The bar looked like a setting from a Western: bat-wing doors, a long wooden bar backed with a mirror, polished brass spittoons, and tables scattered around almost at random. The floor was thickly covered with sawdust. There was a man playing an upright piano to one side, a bartender polishing the bartop with a rag on the other.
Four men in western clothing so carefully adhering to the fashions of a bygone day that it qualified as costuming, were playing poker well away from where the mirror might give their hands away. Other than these, the place was empty. I guessed it was too early in the day for a regular crowd. I wondered if the poker players were waiters, killing time until the evening crowd showed.
Paula gave the bartender a casual wave and called, “Two of the usual” as she led us to a table where the music from the piano pretty much guaranteed our privacy. The bartender followed us over almost immediately, a tray with two frothy mugs of beer balanced on one hand. He set the mugs down and left without waiting for payment. I figured we’d be running a tab, and tried to remember how much money I’d brought with me.
“So,
amiga,”
Paula said, blowing the foam off the top of her beer, “why did you come looking for me?”
“I told you,” I said. “I saw you, on Friday, you were there, then you weren’t …”
I trailed off, feeling really stupid. Then I recovered my determination, and forged on. “And today, I’m sure you weren’t in the Plaza, then you were—and nobody else.”
“And you want to know what’s going on?” Paula said.
“That’s right.”
“You are, Mira.”
I stared at Paula Angel. Her eyes were the rich brown of chocolate syrup, and the corners crinkled as she smiled at my confusion.
“Me?”
“You, Mira. I think you suspected this all along, didn’t you? You just wanted to hear it from someone else.”
I pressed my splayed fingers to my forehead, as if I could physically force my thoughts into order. There was some truth in what Paula had just said. When Paula had done her appear/disappear act that first time, I’d been irresistibly reminded of the silent women. I’d wondered if Paula were one of them or something else. Although a part of me wanted to continue to deny, to resist that the oddness I associated with Phineas House could spill out into the rest of the city, I wanted answers more than I wanted to hold on to whatever sense of normalcy remained to me.
And before you fault me for being a coward, or lacking a sense of adventure, let me tell you, reading about it is a lot different from having it happen to you.
“Me,” I repeated, letting the word roll around my mouth. “You seem to know a lot more about this than I do. Any chance you can explain?”
“Explain why you could see me when your friend, Domingo, could not.”
“That would be a good start.”
Paula Angel smiled, picked up her heavy glass beer mug and took a couple more swallows. She had to balance the mug between two hands to do this.
“To make you understand this,” Paula began, “I’m going to have to tell you something about me.”
Isn’t that always the case?
I thought.
People love to talk about themselves.
Paula gave me that sly look that made me wonder if somehow she could read my mind—or if she was just a really good judge of character.
She didn’t say anything else, so I said, “Go on.”
“Well, for one thing,” Paula said, “I’m dead.”
I’d been raising my beer mug, now I set it down with a solid thump.
“You’re what?”
“I’m dead,” she replied matter-of-factly. “I was executed. Hanged. You can find my story in a bunch of books. There’s even a poem about me.”
I nodded very slowly, as if my head might go flying off my shoulders if I didn’t take care.
“I think you’d better tell me about it,” I said.
Paula grinned wickedly. “I thought you’d see it that way. Very well. Like I told you, I was hanged, hanged for murdering a man. That wasn’t terribly fair. There was a dance. He was feeling me up. I didn’t like it much. Pulled out my knife and warned him off. When he didn’t listen, I stabbed him. Did a better job than I expected. Cut something vital. He died pretty fast.
“This happened at a fiesta, so there were lots of witnesses to what I did, but not so many who supported my claim that I was justified in what I did—a man doesn’t go after a girl that way right out in the open, you know what I mean?”
I nodded again, managed to get a swallow from the beer mug I held up in trembling hands.
“Well, one thing led to another and the trial wasn’t fair at all,” Paula went on. “Not that many people liked the bastard I knifed, but all the lawyers and judges and law officers were men, and men don’t like if a woman stands up for herself. That’s what men are supposed to do for them. So the
hijos de putas
sentenced me to hang. They put a rope up over the limb of a tree and put me in a wagon, and drove the wagon underneath the tree.”
Paula’s tone was flat and even, but there was a tension underlying the words that made my skin creep.
“I was sitting on a bench in the wagon and they put the rope around my neck. When they got the noose just right, the driver whipped up the horses and the wagon was pulled out from under me. I was supposed to drop and have my neck snapped.
“Didn’t work that way. I was young and strong, and though that rope cut into my neck, it didn’t break it. They hadn’t tied my hands tightly enough, and I’d worked them free while they were fussing with getting the noose just right. When I realized I wasn’t dead, I reached up over my head, grabbed the rope and started hauling myself up along it. I figured to get up onto that tree limb and see what I could do after.
“Now, a funny thing happened then. There’d been a crowd gathered around. There always is for a hanging. They’d been eager to see me die. The men wanted to see me die because I’d killed a man. The women wanted to see me hang because I was young and pretty, and they didn’t like me around their men. They’d all wanted to see me dead, and if that rope had snapped my neck then and there, well, they’d have thought no more of it than they would have about wringing a chicken’s neck for the stew pot.
“But now, seeing me struggle to win against that rope, the feeling in the crowd changed. They started cheering for me, willing me to win. That was better sport than they’d bargained for, and their cheers gave me heart and soul, they did, because I figured if I could get to the top, they’d demand that I be given my life.
“But the sheriff didn’t feel this way at all. To be fair to him, at another time, he might have been watching with all the rest, but something big had happened in Las Vegas not that long before. The United States of America had taken over the New Mexico Territory from Mexico, and the sheriff was eager to show his new bosses that he was their man.
“He ran forward and grabbed me by the legs, dragging me down with all his weight, trying to make me strangle if he couldn’t break my neck. The crowd wasn’t having anything of it. It was between me and the rope now, and they saw the sheriff as butting in where he wasn’t wanted. They pulled him off me, and I pulled my way up the rope and somehow got my leg over the tree branch, and just lay there panting.
“I listened to what was being said below me, though, you can bet that. Most of the crowd was saying that I’d been hanged and hadn’t died, so that meant I should be set free. The sheriff, though, he insisted on calling the judge. The judge brought with him some of those Anglo lawmen. He also brought a copy of the sentence. They looked this over while the crowd grumbled, and I let some of the kinder folks get me down from the tree and help me get that rope off my neck.
“Then the judge spoke. ‘The sentence,’ he said, prissy as a maiden aunt, ‘was that the criminal be hanged by the neck until dead. Justice has not been satisfied.’”
Paula Angel had been speaking faster and faster as her story unrolled, and I’d been leaning forward as if I might lose the thread of the tale if I didn’t. Now she stopped.
“And?” I said, feeling my breath catch.
“And,” she said, “they pulled me from the crowd and tied my hands again, and hanged me from that tree. My neck still wouldn’t break, but I strangled good and proper.”
“Oh, God,” I whispered weakly.
“I didn’t much feel like God cared,” Paula said, “and maybe that’s why I’m still here. I haven’t forgiven the old bastard for letting me hope, and then letting me hang.”
“I’m not sure I could either,” I said. “So I didn’t somehow bring you here?”
Paula looked at me for moment, rather puzzled. Then she grinned.
“No,
amiga.
When I said that you were the reason you could see me when others couldn’t, I didn’t mean you were the cause of my damnation. I meant what I said. The reason you can see me has its roots in you—not in me. You didn’t create me. I’d be here anyhow.”
“But why can I see you?”
“Because there are people who can see ghosts or spirits, people for whom the borders between states just aren’t as firm as they are for most people.” Paula looked pensive. “Mira, I’m no wise woman, no
bruja
or
curandera.
In life I was a pretty girl, maybe a little wild. I enjoyed living and loving, and died twice for doing so. In death, well, mostly I’ve been angry, but I’ve been around long enough that I’ve seen things, and I’ve been curious enough to wonder about them. If you can take a hanged woman for what she is, I can tell you a few things, but don’t get angry with me when I don’t know everything.”
I reached out a hand and patted Paula’s where it rested on the tabletop. It felt warm and smooth and young.
“Tell me what you can,” I said. “You know more than I do.”
Paula motioned for the bartender, and he brought over a couple more beers. I nodded my thanks and reached for my purse.
“It’s on the house,” the bartender said, but oddly, I heard it as “on the House,” and shivered just a bit.
Paula noticed my reaction, but she didn’t comment She sipped at her beer, obviously organizing her thoughts. I schooled myself to patience. In some ways, Paula was much older than I was—had to be if she’d been around since the mideighteen hundreds—but I had the feeling that in some way she was much younger than I was, and I remembered how hard it could be to explain things you knew intuitively.
“I knew your mother,” Paula began. “Colette, that is, not the woman who raised you. Colette was incredible. She’d been born here, at Phineas House, of a family that had owned the House for generations, but by the time Colette was born, the Bogatyr family had lost touch with what had once bound them to Phineas House, the House to them—maybe been made to lose touch would be a better way to put it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Neither do I, entirely,” Paula admitted. “There’s a history to Phineas House. It has been there a long time, and not by accident either. The people who built it were called witches by those who lived nearby, but as they never did any harm and often did good, well, they were suffered to live. Later, when they became stronger, people were glad to have them around. At least that’s what I think it must have been. This has not been a kind land, you know, and anything that might give an edge would be welcome.”
“I suppose,” I said. “I’d never realized I came from such an old Spanish family.”
“Oh, very old,” Paula said, “but not necessarily Spanish, not Indian either. Your people are defined not merely by bloodline but by what they can do.”
“And that is?”
“Have a beer with ghosts, for one thing,” Paula said. “Now, let me tell this my way.”
“Very well,” I agreed, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling very strange about what I’d just learned.
“Colette was a throwback to older times,” Paula said. “I watched her when she was a little girl, noticed her because she noticed me. Not many people did, not even those who came here looking for ghosts. Like I said, I’m just a little famous.
“Now, Colette’s parents weren’t comfortable with their strange daughter. They were solid, upright people. They still owned Phineas House, but they had sold much of the property around it, they and their own parents. No matter what money they got for this, their fortunes declined. When Colette was born, though, something that was dormant in the House began waking up with her. It responded to her, and the solid, unimaginative people who were Colette’s parents, and who had been trying hard to live down some of the earlier stories about their family, they didn’t like this.”
I thought about the silent women, about the sense of will and awareness I had sensed in the House, and thought I understood how Colette’s parents—my grandparents—must have felt.
Paula went on, “Phineas House didn’t like Collette’s parents. It started doing little things to make them uncomfortable. Colette’s parents were too practical to blame a house—so they blamed Colette. They punished her, locked her away in her room but this only made matters worse. The House could concentrate—if that’s the word to use for a House that has no mind, only will—on Colette, and Colette, who had both mind and will bonded with the House.