Child of a Rainless Year (16 page)

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Authors: Jane Lindskold

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When I shook myself from my reverie, I realized that the library differed from all the other rooms in the house that I had inspected in one marked and complete way. It was the only room that hadn’t been completely tidied, the furniture shrouded in dust sheets. The elaborate oriental carpet remained in place under the desk, covering the polished hardwood floor, its patterns in turn covered by a chokingly thick layer of dust. Doubtless, the police had ordered that this room remain untouched while they continued their investigation, and no one had thought to have someone care for it when the house had finally been closed.
“First step,” I said aloud. “Get the vacuum in here. Otherwise I won’t be able to do anything because I’ll be too busy sneezing.”
I put a fresh bag in the vacuum, and gave a good cleaning to what I could easily reach of the floor, curtains, and edges of bookshelves. Occasionally, pieces of paper caught in the draft of my activity drifted to the floor, distributing even more dust as they fell. This caught the sunlight coming through the windows. One of the upper window panels was crafted of multicolored stained glass and the dust caught in its light glittered in a fashion that reminded me of Tinkerbell and her fairy dust.
“Clap if you believe in fairies!” I said, and did so, the sound of my palms hitting together distant and muted over the roar of the vacuum cleaner.
Again I felt that odd tug of being caught between the reality of my adult self and my younger self. The sensation was not so much one of memory, but of reawakening to a part of me that I had forgotten existed. How much had I made myself forget in my shock? I was beginning to believe that I’d forgotten quite a bit, that in my fear that my mother’s disappearance would mean my own dissolution I had started to reinvent myself even before I had come to live with Aunt May and Uncle Stan.
I remembered how much effort I had put into absorbing the view outside the window of the train, how I’d concentrated on each and every cow, chicken, house, barn, flower, car, tree, as if each and every thing I took into myself made me real in a way that had nothing to do with being my mother’s “Mira.”
The thought was not a comfortable one, and so I concentrated on getting up the dust, sucking it into a dark, fluffy world within the cylindrical bag. I imagined the layers building, stratified with various subtle shades of grey and brown: book dust (greyish white, tinged with yellow), floor dust (darker grey, mingled with brown and bits of carpet thread), curtain dust (grey with a strong undertone of maroon shed from the velvet curtains). Shed a little light on it, and draw your own conclusions.
Couldn’t forensic scientists do that these days? They’d progressed a long way from Sherlock Holmes and his different types of cigarette ash. What might they learn from the relics in my vacuum bag? I fought back a hysterical impulse to take it down to the police station and announce portentously: “Here are your clues. Do with them what you will!”
I didn’t though. What I did was put the vacuum away, wash my hands and face, tie a damp cloth over my nose and mouth, and feeling like some strange bandito, return to the library. This time I took a seat at the desk. I sat in my mother’s chair for the first time in all my memories. I half-expected to find my gaze just level with the top of the desk, as it would have been if as a child I had had such temerity.
I didn’t though. Instead, I looked down at the neat stacks of paper, most of which were weighted down with glass paperweights. One was held down under a heavy—by today’s standards—pop can. Again I saw my mythical sergeant. He had liked orange pop, judging from the evidence of this can and the two in the small trash can. I set all three carefully aside. If no one wanted to buy them over the Internet, I bet I could incorporate them into a Warholesque collage that would garner good notice in a trendy gallery.
For lack of any better order, I started with the papers that had been under the pop can. They proved to be bills: telephone service, electrical and gas service, city services. To each one was clipped a personal check, written in my mother’s hand, and duly canceled. I wondered if my mother had done this matching herself, or if the methodical sergeant had done so.
Eagerly, I checked to see if one of the stacks contained monthly bank statements.
“Bingo!”
They were arranged in reverse order by date. I unclipped the stack and worked through them. Almost immediately, a pattern appeared, but it wasn’t a pattern I particularly wanted to see. My mother had regularly written checks, but every single one was to a local business: utilities, grocery, a gasoline station/garage, a couple of department stores. There was one written every month to Martino Navidad, Domingo’s father. Others were written less regularly to people I recalled as the family doctor, dentist, veterinarian. Twice a year, one was written to Our Lady’s Seminary for Young Ladies. Tuition seemed ridiculously low by today’s standards, but when I compared it to what Mother was paying for other services, I realized she had invested a tidy sum in my education.
As I worked my way back through the years, I couldn’t find a single check written to someone outside of Las Vegas. I vaguely recalled that it wasn’t as easy to use nonlocal checks back then, but this seemed to indicate that Mother had done much of her business in cash. Could she have had a credit card? I glanced at the various piles of paper, but didn’t see any statements for credit cards, not even those issued by local businesses or gas stations.
Interesting, but perhaps not unusual forty and more years ago. I’d have to do some investigating, if I decided that it mattered. I noticed one other thing. Although all the checks were signed by my mother, some of them, especially those to local groceries and related establishments, often had the amount filled out in a different hand. The writing was thin and spidery, with a sense of something tentative to it, and I was sure that it belonged to one or more of the silent women. Then I noticed that each of these checks had a receipt stapled to it. Mother had trusted, but only so far.
However, this got me thinking. How had the silent women themselves been paid? I didn’t find a single check made out to any of them, nor to a maid or temporary service of any kind. Mother must have paid them in cash. Why? She had paid Martino Navidad with a check. She had paid other local businesses with checks. Why not them? Had they requested cash? Had they been illegals? Had Mother had some strange reason for not wanting any record to exist of their being in her employ?
I stared down at the stacks of paper, feeling rather less enlightened than I had when I had entered the library. The light spilling through the window behind the desk was dimming, and I decided I had had enough. I wanted a shower and clean clothes. My stomach growled, reminding me that Domingo’s half-burrito had been eaten and digested quite a while back.
Before leaving the library, I checked the window locks before pulling the curtains shut. Then I locked the door behind me. I had rather liked Chilton O’Reilly, but I couldn’t forget his interest in that closed door. If he was interested, who else might be? I’d better play it safe.
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.

 

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
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 always 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.

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