Читать книгу Quin and Morgan Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - John Moss - Страница 12

“Let me describe her,” the old woman said, blowing across the top of her cup. She looked from Morgan to Miranda and back again, then talked into the space between them. Her voice was warm, embracing the past, inviting them to share in her affection, while her eyes moistened with images visible only to her.

“She was an angel and a devil, Molly Bray. It would make your head spin. As a wee girl, she’d march along beside you like nobody’s business. She wouldn’t hold your hand, mind you, but she’d be close enough you could feel her little body against your leg. Do you know she had her own garden? She wouldn’t let me help. She grew a whole garden of radishes one year.”

“She lived here with you?” Miranda asked, sipping her tea, trying to be as subtle as possible about straining the loose bits through her teeth.

“Oh, yes, from an infant. She was such a good baby …”

“Where was her mother?”

“She didn’t have a mother. What’s your name, dear?” They had introduced themselves when they came in, but the old woman was busying herself with tea paraphernalia and hadn’t paid attention.

“I’m sorry. I’m Miranda Quin. This is David Morgan. We’re —”

“She didn’t have a mother and she didn’t have a father. In those days we looked after our own.”

“That wasn’t so long ago, Mrs. …?” Morgan asked. The woman had neglected to give them her name, the tea ritual taking precedence over niceties apparently deemed less important.

“Former times. I’m thinking of my parents’ day. When you don’t have a family of your own, you do that. I’m Miss Elizabeth Clarke. I’m an old maid. I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Morgan. Would either of you like a dash of hot water?”

“No, thank you,” said Miranda and Morgan simultaneously.

“I have my tea mailed to me directly from England. This one’s Lapsang Souchong. Do you like it?”

“It has a distinctive flavour,” said Miranda. Morgan, who wasn’t so diplomatic, said nothing.

“If you’d prefer, I have some Tippi Assam.”

“You buy it in England?” asked Morgan, succumbing to the notion he had to say something on the subject. “Are you English?”

“Yes,” said the old woman. “Seven or eight generations back. Depends on whether you follow my moth-er’s side or my father’s. I’ve never been there. No desire to go. It’s all Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in my mind, and that’s how I like it. And Winston Churchill and Twiggy.”

Morgan took a deep breath over his teacup. The odour of hot asphalt gave way to an aroma of damp winter evenings warmed by the embers of an open fire.

He looked around. There was only a space heater, smelling faintly of rancid oil. Maybe Miranda was wrong. This house, a cottage, really, must have been built after the advent of cast-iron stoves.

Elizabeth Clarke watched him as he surveyed the small room. She had lived here all her life and her mother before that, and her people before that. She knew what he was thinking.

“There was a fireplace in the back wall. It was filled in. Caused a dreadful draft. The iron pot-belly was better, but it leaked smoke. Then we replaced it with another made from steel. It’s still out back. After that we brought in a modern oil burner. I suppose most heat with electricity now.”

“I suppose they do,” said Morgan.

He was enchanted by how comfortable she was among the generations that had lived here and died. Strangely, it was a bit like he felt himself in the subterranean depths of the Griffin house. That was something he admired about Europe — how people lived less on the surface of history than in its midst, as if it were a place, not a line of descent. “How did you —” he began to ask.

“Because you’re from the city, Mr. Morgan. You expect a fireplace in an old house like this. Now the young lady, she knew better. She’ll be from a small town, I imagine.”

“Waldron,” said Miranda.

“The Griffins had a mill there, too,” Elizabeth Clarke said. “Not many log houses over your way. You mostly built with stones from the fields before hauling in brick when the Grand Trunk went through.”

That would have been in the 1880s, Morgan observed to himself.

“I’d be happy to let you try several,” she said. “You seem like a young man of good taste.”

Morgan was disconcerted for a moment, then realized she was talking about tea. “Thank you, no.”

“Some other time perhaps.”

Miranda was sure the old woman was flirting with her partner. Elizabeth Clarke must have been in her eighties. She had exquisite ankles and crossed them proudly in front of her for Morgan to admire. The old woman kept adjusting her posture, re-crossing her ankles a couple of times. Miranda and Morgan felt comfortable in the embrace of Elizabeth’s Clarke’s ramshackle home that from the outside had seemed virtually empty. She welcomed the invitation their patience affirmed and continued her narrative.

“In her teens Molly was a magical creature. Bright as a whip, determined. My gracious, she did homework like it was fun. She’d make surprises for me in home economics, cooking and sewing and crafts. She taught herself to knit one winter and made me a sweater better than I could have done, and she brought animals home. She always had a wounded chipmunk around or a frog half-chewed up, or crayfish in my good crystal bowl under her bed. Once she rescued a duck with no skin on its neck. A big snapping turtle got hold of it, and she waded right in there and rapped the turtle smartly with a stick. That duck’s neck was as bare as a skinned chicken, but she wrapped it in a rag full of Vaseline and kept it beside her bed. And, can you believe, it lived and went back with the other ducks, only they always made it swim behind. When they walked across the lawn, the ducks all in a line — they did that to take a shortcut from the pond to the marsh — that little duck would bring up the rear. Sometimes it would veer over to where we were sitting on the porch, maybe shucking some corn or peas from the garden, depending on the season, and it would stop right in front of Molly and give her a big quack. Then it would scramble on through the grass to catch up with the others. We never saw them after they flew off south for the winter. Molly never was a problem, you know, with puberty. She just grew up real easy. Not that she wasn’t a handful, at times.”

“What do you mean?” asked Miranda.

“Well, for instance …” The woman paused, savouring the past, trying to sort out the flavours. “She was feisty. Easy, because I admired her causes. But, oh, she could be determined.”

“How so? Tell us about her.”

“She would take control of a situation. When she was just little, in late November of grade one, yes, and she walked home from school. Well, that was four miles, and it was bitterly cold. When she didn’t get off the school bus over by the mill, I was worried. I phoned around, and the bus driver thought she hadn’t been to school that day. Her teacher said of course she had and I’d better notify the police. I called the police and was just going out to the car to search for her when she came walking down the lane — I used to drive then, but now I get my groceries delivered. I told her I was worried sick and the police were looking for her, and she was as calm as could be.

“‘The bus driver smokes,’ she said. ‘He’s not supposed to smoke.’ ‘No, dear,’ I said. ‘He isn’t.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he smokes in the bus and it’s cold out now, so he drives with his window closed. So I walked home.’ Just then the OPP cruiser pulled in past the mill and parked behind my car. The officer got out and asked if she was the missing girl. ‘I’m not missing,’ she announced. ‘I walked home from school because Mr. Poole smokes on the school bus, and he drinks, too.’ ‘How on earth do you know that?’ I demanded. ‘Well, he does,’ she said.

“I don’t even know if she knew what drinking meant. There was never anything here except cooking sherry. But the policeman talked to the driver and then to the bus operator and Poole was reprimanded and the next school year he was replaced. I was that proud of Molly I didn’t scold her for walking home, and I was even more proud when she went out the next day and climbed up into that bus without the slightest fear of recrimination for what she had done, though I imagine Roger Poole scowled as mean as he could. They were a nasty bunch, the Pooles. They’ve died out now, or all moved away.”

“Sounds like an amazing little girl,” said Morgan.

“I told you she was feisty. Do you know that in grade eight she took on a child abuser and beat him at his own game?”

“Good grief!” said Miranda. “How did she do that?”

“It was that same family, the Pooles. The old man used to beat up his son, Troy, who was in school with Molly. After Roger Poole stopped driving the school bus — that was his only job — he mostly just sat around the house, and I hear he would get drunk. If he wasn’t too drunk to move, he’d beat up the kids, especially young Troy. And his wife, too. She was a sorry case. One day Troy came to school all bruised where no one could see — the teachers are supposed to report when they suspect domestic violence — but the other kids knew by the way he was moving that he was hurt pretty bad.”

Miranda grimaced and glanced at Morgan, who was listening intently.

“Molly was twelve years old, and she marched right into the Poole house after school with Troy in tow — he was three inches shorter then. She confronted Roger Poole — it was a village legend for years — and called him a bully and dared him to hit her. Of course, he didn’t. He wasn’t drunk enough, or he was too drunk, or he had a streak of decency or whatever. Instead he backed off, and she screamed at him so that the closest neighbours all heard. Then she backed him against the wall and yelled that if he ever touched one of his kids again, or his wife for that matter, he would have to deal with her and she would tell the police and say he attacked her and he’d go to jail and he was a despicable bully.

“Well, he never touched those children again, and the next time he hit his wife, she called the police herself. They didn’t do anything, but Roger Poole stamped around the village all through the night, wailing about being violated, and in the morning he was gone and nobody ever saw him again, not in Detzler’s Landing.”

“My goodness,” said Miranda, “and you said she grew up easy.”

“She certainly understood power,” said Morgan.

“She did,” said the old woman.

“But not necessarily its consequences,” he added.

“No,” she agreed. “You know, Troy Poole was never her friend. After that, when they went to high school together, he wouldn’t speak to her, and he dropped out and moved away, too. By then he was a foot taller than her, but scared of her because she was tougher than his father.”

“Stronger,” said Miranda. “Did she learn that from you?”

“I think she came with her character already complete. I raised her from the start. She was magic, you know. A girl I never saw before in my life turned up at the door one day. Nineteen seventy-two. Held out a fresh new baby and said, ‘Her name’s Molly Bray.’ I took hold of the baby, then the girl walked smartly away and I never saw her again. The baby was a little beauty.

“I called old Dr. Howell, and we registered her right off. I don’t know what he put down for her parents. Maybe my name — a virgin of fifty. Ha! And his own. He was always interested in me! Might have seemed odd that we named her by her own name, but we did. Doc Howell would have known how to do it. He called in on Molly Bray regularly until two days before he died. I told him he looked rundown. She was too young to remember. Well, I brought her up and was glad of the company.”

“Miss Clarke, have you seen her recently?” asked Miranda.

“No, dear. When she was sixteen, she had to go away.”

“She had to?”

“I was sad. Oh, I was sad when she went.”

“Did you call the police?”

“No, dear. She said goodbye to me, and I’ll love you for always. She wanted to go, so that’s what she did, and I knew she would be all right.”

“Miss Clarke, we’re police officers,” Miranda said.

“Oh, no, dear. I don’t want to hear it. You finish your tea. Would you like a refill? I’ll get some more biscuits. No, you’d better go, dear. I’m tired. Thank you so much for visiting. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Morgan. I’ll just go into the other room. If you’ll see yourselves out …”

When they were on the porch, Morgan leaned into Miranda and said, “There was no point …” He let his voice trail off.

Miranda gazed up at him and smiled. For an instant she felt small and secure, then looked away to the mill, annoyed with herself. It had never occurred to her before that Morgan was taller.

They walked across the lawn and along the drive, stopping where it passed over the dam. R. Oxley had opened the sluice gates on the pond side of the road, and water was gurgling underneath them, rising to fill the flume. They could hear the low rumble of antique wood and iron machinery inside the mill gathering force to begin work.

At the car Miranda asked Morgan if he wanted to drive. He shrugged in the negative, and she got behind the wheel. Morgan appreciated the way she had offered — not as if she were submitting to social convention, but just that he might want to give a vintage sports car a try.

They pulled away from the village and within twenty minutes had entered more prosperous terrain. He observed her watching the road, seemingly oblivious to his gaze. She was enjoying the drive, as if Detzler’s Landing, like an inversion of Brigadoon, had slipped off into another reality when they left, a place where time and customs conformed to different imperatives than the ones shaping the world everyone else shared. Or maybe, he thought, everyone lived in different worlds that overlapped at the edges, creating the illusion that everyone was in the same place. The only thing to prove Detzler’s Landing still existed would be its mark on a map. He took a road map out of the glove compartment and checked. “There is no Detzler’s Landing,” he told Miranda.

“No,” she said.

“You’re probably right.”

“It’s not on the map.”

“Doo do, do doo, doo doo, do do,” she trilled, trying to replicate the sound of The Twilight Zone theme, which actually had been a defining moment in North American television long before either of them was old enough to pay much attention to paranormal phenomena. She didn’t know the theme for The X-Files.

“Seriously, how did you find it?”

“Morgan, I’m a good detective. I phoned CAA.” She couldn’t remember which one was Scully and which was Mulder in The X-Files, but she could see the actors who played the FBI agents clearly on a television screen in her mind. “What did you think of Miss Clarke? She was flirting with you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Morgan, she was.”

“I take that as a compliment — from both of you. It was curious, insisting that Molly wasn’t difficult, then telling stories that would make your hair curl.”

“And with pride.”

“Yeah. I’d say she loved her foundling daughter.”

“Granddaughter. To be age appropriate she designates herself a grandmother.”

“But I’m not really sure she understood her. Must have been like nurturing a wild animal until it springs free of affection. The loss leaves you grateful and grasping, resigned and triumphant.”

“That’s poetic.”

“She was a lovely woman.”

“Morgan, do you know what I like about you?”

“I’m poetic?”

“You wear baby powder–scented deodorant.”

“I do?”

“You smell nice.”

“You smell earthy,” he said.

“I do not.”

“You smell like winter. You always smell like winter.”

“That’s nice, Morgan. Thank you.”

They came to the 401, but instead of crossing over to the Toronto ramp, Miranda veered west toward Waterloo County. Not anticipating the turn, Morgan lurched to the side, recovered, and slouched into the comfortable leather depths of the bucket seat. He looked for an explanation, but she was completely focused on the road ahead.

What difference would it make if he didn’t go into headquarters? Alex Rufalo, their superintendent, knew Miranda was off the case. He also knew they were working together as usual. That meant they were relatively autonomous or, at the least, hard to pin down.

Neither said a word during the short ride to Waldron. Being on a monster highway that swayed across the landscape under the burden of eighteen-wheelers spewing fumes as they passed wasn’t enough to erase his pleasure in the pastoral experience. The low-slung car rolled solidly along, indifferent to the contours of scenery. Miranda drove with casual confidence, but not fast.

Morgan had never been this far west except in the air. Taking the Waldron exit, Miranda drove down past her mother’s house without slowing and didn’t indicate to her partner that that was where she had grown up. She drove directly over the hill and parked the green Jaguar at the end of the loading dock under the lee of the corrugated steel walls of the mill. High above, in faded orange, a rampant gryphon lorded over all he surveyed, even though the mill had long since passed into local ownership. This was exactly where she had last seen the same car, parked right here, twenty years earlier.

Miranda got out of the Jaguar, strode up onto the embankment, and plunged into the cloistered canopy over the millrace. Brooding cedars tinged with autumn russet and perforated with a filigree of light cast dappled patterns between them as Morgan raced to catch up with her. When he reached her, he took her arm and she immediately slowed to a walk, almost a stroll, as if they were lovers. They hadn’t spoken for almost an hour, but driving into the rolling hills of Waterloo County, Morgan had felt perfectly attuned to her needs, if not privy to her thoughts.

When they broke into the open space of the meadow, they saw the pond water divide in the gentle breeze: one branch flowed over the dam, sliding smoothly, carving down into the spillway, where it broke and re-gathered in the trout pool and cut randomly toward the bridge in the valley beyond; and the other branch flowed to the race, where it took on dimensions of shadow and darkness as it moved between parallels under the cedars on its way to the turbines of the mill.

They both stood astonished. Morgan had never seen such beauty. He had never imagined, in all his reading and limited travels, that there could be such a place. He knew other people were moved by mountains or wilderness, the Sistine Chapel or Stonehenge, Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon, the Acropolis, High Arctic archipelagos, or the gardens at Kew. But his mind raced and found no comparisons. For him this was the right combination of nature and the gentle intrusion of human design. For Miranda there was shock, a chilling bewilderment that nothing had changed.

Stepping into the light, she walked to an imagined depression in the grass, knelt, placed her hand on the ground, and ran it slowly over where she would have been spread out so long ago, so recently that it hurt. Morgan came up and stood beside her, resting his hand on her shoulder. He looked over at the dilapidated structure of the old mill, the roof still precariously balanced in sheet metal shards on its tumbledown tower.

Crossing the dam to the mill, Morgan shifted his weight carefully over the thick walk-board. When he got to the mill, he pushed open the door and stepped into a dank maze of shadows and light, crenellations of the sun shining between separated boards of the ancient walls. He pushed against myriad cobwebs, some wheeling in small riots of intricate strategic design, some invisible in the shadows, and choked when they clasped at his face.

Morgan climbed gingerly up the suspended ladder steps into the tower loft and stepped onto the precarious floor, bracing against rafters that swooped ominously over his head. He looked down through the splayed floor-boards into a watery shimmer two storeys below beneath gaps in the ground-level floor — still-water seepage, closed off long ago by the earthen embankment when the pond was diverted to the race. Morgan crouched where the wallboard opened and peered toward the dam and down at Miranda, who was lying spread-eagled on top of her coat on the grass, fully clothed but pathetically vulnerable. She was staring up into the sky, not at the tower but into the layers of cloud and open blue.

Morgan’s eyes adjusted to the chiaroscuro lattice of shadows and light that surrounded him. Tracing in his imagination where the man must have spent all those hours, he lowered his weight to the floor and found it difficult to breathe.

A hand-forged nail lying on top of an exposed joist caught his eye. He picked it up and toyed with it, imagining other hands holding it, other eyes examining the flanged head where it had been drawn and snipped from redhot iron two centuries earlier. Morgan had read about nails. He knew the different shapes of pioneer nails, each peculiar to one region or another, declaring its vintage as clearly as if it were labelled. He didn’t own antiques, but he loved reading about Canadiana, especially early Ontario furniture with its original paint. He watched the Antiques Road Show, both the British and American versions, on late-night reruns.

As he replaced the nail, exactly where he found it, he noticed deliberate marks etched into a wallboard. He brushed the dust away with the side of his hand, blew across what seemed to be letters.

The inscription was brief and enigmatic, like the flourish of a signature that concealed yet expressed identity. The first letter was a capital M, like a skull with the top carved away. The next was a B, crudely done with the eyes of the letter gouged out. Then there were a linked pair of letters, what seemed like a gaping mouth with a slash to one side, followed by the crooked jaw of a G. Leaning to the side, he spied in the shadow of an upright beam other marks scratched into the wood. When his eyes adjusted, the marks became very distinct: M period. Q period.

Griffin knew her name!

Morgan could taste bile in his throat. How many hours and years did he hide here, watching? Morgan spat into the dust.

“Mary Bingham Carter-Griffin,” Miranda explained when he described what he had found after rejoining her. “His mother. He named the semiology institute after her.”

“He knew your name!”

“So you said. Names aren’t that big a mystery in a village. It would be easy to find out from the mill hands. Everyone knows who everyone is — you don’t know them, necessarily, but you know who they are.”

“That’s why I like cities. You know who you know. And who you don’t know, you don’t know. It’s simple. That wanking creep knew it was you he was watching.”

“Why does that make it worse? Morgan, there are people in the city, you see them for years, they have your coffee and muffin ready when you get off the subway because you’re a regular and you tip them at Christmas. They sell you a paper, a haircut, shoes. They nod to you in the hall, you pat their dog. They work in your office at unknown labours. On the street corner you give them a dollar once a week and miss them when they’re gone, maybe in rehab or dead, you don’t know. You know these people. You don’t know anything about them. We all live in villages. The difference is that in a village like this you know everyone’s name. You can be just as lonely.”

Miranda wasn’t sure why she had added the bit about loneliness. She wasn’t certain why being known made her more vulnerable, but it did, at least now, looking back.

“He wasn’t just looking,” said Morgan, turning her perspective around. “He was watching. There’s a difference. He was watching your life.”

“Or I was putting it out on display.”

“For goodness’ sake, Miranda. You said yourself he may have been there for years.”

“We used to gather crayfish in jam jars. I wonder if he saw us. Sometimes we didn’t come by the mill. You could cut across Mr. Naismith’s pasture from the village if the bull wasn’t out. He couldn’t always know we were here. Celia and me, we’d come out when we were only nine or ten, even younger, and we’d catch crayfish in the shallows.”

“What did you do with them?”

“We talked about taking them home to eat, but we let them go. I can work out how old we were by the sequence of gatherings. When we were really small, it was bits of driftwood and pebbles. Then we graduated to crayfish for a couple of summers. Then it was gathering flowers. We’d pick great bunches, and naturally they’d die. We’d pluck water hyacinths and lay them out in the mud like drowned things, and lilies with long, snaky stems. Then we got old enough and we’d come and just admire the flowers, wade out and smell them, and swim by the dam and lie in the sun. We wore bathing suits then. We were modest until we hit puberty. Celia was fully mature at twelve. I think we sunbathed naked after that, except we kept our panties on. I’m not sure why. It seems reckless now to strip down like that, even here, but we kept our underwear on, for periods I suppose, not propriety, and we read romances aloud, graduating year by year from the most romantic drivel with pastel covers to almost Jane Austen. By the time I was reading Jane Austen, Celia was married or close enough to it. Donny was all the romance she could handle, and I preferred Austen in solitude.”

She took a deep breath and glanced up at Morgan, who seemed to be listening, seemed to be waiting. Miranda felt under pressure, as if something were expected of her and she wasn’t sure what it was. “Perhaps he was our necessary witness,” she went on. “Scrunched up in his tower. Dreaming of his dead mother. We had him trapped there, Morgan. We kept him locked away day after day. Rapunzel, a bald-headed wanker. In all our innocence we had the power.”

“Not if you didn’t know he was there until later.”

“But maybe we did. I can’t remember. Sometimes there were pigeons, sometimes maybe there weren’t any pigeons.”

“Pigeons?”

“You know how kids play, as if there’s an unseen audience applauding, or being horrified. Kids play to ghosts, before they grow up and lose them.”

“They just lose them?”

“You were a kid, too, you know. We lose our familiars when we get big enough to know they can’t possibly exist. That’s what makes them go away. We stop unbelief.”

While she talked she wondered how she had avoided immediately connecting the green sports car in Rosedale with the car parked by the mill. No one in Waldron drove a Jaguar. She would have known. Would she have known it was him in the tower?

“No one would want to stay innocent forever,” she said. “But after the Fall, amnesia settles in. We forget what Eden was like.”

“No,” said Morgan. “We forget the Fall, not the Garden.” He paused. “Pre-lapsarian nostalgia,” he said, just to see if the words worked, out loud. Then he added, “When we start talking like televangelists, at least one of us is being evasive …”

“Maybe that’s what I want.”

“We came here to deal with things, Miranda. You brought me here.”

“It’s still beautiful, isn’t it? An interlude from the world.”

“A strange sanctuary.”

“Strange sanctuary,” she repeated, listening to the sounds echo deep in her mind.

“He was probably up there wanking all day.”

“Is that anatomically possible?”

“Only if he was really bad at it.”

“I imagine it was creepier than that,” said Miranda. “I mean, you wouldn’t come back day after day through the long hot summer to ejaculate in the shadows.”

“I don’t know.”

“Not for sex. It’s about needing to watch to prove you exist. Like taking photographs of Niagara Falls to confirm you’re there. Making connections.”

“The connection, of course, is illusion. Even for non-voyeurs. An orgasm is the most solitary act in all of creation.”

“Speak for yourself, Morgan. He must have loathed us, you know, in direct proportion to how much he despised himself. We’re lucky the bodily fluids being spilled weren’t blood. Not ‘we.’ The summer I was eighteen, Celia was getting legitimately laid. I was on my own.”

The car, she wondered, had Celia and she gossiped about the Jaguar? It was always there. It had seemed as if it had always been there. If they had known who had owned it, they had known he was older, an outsider, and rich. From another world. They were trespassing technically. It was his property. Perhaps they wouldn’t have given it much thought.

“We cooked some of them once — the crayfish. Celia said her friend Russell Livingstone used to roast them on a stick when they didn’t catch any trout, and the shiners weren’t worth bothering with. Russell was like Celia’s brother, but he moved away. It was like he died.”

“Did you eat them?”

“No. I don’t think so. We let them go. But don’t you see? We didn’t release them out of kindness. We were cruel. We just didn’t know what else to do with them.”

“You weren’t cruel. You were just kids.”

“Innocent?”

“Innocent. In Toronto we used to hunt along the ravines with slingshots and BB guns.”

“Did you ever kill anything?”

“Not even close. I had a friend who cut the tail off a road-kill raccoon and we took it to school as a trophy, but everyone knew it was road kill and that we’d get rabies or leprosy. The teacher made us throw it out in the big garbage bin and then wash our hands in boiling water and go home and change.”

“In boiling water?”

“Near enough. The teacher was really scared of dead things.”

“I can see Molly Bray as a girl catching crayfish,” said Miranda, changing the subject. “She’s wading in the shallows. You can see her. Scrunch up your eyes and stare into the sun.”

Morgan thought perhaps he could, by shielding his eyes from the light.

They sat close together beside the dam, both with their knees drawn up, gazing out over the pond, feeling the soft autumn breeze on their faces.

Morgan envisioned a grown-up Eleanor Drummond, realizing she had never been a child. She was dressed in city clothes, her tailored skirt hiked up and tucked into a black leather belt, her Jimmy Choo boots set neatly on shore. She was wading with slow, deliberate movements through water up to her calves, with a small net in her hand, staring intently through the fractured glare, able to see down among the rocks where her own reflection rippled the sun.

At first it seemed she was just across from them, with the sun at her back, then she was in the shallows by the house where the old woman lived. Every few minutes she would reach down and fastidiously turn over a rock, careful when she straightened not to let water drizzle along her arm into the sleeve of her blouse. She had a crystal bowl in one hand. He couldn’t see her pluck crayfish from the bottom. The net was gone, maybe there had been no net, but the crystal bowl was slowly filling with crayfish.

She turned and looked at him, directly away from the sun, so that her face was haloed in light, and yet it wasn’t in shadow but softly radiant and he could see her features clearly. Her expression was serene. She bore the look of composure he had seen on the lovely dead face of the figure in the morgue, but she caught his eye and smiled. She gazed into her bowl with satisfaction, then back to the water, peering intently into the shallow depths for her quarry.

The old woman sat on the porch of the farmhouse off to the side, rocking in a painted chair near the railingless edge, watching Eleanor Drummond gradually fill up her bowl with small scrambling creatures.

Miranda saw Molly Bray splashing in the shallows across from them, spraying sunlight into the air. There were no sounds. It was a silent vision, but vivid in every detail. Molly was thirteen, old enough to have abandoned crayfish hunts, still wanting to play, refusing to submit to the maturity her body was taunting her with this summer for the first time, like a promise and threat rolled into one unnerving sensation that wouldn’t recede except when she played fiercely, as she was now, at childish games.

She was between her grandmother’s house and the mill. She was swinging an old metal grain bucket, scooping up water and swinging it around so that the stream-lets of water leaking out the bottom bent through the air in fine splattering rainbows. She would suddenly stop and look down, drive her hand through the surface, and come up with a crayfish caught between pincers of her thumb and forefinger. Then she would wave it around to her grandmother back on the porch, toward the old wooden mill like a talisman, warding off evil so trivial that it was funny.

Miranda felt what the girl felt. She was her emanation, not her likeness or double, but connected as if they were joined in another dimension, two minds not yet born into the world that would drive them apart. Miranda looked through Molly’s eyes and thought she could see eyes staring back between the boards by the flume. The mill was rumbling against the silence. The slow, laborious groaning and keening of wooden shafts turning and wooden gears grinding on iron and wood filled her head as she gamboled forward through the shallow water, defiant. Let him watch. Her clothes were soaking, her T-shirt and shorts clinging to her supple young body as she stepped up onto the roadway above the dam, squarely in front of the peephole, shaking like a puppy, spraying the air with fine rainbows of mist, turning toward the old house and strutting haughtily home.

“My God, Morgan! He used to watch her!”

They withdrew from their separate reveries, which had converged more than they knew on images of water and innocence: the defiant innocence of a wilful young girl and the illusory innocence of a worldly woman on a break from too much reality.

“What is it we were after, going to Detzler’s Landing?” she asked, sliding away so she could address Morgan face to face. “Why did we go there?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “I wanted to get a feeling for who Eleanor Drummond was. You wanted to find Molly Bray. We went to detect. That’s what we do. And now we’re here. In Waterloo County.”

“Detzler’s Landing isn’t that far away.”

“Maybe not from Waldron, but it’s a very long way from Toronto. There’s a huge leap from Molly Bray to Eleanor Drummond.”

“But, Morgan, in Toronto she was both.”

“From the girl to the woman, the foundling who grew up in the sticks to the sleek-city woman who tortured them both unto death, there’s an abyss …”

“Maybe so. But I’m the bridge! I am the bridge.”

“You?”

“I know that girl, Morgan. She wasn’t like me, but I know her, and I knew Eleanor Drummond. In spite of myself, we connected.”

Morgan stared into the depths of reflected water shining in her eyes and then dropped his gaze so she could think out loud

“Look,” she said, “I can imagine Molly, from what Miss Clarke described, flaunting her adolescence if she knew he was watching. She did. She would do that.”

“How so?” He hadn’t meant to speak up.

“It’s a matter of power. She’s being watched, she watches. He knows she’s onto him, but he can’t stop. He’s obsessive-compulsive, excited by knowing she knows.”

She proceeded, forgetting that Griffin peeping through from the mill hadn’t been revealed to Morgan, who at the time had been imagining the woman from the city, not the girl. He struggled for a moment and caught up, glancing at the mill tower and back at Miranda, whose features were bathed in the soft light of the late afternoon.

“When they occasionally pass on the road, when she walks by the mill to the store and he’s out tinkering, maybe building that absurd picket fence, they’re cordial. It’s part of the game. He’s a balding man in his early fifties. She’s a country girl, barely into puberty, a socially nondescript pretty young thing. But from the shadows he sees her as purity incarnate, his own mother restored to primal innocence.”

“There’s a lot about innocence I don’t understand.”

“That’s probably true, Morgan.”

“Where do you fit in?”

“A decade before … and I was older. I mean, she wasn’t naive, but she wasn’t Lolita. That’s male fantasy, that a girl that age understands what she’s doing. It makes it exciting. But she doesn’t. She feels it, her hormones are burning her up inside, but she doesn’t understand. It’s imagination and hormones, powerlessness and power …”

“And neither did you. You didn’t understand. You and your friend.”

“By that summer we were seventeen, Celia was sleeping with Donny, we weren’t kids. Not sleeping. Doing it in Donny’s car. There were lots of better places, but sex and back seats of cars were tradition.”

“Not where I came from. We didn’t have cars.”

“No premarital sex?”

“Working parents and living-room floors.”

“So he was repeating history. There was a pattern.”

“It takes more than two.”

“But how likely is it that we were the only ones? It could have been something he did over and over. Sometimes it ended with sex, other times rape. It’s a matter of perspective — no, judgment. There’s a fine line between. Anyone watched by a predatory voyeur is a victim but doesn’t know she’s a victim until she submits to his gaze.”

“Miranda, you were —”

“No, Morgan, I wasn’t.” She paused. “How did he poop? That’s a long time. Sometimes I stayed most of the day. What did he do?”

“It wouldn’t be hard to go five, six hours, but he’d have to pee. He must have peed in a bottle.”

“Can you do that — pee in a bottle?”

“Yeah, I can,” he said.

“I can’t. I tried once, but I wasn’t very good. In a tent, in a jar in a tent. I peed my initials in the snow in front of Hart House one night. You could read it, too, but it dribbled down my leg and I got really cold and had to go home.”

“You were drunk.”

“I was not drunk. I was making a statement.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. What is it about when you pee in the snow in the middle of a university campus?”

“He probably had a jar,” said Morgan. “Maybe he kept them and his wine cellar is filled with jars of old urine.”

“I wrote an entire name in the snow once.” She didn’t want to return to questions of moral responsibility. “It wasn’t my own pee, of course …”

“Your handwriting’s legendary, Miranda.”

“Is it? He watched me. I let him, and then we were lovers.”

“You weren’t lovers.”

“I was eighteen.”

“A virgin?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Well?”

“What? I forgot losing my virginity, Morgan. If time heals, why didn’t I forget enough to remember? All these years I never thought about it. Isn’t that funny?”

“Time doesn’t heal. It creates scar tissue. I remember.”

“You weren’t there!”

“Losing my own —”

“I don’t want to hear about it. God, Morgan!”

“Sorry. I’m not too smart sometimes, but I have good instincts, and I’m sensitive.”

“You’re relentlessly intelligent, Morgan, with the sensitivity of a watermelon.”

“And?”

“The instincts of an aardvark.”

“Now that’s funny. So what do you think happened? Why did Molly suddenly leave town?”

Miranda seemed from her benign expression as she faced the breeze drifting over the millpond to be almost passive, sorting things out, following things through. It was difficult, Morgan thought, to connect the dots when they were swarming like gnats or mosquitoes. You didn’t want to rush the design; it was all in the perception.

“Did you notice that Detzler’s mill closed in 1988?” she suddenly asked. “That was the summer she was sixteen. Griffin left. Oxley bought the abandoned mill nine or ten years later. Yes, well. Then. No. Yes! Yes, they did. They did it! That last summer, that’s what happened!

“At sixteen I wasn’t a foundling, but I was sixteen. You want desperately to know the limits of identity from the outside in … from the immeasurable genetic sea, to know the current that flows through your veins. Know what I mean? So you endlessly analyze your parents, you find them wanting. Maybe they were exchanged at your birth. But she had no parents at all, not even an origin myth, just a girl at the door with a baby, and a self-professed spinster and her old friend who pooled their affection to make a place for her in the world, but it wasn’t a place of her own.

“So she turns to Griffin. She’d been pushing and pushing. He was like a great ugly mirror, but she could see herself in the glass. She was exploring her awakening sexuality, maybe skinny-dipping or sunning on the grass between the mill and the house. She loved her old granny, but she needed to know who she was, from the inside out as well as the outside in.

“After summers of playing him, not knowing whether he was walleye or pike, fresh fish or foul, she needed to connect. She walked in on him literally. He was her prince, and he raped her, Morgan. There’s a precedent, there’s a pattern. He raped her inside the mill, in the shadows, on a cot on the planks over the watercourse, inside the mill. I know he raped her. And then he closed down the mill and left.”

“And next?” he asked.

“She was pregnant.”

“Pregnant!”

“Pregnant with Elizabeth Jill.”

“Named after Elizabeth Clarke.”

“Molly Bray went to the city.”

“What happened?”

“She tracked him down to his Rosedale mansion. It would have seemed like a mansion to her.”

“And?”

“Griffin sent her packing. Maybe he gave her some money. My guess is she spent the next few months on the street learning Toronto.”

“How do you figure?”

“There had to be a period of metamorphosis. Where else could she go? I know about metamorphosis, Morgan. I can imagine what she must have endured. You don’t just shuck off one identity and unfold your wings to dry in the air. Transformation is traumatic. There had to be time. She didn’t just pass from being a girl to being a woman during the course of her pregnancy. She remade herself …”

“Became her own creation.”

“She worked on it.”

“No one was looking for her.”

“Even if they had been, she was invisible.”

“Seven thousand, maybe ten thousand kids on the streets last winter, just in TO.”

Morgan took the statistics as a personal affront. When he was a kid in Cabbagetown, he had never seen street people. There was one old guy called Bert Shaver who lived in a cardboard shack in a ravine and did odd jobs for the poor in return for a meal. He never talked except to say thank you. The poor looked after their own, and the rich after theirs. And the government looked after the addicts and the damaged and the defectives in institutions.

“The RCMP figures there are fifty thousand homeless kids in the country,” he said, his words taking flight. “There are some wee little kids caught up in porn rings and prostitution, kept out of sight by the worst of the creeps, pervs who get them on booze and drugs, eight-year-old drunks, ten-year-old hookers, kids who can talk their way around lawyers and cops and social workers, and have energy left to roll a john, cut up a derelict, do themselves down with the drugs of their choice.”

Sometimes Miranda thought Morgan should have been a professor or a politician, but she realized he was too restless for either. He might have been a preacher, except for the part about God.

“So,” she said, “Molly was on the street long enough to know she didn’t belong there. She went back to Robert Griffin’s place, determined to hold him responsible. She was no butterfly, not the iron butterfly she would become, but she was on her way. That’s what I would have done if I were her, which I wasn’t … I’m not.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“You saw her, Morgan. That was a woman in control of her life.”

“And death.”

“So it seems.”

“Did she blackmail him? Was it extortion?”

“It’s not extortion when he’s the father. It’s just negotiation.”

“You think she could wield that much power? She was sixteen.”

“Sixteen can be tough.”

“I don’t think a few months on the streets, no matter how bad, empowers anyone that much,” said Morgan.

“Something did. Maybe something innate. He set her up. There might have been a transition before Wychwood Park, an apartment or condo, and he hired Victoria, or she did, and she became Eleanor Drummond. Without abandoning Molly Bray she brought up Elizabeth Jill to be a very together young woman.” She corrected herself. “Girl, she’s still a girl.”

“We can’t even be certain Robert Griffin was the father.”

“You can bank on it, Morgan.”