Mr. Hart called late Monday after we were back from hiking and said he would be able to get to Las Vegas by Tuesday afternoon. I offered to drive to Albuquerque and pick him up at the airport—after all, it was a two-hour drive, and while he probably wasn’t decrepit, he certainly wasn’t young either.
“I have already made arrangements for transportation,” he said. “But thank you. Would you like to come to my hotel?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like you to come to Phineas House and see what I’ve done with it. You say you’ll be here in the afternoon. Why not come over when you’re recovered from the trip, and we’ll talk over dinner?”
“Very well. I’ll call you when I get in.”
So it was that late on Tuesday afternoon I was keeping myself very busy in the kitchen making preparations for dinner. I’d picked up some chicken and had it marinating, intending to cook it on the grill.
Domingo had oh-so-casually mentioned that he was going to Evelina’s house that afternoon to help Enrico finish his project for the fair, and that he’d probably stay for dinner. I was grateful for his tact, since the garden was shared territory between us, but at the same time sorry that my one and only ally wouldn’t be near.
To go with the chicken, I was making an elaborate pasta salad. I’d found tricolored twists at the grocery store, and was adding bright red peppers from the garden. They were sweet-hot, not too spicy, I hoped, for a Minneapolis palate. I figured if they worked for my Ohio one, they should for Mr. Hart.
By early evening, the green salad was made, and I’d stirred the pasta salad and put it aside to marinate. I was just coming in from checking the grill when the front doorbell rang. I rinsed my hands, put aside the dish towel I’d been using for an apron, and went to admit Michael Hart.
Michael Hart didn’t look anything like I’d imagined. He was in his seventies, fairly short, his mouse-grey hair cut short to demonstrate textbook perfect male-pattern baldness. In comparison to Domingo and his painting crew, who’d made up most of my male companionship of late, Michael Hart was soft and pudgy. His handshake felt like unbaked bread sticks, but the gaze of his pale-blue eyes was direct and penetrating. His body might be soft, but he definitely was not.
“Come in,” I said. “Thank you for coming all this way on such short notice.”
“You’re welcome,” Michael Hart responded, stepping over the threshold and looking about the foyer with assessing interest. “I am glad to meet you at last.”
“Then we never met?” I asked, taking his tailored windbreaker and hanging it on the mirrored coat-tree.
“We did not,” Mr. Hart said. “I was the youngest of your trustees. The most senior member of that particular triumvirate, Renaldo Pincas, was the one who interviewed you. He died many years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, rather automatically.
I was trying hard to remember which of the stream of adults who had questioned me after my mother’s disappearance Renaldo Pincas might have been. I thought it might have been a very thin older man who had fascinated me not because of the questions he asked, but because of the elaborate network of brown liver spots on the backs of his hands. The fact that his questions had had more to do about me and my needs than with Colette made me think Mr. Spotty, as I had privately named him, had been my trustee, not a police officer. If he had told me so, the word had meant nothing at the time.
Mr. Hart was looking at me with a touch of bemusement, and I realized that my reverie had made me ignore my role as a hostess.
“I have dinner cooking,” I said. “Would asking you to come sit with me in the kitchen be too informal?”
“Not at all,” Mr. Hart replied with touching gallantry. “The food smells wonderful. Grilling? I thought so. You do your own cooking, then, no servants?”
“No cook,” I hedged, not quite ready to bring up the silent women. I had a feeling that Mr. Hart didn’t need to be told about them. He probably knew more about them than I did.
As I led the way to the kitchen, it occurred to me that my dinner guest, for all that he looked like an out-of-shape lawyer, was quite likely an accomplished sorcerer.
Once I’d settled Mr. Hart with a tall glass of iced tea garnished with mint from the garden, I went out and turned the chicken I’d already started grilling. Somehow, I’d known Mr. Hart would be on time, and when I came in, I reported that dinner would be ready to go on the table in about ten minutes. Unlike with Domingo, I hadn’t felt comfortable with the idea of dining with my trustee informally at my kitchen table, and so had set two places at one end of the formal dining room table.
Needless to say, when I’d gone to wash it, I’d found the crystal and china was already spotless, and the silver polished to a soft, moonlit glow. If I ever gave up Phineas House, I was going to have lifelong nostalgia for the silent women.
Mr. Hart and I chatted about his trip in from Minnesota as I carried the side dishes out to the dining room. I brought the chicken in from the grill last, so we could enjoy it while it was still snapping hot. I was washing the inevitable smudge of grease from one wrist when Mr. Hart commented:
“You are very little like Colette, Ms. Fenn. I think she would be astonished to see what her daughter has come to be.”
“No doubt,” I said, a trace curtly, picking up the tray of chicken and leading the way into the dining room.
“I didn’t mean that as an insult,” Mr. Hart said, settling himself into the indicated chair with the slight fussiness of a robin settling onto the nest. “Nor did I mean to indicate that Colette would necessarily be disappointed. I think her lack of practical competence frustrated her. It may even have been why she was so hard on the … servants. Employers most often are when they realize how they need those who, ostensibly, are in their debt.”
“I wonder if the silent women knew that,” I said, thinking aloud, as I’d fallen into the habit since Phineas House seemed to listen.
“The ‘silent women’?” Mr. Hart said, a slight chuckle underlying his voice. It was not mocking in the least, but instead avuncularly amused. “Is that what you call them?”
“Ever since I was a child, that’s how I’ve thought of them,” I said, and, as if our discussing them granted permission, from the kitchen came the muffled sounds of the remaining mess from cooking being cleared away. “I knew they talked among themselves, but they barely ever talked to me.”
“They feared you, I suspect,” Mr. Hart said, serving himself the largest chicken breast with the air of a man who likes his food, and is certain he will enjoy what is set before him. “They feared Colette, and since you were so young, they would have seen you as her extension.”
“Not hard to do,” I said bitterly, “since that is how she seemed to see me.”
If I had hoped Mr. Hart would say something to ameliorate this harsh image of Colette, I was disappointed.
“Colette was a … difficult woman, but she had some reasons for being so. Mira—may I call you Mira?”
“Please do,” I replied.
“And if you would call me Mikey, I would be grateful. I know I am an old man, now, but ‘Mr. Hart’ still evokes my father to me, and he was a formidable man.”
“But, ‘Mikey’?”
Mr. Hart grinned. “Ridiculous, perhaps, but a childhood nickname I never shed. There were many Michaels in my family—heritage of a dominant patriarch in the person of my grandfather. Later, wherever I went, I seemed to encounter other Michaels who had taken the more respectable diminutives, or the dignified Michael. At least, I escaped Mickey, and attendant references to the mouse, a thing for which I am eternally grateful.”
I found myself liking my dinner guest more and more. I’d prepared myself for someone rather like Chilton O’Reilly but stuffier, and with no childhood fondness to bridge the gap. I found this affable, doughy man quite amusing, and I was certain he was not putting on an act. The silent women would never have manifested if Phineas House didn’t think well of Mikey Hart.
“Mikey it is,” I agreed, and sliced into my own chicken with a great deal more appetite than I had anticipated.
“Well, Mira,” Mikey said, “as I was about to say before I ran off on that last tangent, I’d prefer to discuss this entire matter in something vaguely like chronological order. I don’t mean I won’t tell you about your mother if you wish, but so many of the things that shaped her are related to earlier history. Marvelous chicken, by the way, and is the recipe for the pasta salad your own?”
“Thank you. Yes, it is. I can copy it for you if you’d like, though Domingo’s garden contributed a great deal to the flavor.”
I could see that any conversation with Mikey Hart was often going to run away into tangents. I no longer marvelled at his telling Aunt May about Queens of Mirrors and Mistresses of Thresholds. It now seemed a miracle that he hadn’t still been there when Uncle Stan came home for dinner. I decided I’d need to bring us back onto topic, or doubtless Mikey would be asking me was Domingo suitable as a caretaker or where the garden was or even what we were growing in it.
“I’ve done some research,” I said. “I know a lot more about my immediate family history at least. I’ve even come across the rumors that Colette was responsible for her father’s death.”
“Did Domingo Navidad tell you that?” Mikey asked.
“No, actually …” I trailed off, took a sip of wine to cover my nervousness, and went on, “it was the ghost of Paula Angel.”
Mikey’s response was nothing I could have anticipated.
“Pablita did always like Colette,” he said. “I think she saw her as another rebel against the unfair, male-dominated system.”
“And was she?”
“No, Pablita was …”
“I don’t mean Paula Angel!” I said, not quite shouting, but coming close. “I mean Colette Bogatyr, my mother.”
Mikey blinked owlishly with surprise, but as he helped himself to a third piece of chicken, I don’t think I had offended him.
“Colette was … possibly a rebel, but she was also, quite honestly, less than completely sane and quite probably a parricide.”
“But you,” I fumbled for the right words, “or rather, her own trustees, they got her out of the insane asylum. Why would they do that if Colette was both insane and dangerous?”
“Because if they didn’t, Colette would have left on her own accord. In fact, she had been doing so for years. The trustees merely put her in the position of being able to lay legal claim to Phineas House.
“I’m confused,” I said, my elbows on the arms of my chair, my face in my hands.
“Well, it is easier to understand if I start at the beginning,” Mikey said without reproof. “It’s just that it’s such a difficult beginning, and entails explaining things that have nothing to do with Colette—at least not with her personally.”
He had finished the third piece of chicken, and though he looked longingly at the pasta salad, seemed prepared to make a valiant effort to resist fourths.
“I have dessert,” I said, “and the silent women seem to have anticipated me and turned on the coffee. I made decaf, but I can put on caffeinated if you’d like.”
“My doctor says I should cut back on caffeine and rich foods and get more exercise,” Mikey replied. “Needless to say, I don’t listen. However, your company is sufficiently stimulating that I can do without caffeine.”
I smiled at the compliment. “The evening is lovely, and normally I’d suggest we take our dessert outside, but since I have a feeling that what you need to tell me shouldn’t be overhear … .”
“Yes, that is probably best,” Mikey said. “Tell me, is Domingo Navidad still living on the property?”
“In the apartment over the carriage house. He’s been a gem. Lately, he’s concentrated on getting the exterior paint job done.”
“I noticed it,” Mikey said, with almost incredible understatement ; you’d have to be blind—and possibly deaf—not to notice that paint job.
“I won’t ask if you like it,” I said, grinning, “because I fear that what we’re considering calling the ‘Fairground Midway’ style is probably an acquired taste.”
Mikey rose, nicking one more pasta twist out of the salad. “It is an individual style, and says a great deal about you—more than that you are an art teacher. However, don’t ask me what, because that would take us back to telling the story inside out.”
“I have some suspicions,” I said. “Like I said, I’ve been doing some research. Why don’t we take the coffee and dessert tray into the living room? Then you can start telling me what you’ve come so far to tell.”
And the silent women can get on with tidying up. I suspect they might manifest for the purpose of frowning at me if I dared clear the table with our first formal dinner guest in the House.
Once we had settled in, I tucked my feet up under me—something else Colette never would have done. She might have done a Cleopatra lounging upon her gilded divan routine for one of her lovers, but never just tucked bare feet up under the hem of a loose silk skirt.
Mikey indulged in both a brownie and a cookie, but he was more focused now than he had been before.