Another round of curtain opening brought ample natural light into the bedroom. I removed dust sheets, heaping them on the floor in a big pile, and opened the drawers to highboys and lowboys. All were empty, which was rather odd. I distinctly recalled how one of the first things Aunt May and I had done was buy clothing for me. I’d assumed that was because my belongings had been left behind. Now I checked the closet and found the same bareness.
Had the silent women taken my clothing with them when they’d left? Did those lace-trimmed velvet dresses I recalled so fondly end their lives as Sunday best for a slew of other little girls? I told myself I didn’t really mind, but somewhere inside I did. I’d been looking forward to some physical reminder of myself. Now I found everything was gone.
The playroom was somewhat better. I found a couple of chewed-end pencils in the back of a desk drawer, a bag of cat’s-eye marbles forgotten on a closet shelf. Most of my favorite toys had been sent with me, so I didn’t expect to find them, but apparently the things I had not chosen to take—old school papers, a handful of knickknacks, had been tidied away. I wondered why these two rooms had been so carefully cleaned free from personal items when the other rooms I had looked into had not.
I wondered, but I did not expect an answer. When I went down into the kitchen, I found the beginnings of one.
She was standing over by the sink, polishing hard-water spots from the chrome faucet. Slim but not slender, with straight pale brown hair pulled back from intent, regular features, she wore a white apron over a pale-blue, collared blouse. The hand in which she held the washrag was encased in a yellow plastic glove. She looked about thirty.
I stood motionless in the doorway, unable to move, much less speak. Who was this? Some relative of Domingo’s? She didn’t look much like him or Enrico, but she did look somehow familiar.
Then I realized why. I was looking at one of the silent women. I must have drawn in my breath or made some other sound, for she looked up from her polishing. Our eyes met. Hers were light blue, a different shade from the blue of her shirt. I saw that distinctly.
Just as distinctly, I saw her vanish.
I stood there for a long moment, then I walked slowly over to where the woman had been standing.
There were no water spots on the faucet and the washrag was dropped in a damp heap on the bottom of the sink. I lifted it, shook it out, hung between the paired sinks to dry.
That dampness was the first clue that what I had seen was real. Ever since I had come to New Mexico, I had delighted in how quickly things dried. I could wash my face in the morning, and an hour or so later the heavy terry cloth would hardly be damp.
The second proof was that I’d found the cloth lying in the sink. Even if Domingo or one of the workmen had come in without my permission—and I doubted they would have since they all preferred to use the facilities in the carriage house—they would have wrung out the cloth and hung it to dry.
Third proof was the absence of water spots. I was a fair housekeeper, but no perfectionist. Even if I had been, the sheer amount of work to be done around the house would have daunted me. Five minutes spent polishing the sink chrome could be better spent folding dust sheets or washing a window or painting a bit of the outdoor trim.
No. I had never left the chrome so gleaming and bright. Someone else had done it. And I’d seen that someone with my own eyes. Was the house haunted? If so, these were admirable ghosts. No rattling of chains for them. They preferred clean dishes and polished fixtures.
I remembered the story of “The Shoemaker and the Elves.” Aunt May had read it to me when I was small. I think she’d meant it as a hint, because every so often she’d remind me to tidy my room by saying “No elves here, my little shoemaker.” We’d both agreed that it would have been nicer if there were. Later, I’d read other tales of brownies and pixies, house spirits that cleaned and did chores.
The strange thing was that some stories were like that of the Shoemaker and the Elves. If you thanked the house spirit or gave it a gift, it grew insulted and left. In others, you had better leave out some sort of gift for them—a bowl of milk seemed typical. That kept them happy and working hard.
Was what I had seen a brownie of some sort? She surely hadn’t looked like one. From what I remembered from fairy tales those were short and squat or deformed in some way. The woman who had been polishing my faucet had looked as normal as any woman I might pass in the grocery store.
I stood staring at the polished sink, trying to figure out what to do. If the silent women had returned, I didn’t want them to leave. My reasons had to do with more than the pleasure of having my dishes washed and my sink cleaned. They belonged to the “before”—to the time when Colette had ruled Phineas House. If I could gain their trust somehow … I knew they could talk. I had so many questions, but would they have answers?
Somehow I had to make contact with the silent woman—the silent women, for now that I had seen one, I was sure that the others were present as well. There had been several. The one I had seen in the kitchen had done a lot of cleaning, but there had been cooks, seamstresses, even “Teresa Sanchez,” the one who had tried to be my tutor.
What had happened to make them come back? I was certain they had not been here when I had reopened the house. Was it the cleaning? Were they responding to echoes of their former activities? Was it simply having someone living here again? Were they house spirits like the elves and brownies in my fairy-tale books or were they ghosts or something else entirely?
I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to go about finding out. What I did know with absolute certainty was that I did not want to drive them away.
“So what will it be, Mira?” I asked myself flippantly. “A saucer of milk? New clothes? Nothing at all?”
I had a strong suspicion that Colette had given the silent women nothing. I had found no record of payment. If a bowl of milk had been sufficient …
I shook my head as if I could physically banish an ugly thought. I remembered the silent women. I remembered their whispers. I remembered the terror of the woman who had tried so hard to be my tutor. If somehow they were bound to this place, if somehow my coming back had forced them to come back, well, they had no idea what they were getting into. For all they knew, they were in service to another Colette.
I had thought I knew nothing about the silent women, but now I realized I did. They could be unhappy. Knowing that, I had to make a choice. Be Colette or be Mira—and if being Mira meant that, as with the Shoemaker, my elves would go dancing away, well then, Aunt May had taught me how to do just fine without elves.
“Thank you,” I said to the air. “I only just now realized who has been picking up after me. I appreciate it.”
There was no answer. No neatly clad woman shimmered into sight then or while I made my dinner. Nor did I see any flicker of motion in any of the many scattered mirrors. I avoided the temptation of leaving my dirty dishes in the sink as a test. After I had eaten I went out to sit in the garden for a while. Domingo seemed to be away, but Blanco bounced over and I tossed a stick for him to chase while I watched the coming of night suck the color from the roses.
When I went inside, there was no sense of anyone but me being in the house, but when I went up to bed that night, I found the quilt turned down. There was a sprig of Spanish lavender—the tiny dark purple blossoms still unwilted—resting on my freshly plumped pillow.
The next several days were very odd. I didn’t catch another glimpse of any of the silent women, but I knew they were there. My bed—which I usually made simply by pulling the quilt up over the sheets underneath—was made to perfection. The fixtures in the bathroom and kitchen were flawlessly polished. A button I popped off my painting coverall was sewed back on.
Most dramatic was finding the entirety of my nursery and my mother’s library put into perfect order. None of the missing clothing reappeared in the nursery, but the dust sheets I’d left heaped on the floor were neatly folded, the woodwork polished, and the floors dusted. The same happened in the library. The neat stacks of sorted paperwork were left in place, but the room was dust free.
One morning, coming back from a run to the hardware and grocery stores, Domingo met me outside the carriage house. He took a couple plastic bags from the back of my truck, then looked at what remained rather strangely.
“You must have been gone for quite a while, Mira.”
“I left early,” I agreed, looping bags on my fingers. “I wanted to be back in time to paint before it got too sunny on that side of the House.”
Domingo walked beside me to Phineas House. “I think I told you that I wouldn’t be here this morning.”
“That’s right,” I replied. “You said you were taking the crew to help you with an emergency job.”
“That is so, but before I went to meet them, I remembered I had left a tool kit over by the house where I’d been tightening a shutter. I went over there and—I could have sworn I heard a vacuum cleaner running inside. I thought you were up and being industrious.”
“Not me.” I denied cheerfully. “You must have heard something from another house. Sound can carry strangely in this area, what with people leaving windows open.”
“That must be it,” Domingo agreed, but I could tell he wasn’t happy. He helped me put the bags on the kitchen table, then hurried away to meet his crew.
I thought about saying something to the silent women, just in case they were listening, then I shrugged. I wanted to lure them back, and reprimanding them wasn’t going to help. So I just cut myself a slice of the breakfast cake I’d brought back, donned my painting gear, and went outside.
As usual when I was painting, I found myself getting lost in the process. I’d finished the series of wild-cat windows and was now doing some routine work along the porch railings. Domingo’s crew had already laid down the base coat, and I was putting on the contrast. I lost myself in the rise and fall of my brush, the pleasure of seeing the two colors coming together so perfectly, until the rumbling of my stomach and the feel of the sun burning the back of my neck where I’d tucked my hair up under a painter’s cap reminded me that a good amount of time had passed.
Young Enrico was getting ready to go back to school now, but we’d cut a deal that he’d continue being paid for doing small jobs around the house after school—and after his homework was done. One of these was cleaning paintbrushes, a job I hate almost enough to make me eschew jobs that use a brush any larger than about two inches.
Leaving the brushes to soak, I put away my other gear, rinsed off in the shower, and went down to make a sandwich. This consumed, I grabbed a bottle of cold water from the fridge and headed upstairs toward a job I’d known I was going to tackle today—and that I’d avoided thinking about in case I found an excuse not to do it.
Keys in hand, I made my way to the door of my mother’s suite. As I searched for the correct key my hand shook so severely that the entire ring rattled. All over again I was a little girl, doing the forbidden, invading my mother’s territory without her permission. It took all my will to put the key in the lock and turn it. By the time I had opened the door and reached for the light switch I felt as drained as if I’d run a couple of miles.
Pushing the switch into the on position was almost more than I could manage, but I did it, flooding the room with light from six or seven small candelabra style bulbs in the elaborate fixture that hung in the center of the room. There were at least as many bulbs that had burned out, but with the daylight coming in from the hall there was plenty to see by. I stepped over the threshold and into the room that had been Mother’s private parlor.
The layout of her suite was not unlike that of the nursery: two rooms and a full bath. The parlor was closest to the front of the house, the bedroom in back of it, the bathroom behind that It was a tidy arrangement, and contained a great deal more space than many New York apartments I’d seen. The only thing it lacked, in fact, were kitchen facilities, and, as there was a dumbwaiter in the bedroom, even those needs could be considered served.
The parlor was furnished in elegant comfort: a small writing desk, a few bookshelves, a sofa, some chairs, scattered tables—one of which my mother had frequently used when she took meals in her room. I remembered sitting there across from her when she chose to have me with her.
Like the library, the parlor was swathed in dust sheets, and I didn’t look forward to uncovering everything and dealing with the dust. Rather than doing so now, I checked the chandelier bulbs and made a note of the size and wattage I would need. These were the small stemmed sort, and I had none in my hoard.
From the parlor I passed into the bedroom to again be confronted with dust sheets. Even so, I recognized some shapes. The bed, of course, the various dressers, the vanity, the big portrait. The bathroom had been spared the dust sheets, and I stood for a long while staring rather stupidly at the huge claw-footed tub. There was a separate shower in another corner, a toilet politely tucked behind a low wall that I vaguely recalled being topped with a planter containing orchids.
In each room I opened curtains, methodically noted what lights had blown out, replaced what I could, and tried not to run out in a panic. The tactic worked—at least some.