Read Child of a Rainless Year Online
Authors: Jane Lindskold
Child of a Rainless Year (12 page)
Moving slowly, I went into the kitchen. I’d set up my laptop there at one end of the kitchen table. While I drank my morning coffee, I drafted half-a-dozen e-mails. I sent them before I could think any further, but when I went upstairs to shower, I noticed that my feet felt light upon the stairs.
I made some resolutions while I showered. If I was going to take time off, then I needed to do more than house cleaning. I needed to pursue what had brought me back—the question of what had happened to my mother forty-some years before.
I thought of some of the lists Aunt May had made. I’d save myself time and trouble if I looked into her journals, saw how far she’d taken her quest. Some of the things that had been so hard for her to do would be easy for me now. More and more newspapers were scanning in their morgues, putting the information online. Moreover, I was here in Las Vegas. I could find out if the police chief was still alive, any of the reporters. If they were they would be older now—sixty or seventy at the least. They’d probably be happy to talk about a long-ago mystery with the person it had most deeply affected.
Unlike Aunt May, I had no need to fear those mysterious trustees, those men who had placed such peculiar conditions on my adoption. Why hadn’t they wanted the Fenns to have any contact with my earlier life? Was it indeed, as Aunt May had suspected, some sort of protective custody? There were similarities to witness protection programs: the move, the changing of names.
When I’d dealt with Aunt May and Uncle Stan’s final paperwork, I’d come across the decrees they’d signed when they had legally changed their names. His full name had been Steven Stanley Flinwick. I suspected he might have already gone by Stan, since Aunt May referred to him that way, even in her journals. Hers had been Martha Ann. Maybelle had suited her better. May’s beauty. Her birthday had been in May. I liked to think Uncle Stan might have chosen it for her.
I jerked my wandering thoughts back to practicalities as the water began to get a little chilly. I made another mental note: replace hot-water heater. I wondered if anyone out there collected old water heaters. Probably not, but it never hurt to check.
Getting a leave of absence from my job was made easier in that I wasn’t asking for a sabbatical, where I’d get paid, just leave. I’d been working for the school system long enough that periodic raises meant that some bean counter was probably celebrating the sudden fat in the budget.
No matter. I’d dotted all the i’s, crossed the t’s. My job would be waiting for me next year.
I’d also arranged for someone to mow the lawns at the two houses I now owned back in Ohio. Betty Boswell had said she’d keep an eye open for someone who might want to housesit. I put the word out among my own friends as well.
Domingo Navidad expressed pleasure when I said I’d decided I needed to stay a year in Las Vegas in order to decide what to do with Phineas House. Doubtless his pleasure was intensified by the fact that I made clear I had no designs on his carriage-house apartment, and that I wanted to invest in having the house fully painted.
“You’ve done a wonderful job,” I assured him, “but the escrow account didn’t allow for you to hire the hands you’d need to finish the exterior. Can you write me a budget for what you think you’d need?”
He agreed with enthusiasm, and the price he came back with—and swore he would keep to—made me fairly sure he planned on giving work to some people of questionable citizenship. I decided not to worry about it. Domingo had a contractor’s license. We’d decided that he could handle hiring and firing without involving me if I hired him in that capacity for the painting, rather than having him direct the work in his role as caretaker.
I had no doubt he’d do a good job. I had the evidence all around me as proof.
Over the past couple of days we had worked our way around the uncomfortable awareness of each other that had followed our discussion of our mutual lack of marital partners. We met many mornings for coffee and some sort of breakfast cake, usually sitting out in the walled confines of the back garden. Domingo came and went there freely now, tending his garden. When he brought me roses or cut flowers there was nothing romantic about it, just the lovely end result of pruning.
I stopped working on the downstairs long enough to transform one of the front bedrooms on the second floor into a room for myself. It was across the landing from the rooms that had been my mother’s and had ostensibly been the best guest room. However, the only overnight guests I recalled had been my mother’s lovers. As I had my doubts that any of them had actually spent a night in the spacious chamber, I felt quite comfortable taking it over for myself.
The furniture was in good condition, all but the mattress of the queen-sized bed, in which the foam padding and satin fabric had dried and deteriorated so that lying on the bed felt like lying on old crackers. I didn’t think I could find a buyer for the mattress even on the Internet, so I junked it and bought myself a nice new one.
I found linens to fit in the cedar closet, gave them a good laundering to get rid of the smell of mothballs. Up in the attic, I found a couple of big steamer trunks that had been used to store quilts and other heavy bedding. Las Vegas nights could grow chilly, even in summer, and I picked out a pretty star pattern patchwork quilt done in a riot of yellows and greens with touches of pale pink. I had no memory of ever seeing it before, and that pleased me.
The furniture in the room was heavy cherry, a good wood that responded well to oil soap and polish. The rugs rolled against the wall were simply patterned orientals in neutral tans, blues, and pale golds, perfect for a guest room. I aired and vacuumed them, and found their muted colors glowed.
I was pleased with this place I’d made for myself, but in the process of setting it up, in going up and down, up and down from the attic searching for this accessory or that, I had felt a puzzle growing in my mind.
There, in a side wing, toward the back of the house where they overlooked the gardens, were my own rooms. Mother’s had been on the front left (as you faced the street) of the second floor. These rooms I still had not entered, as I had not entered the front parlor or the library. However, by now I was sure I had opened every other door and at least peeked inside. I found more spare bedrooms, an office that clearly had not been used for even longer than the rest of the house, even an infirmary of sorts.
One of the towers proved to have been furnished as a sitting room, pleasantly situated so that you seemed to be nesting among the tossing boughs of the elms. Another showed traces of having been used as an artist’s studio, though, as with that second office, my impression was that it had been a long time since it had been so used. There was a music room, the piano horribly out of tune, over half the strings on the impressive harp broken. There were numerous instruments stored in cabinets or closets: violins and violas in flaking leather cases, two matching silver flutes and piccolos, a brass trumpet, a French horn, and even a pair of maracas painted with parrots.
In short, I found everything and more than that for which I was searching. Where were the servants’ quarters? Where had the silent women slept? I remembered them as omnipresent, whether putting me to bed at night or bringing me my breakfast in the morning. True, I had never known them well. Mother had discouraged familiarity with the servants, even with the one who was intended to serve as my tutor.
Did they go home at night? It seemed that I should have had some memory of this, some sense of the guard being changed, but all I remembered was them always being there, answering the ring of the bell or my mother’s imperious summons.
I’d hoped to find something of theirs left behind in what must have been a fairly hasty evacuation. A book with a name written on the flyleaf, a notebook, a letter case—something that would give me an idea where I might find one or more of these women. They might have an idea what had happened to my mother, an idea they might be willing to share with her daughter.
Mother might have commanded them to silence, and I remembered Mother well enough to know that her commands would have been respected even after—maybe even
especially
after—she had apparently disappeared, but surely they would break that silence now, over forty years later, when the interrogator was Colette’s own daughter.
especially
after—she had apparently disappeared, but surely they would break that silence now, over forty years later, when the interrogator was Colette’s own daughter.
But I found no trace of them, not even in the kitchen, pantries, and other workrooms that I remembered being their domain. There were no scribbled notes in recipe books, no partial grocery lists. They had cleared away every trace of themselves, perhaps while they settled the house beneath its dust sheets, preparing it for its long nap.
I had one name, Teresa Sanchez, a name Aunt May had found in the newspaper articles about my mother’s disappearance. I decided to ask Domingo about it, and did so one morning over coffee and a particularly good pecan roll his sister, Evelina, mother of Enrico, had sent over.
We were in the back garden, and Domingo was already dressed for painting in off-white overalls that held the rainbow in tiny teardrop splatters. I had resolved to finally start on the front parlor that day, but the pleasant weather was making me reconsider. Maybe I would ask permission to join the painting crew. The buckets with their liquid color practically sang to me whenever I went outside.
“Domingo, you mentioned that you helped your father when he was groundskeeper here.”
“That’s right. As soon as I was large enough not to be a nuisance, and, I suspect, rather before.” Domingo laughed, probably at some memory of his own ineptitude.
“Were you friendly with any of the women who worked in the house?”
“Oh, no. We were outdoor workers. That was made plain from the start. I don’t think I ever went farther than the kitchen door until I was given care of the place when my father retired.”
“Did your father?”
“Go inside?”
“Yes. I mean, that’s not the point. Did he make friends with any of the women who worked here?”
Domingo shrugged. “I don’t know. He has never mentioned it.”
I sighed, then cut myself another hunk of pecan roll. One thing about my steady physical labor around Phineas House: I wasn’t much worried about gaining weight.
“I told you I wanted to learn what happened to my mother. I thought one of the servants might know something she didn’t want to tell the police.”
Domingo might have a foolish attachment to Phineas House, but he was no fool when it came to anticipating what I was thinking.
“And you think they might not have wanted to tell the police?”
“My mother was a formidable woman,” I replied. “I think if she told someone something and said it shouldn’t be told to anyone, that secret would be kept—even from the police.”
“But now …” Domingo nodded. “I will ask my father. I was going to visit him and my mother tonight in any case. He’s interested in the progress on the House.”
“Tell him to come over if he wants,” I said. “I’ll give him a tour of what I’ve done.”
“I will tell him,” Domingo said.
The morning was showing promise of turning into a lovely day. Suddenly, I could not face another round of moving furniture, dusting, polishing, of the vacuum howling in my ears.
“Can you use another hand with the painting?”
Domingo grinned. “I have been making a bet with myself on how long you would wait to ask—artist that you are. Come. I have just the place for you to start.”
What Domingo had reserved for me were leopards. There were three of them, bordering a lancet window on the ground floor that looked in upon the formal dining room. One leopard crouched at the top of the window, its tail hanging down, apparently without regard for the leopard stretching up from below with every intention of giving it a good swat. The upper leopard’s disregard could be understood, for its attention was fixed on the leopard beneath the windowsill, its long body elongating in a crouch so lifelike that it seemed impossible that it would not be completed.
“Wonderful!” I said. Then I frowned. “But I don’t remember it at all.”
“But, Mira,” Domingo said, “then there were houses on either side. These were framed by comparatively narrow side yards—I don’t think anyone but my father and myself ever came here, and then just to tend the roses that climbed the wall.”
“I remember them,” I said, “a glorious pale yellow. They only bloomed once a year. The rest of the time they were just a nice, dark green—unless bare in winter.”
“That’s right,” Domingo said, pleased. “Old roses. After the fire, I transplanted what I could save to one of the back walls. You will see them flower again in the spring.”
I returned my attention to the leopards. The area surrounding them had already been painted the dark green used elsewhere for the window frames. The leopards themselves had been primed, but waited for an exterior cover.
“Looks like this is ready to go.”
“All you need to do is select your colors,” Domingo agreed. “Come this way.”
I did, and a short time later returned carrying brushes, rags, and a tin of golden-yellow paint. Enrico, Domingo’s nephew, followed with the stepladder I would need to reach the upper portions of the frame. I thanked the boy absently, my mind already taken up with the challenge before me. Brush went into paint, and I lost myself to the demands of color.
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