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The next morning Miranda returned to the house in Wychwood Park, the most coveted residential enclave in Toronto and a fitting place from which Molly Bray could negotiate her life with Eleanor Drummond. Past tense, she reminded herself. What was it about Wychwood Park that made Miranda feel good about her own limited resources, about the complexities of a fractured identity? It wasn’t about money but taste. Perhaps it was the absence of fences, how one neatly appointed property flowed into the next and into the common grounds shaped by the contours of the ravine. Maybe it was the huge trees standing at random like the towering remains of a natural-growth forest. Or perhaps it was the houses themselves, all of them reflecting the Edwardian precepts of their common era, but each very different, each having reached the present in its own way. It wasn’t about privilege but class.

Wychwood Park nestled in the lee of Casa Loma, the Victorian monstrosity devoted like the Taj Mahal to a beloved wife, in this case one still alive while her memorial was being erected. The woman’s husband, as a bankrupt widower, eventually shared quarters in the carriage house with his valet. Miranda loved that such follies existed, but like most Torontonians she had never been inside, though it was kept open by public subscription.

The previous evening, when she arrived to see Jill after dropping off Morgan, the girl was already asleep. It was barely past nine. Miranda had talked with Victoria in the kitchen.

“How’s she doing?” Miranda asked.

“She’s fine. I think she just wants to sleep more than anything. Sometimes you have to, I suppose.”

Miranda liked Victoria. The woman seemed comfortable in the rambling house, moving through its spaces as if it were her own. At the same time she broadcast a subtle disinterest in her artful surroundings. Victoria seemed self-sufficient, and that appealed to Miranda, who suspected self-sufficiency and self-reliance were traits undermined in herself by her admiration for them in others.

Victoria was maternal, but home was a quality she projected more than a place she inhabited. She gave Miranda confidence that Jill was well cared for and loved.

“Have you always been with Molly and Jill?”asked Miranda.

“I was here from day one. I took them in for Mr. Robert Griffin. I used to clean for him. After the baby was born, we searched out this place. Molly thought it was just right, so Mr. Griffin bought it and we moved in. We’ve been here ever since, for fourteen years. Just over there is where Marshall McLuhan used to live.”

A brief look of defiance crossed her face, which immediately softened to forbearance. “I don’t know if we can afford to stay. Molly paid the bills. But don’t you worry. I’ll look after the girl. Molly counted on me.”

“You’ll be all right, Victoria. This is your home.”

“I come from Barbados,” she said. “I speak Barbadian with my friends. Lord, you wouldn’t understand us. No, you wouldn’t. We speak Canadian dialect here.”

“Do you know who Eleanor Drummond is?”

“Never heard of her before yesterday, the night when you brought the girl home. Jill asked me about that — did I know Eleanor Drummond? I don’t think there are any relatives or otherwise out there, not at all. There’s not anyone but me and the girl. Miss Molly never got a Christmas card in her life.”

“Tell me about Molly Bray.”

“Oh, dear, it’s hard to believe she’s gone.” Victoria lifted her hands to shoulder height and gestured into the depths of the house. “She’s everywhere here. She was so young, too young, you know. There’s no good age for dying, but there are some worse than others. She was too young to be dying on us.” She looked into Miranda’s eyes. “She never took something for nothing, nothing that wasn’t rightfully hers.”

Victoria smiled almost wistfully. “But, boy, oh, boy, if it was hers, she was fierce.” She wasn’t crying. Her eyes glistened with pride. “Boys,” she declared as if there was an argument. “She could be as cool as a breeze from heaven, and hot as the fires of hell.” She nodded in affirmation to herself, evidently pleased with her summary description, enjoying the familiarity of her own words. She had clearly said them before. “The hellfire was all inside,” she clarified. “She was serene, a lady, out where it counted.”

“And you never even heard the name Eleanor Drummond before?”

“No, ma’am, I never. Like I said.”

“Was Mr. Griffin a part of your life?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. Molly hated old Robert Griffin. I never thought there was enough of him to make any difference.”

“How do you mean?”

“He wasn’t much of a human being, one way or another.”

“He certainly had an impact on her,” said Miranda. Victoria suddenly became wary.

“All this,” said Miranda, indicating their surroundings.

“Don’t you believe it. This was Molly Bray’s doing. From the time she was sixteen she was who she was. This is what she set out to make for herself.”

“Tell me about Jill.”

“She’s sleeping now, or as good as asleep.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’s family, Miss Quin. Family is family.”

“And was Molly Bray family?”

“Well, she was and she wasn’t. She was Jill’s momma, and Jill is my very own child, like the child of my womb. We loved her no matter what, so I guess we were all family.”

Miranda picked up on the phrase “no matter what.”

“Was she difficult sometimes?”

“Jill or Molly? Molly wasn’t difficult, Detective. Distracted maybe. Sometimes Molly Bray was, like, here and not here.”

“Distracted?”

“Like she was following another agenda, you might say. You know, in her head. She was a loving mother. She was my very good friend. Nobody should die so young. Nobody should die if they can help it.”

“I’ll call in to see Jill in the morning,” said Miranda, getting up and moving through the central hallway toward the panelled vestibule by the front door.

“It’s Saturday tomorrow. She’ll be here. She went to school today. I wanted her to stay home, but she’s headstrong like her mother. She was going, and that was that.”

Miranda noticed the rug in the vestibule. It was like one of Morgan’s, a Gabbeh, a thick weave from Anatolia done with old-style vegetal dyes. She could hear his voice, expounding. “It’s a Gabbeh,” she said. “The rug’s very beautiful. It fits in perfectly.”

“Maybe so. I don’t know about Gabbeh. It’s the last thing she did, buying that, the last thing to make this house like it is.”

Before leaving, Miranda had reached out and given the woman’s hand a reassuring squeeze.

“Now don’t you fret, Detective, and I won’t worry too much myself, just enough. Jill and I, we’ll manage fine.”

Now, the next morning, at the large front door with a full night’s sleep behind her, Miranda felt good about coming back to see the girl. For now Miranda was content with getting to know this strange woman-child who, like herself, was a link between Molly Bray and Eleanor Drummond, and who was virtually, as events were unfolding, Miranda’s ward.

Jill came to the door and opened it wide. She welcomed Miranda with a flourish, then turned and walked purposefully toward the kitchen. Miranda followed, thinking the outfit Jill was wearing, prescribed to make young girls feel sexy, made her look as if she were playing dress-up — pretending to be women without quite developing the knack.

“Hello, Victoria,” Miranda said when they reached the kitchen. “Good morning.”

“Good morning, Lady Detective. We’re just having breakfast. Pancakes or French toast?”

“Scrambled eggs,” said Jill. “Let’s have scrambled eggs and brown toast and coffee.”

“You don’t drink coffee,” said Victoria matter-offactly. “You can pour Miss Quin a cup. We’re having French toast.”

After breakfast, Miranda and Jill sat out on the front steps. A few people strolled by, walking dogs, exchanging pleasantries as they passed one another without stopping.

“How are you doing?” Miranda asked.

“I don’t like my mom being dead.”

Miranda waited.

“She left me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’ve got to look after Victoria. Do you know that she’s got three kids in Barbados? They live with her mother, and she sends them money, but they’d rather live here. She’s going to go back some day and be a family again.” The girl looked resigned. There was nothing to count on for certain, not in the end.

“Jill, we’ll have to talk about your mother’s funeral.”

“I told you, I don’t want a funeral. There’s no one but us.”

“We could have her cremated and just have the ashes placed in a vault.”

“Do they make little vaults just for ashes?”

“I don’t know. I’ll make the arrangements. Do you want to speak to a minister, or have someone say a few words?”

“Who? About what? That’s not my mother at the morgue.”

“Because she’s Eleanor Drummond?”

“It’s Eleanor Drummond’s remains, and it’s my mother’s remains.” She looked up into Miranda’s eyes ingenuously. “Will they need two caskets?”

Miranda blanched.

“My mom’s gone. I want to forget that she’s dead. No funeral, no words over ashes, no fuss. Please, okay?”

“Forgetting’s not easy, Jill. And maybe not right.”

“I don’t want to think about dead!” She took a deep breath. “Not a dead body, a corpse, a cadaver, ashes formerly known as …” Miranda put her arm lightly over the girl’s shoulders, but Jill sat upright, untouched. “I just want her to be inside my head. You know what I mean?”

Miranda understood. She remembered when her father died, trying in bed to summon up good memories only, or to avoid him entirely in the dark. She couldn’t bear images of absolute stillness, silence, and decomposition.

Thinking about murder victims, Miranda tried to maintain the fine line between clinical disinterest and common humanity, a line occasionally erased by a personal detail, an imaginative leap, and then there was loneliness in the dead of night and fear that was both visceral swarming through her mind.

“That pin you were wearing …” she said to Jill.

“At the morgue?”

“You said your mother gave it to you.”

“Why are you asking?”

“It was pretty.”

“Yes. She didn’t like fish, but she liked the design.”

“How did you know what kind it was?”

“A Shiro Utsuri? She told me.”

“Jill, did you know Robert Griffin?”

“No.”

“Does the name seem familiar?”

“I’ve heard it. Like, that’s where they found my mom. At his place.”

“Did you ever go there?”

“I didn’t know him. He was an associate of my mother’s.”

“As Eleanor Drummond?”

“I guess. I’m not sure. Could you take me to where she died? I would like to see where she died.”

“I don’t think so, Jill. Why?”

“It’s just — she was alive, and then she wasn’t alive. I need to see where that happened, where she changed from one thing to another like that. Do you know what metamorphosis means?”

“Yes, I do,” said Miranda.

“We read stories about metamorphosis in school, stories from Rome a long time ago. And we studied metamorphosis in science. I just want to see where it happened.”

“All right. Tell Victoria I’ll get you back in a couple of hours. We’ll have lunch downtown. Tell her I’ll have you back after lunch.”

When Miranda pulled into the Rosedale garage, she knew Jill had been at Robert Griffin’s before. They were both a little windblown. Jill had insisted they drive with the top down.

Miranda was self-conscious about the Jaguar. She expected Mrs. de Cuchilleros would be watching them from among the ferns in her receiving-room window. As far as the neighbours were concerned, she was a police detective investigating a possible homicide and she was driving the dead man’s car. She hadn’t returned it the previous night, and somehow that made her feel even more truant.

As they had approached, Miranda saw Jill avert her eyes, keeping the house out of her line of vision, then stare up at it abruptly when they turned down the ramp and descended into the depths. Parked, Miranda smoothed her hair back while Jill resolutely got out of the car as if she were obeying a command. Together they raised the top back up into position, and Miranda locked the doors. She started toward the inside entrance, then realized Jill was already striding back up the ramp. She followed her onto the front steps where the girl was pushing at the door.

“It’s locked,” said Miranda.

“I’ve got the keys.” Inside, Jill’s eyes followed the stairs in the direction of the study where her mother had died, but she walked through the hallway to the side, down the stairs into the den, and stopped at the French doors, waiting for Miranda to catch up, looking out through the portico into the garden. Miranda moved beside her, careful to give her enough distance.

“Jill, tell me about it. Why did you want to come here?”

The girl turned to her and stepped back. “To see what it was like.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“No.”

“Jill, you have.”

The girl looked angry and hurt. “What do you want from me?”

“Jill?”

“I can be anything you want.”

“What do you mean?”

“I could be the daughter she wanted. She would see if she came back. I can be his Shiromuji girl if that’s what he wants. I didn’t mean for all this to happen. I can be whatever, whatever.”

Miranda was stunned by her compliant ferocity. “Did he call you that?” Panic rose in her gut.

The girl didn’t answer.

“Did Robert Griffin call you that?”

No answer.

“Did he?”

“Yes.”

“Jill …” A great wave of despair rolled through Miranda from deep inside to the surface, where it was quelled by an icy chill, and for a moment she felt nothing at all. She stood very still. Then her skin seemed on fire. “I was there, too …” She didn’t know if she had said that aloud. Miranda touched the girl, and neither of them burned. She took the girl in her arms.

At first they stood stiffly upright, the girl defiant. Then Jill leaned into Miranda, letting her body weight slump against Miranda, and together they sank to the floor, holding each other on the Kurdish runner, swaying gently in a silent embrace, both of them waiting without apprehension for something to happen.

“Jill,” Miranda said after a long time had passed, “I need you to tell me about it.”

“You knew him before?” Jill asked in a conspiratorial whisper. “Like before he died?”

“Yes, I did. I was a girl your age …” She didn’t know how to avoid the euphemism. It was more honest than anything she could think of. “When he came into my life.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“Yes, I think he did very much. He hurt me more than I understood, perhaps more than I understand even now.”

They were sitting now, facing each other on the Kurdish runner, hunched forward like girlfriends.

“Did he hurt you, Jill?”

“He hurt my mother. Did you know she worked for him? She had an office and managed his money. Not the money he had invested — you know about that. It was money he used for buying things and running his life. She looked after him.”

“Do you know where her office was?”

“I could find it. It’s over a fancy gallery in Yorkville. I was only there once. That’s when I discovered she called herself Eleanor —”

“You knew at the morgue! Of course you knew.”

“Only after I followed her. I just found out.”

“You followed her?”

“We had a really bad fight. She caught me smoking with my friend Alexandria. She said I couldn’t see Alexandria for a month, like that was worse than being grounded. The fight was about that, more than about smoking. I mean, she knew I wasn’t really a smoker.”

“Did she ever smoke?”

“My mother? Are you kidding? She was death on tobacco. She had what I’d call a counter-addictive personality.”

“You would?”

“No way she’d give up control, not to a vice, not to a pleasure.”

“Where did you come up with ‘counter-addictive’?”

“We looked it up, Alexandria and me. We researched our parents.”

“Okay. So you had a fight. And you skipped school and followed her to work.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I was researching, like I said. There was a picture in the paper. I wasn’t supposed to see it, so I knew it was important. She threw it out without reading it, so I dug it out of the garbage. There was a picture of her with some guy I’d never heard of.”

“Robert Griffin?”

“Yeah. She was in the background, but you could see there was a connection between them. Well, it said she was Eleanor Drummond and she managed the Gryphon Gallery. Surprised much? So I didn’t exactly follow her. I just went there. Anyway, he paid a huge amount of money for a paddle with some writing on it.”

“Rongorongo, does that sound familiar?”

“Yeah, maybe. So suddenly I discover she has a whole other life.”

“To protect you, Jill.”

“A life without me. Maybe it was. I think it was. I think she needed to keep me away from him.”

“What happened?”

The girl glanced over her shoulder toward the corridor into the bathroom and cellars as if she were expecting someone to appear. Then she looked back at Miranda. “He was my father. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I think I did. When did you find out?”

“When I went to my mom’s office … to Eleanor’s Drummond’s.”

“Are you mad at your mother for being someone else?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you won’t let yourself grieve?”

Jill stared at her intently. She seemed relieved to be sharing her secret world and, at the same time, angry that her secrets were being exposed.

“How did he hurt you?” she asked Miranda.

Miranda wanted to keep the focus on Jill.

“The same way he hurt me?” asked the girl, answering her own question. “The same way he hurt my mother. That’s why I was born, you know. Because he hurt my mother. I wasn’t a love child.”

“I’m sure your mother loved you very much,” said Miranda, feeling the words hollow in her mouth. It was more complex than love.

“Which mother? Molly Bray was my mother. Eleanor Drummond was my mother. Victoria is my mother. You want to be my mother?”

Miranda flinched. “I want to be your friend.”

“Okay,” said Jill. “That’s reasonable.”

Miranda almost laughed. Reasonable wasn’t a word sufficient to the relationship, but perhaps it would do for now. “Tell me about going to the gallery. This was just a few days ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not listed under your mother’s name. I put a trace on her name and only came up with Griffin’s address here. The gallery was in his name.”

“I think the building was in my name, and maybe the business was in his.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because that’s what she’d do. Because I went through her files.”

“You went through her files! Is that how you found out about Griffin being your father?”

“She wasn’t in her office when I went there. She was in a smaller room at the back of the gallery. She didn’t see me. I went upstairs. As soon as I opened the door, I knew it was Molly Bray’s space, whatever she called herself. You know how everyone has colours? I mean, the decoration wasn’t the same as at home, but I could tell from, you know, the arrangement of things, textures and colours, the feel of the place, that it was hers.

“So I snooped. I found letters. Nothing compromising, but they showed an unhealthy connection between them. So he was a mystery. I couldn’t figure out who he was. But I knew from the way his name was in my mother’s files that he was my father.”

Miranda continued to be amazed by Jill’s use of words such as compromising and unhealthy connection and found herself scrutinizing the girl-woman seated on the carpet in front of her, searching for a sign of childishness to balance the preternatural maturity. But right now Jill seemed composed. “You knew, like there it was, a paternity file?”

“Sometimes a connection that doesn’t make sense, makes sense,” the girl said.

“Point taken.”

“So she didn’t come up to her office for a long time. At first I was just doing research, making mental notes to share with Alexandria. But there was more stuff than I wanted. And then my mother came in. She seemed hurt rather than angry … that I had discovered who she really was.”

“Jill, she was Molly Bray, you know that.”

“Do I? Okay. So you don’t get to be my age without wondering about your parents. I think real kids wonder if they were adopted, or maybe exchanged at birth. In my case it was my mother who was exchanged, and at my birth, not hers.”

Miranda thought of the same quip passing less poignantly between Morgan and her on their trip to Waterloo County. “And you’re not a real kid?” she asked.

Jill ignored her and continued. “I knew, just the way she was upset, that he was my father. Her files were proof positive. She cried. I never saw my mom cry before, and the way she cried, I knew he had hurt her. My father wasn’t a nice man. But there she was, running an office or gallery or whatever. She was his partner. Only I wasn’t part of the equation. I was off living in a bubble in Wychwood Park.”

“She was the one in the bubble, Jill — Eleanor Drummond. When she went home to you and Victoria, that was the real world. She was Molly Bray. That’s what was real. You can see it in the furniture, the art, the loving attention to detail and design in your home. You can see it in you, Jill, how you’ve turned out to be you.”

Jill smiled sweetly. Miranda figured the girl wanted to believe her, needed to reconcile with her natural mother.

“Did she know you thought Griffin was your father?” Miranda asked. “Did you rush over here directly from Yorkville?”

She wanted to let the revelations come without being forced, to suppress the urgency welling inside her, generated perhaps from the inextricable connections between herself and this girl. She wanted to know everything.

Miranda recognized the name of the gallery. She had browsed there a few times, trying to look prosperous, not at all sure she was carrying it off. The staff — they could hardly be called clerks — had treated her with unwavering cordiality. But the time she had gone in with Morgan they were almost obsequious. It must have been the way Morgan subverted snobbery, wearing quality clothes as if he dressed in the dark.

Morgan had almost bought a bronze sculpture, then had decided against it, possibly because they were asking the price of a new condo. She didn’t remember seeing Eleanor Drummond, but then she would have had no reason to deal with management in the little back room with the Salvador Dali on the wall, or in the office upstairs. If they had met, she would have remembered.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” she asked Jill.

“Nothing happened.” The girl rose from the Gabbeh and started pacing, fingering books on the shelves. Suddenly, she withdrew a fat book and tossed it onto the floor beside Miranda. “Have you read any of these?”

Miranda picked up the book. It was a collection of international short stories. She knew there would be a story by Yukio Mishima. Miranda expected Jill to say the book was her mom’s. She opened the volume to the Mishima story and wasn’t surprised to find that passages detailing the grisly procedures of seppuku had been underlined in ballpoint. With a different pen someone had put a large exclamation mark beside the brief description of the wife’s modest death.

The book felt familiar. Miranda opened it to the flyleaf. “Miranda Quin.” Her name leaped out at her. Underneath were the words “Annesley Hall.”

Grasping for an explanation, she realized this must have been one of the books she had sold when she moved into her apartment at the end of her first year at university. The bastard had followed her, gone through the bins, bought her old books.

She recalled being deeply disturbed back then that her own reading of Mishima’s story, according to her professor, was diametrically opposed to the author’s intent, which had acquired awesome authority by his real-life disembowelment. Seeing into Mishima’s world from such a different perspective had disrupted her moral equilibrium, far more than the obscenity of his pleasure in the details of death. It was a book she had gladly discarded.

“I read that,” said Jill, “about the warrior’s wife.”

Miranda waited for her to continue. Instead she walked to the corridor exit. Miranda assumed she was going to the bathroom. The girl stopped outside the door, waiting for Miranda. Together they went into the bathroom. Jill slumped onto the shower ledge; Miranda sat squarely on the toilet, curious about the unusual intimacy. Jill stared at the drain in the tile floor.

“I was bleeding. I had a shower, and then because I didn’t have a towel I jumped around to get warm, and blood came out, so he gave me a towel and I dried myself off.”

“Griffin?”

“My father.”

“He brought you down here?”

“I came to the front door in a rage, all confused. I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“You got the address from your mother’s files?”

“I practically ran from the subway, and when he answered the door, he didn’t look like my father. I could hardly breathe. He knew who I was. He brought me down to the den. I kind of walked around. He watched me. Neither of us had anything to say. What do you talk about when you first meet your father, like, when you’re already grown up?”

Grown up? Miranda at about the same age had lost her own father, and there were parts of her that would never grow up.

“I kept mumbling ‘bastard,’ over and over, so I guess I did say something. Bastard, bastard.” She seemed almost amused. “I didn’t know if I meant him or meant me. He asked if I wanted to see his fish.”

“His fish!”

“I think I screamed. He brought me into the cellar. He didn’t drag me, but he made me walk through the big door.”

“Into the old part?”

“Yeah, in through there.” She got up and thrust out her trembling hand to Miranda. “Come with me.”

They pulled the huge door open and entered what seemed even more than previously like a vast and intricate crypt. Jill’s grip was as dry as soot, but her forehead glistened. They walked slowly, purposefully, the girl feeling her way into the past. “Here,” she said, stopping in front of the wine cellar.

“Here?” Miranda was puzzled and apprehensive. “It’s locked.”

The girl reached overhead into the deep shadows of the joists above one of the dangling light bulbs and took down a key. “He didn’t care if I saw where he kept it. It didn’t make any difference.”

When the thick thermal door swung open, revealing on the other side a dented sheet-metal panel, the looming darkness was palpable. Miranda hesitated, then reached for the external light switch, but it flicked against her finger with no effect.

“Here,” said Jill, “let me do it. It’s tricky.”

The girl fiddled with the switch, a loose connection made contact, and an austere vault gaped radiantly behind the shower curtain with the wine cellar motif. Miranda stepped forward, pulled the curtain aside, and gasped with a sharp intake of breath that for a moment wouldn’t release so that she felt asphyxiated. The chamber contained no racks of fine wine but, instead, a bed, larger than a cot but not full-size, made up with a pillow, flannel sheets, and a blanket. A wooden chair, a small table, and a stainless-steel bedpan on the floor by the table were also in the room. Two bright lights were recessed into the ceiling. It was a cell.

Miranda turned to look behind her at Jill. The girl was fingering the shower curtain.

“This is the privacy barrier,” Jill said. “He didn’t care if you ripped it down, but you didn’t. It was all you had.”

“Jill, what do you mean ‘you’? I need you to explain. Were you a prisoner here?”

“Yes.”

Horrified, Miranda stared at her. The girl’s face was expressionless. They sat side by side on the edge of the bed, then Miranda stood, moved over to the chair, and took a seat facing Jill.

“Is this where he …” She wanted to avoid the brutality of a certain word.

“Is this where he …” The word rape was hard and trite and ominous. “Is this where he did things … to you?”

“Yes.”

“He made you bleed?”

Jill looked into Miranda’s eyes.

“He fucked me.” Miranda reached out to her, but the girl didn’t respond. “He kept you prisoner here?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Until my mother came.”

“How long was that?”

“Maybe three days. I slept a lot. I slept when he wasn’t here, and I read.”

“Did he come back? Did he do it more than once?”

“Yes.”

“How many times, Jill?”

“I don’t know. Three times, five times? He let me go in and take showers. One time he watched. The next time he left me alone, but I couldn’t leave. The exit doors were locked. He had the key, so I came back to my room.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Jill, did you make the bed like this?”

“Yes.”

“Before your mother came?”

“No, after.”

“Where was Griffin when she came?”

“He was dead.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know, not breathing. Lying very still. Dead.”

“Where?”

“In the den.”

“In the den?”

“She came and got me out. I tried to shout where the key was through the door. She couldn’t hear me, but she knew where it was, and she unlocked the door and got me out.”

“And he was in the den and he was dead?”

“He called me Shiromuji. He said it’s a kind of fish. He said I wasn’t his real daughter. That things didn’t work like that. He told me he fucked my mother. I tried to scratch him. He said she was a girl like me, only she was better. She was only a girl. He said he liked her better, but I was okay. He said Shiromuji means you’re only okay. I was too young, he said. I wasn’t purebred, he said. I said, ‘That’s because you’re my father.’ He laughed at me. We both laughed. He called me his Shiromuji girl. I think he liked me. He just didn’t want to say it. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t have the right words.”

“Jill, when you went out into the study, where was he?”

“He was lying on the floor, on the carpet.”

“On the carpet that’s out there now?”

“No, on the thick one with all the colours.”

“The rug at your place by the front door?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you take it home?”

“Because … it had blood on it, just little specks, and they came off. But my mom didn’t want to leave it, just in case.”

“In case what?”

“Well, she killed him.”

“She killed him?”

“We couldn’t just leave him lying there.”

“He didn’t die from a blow, Jill, not from bleeding.”

“No. He died from sleep apnea, my mother said. Only Molly Bray helped him along. When he died, he slipped off his chair and bumped his head a little. There wasn’t much blood, but my mom’s fastidious.”

“Yes,” said Miranda, enjoying the girl’s vocabulary in spite of the gravity of their conversation.

“Can you die from sleep apnea?”

“You can,” said Miranda.

“Especially since he took Valium and he wasn’t used to it. It would relax his throat muscles. It’s possible if he already had problems. Yes, he could die that way.”

“Sitting up in his chair?”

“Possibly.”

“She said she held a pillow over his face. He didn’t struggle or anything. He just, you know, expired.”

Miranda thought it was more likely that Griffin had been stretched out on the sofa, possibly with his legs up over one end and his head low on the cushions. If he had truly suffered from apnea, he probably didn’t need help dying.

Perhaps Eleanor or Molly — she wasn’t sure whether they were separable at that point — just said she had smothered him. Maybe he was dead when she arrived and she hadn’t come to find Jill at all. Perhaps when she discovered Jill, she needed to murder a man who had already “expired.” She needed to take responsibility for what he had done by co-opting his death as murder.

“Jill, how did your mother know you were here?”

“My cigarettes. There was a package out on the table. He wasn’t a smoker. He bought them for me. He let me smoke in the bathroom. I don’t really like smoking. It’s just to bug my mom. In here it made her seem close, knowing she’d really be, you know, pissed off. Did you ever listen to a Zippo? Clickety-click-click. Like a gun. Very Quentin Tarantino.”

“You like guns?”

“No. That’s why I carry a lighter.”

Jill reached for the lighter in her pocket, then realized she had lost it. “I think smoking’s dumb really. I’m giving it up.”

“For your mother’s sake?”

“No, it’s just dumb. It wasn’t that big a deal between us. But she saw the cigarettes and figured I must be here, since she thought that was what our fight was about. You know, about smoking.”

“But it wasn’t?”

“No.”

“Did she know how much you saw in her files?”

“She knew I discovered who she was. She didn’t know I had discovered who I was! She didn’t know I knew about him.”

“Did you and your mother have lots of fights?”

“I think it was because we’re the same. It’s easier when you’re different.”

“You know that from your research?” asked Miranda, smiling.

“No, just from life. It’s something I’ve learned. It’s harder to be the same than different.”

“I’ll have to think about that.”

“Okay.”

“Wasn’t your mother worried if you were away for three days?”

“Yes, she was. And no.”

“Explain.”

“I’d run away before. I lived at a Sally Ann hostel one time for a week.”

“What did she think of that?”

“It terrified her, me being on the street. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t walking the streets, or streetwalking. I was living with the Salvation Army, for God’s sake.”

“So to speak. She must have been worried sick.”

“I guess that was the point. But when I realized how much, I felt bad.”

“Bad, as in wicked? Or badly?”

“Both. You like words, just like me and my father. I promised her I’d never do it again. She should have known I wouldn’t.”

“Jill, your mother might not have killed Robert Griffin.”

“I didn’t do it. I was locked up in here.”

“No, no. It’s just that he might have, well, let himself die.”

“She said he didn’t struggle.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“She didn’t want anyone to know she did it except me. She said the police would find him. They’d think it was suicide, especially if they didn’t know we’d been here. She left me with his dead body. I sat beside him on the floor. He didn’t seem like my father and yet he did. She came back with the long carpet from the hall upstairs. She said we’d have to hurry. It was almost time for the old woman next door to switch from spying out front to spying from her attic at the back. Before we rolled him up she turned on an air bubbler thing that was on the bar. It’s for fish. And she really gently put the tube in his mouth and blew air in until he burped. My mother said she didn’t want him sinking out there — polluting and killing the fish.

“So we rolled him sideways in the underpad. My mom said it was top quality, or it wouldn’t take his weight, but we didn’t need the rug like she’d thought. So we carried him out through the big doors, sort of lifting him over the sill, and then we hauled him over to the pond in broad daylight, holding his weight off the ground so we wouldn’t leave marks. Then we slipped him in. One big fish, all brassy and crinkly, came up too close just to watch, and Mr. Griffin, my dad, landed right on top of him. Mom said it would be okay. It would just go to the bottom for a while.”

Miranda listened as the gruesome account fell open before her in the strange, dispassionate voice of a young girl talking about her family reunion.

“So then we went home.”

“That was it?”

“Well, my mom spread out the carpet from upstairs on the floor, and we took that other one. It’s called a Gabbeh. She placed books, big ones with pictures of koi, open on the sofa. She took the Gabbeh and its underpad to the car —”

“And the pillow?”

“The one she killed him with. We took it. She rolled it up in the underpad, which wasn’t that smudged from the grass and flagstones, and we threw them into a dumpster on the way home. Oh, yeah, before we left she sent me back in here to clean up this room. That’s when I made the bed. And I took the book back out to the den and put it in the bookshelf where it belongs.”

“The short-story book? He let you read?”

“Yeah, I told you. Mostly, the lights were on full blast. But I slept a lot, anyway. She was outside already, so I locked the door. Then we went home.”

“And you forgot your cigarettes?” Eleanor Drummond must have created the inept smoking business as an excuse to tuck the pack into her purse. She didn’t want anybody to know Jill had been there.

“Yeah, I guess I did. And I lost my lighter. Maybe at the morgue. It wasn’t for smoking, just a souvenir.”

“Of what?”

“Of whatever happened while it was mine.”

“Jill, how did your mother know you were in this cell? I don’t think a package of cigarettes would be enough. You could have been and gone. They could have belonged to somebody else.”

“Well, she did.”

“But she didn’t come in right away?”

“No, I guess not. It was just some place she checked when she was here.”

“Was she surprised?”

“To find me? Shocked, but not surprised. By the time she opened the door, she already knew. I could tell.” The girl seemed almost wistful. “Do you think he did that to my mother like he said?”

“I think he did bad things to many people.”

“I didn’t really have a father, you know. Not if he raped her.”

“No, you didn’t, not a real father.”

“How come you’re looking after my interests?”

Miranda smiled at the arcane description of their relationship.

“You didn’t know my mother until after my father was dead. If he hurt you, why would you care?”

“Because.” Miranda gazed into the girl’s troubled eyes, acknowledging the truth of their common experience. She rose and reached out. “Come on, Jill. Let’s get you out of here.”

“Okay,” said the girl, allowing Miranda to take her hand and rising from the edge of the bed. They stood side by side and surveyed the chamber, Miranda with an overwhelming feeling of horror, Jill with unreachable memories and surface indifference.

“Do you think my mother really murdered my father?” she asked as if the thought had just crossed her mind. “Molly Bray, I mean. Not Eleanor Drummond. I didn’t really know her.”

“I think your mother was involved in Robert Griffin’s death, but I don’t know that she killed him. We’ll have to see.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“They’re both dead.”

“We have to know what happened.”

“It won’t make any difference. She’s dead.”

“We’ll sort everything out.”

“I told you what happened.”

“Yes.”

“So why not leave her alone?” She said this as if it were a test.

Miranda moved toward the door. Jill pulled her back.

“No,” said Jill. There was an indefinable urgency in her voice. “Let’s just stay for a minute.”

They returned to the bed, and Miranda sat down. Jill walked to the shower curtain and stood with her fingers running along its slippery folds, almost leaning into it for support. She looked back at Miranda, who was slumped over on one elbow, anxious, exhausted, wanting to escape, but also feeling patience, compassion, and the desire to protect this girl from the terrors within.

“I don’t want it like this,” said Jill. There was an edge of hysteria in her voice. “I shouldn’t have told you. She wanted me to know. I thought she wanted you to know, too. Please, Miranda, you have the power. Why can’t we leave the past in the past? Wouldn’t that be best for all of us — to bury the past?”

“I understand,” said Miranda. “But even if we could, the law won’t let us. There’s a lot at stake here, Jill. Two deaths under mysterious circumstances. And a huge estate. You’re an heiress, you know. You stand to gain a great deal from all this.”

Jill glowered at her from across the room. “All this?” She gazed around, almost cowering within the confines of the cell, despite surface bravado.

“Griffin’s estate —”

“I don’t want anything!”

“It’s not your choice, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, Jill.”

“I’m a rich orphan,” Jill said with disdain.

“Come sit down, Jill. Let’s talk.”

“No, I’ve got to figure this out by myself, Miranda.” She spoke her name as a challenge, like a barrier between them. Her eyes flicked furtively about, and the bleak walls seemed proof of her guilt for having been raped, evidence of her shame for being her father’s child, a horrific reminder of her burden as the keeper of her mother’s secrets. A shadow of defiance and rage crossed her face, giving way to the pallor of quiet despair.

“Miss Quin, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. My mom didn’t want anyone to know about this place, about what he did to us, to all of us. You’re the only one who can put it together.”

Jill stepped backward through the doorway out into the corridor, drawing the huge door closed behind her, all before Miranda could assimilate what was going on. The girl turned the key in the lock and switched off the overheads.

Miranda was engulfed in a stifling absence of light, too stunned to move. After what might have been only seconds, she saw the small, glowing rectangle in the door disappear, and she gasped in astonishment, like a diver plunging into absolute darkness in the depths of the sea.