“I listened to what was being said below me, though, you can bet that. Most of the crowd was saying that I’d been hanged and hadn’t died, so that meant I should be set free. The sheriff, though, he insisted on calling the judge. The judge brought with him some of those Anglo lawmen. He also brought a copy of the sentence. They looked this over while the crowd grumbled, and I let some of the kinder folks get me down from the tree and help me get that rope off my neck.
“Then the judge spoke. ‘The sentence,’ he said, prissy as a maiden aunt, ‘was that the criminal be hanged by the neck until dead. Justice has not been satisfied.’”
Paula Angel had been speaking faster and faster as her story unrolled, and I’d been leaning forward as if I might lose the thread of the tale if I didn’t. Now she stopped.
“And?” I said, feeling my breath catch.
“And,” she said, “they pulled me from the crowd and tied my hands again, and hanged me from that tree. My neck still wouldn’t break, but I strangled good and proper.”
“Oh, God,” I whispered weakly.
“I didn’t much feel like God cared,” Paula said, “and maybe that’s why I’m still here. I haven’t forgiven the old bastard for letting me hope, and then letting me hang.”
“I’m not sure I could either,” I said. “So I didn’t somehow bring you here?”
Paula looked at me for moment, rather puzzled. Then she grinned.
“No, amiga. When I said that you were the reason you could see me when others couldn’t, I didn’t mean you were the cause of my damnation. I meant what I said. The reason you can see me has its roots in you—not in me. You didn’t create me. I’d be here anyhow.”
“But why can I see you?”
“Because there are people who can see ghosts or spirits, people for whom the borders between states just aren’t as firm as they are for most people.” Paula looked pensive. “Mira, I’m no wise woman, no bruja or curandera. In life I was a pretty girl, maybe a little wild. I enjoyed living and loving, and died twice for doing so. In death, well, mostly I’ve been angry, but I’ve been around long enough that I’ve seen things, and I’ve been curious enough to wonder about them. If you can take a hanged woman for what she is, I can tell you a few things, but don’t get angry with me when I don’t know everything.”
I reached out a hand and patted Paula’s where it rested on the tabletop. It felt warm and smooth and young.
“Tell me what you can,” I said. “You know more than I do.”
Paula motioned for the bartender, and he brought over a couple more beers. I nodded my thanks and reached for my purse.
“It’s on the house,” the bartender said, but oddly, I heard it as “on the House,” and shivered just a bit.
Paula noticed my reaction, but she didn’t comment She sipped at her beer, obviously organizing her thoughts. I schooled myself to patience. In some ways, Paula was much older than I was—had to be if she’d been around since the mideighteen hundreds—but I had the feeling that in some way she was much younger than I was, and I remembered how hard it could be to explain things you knew intuitively.
“I knew your mother,” Paula began. “Colette, that is, not the woman who raised you. Colette was incredible. She’d been born here, at Phineas House, of a family that had owned the House for generations, but by the time Colette was born, the Bogatyr family had lost touch with what had once bound them to Phineas House, the House to them—maybe been made to lose touch would be a better way to put it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Neither do I, entirely,” Paula admitted. “There’s a history to Phineas House. It has been there a long time, and not by accident either. The people who built it were called witches by those who lived nearby, but as they never did any harm and often did good, well, they were suffered to live. Later, when they became stronger, people were glad to have them around. At least that’s what I think it must have been. This has not been a kind land, you know, and anything that might give an edge would be welcome.”
“I suppose,” I said. “I’d never realized I came from such an old Spanish family.”
“Oh, very old,” Paula said, “but not necessarily Spanish, not Indian either. Your people are defined not merely by bloodline but by what they can do.”
“And that is?”
“Have a beer with ghosts, for one thing,” Paula said. “Now, let me tell this my way.”
“Very well,” I agreed, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling very strange about what I’d just learned.
“Colette was a throwback to older times,” Paula said. “I watched her when she was a little girl, noticed her because she noticed me. Not many people did, not even those who came here looking for ghosts. Like I said, I’m just a little famous.
“Now, Colette’s parents weren’t comfortable with their strange daughter. They were solid, upright people. They still owned Phineas House, but they had sold much of the property around it, they and their own parents. No matter what money they got for this, their fortunes declined. When Colette was born, though, something that was dormant in the House began waking up with her. It responded to her, and the solid, unimaginative people who were Colette’s parents, and who had been trying hard to live down some of the earlier stories about their family, they didn’t like this.”
I thought about the silent women, about the sense of will and awareness I had sensed in the House, and thought I understood how Colette’s parents—my grandparents—must have felt.
Paula went on, “Phineas House didn’t like Collette’s parents. It started doing little things to make them uncomfortable. Colette’s parents were too practical to blame a house—so they blamed Colette. They punished her, locked her away in her room but this only made matters worse. The House could concentrate—if that’s the word to use for a House that has no mind, only will—on Colette, and Colette, who had both mind and will bonded with the House.
“Her father was the one who punished her most often, and together Colette and Phineas House set out to put him out of the way. She was just a child then. I don’t know what was done, but Colette’s father was found one morning at the bottom of the main staircase. His neck was broken.”
I was appalled. “An accident, surely. That’s an old house.”
“An accident, probably,” Paula said, moving her bare shoulders in a fluid fashion that could not be called a shrug. “But Colette did not think so. She was young, yet, and very strange. The next time she behaved in a fashion her mother did not like, and punishment was threatened, Colette bragged that she had caused her father’s fall—she threatened, too, that her mother should take care unless she wanted something to happen to her.
“Now, the mother was not of the line that owned Phineas House. That had been the father’s line. Moreover, after the custom of the day, her family was all too eager to send a male relative to advise and protect her. Colette’s uncle had no patience with his niece. He told his sister that her daughter was unruly and spoiled. Once I heard Colette tell one of her lovers as they rode in her carriage about the Plaza that her uncle had beaten her.”
I thought I knew what was coming. “Did he fall as well?”
Paula smiled a lazy smile. I could tell she had no love for domineering men. No wonder, given her history.
“He fell, but was not killed. Again Colette claimed the fall was her doing—this, though she was locked in her nursery at the time. The uncle used this claim to have Colette committed for insanity. Conveniently, the State Hospital was right here in Las Vegas, and, like most public institutions, eager for donations.”
“So it was true, what Hannah told me,” I said. “My mother was committed.”
“But was she crazy?” Paula said shrewdly. “You have lived in that house. You know it is more than boards and nails.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I do. But how did Colette get out?”
“After Colette was committed, the uncle tried to sell Phineas House, but he learned he coul
d not do this. The mother had inherited her husband’s personal property, but Phineas House and its earnings belonged to Colette. The best they could do was take what they could and leave. This they did.”
“Leaving Colette?”
“Leaving Colette. Can you blame them? This was a child who claimed to have done murder—and threatened to do it again. You knew the woman she became. She was not a loving child either.”
I didn’t know what to think. It was hard imagining my mother as a little girl of any type, much less one who would brag that she had killed her father.
Paula was merciful, and did not press me to speak.
“Colette’s story after that is only partially known to me. The State Hospital is not a place I care to go. It is … unsettled. I next saw her a few months after her twenty-first birthday. Many things had happened in the ensuing years. Her mother had died in an influenza epidemic. Trustees associated with her father’s estate ordered a review of Colette’s situation. The doctors they hired ruled the young woman was functionally sane, a bit delusional, but certainly not in need of institutionalizing. However, they recommended Colette remain near some facility where she could undergo periodic reviews.
“This suited Colette fine, as it got her out of the hospital. She had no desire to move away from Phineas House, so saying that she’d stop in at the State Hospital from time to time was no skin off her back. Far as I know, she never went back, though. Instead, Colette reopened the House and took up residence. The money that had been left in trust for her was sufficient for her to maintain Phineas House, and to travel some. I don’t know where she went, or what she did, but each time she came back she seemed a bit wealthier.
“That was a good thing, because as time went on Colette got odder and odder, too, dressing as if from an earlier time, and all that … . People are more patient with strangeness when the odd person is either very rich or very poor. Eventually, when Colette was in her late twenties she committed what in any but a confirmed eccentric would have been an outrage. She bore a daughter—you—without bothering with a husband. Few people knew this, and fewer cared. Colette put about that she had been widowed, and as she was a local eccentric, people believed her. In a way, her disappearance proved a fitting capstone to her odd life.”
Paula Angel drained the last of her beer in what was without doubt the equivalent of a terminal punctuation mark.
I thought about all the questions I had, and chose the one that seemed most important.
“Do you know who my father was?”
Paula shook her head. “Colette had lots of boyfriends, both before and after you were born. Could have been any of them.”
“Oh.” I sat in silence for a long while, then said, “Paula, that’s a lot to absorb all at once. Tell me, can I meet with you again?”
Paula gave one of those feline grins. “Sure, why not? I’m not going anywhere. I don’t know a lot more, though. Mostly I watched Colette because she was interesting, and because she was one of the few people who could interact with me. It gets dull being dead, and even someone who does nothing more than incline her head in a regal nod breaks up the boredom.”
“I want to keep talking to you,” I said, “but I can’t think straight. There’s too much to take in.”
“Yeah,” Paula said, stretching. “It’s quite a story, almost as good as mine.”
“Yours,” I said, “is far sadder.”
Paula seemed pleased to be given precedence. “I’ll take you back to where you can find your car. If you want to chat, just come down here. I seem to find myself here a lot—around that damned windmill. Wasn’t there I was hanged, but I guess we’re akin somehow.”
I refused to think about this. It was a little too unsettlingly like the relationship between my mother and Phineas House. Instead, I accepted Paula’s escort back to the Plaza. She sort of faded me in or faded herself out. As I walked to where I’d parked my truck, I noticed that the bar where we’d gone to talk wasn’t there. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.
After I pulled my red pickup truck into my space in the carriage house, I got out and stood staring at Phineas House. My visit with Paula Angel had taken longer than I thought and darkness was falling, but the outside security lights I’d had the electrician install soon after my arrival illuminated segments of the wildly colored exterior.
I stood there, almost frozen, considering the tales I’d been told by a ghost. I’d known there was something strange about the House, but was it capable of murder—or conspiring at murder? I’d thought that whatever spirit—if spirit was even the right word—that inhabited the House was benign. Paula’s story made me wonder if it was otherwise, if the welcome I’d met since my arrival had been offered for ulterior motives.
Then again, was there any reason I should believe what Paula had told me? Was the fact that she was a ghost any reason for her to be honest? It didn’t take much to realize, based on her own account of herself, that she’d probably not been from the highest social class nor too careful around men. Women who were—especially at the time Paula had been alive—didn’t tend to find themselves in dark corners at wild parties.
But why shouldn’t I believe her? She’d spoken of Colette with a certain odd affection, as someone who acknowledged her existence. What reason would Paula have for lying to me? If I found out, she’d lose someone else who could break up the monotony of her deathless existence.
I stood there for a long while, staring at the House, almost mesmerized by its color, brighter where the lights hit, attenuating into shadow by gradual stages until it was hard to decide where the color ended and the shadow began. My gaze flickered back and forth, hunting for the certain border, as if where there was neither color nor shadow I’d find an answer.
The sound of a door opening behind me broke me from my trance.
“Mira?” Domingo’s voice spoke from the square of light that spilled out from the interior of the carriage house. “Mira? Is that you?
“It’s me,” I said, so softly I could hardly hear my own voice. I repeated it more loudly. “It’s me.”
Domingo stepped out into the garage. His jeans and work shirt looked as if they had been pulled on in haste, and he cradled a gun of some sort in one hand. He continued to hold it as he came to join me.
“I heard the truck come in, then nothing, not even the garage door closing,” he explained, his tone almost apologetic. “I thought you might be ill.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Blanco had come out with Domingo and was sniffing around my ankles. I wondered if the little dog smelled the scents of the bar where I’d sat drinking with Paula. Did sawdust cling to the soles of my shoes? “I was thinking about things I learned tonight. I guess I got lost in my thoughts.”
Domingo said nothing, but his silence was a listening one, one that invited confidences. I went on.
“Did you know that my mother claimed to have killed her father? That she later claimed to have tried to kill her uncle? Did you know that she spent time in the state mental hospital?”
“When I was a boy,” Domingo said, “and Colette vanished, some people called her ‘the crazy lady,’ but I thought they only meant her odd ways. I never heard the rest, not even after I became caretaker here.”
“I suppose time and money could make even a juicy story like that one die away,” I said, “and Mother did give a lot of money to local charities. She was a minor at the time of her father’s death, too. I wonder if juvenile records were sealed then, like they are now?”
I heard a quiet thump as Domingo put the gun down on the hood of his truck, then felt his arm slip around my shoulders.
“Who told you this, Mira? Did you go to the hospital?”
“My school friend Hannah told me a little, but she didn’t know if it was just malicious gossip. I heard the rest from someone named Pablita Sandoval. She told me to call her ‘Paula Angel.’”
Domingo’s grip around my shoulder momentarily tightened. “Someone who calls herself ‘Paula Angel’
may not be someone to trust. Here in Las Vegas, that is a name from cuentos, from stories.”
“From histories, I think,” I said. “She told me who she was— and when she lived. She is the woman I saw last Friday in the Plaza, the woman you did not see.”
“And you went looking for her again today?”
“I did. She seemed very real. She was there. We went and talked in a bar, a bar that isn’t there now. Paula had been acquainted with my mother. It seems my gift for seeing ghosts may be inherited.”
Maybe Domingo didn’t push me away and call me a liar because his traditional culture hasn’t rejected stories of ghosts and spirits. Maybe his reaction was rooted in the fact that he was Domingo, who had lived near Phineas House and served it since he was a child. Perhaps he could feel that I was on the edge of breaking down, and he did not wish to be the one to push me over.
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