"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 ..."

"Or the broken rainbow of color?" I added. "I think I see, but we were talking of kaleidoscopes."

"Yes," Mikey agreed. "We were. You know how kaleidoscopes work-that they have an interior mirrored chamber."

I nodded.

"Well, Colette's obsession with mirrors extended to kaleidoscopes and teleidoscopes as well. That was common knowledge. Many of us knew that she was amassing a collection of them, and that among that collection were pieces that were ..."

"Enchanted?"

"Why not? It's as good a word as any. In any case, created for a specific purpose. That's why I placed my message to you as I did. It was set to intercept you if you did any mirror scrying, through the kaleidoscope or not."

"How?"

He waved his pudgy hands. "It's very technical, and, frankly, you don't have the vocabulary to understand what I did. Will you accept that I know how to place things at liminal crossroads? I located the road you would need to travel to begin scrying, and set my marker there."

"I'll take your word for it," I said. "So if I had tried gazing in a pool of water or an oiled shield or whatever, your note would have reached me?"

"Only if you did it with a conscious knowledge of what you were attempting," Mikey said. "Idle studying of your face in the mirror would not have done it. Scrying with some sincere belief that such could be done would-and did."

"Tell me," I said, "what would you have done if I had tracked you down in some more usual fashion? I had already decided to do so when I, uh, intercepted your message. I had your name, and even a few addresses and phone numbers. It might have taken me a while, but I figure I could have tracked down you or one of the others."

"Only me," he said sadly. "I am the sole survivor of your three trustees. We are not an extraordinarily long-lived family, though seventies, and even eighties are not unusual."

"But what would you have done if I'd phoned you not on the special scrying line?"

"I would have been happy to hear from you, made arrangements to come see you, much as I did, and then tried to get a sense for how much you knew, and how much you could handle knowing. I might even have found a way to see that you came across certain books or articles. Or, if you were obviously uninterested or unable to comprehend such odd concepts, I would have done my best to make sure you were comfortable, and then reported to what, for lack of a better term, I'll call the 'Family Council' that Phineas House might be on the market."

I had a sneaking suspicion how Mr. Gilhoff, the bookseller, might have acquired some of those books that were so fortuitously useful in guiding Aunt May in her studies, but I didn't ask. Colette wasn't the only rebel in Aldo Pinca's line. I thought that, for all his pudgy body and cheerful demeanor, Mikey Hart might be one, too. There was no need to put him on the spot about what was done and gone. He'd probably simply reply that it had been another of his ways of looking out for my interests.

"We've gone off on another tangent," I observed. "I suppose that's another form of liminal space, isn't it?"

"You could see it that way. I prefer to think of it as a sign of active curiosity and a healthy mind. Now, kaleidoscopes. Phineas House did not exactly encourage prying after Colette's disappearance. It didn't do anything like drop pictures on us or make the carpets rumple and trip us, but it had a distinct way of making us uncomfortable.

"Moreover, making an inventory of the property wasn't our job. Therefore, although we did look for the kaleidoscope collection, when we didn't find it, we didn't look too hard. I take it you did find it?"

"Hidden in the drawers of my mother's vanity," I said.

"Appropriate," Mikey said. "Kaleidoscopes and teleidoscopes, both."

"That's right."

"And were there any particularly unusual ones?"

I rose and pushed back the kitchen chair, outside the sound of a Spanish-language talk show drifted in from where the painters worked.

"Why don't you come with me?" I said. "It will be easier if I show you."

24.

They stript Joseph out of his coat, his coat of many colours.

-Genesis 37:23

INSIDE THE LINES.

"This is an amazing collection," Mikey said, looking up from his inspection of the kaleidoscopes.

We had lifted the trays from their drawers in the vanity and carried them into my mother's front parlor. While Mikey systematically inspected each kaleidoscope and teleidoscope, I idly lifted one or another out at random, enjoying the shifting patterns, determinedly not trying to see anything but the pretty colors.

"As I'm sure you realize," Mikey said, "these seven are the most remarkable of the lot."

I liked that he didn't try to lecture me, and answered easily. "I did notice the symbols on the casing, and lucked into some information in one of Aunt May's books that helped me realize what they are. They're an adaptation of the cabalistic seven mirrors of divination, aren't they?"

"That's my guess, too," Mikey said. "I haven't studied the cabala in any detail, but I have an interest in scrying. In my opinion, this is a particularly lovely system: a different mirror for each day of the week, each made of specific materials, and meant to provide information on a specific type of question."

"But are they really ensorcelled?"

Mikey shrugged. "Mira, that's an almost impossible question to answer. Magic-to use a word I'd rather not-is not as simple as technology. Anyone can turn on a radio or flip a light switch. Magic takes training. A violin, for example, is an elaborate construct, but where one person can use it to create lovely music, another will make only scrapes and screeches."

I lifted one of the kaleidoscopes and rolled the barrel between my hands, listening to the rainfall hiss as the items in the object case shifted against each other.

"So you're saying that items created for magic are more like violins than radios. The virtue in them is as much in the user as in the item."

"Precisely," Mikey said. "As with violins, there are varying degrees of quality. The majority of these kaleidoscopes are the Stradivariuses of their kind, but just as an amateur handed a perfect violin would not become a perfect violinist, so these cannot create visions for someone who lacks both talent and training."