“Mira! Hold on. Mira!”
The shout came a second time, and this time I recognized the source. Domingo. His voice—and the panic in every note—pulled me back from wherever it was that I had been.
I was suddenly aware that the ladder under me was swaying. The thump and thud I’d heard had been my paint bucket falling off where I’d hung it from the ladder and tumbling down to land on the ground two stories below. The white paint had left a trail like the droppings of an impossibly large bird streaking the gaily painted side of Phineas House.
The ladder was tipping to one side, tilting back. I shoved my own weight in the opposite direction, glad for once not to be slim and featherweight. The ladder halted in its tottering. Then strong hands had it from beneath: Domingo and Tomás, both men looking pale and frightened beneath their outdoorsman’s tans.
“Mira!” Domingo called. “Stay still while we make sure this is stable. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I called back. “Now. I don’t know what happened. Maybe I drowsed off?”
Domingo forced a laugh. “Only you, Mira Fenn, could fall asleep on a ladder, paintbrush in hand. Just a moment more.”
I felt vibrations as the two men made sure the base of the ladder was well-anchored. Then Domingo called, still shouting a little, as if I were farther away than at the top of an extension ladder.
“Can you come down now?”
For answer, I started picking my way down. I didn’t want to admit it, but my legs were trembling. When I got down onto the lawn I gave both men impulsive hugs. Domingo held me a trace longer than was necessary, then moved me to arm’s length.
“You, inside. I will come in and see that you are taken care of. Tomás, will you put this ladder away and see what can be done about the paint?”
“Sí,” Tomás said. “Your nephew is here. I’ll get him too clean up on the ground. I’ll check the side of the house myself.”
“Thank you, Tomás,” I said, still shaky. “I’m sorry to create so much more work.”
“No problema, Miss Fenn,” he said with a grin. “Better you than one of us. You are paying us, after all.”
His teasing did more than all of Domingo’s anxious fussing to make me feel firmer on my feet. I insisted on walking under my own power to the kitchen—but I didn’t send Domingo away either. I let him seat me at my own kitchen table and obediently drank the glass of water he put in front of me.
“Mira, do you think you got dehydrated?” he said, refilling the glass as soon as I had emptied it. “This is easy to do, this time of year. The weather is so pleasant compared to summer, you can forget how the dry air takes it out of you.”
“No, Domingo, I don’t think it’s that. I’ve been careful. I don’t like what the dryness does to my skin. If anything, I’ve been drinking too much. Domingo …”
I hesitated, then barged on. If anyone deserved to know the truth, it was Domingo. He had never laughed at me, not even when I told him about Paula Angel.
“Domingo, I … I guess you could say I had a vision. I saw my mother—Colette—riding in the gig pulled by Shooting Star. I couldn’t have imagined it. It was too perfect. I could see the details of her dress, the lace at the collar and wrists. I saw how her hair was dressed, even where it was a little mussed. I saw the trappings on the horse, what she held in her free hand. I think it was a vision of the day she vanished.”
Domingo almost disappointed me. His brown eyes got very wide, and I saw the doubt in them. Then he shook his head, not in disbelief, but as if disbelief was a physical thing he could shake from him.
“¿Verdad?
Well, if you say so, then so it must be. I wonder why you saw it now, there, up on a ladder. This is not a good place for visions.”
Because
, I thought,
I was on a ladder, neither on the ground nor in the air—liminal space, of a sort. And because I was staring into the borders between the white trim and the turquoise paint, trying to get it right. And maybe most of all because Phineas House now knows I know more than I did, and maybe it tried to show me something.
I said none of this aloud. Aloud I said, “I’m not completely sure, Domingo. I have some theories, though. Can I invite you to dinner tonight, here, at the House? It’s going to take some telling, and I’d rather not do so in a restaurant. I also have an experiment I’d like to try—one that definitely can’t be tried in a restaurant.”
“I will come,” he said promptly, “on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“No more ladders for you,” he said sternly. “Not today, maybe not for several days. I do not like how dying of broken necks seems to run in your family. I would prefer you not do so as well.”
“Deal,” I said. “Can I drive a car? I want to go to the grocery and pick up a few things for dinner.”
“You can,” Domingo agreed, “but better. Let me have one of the men drive you. I think we will need more paint thinner to deal with that paint splatter, and maybe even more rags.”
“No need to worry about rags,” I said. “I’m not sure that a square inch of fabric was ever thrown out in Phineas House. I have plenty, but I’ll accept a driver—and gladly.”
In fact,
I admitted sheepishly to myself as I trotted upstairs to change out of my overalls,
I think I was hinting that I needed one.1 wonder if Domingo caught that, too. It would be like him.
After running errands, I went inside and busied myself with mindless domestic tasks. I’d decided on a nice baked chicken and herbs, with a side of brown rice and a big salad. Usually, I didn’t like using the oven in the summer, but the new model I’d bought was so well-sealed that it released very little extra heat.
I juiced fresh lemons and made lemonade. I picked vegetables from the garden and worked on a salad. I forced myself to concentrate hard on every task at hand, a little afraid I might go slipping off again.
Domingo showed up when the chicken was about five minutes from being done, a pastry box in one hand, Blanco bounding at his heels. The chicken smelled wonderful, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Blanco rose on his hind legs and danced in front of the oven door like somebody or other before the Tabernacle.
“I hope you don’t mind that I brought him with me,” Domingo said. “He can go out into the garden if you like.”
“Blanco is fine with me, but chicken isn’t fine with dogs, at least the bones aren’t.”
“Blanco lives to believe he will be fed table scraps,” Domingo said. “I think it is very good for everyone to have a dream.”
“And I,” I said, reaching into a cabinet and pulling out a box of what I knew were Blanco’s favorite treats, “thought I might have another guest for dinner.”
We grinned at each other like a couple of kids, then I gave Blanco a few treats, and motioned Domingo to a seat at the kitchen table.
“I hope you don’t mind eating in here. We could have done the whole grand dining room thing, but it seemed ridiculous for two.”
“I like sitting here,” he said. “You can look out at the garden. Did you eat here when you were a little girl?”
“No,” I said, getting out a bottle of wine. I’d gotten a red, even though I knew it’s supposed to be the wrong type for chicken. I’d always found the rich color sustaining. “I either ate in the dining room or—most of the time—in my nursery. That had a window that looked over the garden, too, but my table wasn’t there. The garden window was in the bedroom part.”
“The window that has the tigers and bramble roses around it,” he said, accepting with a nod of thanks the glass of wine I handed him. “I remember.”
“Funny,” I said, putting my own glass down on the counter so I could pull the chicken from the oven. “I never knew what was there. The house was painted mostly white when I was a girl. It did nothing to show up the details.”
“Perhaps that was the reason why,” Domingo said reasonably. “Not everyone would like to live in a house that looks like it belongs on a fairground midway—or would if it was covered in flashing lights.”
“Please, no,” I said. “The bright colors are nice, but flashing lights … I don’t think the neighborhood association would agree.”
“Don’t worry,” Domingo said. “No one has suggested it.”
I brought the chicken to the table in the bright amber Pyrex dish in which it had been cooked. A matching casserole dish held the fluffy brown rice, and a large salad was in the red bowl from the Fiesta ware set. I’d set my place with blue, Domingo’s with green. It made for a colorful, but surprisingly harmonious, assemblage.
“It’s sort of uncivilized,” I said, “but the best topping for the rice is the drippings from the chicken. There are all sorts of herbs in there, plus onions, and garlic.”
“It smells wonderful,” Domingo said, “and not uncivilized at all.”
We made it through dinner on small talk about cooking and our childhoods, but my near fall that afternoon and what I’d promised to tell him hung over the conversation. As I snapped on the coffeemaker and cleared away the worst of the mess from dinner, I launched in to my account.
“The reason I nearly fell today,” I began, “I had a vision of my mother—my mother riding off on the day she disappeared.”
Over coffee and blueberry pie, I told Domingo everything I had seen, stressing again how detailed the vision had been. Then I backtracked, explaining about liminal space, and how I’d been reading about it just before I came out to paint.
“I suppose that could have put me into a suggestible frame of mind,” I said.
“Very likely,” Domingo agreed. “If I understand what you are saying, that is. You are saying that you had a vision because the possibility of seeing between spaces had been put into your mind.”
“Essentially, yes. You see, the one thing I hadn’t told you was how I happened to be reading that section this morning. It’s well ahead of where I was, in a different journal even. The night after I got so scared, when I came out of the shower, the journal was waiting for me on my pillow, open to that page.”
Domingo cocked an eyebrow at me. “Do you think I had anything to do with that?”
“No, I don’t. I locked the back door when I came in, so I know it wasn’t one of the painters either. I think it was Phineas House herself who did it, the House or one of her agents. I’m not sure which, and I’m not sure just how much free will the silent women have.”
“Silent women?”
I told him about them, about how they were the reason the House was so sparkling clean these days. How they had been there when I was a child, and how after I’d been back for a while they had reappeared.
“I don’t see them very often,” I concluded, “but there’s no doubt they’re here. This place is spotless. My bed is made for me. They don’t do laundry or cook, but I wonder if they’re just being polite. In my mother’s day they were physically visible to everyone who came by. Your father and you probably saw them.”
“There was a day,” Domingo said, “not long ago, when I heard the vacuum cleaner running when you weren’t home.”
“That was probably one of them,” I said. “They’re not above using modern methods to do their work.”
“So they’re not ghosts, not insubstantial,” he said.
“I don’t know if they’re ghosts or not,” I said. “I don’t know what they are. I just have a feeling they’re connected somehow to the House and its care.”
“That would explain,” Domingo said, “why there were so few problems when the House was closed. I mean, dust accumulated, but there were no vermin, no major damage. I inspected the place, but I did very little to the interior.”
“I thought of that,” I said. “Accumulating dust might have seemed like a wise move to the House, though I have the distinct impression she is well … house proud?”
We shared an uncomfortable laugh at my pun, then I went on.
“I’ve been learning a lot, but obviously Phineas House felt I was missing something important. How she knew that what I needed was in Aunt May’s journal …”
“Maybe one of the silent women read them,” Domingo said practically. “If they can use cleaning appliances, well, certainly they can handle a book. Are you sure the silent women are extensions of the House?”
“No, I’m not,” I admitted. “Maybe the relationship is symbiotic. The silent women keep Phineas House clean in exchange for something. I don’t think they’re enslaved to the House. The little touches, like the sprig of lavender on my pillow, go above and beyond servitude.”
“And they were here in your mother’s day,” Domingo said, thoughtfully.
“Yes.” I hesitated. “But, Domingo, I don’t think they liked her. In fact, I know they were frightened of her. That makes me wonder … Did Phineas House like my mother? I’ve thought she must have, based on what Paula Angel said, but now I’m wondering.”
“We cannot know,” Domingo said, “until we better understand the House and whatever heritage has come to you through it. Certainly, you inherited more than real estate.”
“True,” I said, “and I have a thought about that. Do you remember I told you that Colette was holding something in her hand in the vision?”