Isabela married one Wallace Jefferson. They had two children. The eldest, a girl, was given a name clearly derived from her mother’s maiden name: Pinca. Pinca’s own first child, my great-aunt, had also been named Pinca. It seemed to me that remembering the connection to the line of Aldo Pincas was essential.
I have a good eye for color, and that’s probably why I noticed the next anomaly, a discoloration on the page near Great-aunt Pinca’s entry. The paper alongside her name was both lighter and darker at points, indications of very careful erasure, erasure that had left at least a little smudge. So there had been further information about her. Likely, then before her early death, Great-aunt Pinca had been married, maybe even had a child, but someone had erased that information.
Why? What harm could it do?
I remembered what Paula Angel had told me, about how the ability to use Phineas House had seemed to skip a few generations—so that when it manifested again in my mother, her parents didn’t know how to deal with it. What if the true story was slightly different? What if the talent or ability or whatever you called it
had
manifested in my grandparent’s generation—and it had manifested in Great-aunt Pinca. Then Pinca had died, and the right of inheritance, but not the ability to use the House, had passed to Nikolai.
Might that be a better reason for Grandfather Nikolai’s unreasoning attitude toward his daughter—not fear of a witchcraft that had run in his family for generations, but resentment that his daughter, not himself, was the true heir to Phineas House? Might he also have erased his sister’s name, as if to assert that he, not she, was the one fated to carry forward the line of inheritance?
Paula had said several generations had lacked whatever was the strange ability that defined the line. That seemed peculiar, too. Las Vegas, New Mexico, had been officially founded in 1835. The first family member listed on this chart had been born in 1813, making him a young man when the city was founded. Even if he’d hurried up, claimed the land on which Phineas House now stood, and started building, that left only two generations for his family to build what Paula had indicated was a formidable reputation. Four generations on, two off, then Colette, then me.
I suppose it would be enough, but I wasn’t at all sure. I had this funny feeling that Paula had been talking about a lot longer span of time than from between the founding of Las Vegas to when Nikolai’s grandmother had died. Then again, the Anglo history of the “American West” is so short that maybe it would have been enough.
I wasn’t convinced.
I was about to go hunting in the vicinity of where I’d found the Bible when the phone rang. It was Chilton O’Reilly, reminding me about tomorrow’s meeting. I thanked him and rang off, but that call made me think that there were other things I needed to do before tomorrow morning. The silent women kept the House far nicer than I could, but the front garden really needed some work if the place was going to be photographed.
I had to admit, if only to myself, that I needed a little time to think. Just over three months ago, I had been an orphan with little sense of where my ancestors had come from. Now I was discovering if not a family—for family is far more than shared bloodlines—at least my maternal heritage, a heritage that included, apparently, patricides and witches. It was a lot to take in, a lot more to accept.
And I still knew nothing at all about my father.
I was beginning to wonder if I really wanted to find out.
Despite my apprehensions, Chilton O’Reilly’s visit went smoothly. The photographer was efficient, and admitted to being pleased to have a chance to take what he called “arty” shots. Domingo was surprisingly eloquent when Chilton interviewed him. The weather was what I was coming to expect as typically New Mexico—clear and sunny.
Chilton had kept his promise not to slight the neighbors, and soon everyone was trooping around in a small herd, watching the photographer do his work, and offering Chilton enough information on restoring old houses, local history, and the Painted Lady movement that he could have written a small book.
My mood was so good that after the photographer had packed his gear, I invited Chilton in for lunch. He accepted with pleasure.
“Maggie is at one of her clubs, needlepointing, I think,” he said. “I was going to have a sandwich at home.”
“I don’t have anything fancier here,” I warned, “unless Domingo and his crew are ordering takeout. I could check.”
“Don’t worry. A sandwich would be marvelous,” Chilton assured me. “Company will be the sauce.”
I waved him ahead of me down the front hall to the kitchen. I thought his gaze rested briefly on the door to my mother’s office, but he didn’t push. In the kitchen, I pulled out a variety of cold cuts and a loaf of dark rye bread. I had drinks, chips, and fresh fruit, even some of Chilton’s candy left.
As we were making our sandwiches at the kitchen table, he gave an admiring look out the window toward the garden.
“You’ve gotten this place into wonderful shape,” he said.
“The garden is Domingo’s work,” I replied. “His father was gardener here in my mother’s time. Domingo kept up with it after.”
“But Phineas House itself,” Chilton said, “the painting outside, all the cleaning inside. It must be costing you a fortune.”
“It’s not as bad as you might think,” I said. “Domingo has a way of finding good workers and materials. I’ve sold a few things here and there to raise the cash.”
“Antiques?”
“Oh, no. Old appliances, mostly. It’s amazing what you can sell online.”
“There might be a story in that,” Chilton said.
“If there is,” I said, “you can consult me, but anonymously. I don’t want people breaking in thinking there’s a treasure trove here.”
“Understandably. Let me run it by my editor. It might make a good followup to the piece on Victorians.” He looked around the room with real appreciation. “Still, I reserve the right to compliment you, Mira. This old place looks great.”
“I’ve had some help in,” I said, not wanting to press his credulity, and wanting to give the silent women some credit. “And one person alone doesn’t make as much of a mess, especially in a big place like this. In my experience, it’s easier to clutter up a small apartment than a big house—and then the clutter makes cleaning harder, and …”
Chilton nodded. “That’s how it is in my office at home. Maggie won’t go in there anymore, and I don’t do the best of jobs with dust. We have a maid twice a month, but she messes up my papers.”
We laughed, and riding the general feeling of fellowship, I decided to tell him a few of the things I’d learned. Some of what I’d learned about Colette might be embarrassing, but it couldn’t hurt anyone now—and I was curious what Chilton’s response might be.
“I’ve learned a few things about my mother’s past,” I said. “I’ll tell you about them, but only if you promise to keep them off the record.”
Chilton paused, and I respected him for that. I was effectively asking him to sit on a story before he knew how juicy it would get. Then he nodded.
“I can do that. If it’s really good, I reserve the right to try and talk you around.”
“Done,” I said with a laugh.
Chilton turned his shirt pocket out. “No hidden tape recorder, and my hands are busy with my sandwich. What have you learned?”
“I found out why some people said my mother had been born at Phineas House, while others claimed she’d only been there about ten years. In a way, both stories were right. Colette was born here, but she wasn’t here for many years in between. Did you come across anything about her father’s death?”
Chilton shook his head. “I was interested in her then, not her childhood. Wait. Didn’t he die when she was young?”
“That’s right. He fell down a flight of stairs when she was nine. Broke his neck.” I took a swallow from my iced tea before going on, studying Chilton’s face. There was nothing there to indicate he was hiding prior knowledge, so I went on. “The fall was ruled an accident, but apparently Colette claimed to have pushed him.”
“What? Why would she have done that?”
“Apparently, Colette and Nikolai—that was my grandfather’s name—didn’t get along at all. I wonder if he might have beaten her. In any case, she was young enough to think she was showing her strength.”
“Sort of a ‘don’t mess with me’ statement?” Chilton asked. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but that would be in keeping with the woman I remember. She had that attitude. Queenly. Arrogant.”
I nodded. “Well, after Nikolai’s death, my grandmother’s brother came to help her run things. Then
he
had a fall …”
“He wasn’t killed, was he? I would have heard about two deaths in such a similar fashion in the same house.”
“No. He wasn’t. The fall may not even have been mentioned outside the family, but Colette … well, let’s just say that Colette’s behavior was such that her mother had no trouble getting her committed to the State Hospital. Colette spent something like ten years there. While she was committed, her mother died—natural causes, flu, I think, and so the estate came to Colette. Her case was reviewed, and she was let out.”
“To become the town’s eccentric, and vanish a decade or so years later,” Chilton said. He sounded like he was trying out the words for print.
“This is confidential,” I said. “I’m telling you because you cared enough to look for her all those years ago.”
“I promise I’ll keep it to myself,” Chilton said. “Mental illness, especially of someone who could pay for private care, could be kept quiet, and if she’d been ruled sane after all—well, the hospital authorities wouldn’t have been talking. Like most institutions of its type, it has been open to criticism in the past.”
“Domingo told me a few stories,” I said, “when we were out playing tourist.”
“There are some good ones,” Chilton agreed. “Speaking of good stories, how did you learn this one, Mira?”
I’d thought up a good answer to that one while I’d been talking. “I was looking through some family papers. I found some that told basically what I just told you. I think they may be copies of papers submitted to the State Hospital when …”
“When they were moving to have Colette committed,” Chilton said, completing my sentence when he saw my discomfort. “That makes sense. I’d guess that Colette was interviewed, too. She must have said at least enough to confirm the claims she was unbalanced.”
“I suppose so,” I said. I ate a few potato chips to cover a moment of unexpected sorrow for that strange girl my mother had been. “And then she may have outgrown whatever it was, or at least learned more socially acceptable behavior.”
“Or,” Chilton said with brutal honesty, “she may have been treated in a fashion meant to make her behavior more socially acceptable.”
Words like “lobotomy” and “electroshock” hung in the air between us, thought but not spoken. I left them there.
“In any case, I was wondering, there wasn’t anything, uh, well, untoward connected with my mother’s disappearance was there?”
“You mean bodies at the foot of staircases or anything like that? I can reassure you, Mira. There was nothing of the sort. The chief of police had someone check records for crimes in the area after it occurred to him that Colette might not have been disappeared, but rather have chosen to disappear voluntarily.”
“That’s a relief,” I said. “I’ve been nervous about that possibility ever since I learned Colette had been accused of violence. She was never violent to me—cold, so cold that her disapproval could feel like a blow—but as far as I can remember, she never raised a hand to me or to any of the servants. It was hard to accept that she might have been, well, a murderess.”
“And you don’t have to accept that, Mira,” Chilton said with a firm kindness I hadn’t expected. “Colette may have been committed for other reasons entirely. You said there was an uncle involved. Might he have hoped to get his hands on the estate?”
“He might,” I said. “I checked, and my grandmother was left Nikolai’s personal property, but the House and its contents were left to Colette.”
“Not uncommon,” Chilton said, “when a property has been in a family a long time. Whatever games might have been being played at Colette’s expense, they didn’t succeed in the end.”
“She lost ten years of her life!” I protested.
“I don’t mean that,” Chilton said. “I mean someone was acting for her interests, someone who couldn’t do anything until she reached majority, but there was someone. You mentioned a trustee, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “That’s right.”
I got up quickly to bring the tea pitcher from the refrigerator, letting motion cover my whirling thoughts.
Trustees. That’s something I have to look into. Trustees protected my interests. Now it looks like they protected Colette’s as well. Mr. Hart came to warn Aunt May off her investigations—but he dropped hints, too, or at least she thought he did.
I filled our glasses, then sat down again.
“Thanks for listening, Chilton. I’ve felt I owed you something, but I didn’t expect you to accept what I told you.”