Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  Mr. O’Reilly looked surprised. “I never got her letter. Did she write care of the Optic?”

  “I imagine so. That’s the only address she would have had. She notes that she wrote at least twice. As far as I can tell, she never got an answer.”

  “Are you sure she wrote me, not another reporter, or the editor?”

  I nodded. Aunt May had made carbons of her letters. I’d found them in a large envelope wedged into the metal document box alongside the journals.

  Chilton looked sincerely embarrassed. “Mira, I don’t remember receiving either of those letters, and I’m sure I would have remembered hearing from the woman who was taking care of you.”

  Now it was my turn to look embarrassed. “Actually, Chilton, Aunt May didn’t mention that. She represented herself as a sociology student doing work on why women abandon their families.”

  Chilton’s expression became quizzical. “Now, why would she do that?”

  Even as I shaped an answer I thought would work, I found myself thinking, Because in a way that is what she was interested in. She loved Uncle Stan and me, but there was a part of her that wanted to abandon it all and have a life of her own.

  Aloud I said, “Because she thought no one would tell her anything if they knew who she was. Apparently, the trustees for my mother—that is Colette Bogatyr’s estate—were pretty cryptic about the circumstances surrounding her disappearance.”

  Chilton coughed a dry laugh. “They had to be, didn’t they? They didn’t have much to tell, and who would want to admit that? But, Mira, believe me, I never heard from Maybelle Fenn—or from a sociology student either. I’d remember that, too. I would have been thrilled to be part of a research project of any kind. I was young, eager, and very determined to make a difference.”

  He looked sad, then, as if wondering if anything he’d done had mattered in the least.

  “I wish I knew where those letters went,” I said, but I didn’t push the matter further. To do so would be to come straight out and call Chilton O’Reilly a liar—that, or accuse him of being part of a conspiracy to conceal what did happen to my mother. I didn’t think he was a liar, and if he was—or had been—part of a conspiracy, I didn’t think accusing him of such would do any good. It might well do harm, because then he’d know I had reason to suspect there was a conspiracy, and if he was part of it … .

  I shook my head as if I could clear the confusing tangle of thoughts that way.

  “I’ve made coffee,” I said, “and there’s iced tea, orange juice, and some pop.”

  “Coffee would be great,” he said, and followed me back into the kitchen.

  Once we’d poured and doctored, I suggested we sit in the living room.

  “I’ve put a lot of time into getting it cleaned,” I said, “and I’d enjoy showing it off.”

  He agreed, but I noticed him glancing toward the closed door of my mother’s library/office as we went past. Interesting. Had he been in there at some point?

  We seated ourselves, me on the sofa that until recently had served as my bed, Chilton on a high-backed chair. I’d placed a coaster on the table nearby, and as he rested his coffee cup on it, he smiled at what else was there.

  “My favorite candy,” he said. “That’s not easy to find this time of year.”

  I grinned back. “I lucked into some at one of the general stores. I can’t swear it’s not stale, but the bottle was sealed.”

  He took a piece, and nodded his approval.

  “Good,” he said, his words slightly distorted by the candy tucked in the corner of his cheek. “Now, I prefer to take notes as I do an interview, but I’d also like to run a tape. That way I can double check my notes if necessary.”

  “No problem,” I said. “What do you want to know?”

  He started by asking a bunch of questions for which he already knew at least some of the answers. I guessed he was making sure he had his facts straight. Then he moved into other things: my art, my teaching career, my impressions of Las Vegas now as compared to what I remembered.

  The process took a while, and I warmed our coffee a couple of times before we were done.

  “That’s far more than I’ll ever be able to use,” Chilton admitted as he folded his notebook closed and pushed the Stop button on the tape recorder. “However, I prefer to have rather more than less. This way, if there’s a followup story, I’ll already have some of what I’ll need. Now, one more favor. Can I have a quick walk through the house—and maybe around the outside? It’ll let me better plan what to do with the photographer when we do the other piece.”

  I rose, nodding. “That would be fine, but I haven’t gotten to even half the rooms. I’d rather we restricted ourselves to the ones I have done. Certainly, you’re not going to be able to run more than one or two pictures in any case.”

  “True enough,” he agreed, but I had the impression he was disappointed. I didn’t let that change my mind. The way he had looked at the door of my mother’s office had made me uneasy.

  I began the tour with the room in which we stood, took him through the dining room and kitchen, down into the cellar, then up to the room in which I was currently sleeping. I made a point of showing off details like the cedar-lined linen closet and the elegant—if outdated—fixtures in the bathrooms. When he asked to see a room that hadn’t yet been cleaned up—for contrast, so he claimed, I showed him the music room.

  I hustled him outside before I had to flat-out refuse to show him the library or front parlor—the latter still a work in progress. We walked slowly around the house, looking up at the intricate carvings adorning the facade. Domingo came down from his ladder, and took over the tour, proud as if he’d done the original construction himself. If a few of the workmen made a point of keeping out of the reporter’s way, none of us were so impolite as to comment.

  At last, Chilton departed, leaving me feeling an odd combination of jazzed and exhausted. Domingo seemed to sense my mood.

  “Have you had something to eat?”

  “Not since breakfast,” I admitted.

  “And that was a sweet roll,” he said.

  “I’ll go in and make myself a sandwich,” I said, glancing at his watch and noticing that it was well past one.

  “Better,” Domingo said. “Tomás went out for burritos earlier, and there is half of one—beef and bean—hardly touched. Take that. It’s in my refrigerator.”

  I wanted to refuse, suspecting I was stealing his dinner, but the fact was a cold sandwich sounded completely unappealing, and I didn’t have the energy to make something more complex. I accepted his offer, and took the Styrofoam box back to my own kitchen. As part of my orgy of appliance buying, I’d gotten a nice microwave at a very good discount. Soon, the burrito, and a good-sized portion of Spanish rice and refritos were steaming on a brilliant green Fiesta ware plate.

  As I ate, my energy returned, and along with it a sense of resolution. I needed to stop putting off going into my mother’s rooms—and into the library as well. Doubtless the police had been through both with great care, but there might be something in which Colette’s daughter would recognize significance where a stranger would not.

  I nodded sharply to affirm my decision, and fragments of my reflection nodded with me from mirrors and polished pot bottoms. Determined not to delay, I set my plate in the sink, unwashed, mentally promising to take care of it later.

  I went to my room, changed into my housekeeping clothes, and stood, indecisive on the upper landing. What first? I decided on the library. I’d been allowed in there. It had even been my schoolroom for a time. I didn’t think I’d feel quite so much like I was trespassing.

  The door was locked, but I had the key. It turned without difficulty. Aware that my heart was beating ridiculously fast, I stepped over the threshold into the dark-paneled confines.

  The closed space smelled of old books, dust, paper, and, oddly, given how long it had been since any cleaning had been done in there, furniture polish.

  I was r
ight in my guess that the police had been in here—not that the place had been torn up or anything. It was actually very tidy, but the tidiness was the wrong sort of tidiness. It wasn’t Mother’s sort of tidiness. There was another clue as well.

  Wherever possible, mirrors had been turned to face the wall. I imagined some dutiful sergeant sent into the library to methodically go over correspondence, old bills, any record or bit of written material that might give some indication of who my mother’s associates were, who were the people with whom she was in communication.

  He’d sit there at the desk, an older man, responsible, but not very energetic, going through file folders and stacks of unanswered letter. He’d feel a bit voyeuristic about the job, and every time he looked up, he’d see his own reflection in a half-dozen or so mirrors, his expression guilty and hangdog. Finally, he’d push back from the desk, get to his feet, and, moving with deliberation around the room, start turning the mirrors over so they faced the wall.

  Where he couldn’t turn them over, he’d find something to cover them. One was covered with a crocheted lace doily, another with a knitted afghan, a third with a shapeless garment that—after some investigation—I realized was a man’s cardigan, probably the sergeant’s own. I wondered why he’d never retrieved it.

  The image was so vivid that I found myself wondering if it was something I had actually seen. Had I been lurking in some corner of the room? Perhaps I’d been in the front parlor, peeking through a partially opened door, using the mirrors to expand my range of vision as I had learned to do from spying on my mother.

  I had no memory of doing this, but then my memories of those days immediately following the realization that my mother had disappeared were all very vague for me. Likely I’d been in shock. I know I’d entertained a strange notion that I, too, would vanish now that my mother was gone—not through anything as immediate and real as kidnapping, but by fading away, melting as a snow angel does, retaining the form of the person who pressed it into the drift, the edges blurring until all that is there is a hole, and then even that is gone.

  When I shook myself from my reverie, I realized that the library differed from all the other rooms in the house that I had inspected in one marked and complete way. It was the only room that hadn’t been completely tidied, the furniture shrouded in dust sheets. The elaborate oriental carpet remained in place under the desk, covering the polished hardwood floor, its patterns in turn covered by a chokingly thick layer of dust. Doubtless, the police had ordered that this room remain untouched while they continued their investigation, and no one had thought to have someone care for it when the house had finally been closed.

  “First step,” I said aloud. “Get the vacuum in here. Otherwise I won’t be able to do anything because I’ll be too busy sneezing.”

  I put a fresh bag in the vacuum, and gave a good cleaning to what I could easily reach of the floor, curtains, and edges of bookshelves. Occasionally, pieces of paper caught in the draft of my activity drifted to the floor, distributing even more dust as they fell. This caught the sunlight coming through the windows. One of the upper window panels was crafted of multicolored stained glass and the dust caught in its light glittered in a fashion that reminded me of Tinkerbell and her fairy dust.

  “Clap if you believe in fairies!” I said, and did so, the sound of my palms hitting together distant and muted over the roar of the vacuum cleaner.

  Again I felt that odd tug of being caught between the reality of my adult self and my younger self. The sensation was not so much one of memory, but of reawakening to a part of me that I had forgotten existed. How much had I made myself forget in my shock? I was beginning to believe that I’d forgotten quite a bit, that in my fear that my mother’s disappearance would mean my own dissolution I had started to reinvent myself even before I had come to live with Aunt May and Uncle Stan.

  I remembered how much effort I had put into absorbing the view outside the window of the train, how I’d concentrated on each and every cow, chicken, house, barn, flower, car, tree, as if each and every thing I took into myself made me real in a way that had nothing to do with being my mother’s “Mira.”

  The thought was not a comfortable one, and so I concentrated on getting up the dust, sucking it into a dark, fluffy world within the cylindrical bag. I imagined the layers building, stratified with various subtle shades of grey and brown: book dust (greyish white, tinged with yellow), floor dust (darker grey, mingled with brown and bits of carpet thread), curtain dust (grey with a strong undertone of maroon shed from the velvet curtains). Shed a little light on it, and draw your own conclusions.

  Couldn’t forensic scientists do that these days? They’d progressed a long way from Sherlock Holmes and his different types of cigarette ash. What might they learn from the relics in my vacuum bag? I fought back a hysterical impulse to take it down to the police station and announce portentously: “Here are your clues. Do with them what you will!”

  I didn’t though. What I did was put the vacuum away, wash my hands and face, tie a damp cloth over my nose and mouth, and feeling like some strange bandito, return to the library. This time I took a seat at the desk. I sat in my mother’s chair for the first time in all my memories. I half-expected to find my gaze just level with the top of the desk, as it would have been if as a child I had had such temerity.

  I didn’t though. Instead, I looked down at the neat stacks of paper, most of which were weighted down with glass paperweights. One was held down under a heavy—by today’s standards—pop can. Again I saw my mythical sergeant. He had liked orange pop, judging from the evidence of this can and the two in the small trash can. I set all three carefully aside. If no one wanted to buy them over the Internet, I bet I could incorporate them into a Warholesque collage that would garner good notice in a trendy gallery.

  For lack of any better order, I started with the papers that had been under the pop can. They proved to be bills: telephone service, electrical and gas service, city services. To each one was clipped a personal check, written in my mother’s hand, and duly canceled. I wondered if my mother had done this matching herself, or if the methodical sergeant had done so.

  Eagerly, I checked to see if one of the stacks contained monthly bank statements.

  “Bingo!”

  They were arranged in reverse order by date. I unclipped the stack and worked through them. Almost immediately, a pattern appeared, but it wasn’t a pattern I particularly wanted to see. My mother had regularly written checks, but every single one was to a local business: utilities, grocery, a gasoline station/garage, a couple of department stores. There was one written every month to Martino Navidad, Domingo’s father. Others were written less regularly to people I recalled as the family doctor, dentist, veterinarian. Twice a year, one was written to Our Lady’s Seminary for Young Ladies. Tuition seemed ridiculously low by today’s standards, but when I compared it to what Mother was paying for other services, I realized she had invested a tidy sum in my education.

  As I worked my way back through the years, I couldn’t find a single check written to someone outside of Las Vegas. I vaguely recalled that it wasn’t as easy to use nonlocal checks back then, but this seemed to indicate that Mother had done much of her business in cash. Could she have had a credit card? I glanced at the various piles of paper, but didn’t see any statements for credit cards, not even those issued by local businesses or gas stations.

  Interesting, but perhaps not unusual forty and more years ago. I’d have to do some investigating, if I decided that it mattered. I noticed one other thing. Although all the checks were signed by my mother, some of them, especially those to local groceries and related establishments, often had the amount filled out in a different hand. The writing was thin and spidery, with a sense of something tentative to it, and I was sure that it belonged to one or more of the silent women. Then I noticed that each of these checks had a receipt stapled to it. Mother had trusted, but only so far.

  However, this got me thinking. How
had the silent women themselves been paid? I didn’t find a single check made out to any of them, nor to a maid or temporary service of any kind. Mother must have paid them in cash. Why? She had paid Martino Navidad with a check. She had paid other local businesses with checks. Why not them? Had they requested cash? Had they been illegals? Had Mother had some strange reason for not wanting any record to exist of their being in her employ?

  I stared down at the stacks of paper, feeling rather less enlightened than I had when I had entered the library. The light spilling through the window behind the desk was dimming, and I decided I had had enough. I wanted a shower and clean clothes. My stomach growled, reminding me that Domingo’s half-burrito had been eaten and digested quite a while back.

  Before leaving the library, I checked the window locks before pulling the curtains shut. Then I locked the door behind me. I had rather liked Chilton O’Reilly, but I couldn’t forget his interest in that closed door. If he was interested, who else might be? I’d better play it safe.