“Her father was the one who punished her most often, and together Colette and Phineas House set out to put him out of the way. She was just a child then. I don’t know what was done, but Colette’s father was found one morning at the bottom of the main staircase. His neck was broken.”
I was appalled. “An accident, surely. That’s an old house.”
“An accident, probably,” Paula said, moving her bare shoulders in a fluid fashion that could not be called a shrug. “But Colette did not think so. She was young, yet, and very strange. The next time she behaved in a fashion her mother did not like, and punishment was threatened, Colette bragged that she had caused her father’s fall—she threatened, too, that her mother should take care unless she wanted something to happen to her.
“Now, the mother was not of the line that owned Phineas House. That had been the father’s line. Moreover, after the custom of the day, her family was all too eager to send a male relative to advise and protect her. Colette’s uncle had no patience with his niece. He told his sister that her daughter was unruly and spoiled. Once I heard Colette tell one of her lovers as they rode in her carriage about the Plaza that her uncle had beaten her.”
I thought I knew what was coming. “Did he fall as well?”
Paula smiled a lazy smile. I could tell she had no love for domineering men. No wonder, given her history.
“He fell, but was not killed. Again Colette claimed the fall was her doing—this, though she was locked in her nursery at the time. The uncle used this claim to have Colette committed for insanity. Conveniently, the State Hospital was right here in Las Vegas, and, like most public institutions, eager for donations.”
“So it was true, what Hannah told me,” I said. “My mother was committed.”
“But was she crazy?” Paula said shrewdly. “You have lived in that house. You know it is more than boards and nails.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I do. But how did Colette get out?”
“After Colette was committed, the uncle tried to sell Phineas House, but he learned he could not do this. The mother had inherited her husband’s personal property, but Phineas House and its earnings belonged to Colette. The best they could do was take what they could and leave. This they did.”
“Leaving Colette?”
“Leaving Colette. Can you blame them? This was a child who claimed to have done murder—and threatened to do it again. You knew the woman she became. She was not a loving child either.”
I didn’t know what to think. It was hard imagining my mother as a little girl of any type, much less one who would brag that she had killed her father.
Paula was merciful, and did not press me to speak.
“Colette’s story after that is only partially known to me. The State Hospital is not a place I care to go. It is … unsettled. I next saw her a few months after her twenty-first birthday. Many things had happened in the ensuing years. Her mother had died in an influenza epidemic. Trustees associated with her father’s estate ordered a review of Colette’s situation. The doctors they hired ruled the young woman was functionally sane, a bit delusional, but certainly not in need of institutionalizing. However, they recommended Colette remain near some facility where she could undergo periodic reviews.
“This suited Colette fine, as it got her out of the hospital. She had no desire to move away from Phineas House, so saying that she’d stop in at the State Hospital from time to time was no skin off her back. Far as I know, she never went back, though. Instead, Colette reopened the House and took up residence. The money that had been left in trust for her was sufficient for her to maintain Phineas House, and to travel some. I don’t know where she went, or what she did, but each time she came back she seemed a bit wealthier.
“That was a good thing, because as time went on Colette got odder and odder, too, dressing as if from an earlier time, and all that … . People are more patient with strangeness when the odd person is either very rich or very poor. Eventually, when Colette was in her late twenties she committed what in any but a confirmed eccentric would have been an outrage. She bore a daughter—you—without bothering with a husband. Few people knew this, and fewer cared. Colette put about that she had been widowed, and as she was a local eccentric, people believed her. In a way, her disappearance proved a fitting capstone to her odd life.”
Paula Angel drained the last of her beer in what was without doubt the equivalent of a terminal punctuation mark.
I thought about all the questions I had, and chose the one that seemed most important.
“Do you know who my father was?”
Paula shook her head. “Colette had lots of boyfriends, both before and after you were born. Could have been any of them.”
“Oh.” I sat in silence for a long while, then said, “Paula, that’s a lot to absorb all at once. Tell me, can I meet with you again?”
Paula gave one of those feline grins. “Sure, why not? I’m not going anywhere. I don’t know a lot more, though. Mostly I watched Colette because she was interesting, and because she was one of the few people who could interact with me. It gets dull being dead, and even someone who does nothing more than incline her head in a regal nod breaks up the boredom.”
“I want to keep talking to you,” I said, “but I can’t think straight. There’s too much to take in.”
“Yeah,” Paula said, stretching. “It’s quite a story, almost as good as mine.”
“Yours,” I said, “is far sadder.”
Paula seemed pleased to be given precedence. “I’ll take you back to where you can find your car. If you want to chat, just come down here. I seem to find myself here a lot—around that damned windmill. Wasn’t there I was hanged, but I guess we’re akin somehow.”
I refused to think about this. It was a little too unsettlingly like the relationship between my mother and Phineas House. Instead, I accepted Paula’s escort back to the Plaza. She sort of faded me in or faded herself out. As I walked to where I’d parked my truck, I noticed that the bar where we’d gone to talk wasn’t there. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.
After I pulled my red pickup truck into my space in the carriage house, I got out and stood staring at Phineas House. My visit with Paula Angel had taken longer than I thought and darkness was falling, but the outside security lights I’d had the electrician install soon after my arrival illuminated segments of the wildly colored exterior.
I stood there, almost frozen, considering the tales I’d been told by a ghost. I’d known there was something strange about the House, but was it capable of murder—or conspiring at murder? I’d thought that whatever spirit—if spirit was even the right word—that inhabited the House was benign. Paula’s story made me wonder if it was otherwise, if the welcome I’d met since my arrival had been offered for ulterior motives.
Then again, was there any reason I should believe what Paula had told me? Was the fact that she was a ghost any reason for her to be honest? It didn’t take much to realize, based on her own account of herself, that she’d probably not been from the highest social class nor too careful around men. Women who were—especially at the time Paula had been alive—didn’t tend to find themselves in dark corners at wild parties.
But why shouldn’t I believe her? She’d spoken of Colette with a certain odd affection, as someone who acknowledged her existence. What reason would Paula have for lying to me? If I found out, she’d lose someone else who could break up the monotony of her deathless existence.
I stood there for a long while, staring at the House, almost mesmerized by its color, brighter where the lights hit, attenuating into shadow by gradual stages until it was hard to decide where the color ended and the shadow began. My gaze flickered back and forth, hunting for the certain border, as if where there was neither color nor shadow I’d find an answer.
The sound of a door opening behind me broke me from my trance.
“Mira?” Domingo’s voice spoke from the square of light that spilled out from the interior of the carriage house. “Mira? Is that you?
“It’s me,” I said, so softly I could hardly hear my own voice. I repeated it more loudly. “It’s me.”
Domingo stepped out into the garage. His jeans and work shirt looked as if they had been pulled on in haste, and he cradled a gun of some sort in one hand. He continued to hold it as he came to join me.
“I heard the truck come in, then nothing, not even the garage door closing,” he explained, his tone almost apologetic. “I thought you might be ill.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Blanco had come out with Domingo and was sniffing around my ankles. I wondered if the little dog smelled the scents of the bar where I’d sat drinking with Paula. Did sawdust cling to the soles of my shoes? “I was thinking about things I learned tonight. I guess I got lost in my thoughts.”
Domingo said nothing, but his silence was a listening one, one that invited confidences. I went on.
“Did you know that my mother claimed to have killed her father? That she later claimed to have tried to kill her uncle? Did you know that she spent time in the state mental hospital?”
“When I was a boy,” Domingo said, “and Colette vanished, some people called her ‘the crazy lady,’ but I thought they only meant her odd ways. I never heard the rest, not even after I became caretaker here.”
“I suppose time and money could make even a juicy story like that one die away,” I said, “and Mother did give a lot of money to local charities. She was a minor at the time of her father’s death, too. I wonder if juvenile records were sealed then, like they are now?”
I heard a quiet thump as Domingo put the gun down on the hood of his truck, then felt his arm slip around my shoulders.
“Who told you this, Mira? Did you go to the hospital?”
“My school friend Hannah told me a little, but she didn’t know if it was just malicious gossip. I heard the rest from someone named Pablita Sandoval. She told me to call her ‘Paula Angel.’”
Domingo’s grip around my shoulder momentarily tightened. “Someone who calls herself ‘Paula Angel’ may not be someone to trust. Here in Las Vegas, that is a name from
cuentos,
from stories.”
“From histories, I think,” I said. “She told me who she was— and when she lived. She is the woman I saw last Friday in the Plaza, the woman you did not see.”
“And you went looking for her again today?”
“I did. She seemed very real. She was there. We went and talked in a bar, a bar that isn’t there now. Paula had been acquainted with my mother. It seems my gift for seeing ghosts may be inherited.”
Maybe Domingo didn’t push me away and call me a liar because his traditional culture hasn’t rejected stories of ghosts and spirits. Maybe his reaction was rooted in the fact that he was Domingo, who had lived near Phineas House and served it since he was a child. Perhaps he could feel that I was on the edge of breaking down, and he did not wish to be the one to push me over.
For whatever reason, Domingo didn’t say the things most people would have. Instead, he asked, “And you believe what Paula Angel said?”
“I think I do,” I said. “I might even be able to get Colette’s records, if the hospital has kept them for so long. I don’t know whether she killed her father, but the woman I knew would have been capable of making such a claim. She was the most coolly confident person I have ever met—and she enjoyed inspiring fear.”
“How,” Domingo phrased his question very carefully, “did she claim to have done it?”
“Paula didn’t say. My grandfather …” I swallowed hard, for this was the first time I had spoken aloud the intimate connection to myself. “My grandfather broke his neck in a fall down the front staircase. Colette claimed responsibility.”
“Did she say she pushed him?”
“She was supposed to be locked in her room at the time, being punished for some infraction. I suppose she could have gotten out. Children are more clever about this than their parents like to admit. However …” That lump was back in my throat, but I forced myself to speak around it. “Paula told me something else. She told me that my mother was a throwback to those of her ancestors who built Phineas House—people she called ‘witches’ and
‘brujos.’
The House was somehow connected to their …”
I couldn’t say “magic,” and so concluded rather lamely, “To their abilities.” Then, “Why am I telling you this?”
“I think because this is not the type of story you could not tell,” Domingo said, “and because you know I know Phineas House and might believe you just a little.”
“And do you?”
“I know the House is not just a thing of wood and paint and nails, but I wonder, maybe it is because I have cared for it for so long, but I wonder, is it evil?”
“If Colette used it to kill …” I said, shaping the words carefully, thinking frantically,
Why did I confide in Domingo of all people? He was the House’s caretaker long before I formalized the agreement. How could I have forgotten that?
Domingo’s next words were not precisely reassuring. “I have a gun, several guns, and I know how to use them very well. If I take a gun and shoot someone, is the gun evil?”
I forced a laugh. “‘Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.’ Is that what you’re getting at?”