When The Rain Falls

Chapter Three

For the next few days, everyone dodged the conversation around the girl. Father, despite his promises, did not send anyone out to scour the woods for her, and it appeared everyone else just allowed her to fade away. I, however, couldn't forget it. There was something about the look on her face, the state she was in and the fact that she had obviously been in the woods for a while that intrigued me. Why had she been there?

Even if I wanted to forget, the bruises on my right side were a reminder whenever I got dressed of what had happened that day. They had appeared the day after the girl, dark purple marks that spread across my ribcage and made my injury look far worse than it was. I hadn't shown the bruises to anyone because I knew Mother would go running to Doctor Merrick and insist I have them looked at.

They had started to fade, the dark purple being fainter and turning a little yellower as the days went by. Every day I would look out the window hoping to see the girl standing in the trees, but she didn't reappear. I would gaze out the window when I was supposed to be studying, and stare through the darkness before bed or early in the morning, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, but I never did. Once or twice, I saw Joseph disappear into the trees with a bucket, but he always returned with drinking water for the horses.

With the topic of the girl expressly forbidden by Father, life continued as normal. One afternoon, Mother had organised a day on the grounds, followed by supper with some old family friends. The Seabrooks had been friends of the family for as long as I could remember and I grew up around their son, Andrew. We got on splendidly with one another, but we could both be rather competitive.

"Are you going to serve the ball, Nate, or should I join the ladies for tea and cake?" Andrew paused. "On second thoughts, that sounds far better than trying to play tennis with you."

I tore my eyes away from the trees. "You're just mad because I have more points than you."

"Because you're cheating. If we had someone else as umpire, half of your points wouldn't have counted."

"No, they would have agreed with me that the ball went out of bounds."

"Out of bounds is just a piece of rope, Nate. It's hardly a real tennis court."

"It's not like we're playing real tennis."

"Touché." Andrew laughed and spun his tennis racket around, gearing up for the next serve.

I threw the ball into the air and smacked it as hard as I could with the racket, watching it fly over the net we had constructed. Andrew stared at the ball as it hurtled over the net, almost falling a few inches or so in front of him. He launched himself onto the floor and caught the ball with the very edge of his racket. I laughed at the sight of him laying face-down on the floor, his racket a short distance away from his hands. The tennis ball fell just to the left of me, but I was enjoying the sight of Andrew on the floor too much to care.

Andrew huffed and sat back on his knees, brushing grass from the front of his shirt. From where I stood, I could see light green grass stains along the rolled-up sleeves and across the front. After an afternoon of playing tennis, my clothes were hardly in a better condition, but I had avoided the grass stains Mother had threatened me about that morning.

As Andrew pulled himself together, a feat that included a lot of complaining and muttering, I glanced back over to the trees, hoping that the girl might have reappeared to see what was going on, but the trees remained still. The trees were easy to become lost in, but I suspected that the girl wouldn't wander too far away. If Joseph knew she was out there, she had to stay close in order for him to find her. She had to have been getting food from somewhere.

"What is it with you and those trees?" Andrew said.

"Huh?" I looked over at him, frowning a little.

Andrew brushed a blade of grass from his trousers, ran a hand through his red hair and gestured over to the trees. "All day you've been staring at the trees like you're expecting something to come out of them. You suggested we play tennis, but you're more distracted than Emily when she's in one of her etiquette lessons. Why?"