Child of a Rainless Year (48 page)

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Authors: Jane Lindskold

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The same routine was followed at the front door, which, evidently was unlocked. I expected my point of view to follow Colette inside, but I was stopped at the front door, unable to penetrate further. It wasn’t as if I was anchored to the gig, but rather as if a strong wind—one that politely didn’t muss my hair or stir my garments—pressed me back.
I remembered that Mikey had said Phineas House had been created to channel the currents of liminal space, and that while the channelling had greatly benefitted Aldo Pincas and his family, it had not benefitted other liminal travellers in the least.
“But why can’t I get through?” I said to myself. “I’m a member of the family. Could it be because I haven’t been born yet? Colette could get through, though. Does this mean that she has returned to the past—for certainly this is the past—but within the span of her own life?”
That made sense. Paula Angel had told me that Nikolai Bogatyr had held but the lightest of holds on Phineas House, and that upon Colette’s birth, the House had bonded with her. Therefore, unlike earlier heirs who had taken over upon their parent’s death, Colette had the bond from her birth.
I kept trying to get in without success. Had Colette gone into the past and been killed there? That would explain why she hadn’t returned, and why there was no record. Nikolai and Chantal Bogatyr would not have recognized their daughter in this elegant woman dressed, even for their time, in out-of-date styles.
I began to think that I would keep a fruitless vigil right up until midnight when, presumably, Saturday’s kaleidoscope would cease to show its vision and I would be thrust back into the front parlor in the Phineas House of the present day. With a long wait in mind, I’d taken a seat on the high curb, leaning back against a tree that wasn’t there in my time, but here and now provided fine shade from the late-spring sun.
I’d gotten comfortable, and my feet—which felt like I’d been on them all this time, for all that I must have been here only in spirit—had lost their ache, when Colette came back out the front door and made a beeline for her gig.
Although Colette moved with her usual grace, there was no doubt that my mother was furious. Her hands in their kid gloves were clenched into tight fists, and her mouth pressed in a line so thin that her full lips became a slit. She mounted the driver’s seat with abrupt jerking motions, and when seated slapped the reins across patient Shooting Star’s back so that the mare looked back at Colette in equine rebuke before breaking into a trot.
Leaving Phineas House behind, Colette began to retrace her way through the streets of Las Vegas. When I saw her lips moving, I brought myself alongside the gig in case I might overhear something interesting or useful. Most of what she said was inarticulate, little hisses and snorts, punctuation in an internal dialogue to which I was not privy. Only once did she say something aloud.
“I suppose I’ll need to return the one before I can have another. What a bother! I’ve made the trip twice now, and hoped never to risk a third.”
Colette said nothing further to clarify this. Over time her supreme self-control reasserted, so even the indignant hissing ceased and her mouth resumed a semblance of its usual lines. Only her eyes narrowed with calculation showed she was anything but a well-born lady out for a drive.
I think I noticed before she did that something wasn’t right, but I could be wrong. Self-control was always one of Colette’s strong points. In any case, before long we both had registered that the gig was no longer travelling either through the streets of Las Vegas or through the surrounding countryside.
The landscape was familiar, yet it was not. There were mountains in the right place, but they weren’t quite the right mountains. Key features looked just the littlest bit off. The dirt road was the same, but the flowers that grew along the edge were too far advanced for late April. These were the sunflowers and asters of late summer. The fields showed signs of harvest, cut to the ground in some places, bailed hay waiting to be hauled to shelter.
There were other indications, but they all came down to the same thing. Colette Bogatyr was lost somewhere between the past and her present. Belatedly she pulled out the forgotten teleidoscope and sought to chart her course back to familiar ground. Although I understood nothing of what she was doing, I could tell she was unsuccessful.
My mind filled with the image I had encountered in various forms in dreams and visions, Colette travelling further and further down a road that fragmented with possibilities, growing more and more lost with every choice she made.
When a swirling of sunflakes heralded my return from vision to my own time and place, Colette still had not found her way back. Her expression was becoming increasingly frantic, the hand holding the teleidoscope was beginning to shake.
For the first time in this mad venture I was glad I couldn’t speak to her. I felt shamed and yet relieved that I did not have to be the one to tell her that she would never make her way home.

 

Surrealist artists were fascinated by psychological meanings of colors. Oddly, each hue has both a positive and negative connotation in most cultures. For example, consider the following: White: innocence
and
ghostliness; Black: restful strength
and
depression; Yellow: nobility and treason; Red: ardent love
and
sin; Blue: truth and despondency; Purple: dignity
and
grief; Green: growth
and
jealousy.
—Betty Edwards,
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
I came out of my trance to hear the grandfather clock on the upstairs landing chiming the strokes of midnight. Mikey Hart sat, or rather slouched, half-asleep in one of the comfortable padded chairs. To my surprise, a much more wide awake Domingo Navidad sat in another, and when I lowered the kaleidoscope from my eye, he was across the room and taking it from my hand, setting it on the table, pressing my hands between his own.
“Mira? Mira? Are you all right?”
Sunflakes still spotted my vision, like the afterimage of a camera flash or a bolt of lightning. The room reeked of strong coffee, undertoned with male sweat.
“Coffee,” I said weakly. “Water. Aspirin. Bathroom first.”
I tried to get to my feet, but I felt wrung out. Unfairly, for someone who had been sitting for the last several hours, my feet hurt, just as they had in my vision. When I tried to stand, my left ankle buckled.
Domingo caught me, his arms around me feeling very good. I restrained myself from an impulse to giggle, knowing full-well I was overtired and punchy, not wanting to say or do anything that I would regret later.
By the time he had escorted me to the bathroom, I was steady enough that I gently pushed him back.
“Thank you,” I said, “but I think I can handle this.”
He nodded, but as I closed the bathroom door, I noticed he watched very carefully to make sure that I didn’t fall. I managed to pee, then drank several glasses of water and swallowed two aspirin. When I opened the bathroom door again, Domingo was waiting at a polite distance. Mikey stood beside him, a mug of coffee in his hand.
At the smell of the coffee my head pounded harder and my stomach roiled. I waved it away when Mikey would have brought it over.
“No. Sleep. I’m sorry. So much to tell … Too tired. Too damn tired.”
I was nearly asleep on my feet, and I didn’t even want to protest when Domingo came and helped me into my bedroom. I know that he and Mikey were there when my head hit the pillow. After that, I don’t remember anything except for a host of odd, golden-hued dreams.
I slept ten hours, and I’m not sure I even rolled over once. When I opened my eyes, Domingo was waiting in a chair by my bed. I grinned weakly at him.
“Making a habit of this?”
“I hope not,” he said seriously, “at least not quite this. How do you feel?”
I yawned, remembering belatedly to cover my mouth, and as I did so ran a mental check through my body.
“Pretty good,” I said. “No headache. Starved though.”
Domingo smiled. “Mikey Hart slept at my place last night— so did I, in case you wonder. The silent women escorted us out, but they let me come back in this morning. Mikey hasn’t gotten moving yet. He’s not young, and though he hasn’t said anything, I’m sure this hasn’t been easy on him.”
“Go check on him,” I said, “while I shower and get respectable. Then come back over for breakfast. Oh, and tell Mikey he should check out of his hotel and come stay here. The silent women won’t throw him out if he’s a guest, and I’d feel safer with someone in the House.”
Domingo quirked the corner of his mouth. “I hope you’re not afraid of me. Even the silent women know I’m harmless.”
“Harmless?” I teased. “I hope not. That would be too boring. You can stay here, too, if you want, but you have a perfectly good house within shouting distance. Look. This will all make sense when I’ve had a chance to explain what I saw last night.”
“Do you know, then, what happened to Colette?”
“Sort of,” I said. “Not quite. It’s very strange.”
“What about this hasn’t been?” Domingo said. “I will do as you say, but first …”
He leaned down and kissed me squarely on the lips, and though he made no effort to prolong the contact, there was nothing brotherly about it. Lightning shot right through me at the contact, and I know I blushed right up to the roots of my hair.
“I’m very glad you’re feeling better, Mira,” Domingo said, and then he made his way briskly, but not hurrying, out of the room. I lay there listening to his feet on the stairs, thinking of falling daisy petals.
Then, practical soul that I am, I got up and headed for the shower.
I told Mikey and Domingo about my vision of the night before over a very substantial breakfast.
“These car models,” Mikey said, looking at the sketch I’d drawn. “Late twenties, early thirties.”
“Colette was born in 1928,” I said. “That would be about right then, at least if my guess that she could enter Phineas House without resistance because it was, effectively, her house. The House has intelligence, in its own way, but I’m not sure it has enough to sort Colette from Colette.”
“Wouldn’t it sense two Colettes?” Domingo asked. He’d made no comment about that kiss—and well, neither had I—but insisted on doing most of the cooking, and had hovered over me until it was quite clear that I was feeling fine.
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe the signatures, well, sort of blend, like if you add ocean water to ocean water. It’s not possible to sort it.”
Both Domingo and I looked at Mikey, but our expert only shrugged.
“Time travel through liminal space has always been theoretically possible, but I’ve never tried it, and I’ve never known anyone who has successfully done much more than retrace a couple of seconds. The farther back you go, the more possibilities there are, complications that make it … the best word I can find for the sensation is dizzying. The times I tried I felt sick, disoriented, with a touch of vertigo thrown in.”
I nodded. “But you did say that Colette had learned to use routes most people never dared. I think that’s what she was trying to do here—and that she’d done it before, made it there and back successfully. What messed her up this time is that she was so angry she forgot to plot her course, and when she realized what had happened, it was too late.”
“But what happened in the House,” Domingo asked. “What did she see that upset her so much?”
“I wonder if she witnessed her father’s death?” I suggested, then I shook my head. “That can’t be right. This was the middle of the day. Didn’t that happen at night?”
“So the reports say,” Mikey agreed, “but those need to be taken with a grain of salt, since we know a cover-up was involved. I’m interested in what you overheard. What did she say again?”
“‘I suppose I’ll need to return the one before I can have another.’”I quoted from memory, though I’d written the words down, for future reference. “‘What a bother! I’ve made the trip twice now, and hoped never to risk a third.’”
Mikey frowned. “It sounds to me like she’d actually succeeded in bringing something forward from the past into her time. I wonder what would be worth the risk? She would have inherited everything the House contained.”
“We can theorize forever,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “There’s only one way to be sure—I need to use today’s kaleidoscope and see if I can learn more. You yourself mentioned that Colette is a ‘great person’ in my life, especially right now. I’m hoping that kaleidoscope is set to show not only great people, but great events—like the murder of Julius Caesar or something. I’ll ask to see not only Colette, but what happened to her that day in Phineas House.”
“Do you think it will work?” Domingo asked, as much of Mikey as of me.
Mikey only shrugged as if saying the kaleidoscopes were not his to assess, so I answered.
“I think my mistake—and it wasn’t really a mistake—last time was in asking to see what happened to Colette. The kaleidoscope did as requested. It showed me going into the past, then that she got angry, and whatever made her angry led to her making a mistake that put her off course so she got lost.”
“And since the fact that she got angry—not what she got angry about,” Domingo said, following my logic with flattering speed, “was what was the key to her getting lost, the kaleidoscope did not bother to work through Phineas House’s currents to show you the specific incident.”
“That’s what I guess,” I said, “but I won’t know until I try.”
Mikey spread jam on a slice of cold toast. I’d thought I had a sweet tooth, but Mikey was making me feel positively virtuous.
“How soon are you going to try scrying again, Mira?” he asked, looking down at the shining surface of the strawberry jam as if he could see omens in it. For all I knew, he could.
“Pretty much immediately,” I said. “I’m rested, fed, and if I do this now and learn something that makes me want to refine my scrying I’ll still have time to try.”
“Good planning, except for one thing,” Mikey said. “Last time what you asked the kaleidoscope to show you essentially had no end, so you remained enthralled until the kaleidoscope reached its limits—and we were lucky that wasn’t beyond your physical limits.”
Domingo leaned forward, his gaze intent. “Watching you was a little frightening, Mira. You hardly moved. You sat there like you’d been carved from wax, hour after hour. The only thing that changed was that you grew more and more pale, and circles formed under your eyes. There was no doubt the process was draining you.”
I acknowledged their concern with a brief nod.
“I can see your point, but what I want to scry for this time is definitely a matter of limited duration. Colette was not in that past Phineas House for more than an hour.”
“How can you be sure?” Mikey countered. “I suspect your sense of time was distorted.”
“It may have been,” I replied, “but the odd thing was that I felt as if I had my body with me. I mean, my feet hurt after I’d been standing for too long—even though here I’d been sitting. How about my using those signals my body gives to let me know if I’m pushing too hard?”
Domingo shrugged. “I don’t see how we have much choice, but, please, take care, Mira. These kaleidoscopes are wonderful tools, but you cannot forget that they take a toll on you.”
“I’ll be careful,” I promised, “but what happened in there is important. I feel it in my bones.”
The two men looked at each other, exchanging glances that said, “Well, we warned her.” About a half hour later, we once again adjourned to the front parlor.
I hadn’t bothered to tell Mikey and Domingo that I sincerely doubted the experiment would work at all, that we might be left waiting until later in the week, maybe all the way to next Saturday to do our follow-up research. My dictionary defined Sunday’s mirror as used to scry “great persons on earth.” I wished I knew more. Did that category include great persons living and dead? Did it include past events as well as present?
I’d decided to press ahead as if it did, remembering stories of legendary seers who impressed their clients by showing them views of famous historical personages, but I wasn’t confident that my kaleidoscope embraced the ability to do the same. Maybe that was why the two men’s cautions didn’t seem important. I didn’t believe today’s attempt would achieve anything.
Making myself comfortable in my chosen window alcove, I picked up Sunday’s kaleidoscope. The hand-beaten gold case was comfortable in my hand, the little dimples in the metal kissing my fingertips.
As I raised the kaleidoscope to my eye, I spoke my purpose aloud. “I want to see my mother. I want to see what happened when Colette went into Phineas House that day.”
Somehow I felt certain the kaleidoscope would know what I meant by “that day,” but I clarified, “The day I viewed yesterday through the kaleidoscope with mirrors of lead, the day Colette left here and never returned.”
The object chamber for Sunday’s kaleidoscope held a rattling assortment of multifaceted topazes in shades ranging from a yellow-gold so pale that the stones were almost clear all the way to dark amber. Interspersed among the topazes were infinitesimally small rubies. Scattered among the stones was a haze of gold dust.
The combination made for beautiful mandalas, flower-shapes whose golden petals were streaked with red. Occasionally, when I turned the kaleidoscope, red would dominate, creating tiny red wildflowers against fields of gold. I walked into this garden, moving here and there to enjoy each new delight as it materialized, gradually losing awareness of the me who sat in the window seat, a dimpled metal casing rolling slowly between my fingers.
I was in the garden behind Phineas House. A woman wearing old-fashioned clothing, her shining brown hair parted in the middle was there with me. She had the gravitas of a matron but the fresh, unlined skin of a girl. In her arms she cradled a very young infant wrapped in the lace-trimmed flounces of another day.
“Chantal,” a man’s voice called down from us, “I know you are weary of being shut indoors, but I think it is too cool yet for the baby. Come inside now.”
“
Oui
, Nikolai,” Chantal replied with tranquil patience. “See? I have wrapped her up very well, but I will come in as you say.”
“Very good,” the man’s voice said.
I heard what sounded like a window closing, and guessed that the speaker—my grandfather Nikolai—must have been upstairs, looking out into the garden. This then would be my grandmother Chantal, and the baby in her arms could be none other than Colette.

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