Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  “Hello?”

  The voice was young and strong, and my heart sank within me. A son. The name probably belonged to a son.

  “May I speak with Chilton O’Reilly?”

  “Speaking.”

  “I was actually hoping to speak with Chilton O’Reilly, who reported for the Optic,” I said, hearing myself sound very tentative. I added for clarification, “Could you help me locate him?”

  Please, please, please, don’t let him be dead, I prayed silently to who knows who.

  “That would be my grandfather,” Chilton the Younger said. “One moment.”

  My heart rose back to its normal place within me, but I remained nervous. After what seemed like an eternity, a voice very like that of the younger man, but with a more polished diction, said, “Yes. This is Chilton O’Reilly.”

  “Mr. O’Reilly,” I said. “This is Mira Fenn, that is, when you knew me I was Mira Bogatyr.”

  There was deep sigh from the other end of the line, as if breath that had been held these forty years had finally been released.

  “Good to hear from you again, Ms. Fenn.” He spoke the modern neutral abbreviation as if it came hard to his lips. “What may I do for you?”

  “I was wondering if we might meet. I’m trying to learn what I can about when my mother disappeared.”

  “She never returned, then?”

  “No.”

  I felt that blunt monosyllable had given away far more than I had intended, and heard that knowledge in Mr. O’Reilly’s reply.

  “Why don’t you come over to my house? I have some files here, I think, and it would be more private than a restaurant. I assume your return isn’t widely known?”

  I knew my voice must sound puzzled when I replied, “I haven’t exactly hidden it.”

  “But no one from the paper has come by to interview you?”

  “No, no one.”

  “Well, it’s a very old story, and I don’t suppose anyone there even remembers it now. Where are you residing?”

  “Phineas House.”

  “I see.”

  “When would be convenient for you, Mr. O’Reilly?”

  “Can you come by tomorrow midmorning? I would like time to pull the files and refresh my memory.”

  Somehow, I didn’t believe he needed to refresh his memory at all, but I couldn’t disagree that it might take time to locate files from a story forty years gone.

  “That sounds great,” I said. “Can you give me directions?”

  He did, and we rang off with mutual assertions that it would be interesting to see each other again after so long.

  The next morning, I spent a couple hours working on the tigers around the window. Their stripes were intricately carved, and I found they took even more attention than had the rosettes on the leopards’ coats. As requested, young Enrico stirred me from my painter’s trance in time for me to shower and dress for my appointment.

  New Mexico throve on informality, but I decided that this visit merited dressing up. Mr. O’Reilly had sounded just a bit old-fashioned. I chose a watered-silk skirt in blues and purples that swept my ankles and made stockings unnecessary, a pale blue blouse, and a contrasting rope of glass beads that I had strung from various scrounging finds. I finished the ensemble with comfortable sandals, and a pair of fused glass earrings. It was an outfit I liked a great deal, and in which I was psychologically as well as physically comfortable.

  So girded and armed for battle, I mounted my red pickup, waved to my painting crew, and drove to Chilton O’Reilly’s house.

  His neighborhood was not as old as mine, but it showed signs of long occupancy. The tile numbers for his house were hung on an adobe curtain wall spilling over with silverlace, a vine in which clusters of minute white flowers mingled with dark green leaves. The gate in the wall curved gracefully, and the flagstone walkway echoed that curve. The house itself was Territorial style, a blending of the Spanish adobe with the columned porches brought in by later settlers. It was an attractive house, but not in the least ostentatious.

  In the lines of the man who opened the door when I rang the bell I could just recognize the young reporter of my memory. He was still wiry, but thin rather than lean. His posture was slightly stooped. His hair was a duller brown touched with grey, but he wore it in a similar fashion. The eyes behind glasses that I did not remember remained lively, but the color had paled from a medium brown to something closer to grey.

  We stood for a moment while our memories adjusted themselves to reality. Then Mr. O’Reilly stepped back and opened the door wider to admit me.

  “Ms. Fenn,” he said, and without the distortion of the telephone I was paradoxically more aware of the changes in its timber, even as I heard its similarities to the voice I remembered.

  “Please,” I said, stepping over the threshold and into a cool, shadowed entry hall. “Call me Mira.”

  “Then you must call me Chilton,” he said.

  “It’s an interesting name,” I said.

  “I have always thought so,” he agreed, leading me back through the house. “I liked how it looked on bylines. My son seems to agree. He passed it on to his son. That was who you spoke with, by the way. My grandson, Chiltie.”

  “Chiltie?”

  Mr. O’Reilly was leading me into the kitchen.

  “He goes by Chilton, just as I do. His father is Chilt. It gets confusing, especially since my grandson came to live here, so my wife and I have permission to call him Chiltie—just as long as we don’t do it in front of any of his friends. Chiltie’s going to Highlands University. The arrangement works for everyone. My wife and I have been rattling around in this sprawling place. Chiltie has a section pretty much to himself, and having him here adds some liveliness. Meanwhile, his family is spared paying for a dorm room, and Chiltie doesn’t have to commute from Albuquerque.”

  He took a deep breath, then continued right on talking, “Can I offer you anything? I just made coffee, but there’s tea, lemonade, sodas …”

  “Coffee would be great,” I said. As always after a painting session I felt unaccountably drowsy.

  “Two coffees, then.” Chilton poured. After we’d done the usual routine of “Milk? Sugar? Sweetener?” he said, “I thought we’d go into my office. It’s reasonably tidy.”

  “Are you still working as a reporter?” I asked.

  “On and off,” he said. “Not full time. Maggie—that’s my wife—asked me to retire to part time so we could travel. We’re comfortable enough. This house is bought and paid for, bought it when real estate was bottomed out. After I retired, we rapidly found we got along a whole lot better if we had some outside interests. She teaches a few courses up at the university, and I cover a few stories. We’re just back from Greece. That’s why I didn’t know if your return had been covered.”

  “I see.”

  Chilton’s office was a pleasant, cluttered, book-lined room, in which I could detect the evidence of some hasty housekeeping—probably in my honor. His desk sported both a very modern desktop computer, and a typewriter. From the faint film of dust on the typewriter keys, I could tell which got more use.

  I was offered a seat in a chair I was willing to bet had been buried under one of the stacks of books now resting on the floor. Chilton moved automatically for the chair behind his desk, then stopped.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “You won’t make me feel like I’m being grilled by the principal.”

  “Principal?” he said, settling into his chair. “So you’re a teacher?”

  “Art teacher,” I said. “Grammar school, in Ohio.” I heard my own words with a certain amount of surprise. Not long ago I would have said “back home in Ohio.” “I’ve taken a leave of absence to deal with things here.”

  “Things? You mean finding your mother?”

  “That and Phineas House. You see, until about three months ago, I didn’t even know I still owned it.”

  Chilton’s eyebrows rose in eloquent inquiry, and I hastened to explain. When I
finished giving him all the details, up to and including Aunt May and Uncle Stan’s deaths, and how I’d learned then I still owned the house, I nearly went on to tell him about Aunt May’s journals. I didn’t though. Those were between her and me.

  “So,” I concluded, “I decided that if I was going to be in town anyhow, I might as well see if I could learn anything more about my mother.”

  “Even if you find her,” Chilton said, “she won’t replace the mother you just lost. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded, and heard myself talking. There was something about this man that encouraged confidences. I bet he’d been a great reporter.

  “I certainly don’t think my mother—Colette—could replace Aunt May. I’m not even sure why I want to find her. Maybe I just want a chance to ask her why she left me. Maybe I want to give her a chance to justify herself. Maybe I want a chance to yell at her for what she did. I don’t know.”

  Chilton steepled his fingers and looked at me over the top. “You do realize that even if you find out what happened to her, you may not find her. She vanished over forty years ago. She was in her midthirties then. It’s possible she’s still alive—she’d be seventy something—but it’s easily possible she’s dead. I’m ten years younger, and I’ve buried a fair number of my contemporaries.”

  “I know,” I said, and tried to sound mature and well-balanced. “I just have to try.”

  “Fine. Let me see what I can do to help you. What do you know?”

  “What I remember—which isn’t much—and what I read in the papers.”

  “Which isn’t much,” Chilton repeated. “Right. The Las Vegas Optic hasn’t always been known for the rectitude of its reporting. Fact is, the man who founded the paper didn’t care much if a story matched the facts. However, when we were covering the story of Colette Bogatyr’s disappearance, we pretty much decided to err on the side of what we were sure about.”

  “Good editor?” I asked.

  “That, and a story that got stranger the more deeply we looked into it.”

  “Tell me?”

  Chilton stared down at the files on his desk, but I didn’t think he was really seeing the typescript sheets, nor the newspaper clippings, nor even the sheaf of handwritten notes. I think he was seeing a time when he had been young and optimistic, eager to be the reporter who solved a case that had baffled the police, and so make his reputation.

  And here he was, still in Las Vegas, a town that despite some pretty fine pretensions had never amounted to much of anything. Had he ever left? Did those intervening years contain laurels won elsewhere? I didn’t ask. I didn’t dare alienate this man.

  “Well,” Chilton began, “you know better than I do that the trail your mother left was already cold before the law got onto it—a month gone she was, and the time might have been longer if one of the maids hadn’t felt something should be said. That she chose to say it to your schoolteacher, rather than the law, seemed strange to me when I first heard it, but it doesn’t anymore.

  “You see by the time she disappeared, your mother already had a bit of a reputation about the town. For one thing, no one could quite remember just when she came to town. Folks argued about it, some saying she’d been in residence in Phineas House only for about ten years, others swearing that she had been born there. One thing everyone agreed about. No one ever remembered seeing her in her teens or early twenties. I got a whiff of some sort of scandal, but never could get farther than that.

  “Then there was the way Colette Bogatyr dressed—those elaborate, sweeping, somehow old-fashioned gowns she wore even for a trip out shopping. Some of the men thought Colette was living out of her mother’s trunks, putting a good face on poverty. The women knew differently. They knew good tailoring. The ones who knew even more said that the styles weren’t quite right, that they didn’t match anything you’d find in Godey’s or the other fashion catalogs from a couple generations back. They said your mother made her own style, and even the most waspish admitted it suited her far better than modern fashions would have done.

  “Another mystery associated with your mother was Phineas House itself. In a town where some of the residents can trace their families back to the founding of the town in 1835, there’s usually someone who brags, ‘My grandfather tells when …’ Funny thing. No one remembered when Phineas House was built. It just always seems to have been there.”

  I interrupted, “But it’s Queen Anne style. I know Americans are used to thinking of Victorians as old, and they are, compared to lots of what’s around, but Queen Anne is a late fashion, comparatively speaking: late eighteen, early nineteen hundreds.”

  “I know,” Chilton said. “I’m just telling you what folks said. I even checked the property registration one time. Some documents weren’t there to find—you know about Las Vegas’s having two governments early on?”

  I didn’t, but I didn’t really want a history lesson right now, so I nodded.

  Chilton didn’t press me. “Well, as far as I could tell, the property has been in the family for several generations. Colette’s father inherited it from his father, and apparently it was in the family before that. It’s quite possible that the current Queen Anne was built over older construction.”

  “That’s completely possible,” I said, thinking of the odd layout of the inside of the house, how spaces didn’t always seem to fit into each other. “I think that was often done when fancier exteriors became the fashion. Even Sears sold kits for adding gingerbread trim to gussy up the average farmhouse.”

  Chilton realized we’d strayed off topic. “Anyhow, none of this has much to do with anything, except that Colette Bogatyr was already a lady of mystery when she capped every tale ever told about her by disappearing.”

  I decided the reporter was being a bit too polite, sparing me the worst side of the gossip. If I was to learn anything, well, I had to press the issue.

  “Seems to me that my mother must have had a reputation for something else,” I said boldly. “I remember her boyfriends. That had to have raised eyebrows, even if she was a widow, maybe even more so, since she had a daughter to raise.”

  Chilton didn’t say anything, but he did slide open his top desk drawer and take out a battered tin I instantly recognized.

  “Piece of candy?” he asked. “It’s getting harder to find this stuff, so I lay in a supply at Christmastime.”

  I smiled and took a lumpy, sugar raspberry. It tasted just like I remembered.

  “More coffee?” Chilton asked.

  I shook my head. Chilton crunched a bit of brightly colored candy ribbon between his teeth, letting his eyes drift half-shut, as if he might see the past that way.

  “There was talk, yes,” he said, “but less than you might imagine. Throughout its history, Las Vegas has been one of the rougher frontier towns. Billy the Kid wasn’t an unknown visitor. Neither were Jesse James and a host of lesser known outlaws. It’s said that Doc Holliday tried to set up a practice here, but even rough and tumble Las Vegas didn’t welcome him. Even during those interludes when the town has tried hard to become respectable, there have been those who don’t forget that one of the first structures taller than one story to be built here was a windmill that for a long time was the town’s favorite hanging tree.

  “Maybe if your mother had been slatternly there would have been more animosity toward her. Maybe, she would have awakened resentment if she had worn the finest Parisian fashions or flaunted her wealth or famous friends. Fact is, she did none of that. I’ve already mentioned how Mrs. Bogatyr’s clothing excited curiosity, but not envy. It was like that about the rest of her—she was just so eccentric that even the worst prudes didn’t harp about reforming her. Probably if anyone commented about anything it was that for all she said she was a widow, she still used her maiden name.”

  “I think I see,” I said.

  I voiced a thought I hadn’t even realized I had formulated until Chilton had started talking about my eccentric mother’s relationship to the r
est of Las Vegas society.

  “So it wasn’t because my mother was some sort of public embarrassment that she wasn’t found?”

  “Oh, no. An honest effort was made to find her,” Chilton said. “If that’s what you mean.”

  “I think it is,” I admitted. “I’d read about how the chief of police put himself in charge of the investigation. Two reasons he could have done that: if he wanted to make the best effort to find her—or if he didn’t.”

  “Rest assured on that point,” Chilton said. “Chief Garcia did his best to find Colette Bogatyr. How completely he failed remained a matter of frustration to him to the day he died.”

  “He’s dead then,” I said.

  “Five years ago,” Chilton replied. “At the ripe age of ninety-five. After he retired, we’d still meet and chat, and sometimes he’d mention that case.”