Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  I carried the orange pop cans into the kitchen, and set them in the sink. After I’d run water into them to loosen any antique particles of sweetened syrup that might remain, I squinted at the sink. Something wasn’t quite right. Then I remembered leaving the dishes from my late lunch to wash later.

  Now they rested, shining clean, in the dish rack to one side of the sink. Momentarily, I was startled, then I understood.

  Domingo or Enrico must have come in while I was running the vacuum and decided to perform a small act of kindness. I smiled, thinking how nice it was to have friends rather than servants. I wondered how many friends my mother had had. Perhaps tomorrow, as I went through some of the still unexamined papers in the library, I’d begin to get some sort of idea.

  10

  This visible, physical world in which we live is interpenetrated by more than one unseen world, just as perfect and complete in itself as the material planet, which is the only one most human beings are conscious of. All around us is the great crowd of witnesses, themselves, except on rare occasions, invisible.

  —M. Oldfield Howey,

  The Horse in Magic and Myth

  INSIDE THE LINES

  I started the next day with the lions around the dining room window. After the intricacies of the leopards and tigers, I had thought the relative monochrome of the lions would be a relief. Once I had the base coat of tawny golden-brown down and was mixing in a bit more brown for shadowing and highlights, I realized I was bored.

  Impulsively, I gave the male lions (there were two) dark manes, making them shaggier than even the carving suggested. I couldn’t do much with the females, so I decided to go ahead and continue the green-eyed theme I’d started with the leopards. One of the females had a cub near her flank. Following a vague remembrance that baby lions had spots, I gave him some, making sure he didn’t look like a misplaced leopard.

  Once this was drying, I reluctantly put my paintbrushes to soak and went inside. Since I planned to continue searching my mother’s office, taking a shower seemed counterproductive. I’d been in New Mexico long enough, listened to enough discussions about the hoped for monsoon rains, that I was becoming preternaturally aware of the scarcity of water. Las Vegas wasn’t the driest part of the state by far, but even so, to one with my Ohio upbringing, it seemed as if the average annual rainfall couldn’t be enough for one season, much less an entire year.

  “Child of a rainless year.” The phrase had hovered in the peripheries of my imagination for my entire life, but only now was I coming to understand just what a rainless year might mean.

  So I skipped the shower, settling for dabbing off the worst of the paint with thinner, and on-point applications of soap and water. I changed out of my painting overalls into an old skirt and blouse, and taking my sandwich and iced tea with me, unlocked the library door.

  Pulling back the curtains gave me more than enough light. Opening the window allowed drifts of the house painters’ conversation to come my way. Most of it was in Spanish, so I understood only a little, but I found it restful, like listening to classical music, the vox humana simply another instrument in the orchestral whole.

  My first self-assigned task was to find if Mother had another checking account, one that she used for out-of-state purchases, and possibly to pay a few bills she didn’t choose to pay with the other. I knew I was reaching, but my mother had been so odd in so many ways. Why not in this as well?

  This led only to my eating a fair amount of dust along with my sandwich. I put my lunch plate in the sink, refilled my glass, and went back to the library. I’d found bank statements from several accounts, and for the next hour or so I reviewed these.

  End result: Deposits were regularly made into several savings accounts. Money from these was either withdrawn or transferred into the checking account; occasionally, there were transfers between savings accounts. More money was withdrawn as cash than was spent as checks. I guessed some of this went to pay the silent women, and perhaps others who preferred there not be a record of their earnings.

  That gave me an idea, and I went searching through the stacks and file drawers until I found my mother’s tax returns. Just looking at them gave me the funny, queasy, semipanicked feeling that tax forms always do. Go figure. I never have cheated on my taxes, never will, but there’s something about those forms that scream “Guilty until proven otherwise—and even then we’ll come after you.”

  My mother paid a local accountant to prepare her forms, so these were typewritten and easy to read. From them I did get some new information. Mother’s income came from several sources: real estate, trust funds, at least one annuity, and repeated onetime sales of various commodities; works of art, a coin collection, a stamp collection, a Stradivarius violin, an antique automobile.

  For a moment I entertained the idea that my mother might have been—like me—a scrounger with an eye for the hidden value of things, but the image was too difficult to maintain. What did stay with me was the fact that my mother had apparently never worked a day in her life—or at least in the fifteen or so years of tax returns I had reviewed. I found myself thinking of the resentment revealed in Aunt May’s journals, of how Uncle Stan had gone off to work for his various architects week after week until he retired—and even then he’d gone back to help out when his former employers were in a crunch. I thought how hard I myself had worked since graduating from college, about the commutes between various schools, about the continued wrangling for funds and supplies, and I wondered who Colette Bogatyr had been that she had won the right to be a dilettante.

  You could have lived that life, said a little voice in my head. Look what you’ve found since you’ve come here. Stan Fenn was honest with you, showed you what you’d inherited the minute you became an adult.

  I stuck my tongue out at that inner nag, pushed back from the desk, and surrendered the hunt for the day. I’d learned a lot more about how my mother managed to live her life, but when it came to where she might have gone that day or who might have had reason to make her vanish, I felt I was further than ever from finding my way.

  “Follow the money.” “Who stands to gain?” Those were two of the oft-repeated mantras in the mystery stories I loved to read. I’d tried that. The money came in and went out, but there was no pattern in how it did so. Even when Colette sold some commodity, the money didn’t go rushing out without explanation. It simply went into one of the savings accounts, and was used along with the rest. I detected no pattern of panic, no need for quick cash.

  I supposed that the regular cash withdrawals might indicate Colette Bogatyr was being blackmailed, but it also might simply indicate that she preferred to do most of her business in cash. It’s hard to remember now that credit and ATM cards are omnipresent, accepted by everything from grocery stores to fast-food restaurants, that not long ago most transactions were made in cash.

  “Most murder victims know their killers.” The same might be true of kidnappers. Judging from milk cartons and those slips that come in the ad circulars every week, it probably was the case. So, if Mother had been made to disappear, rather than doing so voluntarily, she probably knew her kidnapper.

  I stared at the heaps of paper. There wasn’t a lot of personal correspondence there. I’d skimmed a stack of bread-and-butter notes when the tax forms had become too much for me, but they’d mostly been from local businesses or causes:

  “Dear Mrs. Bogatyr,

  Thank you for attending our annual (fill in the blank) fund-raiser. Your presence was greatly appreciated …”

  There’d been notes from both the Democrats and the Republicans, so Mother hadn’t taken sides there. There were notes from Protestant churches, the Jewish synagogue, and, of course, the Catholic Church. They’d been signed by Anglos and Hispanics, from just about every possible cause imaginable. Apparently, they’d been happy to take her money, if not her alliance. I did a quick spot comparison against the checkbook register, and found records to confirm that she had contributed, if not alw
ays generously, to all these causes.

  That job gave me one of the few heartwarming moments in the whole business. Colette clearly cared about people more than politics, for her larger checks were written to organizations fighting hunger, or poverty, or working to provide clothing or whatever to the less fortunate.

  When I went out to the kitchen, I found my lunch dishes neatly washed again. I smiled as I put them in the cabinet, wondering if Martino Navidad, groundkeeper, had ever found a bonus in his check at a hard time, if the kindness I’d received from his son and grandson were flowers from seeds planted by my strange, seemingly distant, mother.

  I don’t know why I expected to find something in the library that the police had missed. Although I didn’t find anything that gave me a hint into why my mother had disappeared or where she might have gone, my time hadn’t been wasted. I had a more complex image of the woman, and while I couldn’t say I understood Colette Bogatyr, at least I wasn’t locked into a child’s view of her formidable mother.

  Chilton’s first article, the one on my “homecoming” to Las Vegas appeared in the Optic right around the time I was finishing my search of the office. It was a typical enough article of its type, but I found myself reading it with undue fascination, as if Chilton’s words about me could reveal myself to me. It was an unsettling feeling. When I found myself reading the article for the fourth or fifth time, I buried the newspaper section under a heap of other reading material.

  The article did bring results in the form of several phone calls. A couple were from people who claimed to have known me when I was a child. A few were crank calls—mostly from people who wanted to be paid an unspecified amount of money to tell me what had happened to my mother. One was from a real estate agent wanting to know if I was interested in selling the house. Only one was of real interest.

  I recognized her voice even though over forty years had passed since we had last spoken.

  “Mira? Mira Bogatyr, I mean, Fenn?”

  “Hannah? Is that you?”

  The voice was more mature now, but the breathy timbre, like the speaker sucked in air to carry her through each rushed statement, was still there.

  The voice now sounded terribly pleased. “That’s right. Hannah. Hannah Rakes then, Hannah Schaeffer now. I’m so pleased you remember me. I saw the article in the Optic and couldn’t believe it was you.”

  I forced a chuckle, knowing how different my stocky self was from that pale, attenuated child. “Well, a lot of years have passed.”

  A self-deprecating chuckle echoed my own. “Haven’t they just? I didn’t mean that. I meant I couldn’t believe you’d come back here, after all that time. I’d wondered where you’d gotten to. I was devastated when you left, you know. You were my best friend in all the world. I felt dreadfully abandoned.”

  “Well, here I am,” I replied somewhat awkwardly. Once I would have dismissed Hannah’s statement as mere hyperbole, but I’d been a teacher long enough to know that the outspoken children were sometimes as or more lonely than the quiet ones. I might well have been Hannah’s best friend. She certainly had been mine—really my only friend.

  I hastened to take up the conversational thread. “I’m so pleased you’re still here in Las Vegas, Hannah. Any chance we can get together?”

  “Actually, I’m not,” Hannah said, “not in Las Vegas, I mean. My mother read me the article over the phone, then I checked it out online. I live in Albuquerque now. I do nursing and rehab at Lovelace. My mother is still in Las Vegas, though, so I get there fairly regularly. I have plans to be there over the weekend. Any chance you can free up for lunch?”

  “Lunch, dinner, whatever fits your schedule,” I said, surprised at my eagerness. “Won’t your mother mind?”

  “Not a bit. She was the one who suggested I look you up.”

  “And how’s she doing?” I asked. I had fond memories of Mrs. Rakes, memories having to do with freshly baked cookies, jelly glass tumblers of milk, and sleeve-polished apples eaten around the kitchen table to the accompaniment of the chatter of Hannah and her siblings.

  “Pretty well for someone of her age …” Hannah began. After she ran down after a five minute outline of her mother’s age, including certain details I guessed nurses talk about without embarrassment, we made a date for lunch the following Saturday.

  Talking to Hannah had made me suddenly eager to finally open up my “nursery” and revisit the child I had been. I mounted to the second floor, my feet thumping up the stairs in rapid accompaniment to the memory of Hannah’s voice in my ears.

  At the top of the stairs, I turned toward the back of the house. My rooms overlooked the walled garden Domingo now tended even more lovingly than his father had. Since my return, I’d looked up at those windows, but even when the shutters had been opened, they remained secluded behind long curtains, giving nothing away.

  As I had now found was fairly usual, the door to the room was locked, but the key was there on my ring. The lock turned with a minimal amount of stiffness, and I pushed open the door, automatically reaching up for the light switch.

  I didn’t find it, not until I adjusted and slid my hand down. I turned on the light and one bulb in the overhead fixture flickered dimly to life. I’d come prepared for this, and a few minutes labor with stepladder, flashlight, and fresh bulbs brought the room into view.

  The layout was much as I remembered it. Nor did I suffer the usual “everything seemed smaller than I remembered,” for the scale of Phineas House was so much larger than the house in Ohio that I was still startled to find how much room had been at our disposal. I had entered via my playroom and study. As with most of the house, the furniture had been shrouded under dust sheets, the rugs rolled up and set neatly along the walls.

  Sighing in anticipation of yet another long bout of dusting and vacuuming, I crossed to the window and opened the curtains. Once again, I looked down into the back garden. For a moment my mind struggled to return the plantings to their remembered layout, then the garden of memory vanished, leaving me with the more attractive present.

  I walked briskly through the suite. My bathroom was through one door, my bedroom through another. The bathroom was spared the shrouding dust sheets, but the bedroom looked rather eerie. My bed had been a four-poster, and the canopy had been removed and stored away, leaving the slats exposed. Seen this way, they reminded me of a skeleton, and I turned away with a shiver.

  Another round of curtain opening brought ample natural light into the bedroom. I removed dust sheets, heaping them on the floor in a big pile, and opened the drawers to highboys and lowboys. All were empty, which was rather odd. I distinctly recalled how one of the first things Aunt May and I had done was buy clothing for me. I’d assumed that was because my belongings had been left behind. Now I checked the closet and found the same bareness.

  Had the silent women taken my clothing with them when they’d left? Did those lace-trimmed velvet dresses I recalled so fondly end their lives as Sunday best for a slew of other little girls? I told myself I didn’t really mind, but somewhere inside I did. I’d been looking forward to some physical reminder of myself. Now I found everything was gone.

  The playroom was somewhat better. I found a couple of chewed-end pencils in the back of a desk drawer, a bag of cat’s-eye marbles forgotten on a closet shelf. Most of my favorite toys had been sent with me, so I didn’t expect to find them, but apparently the things I had not chosen to take—old school papers, a handful of knickknacks, had been tidied away. I wondered why these two rooms had been so carefully cleaned free from personal items when the other rooms I had looked into had not.

  I wondered, but I did not expect an answer. When I went down into the kitchen, I found the beginnings of one.

  She was standing over by the sink, polishing hard-water spots from the chrome faucet. Slim but not slender, with straight pale brown hair pulled back from intent, regular features, she wore a white apron over a pale-blue, collared blouse. The hand in which she held the washrag was
encased in a yellow plastic glove. She looked about thirty.

  I stood motionless in the doorway, unable to move, much less speak. Who was this? Some relative of Domingo’s? She didn’t look much like him or Enrico, but she did look somehow familiar.

  Then I realized why. I was looking at one of the silent women. I must have drawn in my breath or made some other sound, for she looked up from her polishing. Our eyes met. Hers were light blue, a different shade from the blue of her shirt. I saw that distinctly.

  Just as distinctly, I saw her vanish.

  I stood there for a long moment, then I walked slowly over to where the woman had been standing.

  There were no water spots on the faucet and the washrag was dropped in a damp heap on the bottom of the sink. I lifted it, shook it out, hung between the paired sinks to dry.

  That dampness was the first clue that what I had seen was real. Ever since I had come to New Mexico, I had delighted in how quickly things dried. I could wash my face in the morning, and an hour or so later the heavy terry cloth would hardly be damp.