpack, and she with her cleaning rags.

  Well, at least he’d gotten a great education out of it. And made enough money to buy his mom a small house in Florida.

  He’d proven himself once. He could do it again.

  In and out. He was going to get the story he came for, spin straw into gold, and return to the newspaper as the prodigal son. He was young enough that he could still work his way up to the top of the masthead as he’d always planned. Until then, he had to buckle down and make something out of this far-fetched errand.

  A little bell announced his arrival, waking the woman at the desk.