“Good,” I said. “I’m actually glad in a way. I hated the idea of Aunt May’s letters merely being tossed in the circular file. Now, to backtrack, you said there were two reasons for setting those conditions on the Fenns—conditions that included asking them to change their name. One was that you were protecting my reputation.”
“The other was we were protecting you personally—your continued physical existence,” Mikey said without the least trace of melodrama. His matter-of-factness on such an issue made my skin crawl. “As I mentioned before, we didn’t know who to trust. We decided to trust no one. We even did our best to remove from Phineas House anything of yours you did not take with you.”
“That’s why the nursery was stripped!” I said.
“That’s why,” he agreed. “I’ve told you that one of the uses liminal space can be put to is scrying. Scrying works better for some people if they hold something that belonged to the person they’re investigating. We did our best to move you into protective custody—on all levels. Again, if the Fenns had decided to ask questions or take you to Las Vegas to find your roots or something …”
“That would have ended any protection you could have given me,” I said, finishing the thought for him. “But why did you trustees drop out of my life so completely? I mean, as time passed, so did the risk. Uncle Stan gave me information on my inheritance when I turned twenty-one. Why didn’t you?”
Mikey raised his hands as if to physically stop the flow of words. “Those questions have very different answers. To answer the first, we didn’t drop out of your life. We regularly reviewed how you were doing, both with the Fenns, and by more objective means. We saw copies of all your report cards, your health records, even talked to your teachers or neighbors, when we could do so without arousing suspicion. Your Uncle Stan practically demanded we inspect your financial standing.
“We didn’t stop with those annual reviews,” Mikey went on a trace smugly. “Edgar Carney made a point of making visits to see things you had done. Remember when you won first prize in that art show when you were in high school? Ed went to that. He went to school plays, to public recitations. We picked him because you were showing an interest in art, and he had one, too, enough that he could tell us you had real talent. He also told us that you were stepping on that talent, that you could have been a professional, but for some reason chose to teach instead. Do you mind telling me why?”
I looked at Mikey, rubbing my hands against my brow as I remembered. “Edgar Carney himself was partly to blame. I saw him twice, both times looking rather intently at my art. One time was at that show you mentioned, now that I think about it. Nine isn’t so young that I hadn’t wondered about why I’d been taken from my home and placed with strangers. I’d even come up with something like the protective custody theory on my own—though I thought Colette was involved with criminals rather than …”
“Sorcerers? Wizards? Practitioners of occult arts?”
I nodded. “But seeing Mr. Carney wasn’t the main reason I ‘stepped on’ following a career in art. From the time I was small, I’ve always felt funny about my interest in art and color. I thought—knew—Colette wouldn’t like it. I guess Mr. Carney’s interest just gave me an excuse to follow my own inclinations to hide my art. I couldn’t leave it entirely, so I turned to teaching.”
“Fascinating,” Mikey said. “Colette didn’t like you doing art?”
“She didn’t know I did art of any kind,” I corrected. “I hid my interest from her. I sensed she’d disapprove.”
“Let me think on that,” Mikey said. “That’s very interesting, very interesting indeed.”
Mikey rubbed his hands across his pudgy face, the flesh moving under his hands like modeling clay, but falling back into its usual lines when he dropped his hands back into his lap.
“Sorry,” he said. “Travelling takes a bit out of me these days. I’m not as young as I was.”
“Who is?” I said. “Let me make coffee, and, as I promised, you can tell me what you intended, rather than answering my questions.”
“Those questions haven’t been completely useless,” Mikey insisted, following me into the kitchen. “Some of your questions anticipated matters I had planned to bring up.”
When I had ground the coffee beans, I shook them into the basket of the coffeemaker.
“So, go on. Or are you done?”
Mikey shook his head. “I’m not done. It’s just, the next item on my agenda isn’t merely a background report.”
“Go on.”
“We have discussed your desire to find Colette. I think that’s a valid and important issue—and one in which you may have more luck than anyone else.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. You are her daughter. No matter how you feel about her, that creates a tie. Also, while Phineas House may have resisted or blocked other attempts to trace Colette, it does not seem inclined to block you.”
No
. I thought.
You actually think it’s encouraging me.
“Colette was a very dominant personality, so much so that you may have forgotten you have another parent.”
“I haven’t,” I said dryly, “though I think Colette did.”
“I simply feel it is important to remind you that your father—whoever he is—should not be forgotten. I’m not saying you should try and trace him …”
“Let me guess. It’s already been done. No luck.”
Mikey grinned. “That’s right. However, we’ve no idea why Colette vanished when she did, but it is not impossible that your father had something to do with her disappearance.”
“He kidnapped her, you mean?”
“Or she fled him. Or, even she chose to go somewhere with him, rather than remaining here. The last seems unlikely. If Colette had known she was going away for an extended period of time, she would have taken things she valued.”
“Like her jewelry or the kaleidoscope collection,” I said.
“Actually, I was thinking of you,” Mikey replied gently. “Whatever her failings as a mother, Colette did value you.”
I didn’t answer. Childishly, I wanted to deny the truth of this statement, but I couldn’t. The problem was, I couldn’t deny that I felt my value had been more in the line of an ornament or accessory, rather than as a person.
Mikey went on. “So, what are you going to do?”
I turned sharply from where I had been getting coffee cups out of the cabinet.
“Do?”
“Are you going to look for Colette? Go back to Ohio? Stay here in Las Vegas, and paint Phineas House into the paean to color you have denied yourself all your life?”
That last hit me like a physical blow. I’d thought I was responding to the House. Had she been responding to me? I tried to remember when Domingo said he had undertaken his ambitious project. Was it before, or after, I had learned I owned Phineas House. Before, surely.
But what if the House had sensed my impending return? It had been constructed to be a hub for liminal space. What was more liminal than time? Past, present, and future shift with every breath, every second, every heartbeat. Might Phineas House have sensed my coming as wild animals sense the shifting of the seasons?
Might it … my heart froze in my chest at the thought … . Might it have done something to make me come? Uncle Stan was not young, so easy to create a ripple in probability and make an older man have an accident. The police had been so vague about the cause of the accident.
“Mira?” Mikey said. “What’s wrong? You’ve gone all pale.”
“I just had an unpleasant thought,” I said, setting the mug on the counter with incredible care. I feared to speak my thought aloud, but a perverse sense of defiance made me do it. “What would Phineas House do to get itself a human focus again? You’ve already said you thought it might push me to go after Colette. Would it do something to make me come here? Uncle Stan tried to get me to take over managing my estate when I turned twenty-one. I refused. It was, well, it was too much like putting Colette in her grave. I couldn’t do it.”
“And Stan Fenn continued to administer the estate for you—including Phineas House.”
“Which I didn’t even know I owned.”
As he had once before, Mikey looked up at the ceiling, as if there he might see the House’s face.
“Mira, I don’t know, but I don’t think the House is capable of doing such a thing. For one, you are among those it is meant to protect. Harming your parents would not be protecting you.”
I poured the coffee with a hand I forced not to shake. “Unless the House is still protecting Colette, rather than me, and got tired of waiting. After all, I’m not young. I have no children. What would happen when I was gone?”
“I’d wondered about why you’re not married,” Mikey said, almost diffidently. “You’re a very nice woman, very sweet, and not at all unattractive. Is there a reason you haven’t married?”
I started to give him all the usual reasons—never the right man, bad luck, too busy—but what I said cut through all the deceptions, even those I’d made for myself.
“I couldn’t, not without knowing more about myself. You protected me, Mikey, but you also robbed me of a past. There were things I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about, not to anyone … That made a barrier I’ve never gotten beyond.”
“I’m sorry,” Mikey said. “It must have been very lonely.”
Again, I couldn’t say the polite things. I remembered he had mentioned having a wife. Did he have children, too?
“Yes,” I said, bluntly, coldly. “It has been very lonely.”
Mikey looked uncomfortable, but had the wisdom to change the subject.
“Mira, on this issue of what Phineas House did or didn’t do, may or may not be capable of, don’t make it worse for yourself. There is one way to resolve some of this uncertainty. Find Colette—or at least find what happened to her. Then you’ll know who the House serves. You’ll know if you have enemies. You’ll know things you can’t learn from me for the simple reason that I don’t know them.”
I set the coffee mugs on the table, and looked down at him.
“Finding Colette has always been one of my goals. However, I don’t have the least idea how to go about it.”
Mikey lightened and sweetened his coffee, the spoon clinking with metronomelike regularity against the sides of the cup.
“There are,” he said, almost hesitantly, “the kaleidoscopes.”
“The kaleidoscopes,” I repeated. “I figured out that they must have something to with scrying. That’s what I was trying to do when I found your note. Are you suggesting I scry for Colette?”
“Something like that,” he said. “However, to be completely honest. I don’t know what you have access to.”
“You mean, you don’t know about her collection?”
“I do and I don’t,” Mikey said. “No. I’m not trying to be difficult. I’m being precisely honest. Let me start over.”
He sipped his coffee, as if the act would permit him to physically readjust his thoughts.
“We haven’t really talked much about Colette’s fascination with mirrors, have we?”
I shook my head. “I’ve thought about it. Reflection and reality are very liminal concepts, like shadow and substance. Which is really real? Peter Pan’s shadow had a life apart from him—Alice went through the looking glass.”
Mikey smiled broadly. “I can see I don’t need to give you the basic primer. Good. Let me jump ahead then. To start, before Colette’s return from the mental hospital, Phineas House was not decorated all over with mirrors.”
“No?”
I glanced around the kitchen. The omnipresent mirrors, seemed so normal now that when I visited somewhere like Evelina’s house, the walls seemed somehow dead. I no longer felt any desire to cover them. In fact, I’d found myself toying with the idea of getting some fabric like my mother had owned, the type trimmed with tiny mirrors.
“No. The mirrors were Colette’s idea, and she cultivated it with enthusiasm. Her trustees were mildly appalled, but as no harm seemed to come from it, and Phineas House did not seem in danger of being damaged, they did nothing to try and stop her—and, to be honest, they would have been on thin ground if they did.”
“Damaged?” I said. “How could mirrors damage a house? I don’t think you’re talking about walls falling down from the weight.”
“I am not,” Mikey agreed. “Phineas House was built to focus liminal space. Mirrors create liminal space. In setting up so many here, placing them where they reflect not only their surroundings but each other, Colette created something of a resonance chamber in which waves flowed in, bouncing off of each other, shattering, and taking new forms.”
He spoke of “waves,” and I think he meant to evoke sound waves, but the image that sprang to my mind was of a stormtossed ocean, an ocean in a house-shaped bottle, the trapped force splitting and reshaping, splitting and reshaping, sometimes coming into the same forms, but more often creating an infinitude of foam and chaos.
“And Phineas House was able to handle this?” I asked.
“It has,” Mikey said. “Maybe for Phineas House, the multiplicity of mirrors was no more a strain than the numerous thresholds, rooms, and corridors, no more than the multiplicity of carvings on the exterior …”