Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  Once I’d settled Mr. Hart with a tall glass of iced tea garnished with mint from the garden, I went out and turned the chicken I’d already started grilling. Somehow, I’d known Mr. Hart would be on time, and when I came in, I reported that dinner would be ready to go on the table in about ten minutes. Unlike with Domingo, I hadn’t felt comfortable with the idea of dining with my trustee informally at my kitchen table, and so had set two places at one end of the formal dining room table.

  Needless to say, when I’d gone to wash it, I’d found the crystal and china was already spotless, and the silver polished to a soft, moonlit glow. If I ever gave up Phineas House, I was going to have lifelong nostalgia for the silent women.

  Mr. Hart and I chatted about his trip in from Minnesota as I carried the side dishes out to the dining room. I brought the chicken in from the grill last, so we could enjoy it while it was still snapping hot. I was washing the inevitable smudge of grease from one wrist when Mr. Hart commented:

  “You are very little like Colette, Ms. Fenn. I think she would be astonished to see what her daughter has come to be.”

  “No doubt,” I said, a trace curtly, picking up the tray of chicken and leading the way into the dining room.

  “I didn’t mean that as an insult,” Mr. Hart said, settling himself into the indicated chair with the slight fussiness of a robin settling onto the nest. “Nor did I mean to indicate that Colette would necessarily be disappointed. I think her lack of practical competence frustrated her. It may even have been why she was so hard on the … servants. Employers most often are when they realize how they need those who, ostensibly, are in their debt.”

  “I wonder if the silent women knew that,” I said, thinking aloud, as I’d fallen into the habit since Phineas House seemed to listen.

  “The ‘silent women’?” Mr. Hart said, a slight chuckle underlying his voice. It was not mocking in the least, but instead avuncularly amused. “Is that what you call them?”

  “Ever since I was a child, that’s how I’ve thought of them,” I said, and, as if our discussing them granted permission, from the kitchen came the muffled sounds of the remaining mess from cooking being cleared away. “I knew they talked among themselves, but they barely ever talked to me.”

  “They feared you, I suspect,” Mr. Hart said, serving himself the largest chicken breast with the air of a man who likes his food, and is certain he will enjoy what is set before him. “They feared Colette, and since you were so young, they would have seen you as her extension.”

  “Not hard to do,” I said bitterly, “since that is how she seemed to see me.”

  If I had hoped Mr. Hart would say something to ameliorate this harsh image of Colette, I was disappointed.

  “Colette was a … difficult woman, but she had some reasons for being so. Mira—may I call you Mira?”

  “Please do,” I replied.

  “And if you would call me Mikey, I would be grateful. I know I am an old man, now, but ‘Mr. Hart’ still evokes my father to me, and he was a formidable man.”

  “But, ‘Mikey’?”

  Mr. Hart grinned. “Ridiculous, perhaps, but a childhood nickname I never shed. There were many Michaels in my family—heritage of a dominant patriarch in the person of my grandfather. Later, wherever I went, I seemed to encounter other Michaels who had taken the more respectable diminutives, or the dignified Michael. At least, I escaped Mickey, and attendant references to the mouse, a thing for which I am eternally grateful.”

  I found myself liking my dinner guest more and more. I’d prepared myself for someone rather like Chilton O’Reilly but stuffier, and with no childhood fondness to bridge the gap. I found this affable, doughy man quite amusing, and I was certain he was not putting on an act. The silent women would never have manifested if Phineas House didn’t think well of Mikey Hart.

  “Mikey it is,” I agreed, and sliced into my own chicken with a great deal more appetite than I had anticipated.

  “Well, Mira,” Mikey said, “as I was about to say before I ran off on that last tangent, I’d prefer to discuss this entire matter in something vaguely like chronological order. I don’t mean I won’t tell you about your mother if you wish, but so many of the things that shaped her are related to earlier history. Marvelous chicken, by the way, and is the recipe for the pasta salad your own?”

  “Thank you. Yes, it is. I can copy it for you if you’d like, though Domingo’s garden contributed a great deal to the flavor.”

  I could see that any conversation with Mikey Hart was often going to run away into tangents. I no longer marvelled at his telling Aunt May about Queens of Mirrors and Mistresses of Thresholds. It now seemed a miracle that he hadn’t still been there when Uncle Stan came home for dinner. I decided I’d need to bring us back onto topic, or doubtless Mikey would be asking me was Domingo suitable as a caretaker or where the garden was or even what we were growing in it.

  “I’ve done some research,” I said. “I know a lot more about my immediate family history at least. I’ve even come across the rumors that Colette was responsible for her father’s death.”

  “Did Domingo Navidad tell you that?” Mikey asked.

  “No, actually …” I trailed off, took a sip of wine to cover my nervousness, and went on, “it was the ghost of Paula Angel.”

  Mikey’s response was nothing I could have anticipated.

  “Pablita did always like Colette,” he said. “I think she saw her as another rebel against the unfair, male-dominated system.”

  “And was she?”

  “No, Pablita was …”

  “I don’t mean Paula Angel!” I said, not quite shouting, but coming close. “I mean Colette Bogatyr, my mother.”

  Mikey blinked owlishly with surprise, but as he helped himself to a third piece of chicken, I don’t think I had offended him.

  “Colette was … possibly a rebel, but she was also, quite honestly, less than completely sane and quite probably a parricide.”

  “But you,” I fumbled for the right words, “or rather, her own trustees, they got her out of the insane asylum. Why would they do that if Colette was both insane and dangerous?”

  “Because if they didn’t, Colette would have left on her own accord. In fact, she had been doing so for years. The trustees merely put her in the position of being able to lay legal claim to Phineas House.

  “I’m confused,” I said, my elbows on the arms of my chair, my face in my hands.

  “Well, it is easier to understand if I start at the beginning,” Mikey said without reproof. “It’s just that it’s such a difficult beginning, and entails explaining things that have nothing to do with Colette—at least not with her personally.”

  He had finished the third piece of chicken, and though he looked longingly at the pasta salad, seemed prepared to make a valiant effort to resist fourths.

  “I have dessert,” I said, “and the silent women seem to have anticipated me and turned on the coffee. I made decaf, but I can put on caffeinated if you’d like.”

  “My doctor says I should cut back on caffeine and rich foods and get more exercise,” Mikey replied. “Needless to say, I don’t listen. However, your company is sufficiently stimulating that I can do without caffeine.”

  I smiled at the compliment. “The evening is lovely, and normally I’d suggest we take our dessert outside, but since I have a feeling that what you need to tell me shouldn’t be overhear … .”

  “Yes, that is probably best,” Mikey said. “Tell me, is Domingo Navidad still living on the property?”

  “In the apartment over the carriage house. He’s been a gem. Lately, he’s concentrated on getting the exterior paint job done.”

  “I noticed it,” Mikey said, with almost incredible understatement ; you’d have to be blind—and possibly deaf—not to notice that paint job.

  “I won’t ask if you like it,” I said, grinning, “because I fear that what we’re considering calling the ‘Fairground Midway’ style is probably an acquired taste.�
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  Mikey rose, nicking one more pasta twist out of the salad. “It is an individual style, and says a great deal about you—more than that you are an art teacher. However, don’t ask me what, because that would take us back to telling the story inside out.”

  “I have some suspicions,” I said. “Like I said, I’ve been doing some research. Why don’t we take the coffee and dessert tray into the living room? Then you can start telling me what you’ve come so far to tell.”

  And the silent women can get on with tidying up. I suspect they might manifest for the purpose of frowning at me if I dared clear the table with our first formal dinner guest in the House.

  Once we had settled in, I tucked my feet up under me—something else Colette never would have done. She might have done a Cleopatra lounging upon her gilded divan routine for one of her lovers, but never just tucked bare feet up under the hem of a loose silk skirt.

  Mikey indulged in both a brownie and a cookie, but he was more focused now than he had been before.

  “You found the kaleidoscopes,” he said, “and, more importantly, you somehow figured out how to use them. I know this, because you found my note. That phone number was given out in one place, in one way, precisely for that reason.”

  I nodded. “You said something to my Aunt May about Colette being a Queen of Mirrors, a Mistress of Thresholds. Did you do it knowing she would start researching?”

  Mikey sipped his coffee, to which he’d added enough cream and sugar that it could qualify as another dessert.

  “I … suspected she would, yes. Maybelle Fenn was a remarkable woman. She was well on the way—not to finding out where Colette had vanished; that would have been unlikely even for her—but to making some inquires that could have caused difficulties.”

  “For you?” I asked mildly, when what I really wanted to scream was Where did Colette go! What happened to her? Is she alive?

  “No, Mira, actually, the difficulties would be for you. I’m going to need to go back before Colette was born for you to understand just how difficult matters could have become. Shall we suffice to say it has to do with inheritance?”

  “I can deal with that,” I said. “My own research has shown me that Phineas House seems to be an important piece of property. Did you tell Uncle Stan not to sell it?”

  “We did not, not precisely. We did indicate that we would assist with the long-distance administration of the property if he would agree not to sell it He was eager to cooperate, to prove he was not interested in adopting you for your inheritance.”

  But someone else might have been, I thought, feeling suddenly cold. That’s what Mikey’s hinting at. Someone or some-ones wanted Phineas House.

  “Am I to understand then,” Mikey went on, “that you learned what you did that enabled you to use the kaleidoscopes from Maybelle Fenn?”

  “Not quite,” I said. “Aunt May never told me about her research, but she left journals. Research journals, I guess you could call them, though they cover a lot more. She made sure that I would get them after she died. Her journal is where I first encountered the term ‘liminal space,’ and some of the theory. I put that together with some of what I’d found here at Phineas House, and decided that maybe the kaleidoscopes weren’t just ornamental.”

  Mikey nodded approval. “You did very well. Now, though I’m risking putting you to sleep after that excellent meal, I’m going to lecture you. You see, liminal space is where all of this begins, and until you understand that, you are going to have difficulty understanding how this all applies to you.”

  “Is liminal space a place then?” I know I sounded puzzled. “That doesn’t seem quite to fit.”

  “No, liminal space isn’t a place. By definition, liminal space can’t be a place because the tenuous virtue of betweenness is what creates liminal space. When liminal space becomes a place, it ceases to be liminal.”

  “I’m with you,” I encouraged him when he looked at me, obviously wondering if I’d accepted this convoluted logic.

  “Liminal space—for all that it is, by definition, most itself when it almost isn’t,” Mikey went on, “is a very potent thing. It can be channeled in a wide variety of ways, but the most obvious way to use it is for scrying, for looking into probability.”

  “That would be because anything that is liminal, that is on the border between two edges,” I said, shaping into words ideas I’d been puzzling over, “is sort of a crossroads where various outcomes can all be seen as probable—if not equally probable.”

  “That’s right,” Mr. Hart said. “Scrying through liminal space is not easy. For one thing, it takes a while to learn how to deduce which of the various futures is most probable, but the technique does work. Trust me on this.”

  “Okay.”

  “Another possible use for liminal space is for travel.”

  “Travel?”

  “That’s right. To one who has the talent and the training, liminal space can be used to violate the charming principle that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Not when liminal space is involved. Probably everyone has used liminal space at least once. It’s easiest to use it accidentally, in a familiar environment where you are, to use the modern term, ‘on autopilot,’ not really paying attention to what you are doing. Don’t tell me that you’ve never been walking or driving somewhere and found yourself at your destination with no real sense of how you got there—and often with time to spare.”

  “More times than I can count,” I laughed. “I always found it most awkward when I was going to visit someone and got there early. There were a few times when I was teaching and I’d find myself opening a multipurpose classroom and walking in before the previous class was over.”

  “What you did then,” Mikey said seriously, “was use liminal space. You unconsciously crossed into a liminal area where various borders met and chose the route you needed. An adept in the skill can do this consciously.”

  “And Colette knew how to do this,” I said, thinking of something Mikey had said earlier, “and that’s how she’d leave the insane asylum.”

  “Bingo,” Mikey said, but despite the flippant term, he looked a little sad. “Because she had been severed from Phineas House—I’ll get back to that, I promise—she chose some very dangerous routes for her escapes. That’s one of the reasons her trustees wanted her released.”

  “Because they thought she’d hurt herself?”

  “And because of the things that might have been created by her on her journeys,” Mikey said. “When you are dealing with probability, for everything you could have done right there are dozens of ways you could have done the same thing wrong. Colette would use one of these wrong ways, correct to make it right, but still, sometimes fragments of the wrongness would get out there.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Good girl, and honest,” Mikey said. “Let me tell you a bit about Phineas House. It may help.”

  “Go on,” I said, suddenly eager, sitting very still, as if my slightest move might distract him. “I can’t wait to hear.”

  22

  This was a land of vast spaces and long silences, a desert land of red bluffs and brilliant flowering cactus. The hot sun poured down. This land belonged to the very old Gods. They came on summer evenings, unseen, to rest their eyes and their hearts on the milky opal and smoky blue of the desert. For this was a land of enchantment, where Gods walked in the cool of the evening.

  —Marian Russell,

  Land of Enchantment: Memoirs of Marian Russell

  Along the Santa Fe Trail

  INSIDE THE LINES

  Mikey Hart stirred his coffee a couple of times, the spoon ringing against the side of the china cup like a chime. I sat in silence, willing him to start talking again. At last he did.

  “Since you are willing to accept the possibility that liminal space may be more than a psychological construct, then it is not a great leap to ask you to acce
pt the idea that those who are aware of liminal space as something that can be used, rather than merely experienced, would construct tools to enable them to better use it. Phineas House is one such tool. The kaleidoscopes and teleidoscopes you found are others. Phineas House was the brainchild of one Aldo Pincas.”

  I nodded to indicate that the name was familiar to me, and Mikey went on without asking any questions. I liked that he accepted I would have come across the name in my own research.

  “Now, again, I need to stop and lecture,” Mikey said with a rueful smile. “There are places where the use of liminal space is easier. This area—Las Vegas, New Mexico—is one. Physically it has useful qualities.”

  I bit down on my lower lip to keep from spouting out what Domingo and I had deduced, wanting to hear whether Mikey would confirm our guesses.