All were well received by reviewers, but none sold in sufficient numbers to make her famous or even to guarantee that she would find an eager publisher for the next. Scorned by the sandman, she stared at the dark bedroom ceiling, brooding about what might have been, yearning for what might never be.īy the age of twenty-eight, she had published four novels. This night, however, the liquid rhythms failed to lull her into slumber, and not just because they were out of season.įor Molly, sleeplessness had too often in recent years been the price of thwarted ambition.
In wet months, the rataplan of raindrops on the roof had sometimes served as a reliable remedy for insomnia. Rain rarely fell after March, seldom before December. September in southern California had always before been a dry month in a long season of predictable drought. Torrents pounded and pried at the cedar siding, at the shingles, as if seeking entrance. The voices of the tempest were legion, like an angry crowd chanting in a lost language. She grew increasingly fidgety as she listened to the rush of rain. Lying in bed beside her husband, Molly Sloan had been restless before the sudden cloudburst. The abruptness and the ferocity of the downpour had the urgent quality of a perilous storm in a dream.
A FEW MINUTES PAST ONE O’CLOCK IN THE morning, a hard rain fell without warning.
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