Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  I watched him drive away, feeling real pleasure. The child me had liked Chilton O’Reilly, and the adult me did, too. I still thought he had an agenda of his own, but I thought my willingness to feed his curiosity had, ironically, served to defuse it.

  When I went back into the kitchen, the silent women had already cleaned up the mess from lunch.

  18

  Color, sound, and taste were no longer separate and

  discrete experiences, but parts of an integrated

  whole, whose components could sometimes translate

  into one another.

  —Patricia Lynne Duffy,

  Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens

  INSIDE THE LINES

  Later that afternoon, I decided to continue trying to figure out why the connection to Phineas House, whatever it was, might have been interrupted in my great-grandparent’s generation—or if this was something that Paula had not completely understood. After all, she herself had stressed she was no omnipotent oracle. She only knew what she had observed. Maybe the descendants of Aldo Pincas had decided it would be wise to hide their odd talents.

  But in looking at the chart, I found a possible reason for the interruption. Isabela and Wallace Jefferson had had two daughters: Pinca, named for her family, and Mercedes, possibly named for her grandmother. Somehow I had the feeling that Wallace was either a nonentity or doted on his wife.

  What I hadn’t noticed before was that Pinca and Mercedes Jefferson were twins. Could that have confused Phineas House? It might have, especially if the girls were identical twins. I’d have to see if I could find any pictures or paintings. I didn’t know if it would matter, but since I had no idea what precisely this connection was that Paula claimed I had to the House, anything that indicated how the connection was made—or broken—could be useful.

  That it was something that could be inherited, I had no doubt, but just what I was inheriting was anyone’s guess.

  Domingo came tapping at the kitchen door that evening as I was working on my laptop.

  “Can I come in, Mira?”

  “Please,” I said. “Let me shut this down. I’m trying to keep in touch with folks I left behind in Ohio. Now that the school year has started, they’re full of stories about mutual friends. Would you believe that the principal of one of the local high schools got married this summer—to a girl who graduated the spring before? True, he was young for his post, but really!”

  “Seventeen-year-old girls get married all the time in northern New Mexico,” Domingo said with deliberate obtuseness. “But maybe not to men old enough to be principals of their schools. Does hearing all the juicy gossip make you homesick?”

  I sent off a sheaf of e-mails, then clicked off connections.

  “Maybe a little, but I also feel a certain guilty pleasure that I’m not expected to be putting together lesson plans and grading assignments. It’s much more interesting to be interviewed for newspaper articles and exploring Phineas House. Want to compare research?”

  Domingo brightened. “I have a few things.”

  “So do I. I found the family Bible—and a family tree.”

  “Good! We can check our work against each other’s.”

  “Coffee? I can make decaf …”

  “Sounds good.”

  While I set up the coffeepot, I started telling Domingo what I’d learned, and what I’d deduced. I thought that maybe he’d be upset, that my finds would have made his own useless, but he only seemed interested, and if his fingers drummed against the file folder in front of him, it was with anticipation, nothing else.

  When the coffee was done, we took cups into the library, and I pulled out the Bible so that Domingo could see the family tree. He ran his finger down the page, then opened his folder. The top item was a list of names with dates following them.

  “Here,” he said, “a bit more on your ancestors. I was lucky when I went down to the courthouse. One of the clerks is an older woman, a friend of my mother’s. She won’t retire, and, to be honest, she knows so much no one really wants her to do so. She helped me find what we needed.”

  “Didn’t she think your interest was strange?”

  “Not at all. She knows I live here at Phineas House, and she had seen the article about your coming home again. If she was at all surprised, it was that you had not come in sooner.”

  I’d been looking at the list as he spoke, and paused with my finger next to one name.

  “Look, Domingo, here’s my great-uncle Urbano. The family tree only gives his dates of birth and death, but you’ve found more. He was married, and had at least two children.”

  Domingo moved the top sheet to one side, and picked up another he’d headed “Urbano Bogatyr.”

  “I looked for further information on these children—after all, they would be your second cousins. I found nothing more, no marriage licenses or the like. My mother’s friend, the clerk, cross-checked the real estate records and found that in 1936 Urbano sold a house on a street a few blocks away from Phineas House.”

  “It’s a remarkable bit of luck that she found that,” I said.

  Domingo did not deny it. “She had been doing some research for someone else not long ago, and come across it. The reference stuck in her mind. She is amazing that way.”

  “I bet Urbano moved then,” I said. “Las Vegas in the Depression would not have been a great place to try and raise a family. Obviously, he stayed in touch at least a little, or Colette would not have known when he died. He left two children …”

  “At least,” Domingo said. “Urbano was a relatively young man when he left Las Vegas. He might have had more later.”

  “I wonder if anyone of them ever came back?” I mused. “Probably not. What would there be to bring them back? Nikolai died a year later, and within another year Colette was committed. Phineas House was probably boarded up.”

  “Nothing in the courthouse will show us if Urbano ever came for a visit,” Domingo said practically. “Bogatyr is not a common surname, though. It might be possible to trace him.”

  “I’m going to back-burner that,” I said, “at least for now. Unless Great-uncle Urbano told his children stories about Phineas House, they couldn’t help me much, and he has been dead since 1960—if the Bible is to be believed.”

  “I think it is,” Domingo said. “The dates in it match what I found elsewhere. See, here are your maternal great-grandparents, Pinca and Ivan Bogatyr. I also found information on Pinca’s twin sister, Mercedes.”

  “Ivan is listed as being born in Saint Petersburg, Russia,” I said. “I wonder what brought him to Las Vegas, New Mexico?”

  “Maybe Pinca did,” Domingo said. “We have very little feeling for the lives your ancestors lived. They may have travelled a great deal.”

  I thought about this, then nodded. “I think they may have. Think about the furnishings in the House. There are Oriental carpets, fine musical instruments, paintings. True, some could have been shipped here on the railroad, but I’d say it’s fairly certain that the family had access to something more than the Sears catalog for their shopping.”

  “True,” Domingo said, turning a page. “Your grandmother, Chantal, was foreign, too. I found a copy of the marriage certificate between herself and your grandfather. Her place of birth is given as Paris.”

  “So we have some evidence that the descendants of Aldo Pincas, rooted as they were in Las Vegas, New Mexico, nonetheless got out and saw the world. That’s something, but I’m not at all sure what.”

  Domingo reached across and squeezed my hand. “I have more. The courthouse was quiet today, and once my mother’s friend got interested, she also got inquisitive. She remembered that at the time Colette disappeared there had been some gossip about a lawsuit related to Colette. It was old gossip, back from when Colette was a child. Given that it was bad form to discuss cases related to a minor, it never got beyond the clerks. She went and looked up files, and eventually found the jacket. It seems that Colette’s maternal uncle bro
ught suit on behalf of Colette’s mother to have Ivan’s will broken on the grounds that Colette was incompetent.”

  “He didn’t succeed,” I said, “but it’s interesting to know he tried.”

  “More than merely interesting,” Domingo said. “The information in the folder gave the names of the trustees for Colette’s estate. There were three: Guillermo Jefferson, Amerigo Hart, and Ignatius Carney.”

  “Guillermo Jefferson!” I said, almost shouting. “That name’s in my Bible. He was the younger brother of Isabela, my …” I counted back the generations, “Great-great grandmother, so he’s my great, great uncle—or would that be great, great, great uncle?”

  “It could well be the same man,” Domingo agreed. “I thought this when you showed me the Bible. I didn’t have time to trace back further than your great-grandfather, Ivan, but I did remember your grandmother Pinca’s maiden name had been Jefferson.”

  “If it’s the same Guillermo,” I said, “he would have been in his seventies at the time of the lawsuit. That works, then.”

  I looked at the name of the second of the trustees. “Domingo, this second name rings bells, too, but you might not realize it.”

  “I did notice,” Domingo said, “that ‘Amerigo’ is also the first name of your great-great-grandfather. It does not seem unreasonable that one of Amerigo’s children—a daughter, perhaps, would have named her son for her father.”

  “That’s just part of it,” I said. “I’ve told you a little about my Aunt May’s journals, haven’t I?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, although the conditions of my adoption were such that she and Uncle Stan weren’t supposed to pry, Aunt May did anyhow.”

  “Like mother, like daughter,” Domingo said, his eyes twinkling.

  I grinned at him. “Right. Well, Aunt May wrote a bunch of letters to various people here in Las Vegas. She represented herself as interested in Colette’s disappearance as part of research for a paper she was writing. She never got any answers. Then she had an excuse to go to Arizona by herself—a beloved cousin had cancer. She decided to use the trip to go to Las Vegas and ask her questions in person.”

  “Your uncle would not have agreed?”

  “She was pretty sure he’d be furious. After all, she was gambling their custody of me against her curiosity.”

  “Does that make you feel uncomfortable?”

  “Not a bit. Her journal makes pretty clear that she got interested at first because she was afraid Colette would show up and take me away someday. But I’m getting off topic.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “So Aunt May made reservations to go from Arizona to Las Vegas, but she did this through a travel agent in Ohio. The day she did this, a man shows up at her door—one of the three trustees for my estate. His name was Mr. Hart.”

  “¡Madre de Dios!”

  “Or at least Mother of Hart,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

  “Could they have been the same man?”

  “I don’t think so,” I admitted. “Aunt May describes the man who visited her as the youngest of the three trustees. I think her Mr. Hart may have been a relative—maybe a son—of Amerigo Hart. This thing seems to run in families. I think you’re absolutely right. Amerigo Hart is the son of either Belinda or Catarina Pincas. Although the House didn’t go to one of them, still they were involved in its disposition … its fate.”

  “And the last man?”

  “No way of knowing. He could be a son of the sister who didn’t marry Whoever Hart. He could be a relative of Aldo Pincas from another branch. He could be some poor lawyer dragged in to do the paperwork, someone who has no idea how very odd a trust this is. Whatever the case, we’re seeing that although Phineas House seems to bond with one family member per generation, whatever is going on is useful enough that other members make an effort to keep the House in the family.”

  Domingo lifted his coffee cup, found it empty, but continued to hold it, staring into it as if the brown smears at the bottom might hold the key to hidden secrets.

  “Mira, what about your own trustees, the ones who arranged for your adoption? There was this Mr. Hart. What are the names of the others?”

  “I don’t think Aunt May mentioned them,” I began, then tapped myself on the forehead in mute reprimand. “She may have, somewhere, but I’m sure the names have to be in that file folder Uncle Stan kept for me. Hang on.”

  As I headed from the room, Domingo called after me, “More coffee, Mira?”

  “Please. There are cookies in the cabinet, too.”

  When I thudded down the front stairs a few minute later, Domingo had brought in two cups of hot coffee and the plastic bakery box of chocolate-chip cookies.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Read the Bible or something for a moment while I plow through this.”

  Domingo grinned. “I’ll do that. I found a few more familiar names. I might as well confirm that they match up.”

  Uncle Stan had kept the file in order by punching each sheet of paper at the top and then clipping it into the file. Since this made getting at the earlier copies harder, I pulled the whole sheaf off.

  “This is going to be a real nuisance to get back on,” I muttered, but I wasn’t really listening to myself. My eyes were skimming documents, looking for the names of my trustees. Funny. To this point that “my” had belonged to Colette—they were not “my” in the sense of men who worked for me or on my behalf. They were Colette’s allies, assigned to me. Now I realized that Colette might well have had a fondness for the concept of trustees. Hers had certainly done more to protect her interests than her mother or father had done. In assigning my care to trustees, rather than to friends or to people I knew, had Colette been doing me a kindness, protecting me as she herself had been protected?

  I found the names I wanted on a letter at the very beginning of the correspondence. It was the same one Aunt May had mentioned: the one that explained the terms under which the Fenns could have me to foster, and, if all went well, to later adopt. It was signed by three men, their names typed neatly beneath their signatures: Edgar Carney, Michael Hart, and Renaldo Pincas.

  “Bingo!” I exclaimed softly.

  “What have you found?” Domingo asked.

  “My trustees,” I said. “Jefferson has dropped out, but Carney and Hart remain—and Pincas is back. All men, but that’s to be expected. I was born in 1952. There weren’t many women in business then.”

  Domingo nodded. “Are we seeing a law firm of some sort here? One where family members are regularly given places, or some sort of club?”

  “A club,” I said firmly, “having something to do with whatever it is Phineas House does.”

  “But what is it that the House does?” Domingo said. “What is this ‘witchcraft’ of which Paula Angel spoke? Is it merely the ability to see ghosts and benefit from the talents of a strange building, or something more?”

  “I think it’s something more,” I said, “but for the life of me, I have no idea what it is. However, sure as God made little green apples, I’m willing to bet that Colette’s disappearance was connected to it.”

  Domingo looked at me, the excitement that had lit his eyes as we unravelled a bit of the tangle, darkening into worry. “So am I, Mira. Please, be careful.”

  “I think I’ve gone too far to be careful,” I said. “I think now I have no choice but to be smart.”

  The next morning was Saturday.

  A week ago, I thought as I walked down the hall to the shower, I was out playing tourist with Domingo—wondering if he might like me just a little more than as a pleasant landlady. Now I’ve had beers with a ghost and am actually coming to accept that my family might have been some sort of sorcerers or whatever you’d call them. I don’t know if I want to think about where I’ll be a week from now. The thing is, I don’t know where to go from here.

  When I went back to my bedroom, I found someone had offered me direction. A later volume in the series of Aunt May’s journals
lay open on my pillow. One of those old-fashioned weights used to hold books open had been laid across to hold it open. I couldn’t miss the hint, nor did I need the sprig of Spanish lavender laid in the join of the page to tell me who had done this. The silent women—or Phineas House through the intermediary of the silent women—was offering me some advice.

  “Aunt May figured something out, did she?” I asked the listening air. “Thanks for showing me. This is farther along than where I was reading. I might not have gotten here for weeks. I’ll look at it after breakfast.”

  After I had dressed, I hurried downstairs to meet Domingo. I’d found a sort of braided bread with apricots and cheese in the folds, and was looking forward to sharing it. I wondered if I should tell him what the silent women had done, but decided against it. I hadn’t quite gotten around to explaining about the silent women, and that would be a lot to go into before the workmen arrived.