Читать книгу Quin and Morgan Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - John Moss - Страница 15

Morgan spent Saturday shopping. He called Miranda in the morning, but there was no answer. He dictated a rambling memo, explaining to her voice mail that maybe Eleanor Drummond for some reason had raised the spectre of Griffin’s suicide not to conceal murder but to reveal it. Stumbling, he apologized for his incoherence, then added that he would call her again on Monday.

After a brunch of scrambled eggs, back bacon, and toast — he kept the bacon in the freezer and usually allowed himself no more than three slices a week, sometimes four — he got dressed and wandered over to Bloor Street and Avenue Road, refusing to admit to himself that he was going to Yorkville.

But he needed a winter coat.

Morgan thought he might check out the early stock in a few of the Yorkville shops while he was in the area and get an idea of what he was up against. He hadn’t bought a coat in almost a decade, and he had no idea of the prices. Morgan was pretty much committed to sheepskin, probably in natural suede, possibly like something Pierre Trudeau would have worn, down to his ankles, but more likely not, most likely conservative; and double-breasted, to keep out the vicious cold of a Toronto winter. He liked the way natural suede weathered, getting better-looking as it got older.

By the time he went into the first shop in Hazelton Lanes, the complex that marked one end of Yorkville like a flagship forging ahead of the fleet, he had decided exactly what he wanted. The price wasn’t outrageous. They didn’t have precisely the right fit, but the main bulk of their stock for the coming season wasn’t on display. He said he would come back later.

Walking east along Yorkville Avenue itself, he went into a coffee bar where the old Penny Farthing had been, or near where it had been, where Neil Young and Joni Mitchell had once sung for their suppers. Bohemian Yorkville was before his time, but he liked the small-scale quality the area retained, despite haughty pretensions. Some of the galleries were museum-quality, and he had always found them amenable to browsing, even though he seldom bought anything.

Morgan sat by the window, sipping a cappuccino molto grande, as it was described in commercial Italian on the blackboard, and watched the world go by. The coffee was made with whole milk. He hadn’t asked for skim, which was what Miranda usually did. He had waited to see what they would give him, and had felt guilt-free because it hadn’t been his decision.

Leaning back, he withdrew the silver lighter from his pocket that he had picked up with loose change from the table in his foyer. He flicked it a couple of times and stared into the orange-blue flame, marvelling at what a simple instrument it was, and how seductively well it was made. It was chrome, actually, or nickel, not silver. For a moment he was charmed by its unfamiliarity, then remembered having found it at the morgue.

From where he was sitting he could see the play of shadows and light through the windows of a prestige gallery across the side street. In front of the gallery there was a huge rampant bronze, the preternatural abstraction of an animist nightmare. Paradoxically, it cast an aura of excitement over its setting that was strangely appealing.

Morgan remembered the time he and Miranda had wandered into the same gallery and he had threatened to buy an exorbitant sculpture by the same artist as the piece outside, which he had described then as “the preternatural abstraction of an animist nightmare” and was impelled to explain what his words were obscuring.

The artist was from Peterborough. Morgan had noted from a brochure that he was apparently doing well enough to have a perfect studio in the Kawartha Lakes, built with timbers and boards salvaged from ancient buildings and reassembled by Alexander Pope who, as the brochure had affirmed, was an oblique descendant of the poet.

So fulsome was the description of the builder that Morgan recalled wondering whether the brochure was for the artist, whose name he had forgotten, or for Pope. He had suggested to Miranda that maybe they were the same person. The name of the artist was a sly pseudonym. Buyers might not trust themselves purchasing sculpture by someone called Alexander Pope who, as the brochure had declared somewhat defensively, was a tall man skilled at the reconstruction of stone buildings and the reproduction of antique cabinetry, and who also antiqued paint and painted landscapes.

Miranda had allowed herself to be amused by Morgan’s meandering discourse on the frangibility of artistic identity only after they had safely left the gallery. In this same coffee house she had let herself laugh and then had slipped into stifled hysterics at the absurdity of Morgan having nearly become a patron of the arts, singular, of one piece of sculpture. He had sat watching her burst with merriment and had marvelled at her display, since she seldom let herself go like that, usually fending off laughter with turns of irony and wit.

Morgan stared at the grotesque beauty of the sculpture in front of the gallery. Slowly, the realization came into his mind that this was a misshapen rendering of a gryphon, the same figure that appeared on the side of the gristmill in Waldron, which marked it as a possession of Miranda’s assailant.

He was stunned by the fact that he hadn’t made the connection immediately, but he was mollified a little by knowing that the context was so entirely different. He was on a Saturday outing. He was relaxing, enjoying the day.

Miranda gasped, and woke up feeling strangled. She sat upright on the side of the bed, waiting with futility for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. There was a complete and utter absence of light. Her body convulsing with surges of panic, she clutched at her gut, wrapped her arms around her rib cage, and tried to hold enough air in her body to breathe. She lifted her hands to her face and could see nothing. Even when she covered her eyes, it made no difference until she pressed hard into the sockets and saw dazzling red streaks against black.

She was afraid to move, to stand. She had no idea where up was or down. She would fall, she thought, or step off the edge of the world. Images rushed through of being underwater, of being deep below the surface of a raging sea in the dead of night.

Miranda took a deep breath and held it, then slowly released air through pursed lips, then took another and did the same. She did this repeatedly, trying to focus on her training for PADI certification, the diver’s course she had taken in the Cayman Islands. She cast herself back to the Caribbean, visualized herself at ten metres, about thirty-three feet, hovering over the sandy bottom, taking her regulator from her mouth, releasing bubbles through pursed lips, recovering her reg, breathing again, filling her mask with water, tilting her head back, blowing out through her nose until the mask was clear. In her mind she took off her scuba gear and laid it on the sand, put it back on, secured the BC vest in place, and made a controlled ascent, absurdly slow, moving to the surface while releasing air in bubbles that rose faster than she did as she watched them expand and transform from spheres into elliptical disks.

When she broached the surface, having expelled more air than she had thought possible, she blew out one last heroic breath, then filled her lungs, inflated the BC, leaned back, tasting the sweetness, and floated near the boat until a gorgeous blond youth, a sun-bleached instructor who applauded her from the rails, helped her aboard and gave her a big innocent hug, apparently oblivious to the suggestive drape of his Speedo.

Her breathing was now under control. She groped behind her for reassurance that the bed was still there. Lying back, she shifted around to stretch out, comforted by the embrace of the softness beneath her. It wasn’t like floating; gravity pinned her against the pliable surface of the bed. No, it was like being cradled, or whirled gently against the side of an invisible centrifuge.

As Morgan would say, oh, my goodness!

Now that her breathing was normal, she had to go to the bathroom. Not an apt expression, she thought. She wasn’t going anywhere. She needed to pee. She reached down and surprised herself by grasping the side of the bedpan on the first try. She had surveyed the room when she came in. She knew where everything was. As long as she remained calm, the room would stay the same size and everything would be in its appropriate place.

When she was finished, she lay down on the bed again. Her mind danced like an escaped marionette. She was slipping deeper into fear — not from claustrophobia but from disconnection, from an abhorrence of death. She had no idea how long she could last without water. She knew it wasn’t as long as people thought. It was dry in here, which made it worse. What kind of wine cellar would be bone-dry? The room had humidity controls — wasn’t the point to make it humid? But this wasn’t a wine cellar; it was a prison cell, a dungeon, a vault, a crypt, a tomb, a grave — the words rattled through her mind.

Miranda held her arm up to look at her watch. She had a digital at home with a light, but her analogue watch was invisible. She held it against her ear. Nothing. She took the watch off and placed it gently on the floor under the side of the bed. Her Glock and her cell phone were in the car, safely in her bag tucked under the seat. She was off-duty, on compassionate leave.

She pulled the cover over her legs, which were a little damp from her episode with the bedpan. Miranda had no idea how long she had been there. Afraid to sleep because she would lose track of time, she stared up into the darkness, her eyes sore around the edges, smarting from the strain of finding no depth to her vision. She closed them softly, and the room seemed to float away, leaving her suspended in a strange, empty universe, a black hole leaking from inside her own skull.

My goodness! she thought. What a dilemma!

That was what Morgan would have said. My goodness! He never swore.

She remembered asking him once, over dinner after a gruesome day’s work, why he didn’t swear.

“Why should I?” he had said.

“Morgan, you know what I mean. I’m not saying you should. It’s just refreshingly unusual.”

“You use a word like refreshing and I’m liable to start. Makes me sound like a room deodorizer. I do know all the words.”

“I have no doubt.”

“Darlene and Fred used to swear.

“A lot?

“My parents? Like troopers. Maybe I didn’t swear the same as I didn’t smoke, because they did.”

“I like that you don’t swear.”

“Yeah, well, it’s an intentional rejection of male privilege and human conceit.”

“Pardon?”

“Obscenity is an expression of male privilege.”

“Go on!”

She said this in mild derision, but he took it as an invitation. “Men swear because they’re lazy with language and/or because they’re bullies — it’s a power trip over women who flinch at the words, whether they’re present or implied. And, of course, women who don’t flinch are simply proving they can be as ignorant.”

“Morgan, do you have an opinion?”

“Damn right I do.”

That conversation had come back to Miranda virtually intact, perhaps polished a bit, his rhetoric improved in recollection.

They had both been eating wiener schnitzel. It was a mistake, and neither of them had eaten very much. They were sharing a nice German Riesling that Morgan had picked out. She didn’t recall the names of the wine or the restaurant, and yet it seemed she remembered, word for word, the entire contents of their discussion and the endearingly pontifical tones with which Morgan had delivered himself of his views.

“Profanity,” he told her. “It’s not the same as obscenity. It’s about fear and conceit.”

“As opposed to privilege and conceit?”

“Like spitting in a windstorm, whistling in the dark.”

“Which?”

“Both. If you spit upwind, it hits you in the face. Downwind and it’s sucked out of your mouth. Either way you’re diminished. You’ve challenged the wind and, paradoxically, you’ve proved its power. A simple ‘god-damn’ and you’ve reaffirmed your sad relationship with an indifferent God.”

“My goodness!”

“Whistling in the dark — you asked? A string of profanities is a feeble emulation of Descartes. I swear, therefore I am. Invariably, it’s the believer who swears at God, since profanity only works if on some level you know it’s profane, and it’s only profane if God is real. And if God’s real, then maybe you are, too.”

“You don’t swear because you’re an atheist!”

“Yes.”

“You’re a strange man.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you, Morgan.”

She now heard their words echoing inside her skull, and the chambers of her mind seemed to open in all directions as she fell into deep sleep.

Morgan wandered south along Avenue Road in the late afternoon, passing through what he regarded as home territory. Sauntering by Annesley Hall and Victoria University, down past St. Michael’s College, he acknowledged that his roots were right here. The University of Toronto was oddly secluded from its urban setting and yet criss-crossed with busy streets that declared its relevance to the city and world at large. This was where he had stepped outside the boundaries of his upbringing. He had been raised in Cabbagetown during its transition from poor place to rich, but he grew up in a different way between Queen’s Park and Bloor Street.

Walking east along College Street, he spied with satisfaction the familiar planes of glass and granite shimmering in the cool autumn sky, but until he was almost at Bay Street, nearly in front of police headquarters, he had no sense of the parts coming together. The entire complex, which took up the better part of a city block, was a building that literally worked — a marvel of materials and design. The rosy pink granite and gunmetal steel that might have been daunting deconstructed with casual elegance as one entered from the street and walked through a welcoming mélange of space sculptured on a human scale. The imposing structure, redolent with power and authority, was still a secure and accessible place for visitors and people who worked there. Morgan regretted that to truly appreciate the whole one would need to clear away the surrounding buildings. The structure must have been breathtaking on the drawing boards.

Morgan strolled past reception and was greeted cheerfully by his rank, detective sergeant, rather than by name. He blushed at being recognized, feeling somehow that the young woman, whose own name he didn’t know, was privy to his intimate adventures with the Bobbsey Twins.

The twins and he were history now; they had made choices that weren’t his doing. Nancy with the big blond hair had married a cop, was pregnant with her second child, and lived in the depths of Scarborough. Anne had tried modelling, he had heard, but her voluptuous lips had led only to lingerie catalogues of the second order, and she was now a vice squad cop in Vancouver.

Still, whenever a pretty young receptionist smiled at him, Morgan was discomforted by a vague sense of the erotic. He would hurry past with a shy smile, avoiding eye contact, and would feel a tickling sensation of relief when he was safely on the elevator. Sometimes he would flirt with women his own age to prove to himself that he was normal.

Morgan slumped down at his desk and began to wade through the accumulated paperwork. Mostly, he came in when Alex Rufalo, the superintendent, wasn’t present. Rufalo tended to work executive hours — long but with weekends free. Others around Morgan, after initial salutations, left him alone.

By early evening he was on top of things. Not finished — “things” were never finished — but they were under control. He reached into a bottom drawer and took out a crumpled linen jacket. Lying under it was his standard-issue 9 mm Glock semi-automatic and a shoulder holster. Despite regulations, he seldom carried his gun. Miranda did more often, but it always seemed to him that homicide was the one detail where guns were redundant. The critical focus was on people who were already dead.

On the way home he stopped in at a bookstore on Bloor Street and picked up a short-story anthology, along with a gourmet sandwich and a yogourt shake to go at a place next door. He was too tired to read, so he ate in front of the television, watched back-to-back episodes from the Law & Order franchise, and went to bed. He dreamed sporadically of full lips and police procedures and judges on high benches, some of them comic and others quite sinister.

Sunday morning Morgan woke up feeling queasy, as if he had endured a train ride in a windowless sleeper, conscious the whole night of the tracks clicking beneath him. He called Miranda again, but there was no answer, and hung up before having to deal with her voice mail.

Settling in for a good read, he selectively worked his way toward the Yukio Mishima story in the middle of the collection he had bought. The first piece was Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” He was struck with how a story about female empowerment could have been written by an icon of machismo. Perhaps Hemingway had had no idea what he was doing. Maybe that wasn’t at all what he had wanted and that was why the story was subversively powerful. Then there was a story by D.H. Lawrence — “The Rocking Horse Winner” — that blew him away. It was about a kid’s pact with the devil. The boy wins and dies. He read William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” twice. It was the most masterfully grotesque story he had ever encountered — the horror of necrophilia and a mouldering corpse not just macabre but a haunting representation of Faulkner’s American South. Next he read a story by Alice Munro with the disingenuous title “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” Disingenuous was the operative word. The detailed idiosyncrasies of a few charming characters in small-town Ontario gradually resonated with each other to reveal genteel emotional mayhem, suicide, and possibly murder.

While he read “Patriotism,” the Mishima story, through his own sensibility, Miranda was always in mind. And Eleanor Drummond. Following the course of the warrior’s blade, driven by will through the intricate design of his gut, Morgan felt an overwhelming sense of estrangement. Seppuku meant nothing to him, a horrific gesture; and it was undermined, as Miranda had said, by the quiet devotion of the wife dying without vainglory as if death were a domestic detail.

Morgan felt like a voyeur peering into a world so different from what its author must surely have meant to convey. He closed the book and thought of Miranda living in a parallel world, utterly estranged from her watcher. He thought of Molly. He thought of Eleanor Drummond, the absurd humility of her end, the outrageous conceit. He wanted to phone Miranda again to share his reading, but the more he considered it the more he realized he had nothing to say.

Miranda touched her eyes, trying to affirm that she was awake. A faint hum from the ventilation system accentuated the darkness clenched tightly around her. She was shivering and drew up the blanket. Her mouth was dry, but when she ran her hands over exposed skin it felt clammy. The air was thick and warm. She removed the blanket, not wanting to sweat. She needed to vomit, but she didn’t want to lose fluids and fought the spasms in her gut by opening her eyes wide and focusing on an imaginary horizon above her. After a while, the nausea began to subside.

She knew she had to move around or she would strangle on fear. Her mind would take flight. Entropy would set in. She would die. Miranda listened intently until she could hear the walls. The hush in the room reverberated softly in her ears, and she started to reconstruct the dimensions of her cell in her head. She got up carefully and groped for the edge of the table to steady herself, the way one did when blindfolded in a children’s game. She kicked the bedpan and heard a splash.

“Damn!” she said out loud, and the sound of the voice startled her.

“Damn, damn, damn!” she repeated. “Miranda calling Earth, can you hear me?”

She felt better. Hearing her own voice was proof she was alive. I am afraid, therefore I am, she thought. Her throat was constricted from lack of moisture, and speaking was painful.

“I am afraid, therefore I am,” she said aloud.

No one answered, and she fought a feeling of dread emanating from the silence by taking a step away from the table toward the back wall. When she reached it abruptly — it was closer than she had anticipated — she slid her hand along and up to the grillwork where ducts would connect to humidity control and heat. It was absolutely flush with the wall. She tried to force her fingers into the metal grid to get a grip until her fingernails split and she felt blood spurt. Miranda moved away, feeling her blood smear across the rough wall. She edged around to the door. The glass was impervious to blows. She felt dents in the sheet-metal back of the door and wondered if these were marks of Jill’s rage at confinement.

Jill had read stories. Griffin had left the lights on even when she slept.

Which would be worse? Miranda wondered. Light was confining: in darkness the end of the world could be glimpsed.

She worked her way back around to her bed, kicking the bedpan again as she sat down. The sound of slopping against the steel made her thirsty. It was dry and warm. She felt moisture leaking through her pores. Her lips were beginning to crack. She lay back, waiting. She didn’t know for what, though.

Would Morgan find her? Would Jill relent? Miranda didn’t think she would. In the mind of a girl so morally distraught, what surely wasn’t a premeditated act wouldn’t weigh on her conscience now, at least not enough to offset the respite gained by Miranda’s erasure. She winced at the notion of being erased, but she directed resentment only at herself. Jill was the heir to Miranda’s fall from grace, a notion Morgan would have vigorously rejected — the implications of fall and of grace. She felt the inevitability of her imprisonment, that it was somehow her own doing.

Eventually, she would be discovered.

Would her corpse be mouldering in the bed, her desiccated remains inseparable from the bedclothes and mattress, or dried into dust? Images of the grotesque and macabre entertained themselves in her brain, stopping her from slipping into a state of calm that scared her more than the taunting illusions of death.

Suddenly, the window in the door flashed with illumination, her cell reverberated with light. Gasping, she struggled to the door, her eyes searing in the dim glow. She couldn’t see or hear anything through the thick, narrow window. Miranda banged against the dented sheet metal, but could feel the door thud against the flesh of her hands, feel her efforts dissipate into the depths of its thermal layers. She walked around the room, straightening and tidying. The light suddenly flicked off, and she felt relieved as she stepped carefully through the darkness back to her bed.

That would have been Eugene Nishimura. It must be Sunday afternoon. She hadn’t thought to check her watch, which was under the edge of the bed. She leaned over, picked it up, and set it on the table. It was either Sunday or Monday. Surely, she had been here more than twenty-four hours. Her body felt drained and depleted. She had to conserve. She was leaching vital energy and fluids into the air.

The absence of humidity, the warmth, these were conditions that could easily be controlled by a system ostensibly set up for wine. This place was designed as a prison specifically to hold captives. Jill wasn’t the first. Those weren’t Jill’s dents on the back of the door. Miranda hadn’t noticed any bruises or abrasions on the girl.

Her mind raced. Griffin had kept other victims locked in here, warm and dry, had let them take showers and use the toilet, or at least empty the bedpan. He could have kept them on hold indefinitely for his personal use. She shuddered. How many rapes had occurred in this room? How many women had died here? She settled into the bed, feeling it rise to her weight, feeling a strange kinship with the girls and women who had preceded her in this terrible place.

Morgan went out for Sunday dinner to a restaurant on Eglinton Avenue. He walked there and worked up an appetite. After a pasta dinner, savouring the pleasant taste of garlic in his mouth, he ambled back along Yonge Street and into Rosedale.

Eugene Nishimura’s van was parked in front of the Griffin house, and though it was dark, enough light from Mrs. de Cuchilleros’s side windows enabled Morgan to see his way around to the back garden. Nishimura was inside. Morgan saw his head bobbing through the abandoned casement that was all that remained of the outside entry into the pump room.

“You’re working late,” he said when Nishimura emerged from the house.

Nishimura called out, “Is that you, Detective Morgan? Just a sec. I’ll turn on the pond lights.”

Suddenly, the most astonishing tableau flashed before Morgan’s eyes. He had been trying to make out the shapes of separate fish in the indirect garden lighting. Now a spectacular cube of illumination and colour opened in the ground, the depths of water resonating with absolute clarity.

“What an amazing collection!” said Nishimura. “I moved the grand champ up from the lower pond. Look at her! Have you ever seen red so wonderfully intense? Asymmetrical continents floating in absolute stillness, perfectly balanced. Such harmony! There’s a perfect tension between all the parts. She’s beautifully healthy. She’s a living haiku, a perfect living haiku.”

“Speaking of which, what does Ochiba Shigura mean?” Morgan asked. “Isn’t it something about autumn leaves and still water?”

“It just means Ochiba Shigura. That’s what kind of fish it is.”

“Don’t the words mean something? Translate it into English.”

“It means Ochiba Shigura. That’s a beautiful name for a fish.”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. My Japanese isn’t that good.”

“It’s my favourite. Except for the Chagoi. You’ve moved it back up, too.”

The two men stood mesmerized, staring into the pel-lucid depths at the fish weaving patterns of colour and form, lazily ignoring the laws of gravity as they expounded the dimensions of their home in soaring slow motion.

Eventually, Nishimura said, “I’ve got to get going. My wife thinks I’ve got a new mistress.”

“A new one?”

Nishimura looked at him with an embarrassed smile. “I am a family man.”

“Lovely.”

“I fed them earlier. I’ll be back tomorrow to clean the filters.”

“I’ll walk out with you,” said Morgan. “I don’t want to be left in the dark.”

Miranda slept fitfully for an indeterminate period of time. Getting up with excruciating effort, she sat at the table, propped on her elbows, and fiddled with her watch. She had no desire to eat, but a craving for water sent burning cramps through her abdomen. Miranda contemplated opening one of the small wounds in her fingers and sucking on her own blood, but she was afraid the strain in processing the rich fluid might deplete more than nourish. She had no stomach at all for drinking urine, which now smelled sour. She had gone again a couple of times. Nothing much had come except a few drops and a sensation in her urethra as if she were trying to pee needles. She hadn’t been able to have a bowel movement, but a heavy urgency hovered painfully in her lower gut.

She decided she needed to think. Despite the miserable depletion of her physical resources, her mind seemed clear. Thinking would make the time pass, keep her focused. Images of the sun-glowing youth in the Speedo drifted through her mind. The last thing she felt was sexy. Her lips seared with pain, and she knew she had to be smiling. He had been a lovely temptation. Like seeing something sinful on a menu — too many calories, too much money. What if she had splurged? Why not? When she got out of this room, she was going to hop on a plane, fly to Grand Cayman, and find that luxuriously endowed young man. She was going to go scuba diving with him and dance beyond gravity in an erotic undersea ballet. Then she would take him back to her hotel room and do it and do it and do it.

“My goodness!” she said aloud, and this time she was strangely reassured by the resonance of her voice, despite its distortion.

Her throat was so dry that the utterance had nearly strangled her, and the deep fissures opening on her lips had caught at the words as they had emerged from her body. Her voice sounded familiar, but not like herself. She whispered, refusing the silence. “When I get out … I want …”

She couldn’t think of what she wanted. Miranda tried to redirect her thoughts. She knew she had to exercise her mind or she would lose control. She didn’t know what that meant, but it frightened her.

If Griffin had died the way she thought he had, and Eleanor Drummond had only killed him after he was dead, he couldn’t have known he was going to die. Miranda’s mind seemed separate from her body and was clearly a better place to be.

Two things. Why had Eleanor come to Griffin’s house if she wasn’t expecting her daughter to be there? Where had she thought Jill was? If Jill had run away before, say, downtown, and hung out with street kids, then her mother must have known she would come back. Eleanor had recognized how headstrong Jill was: bull-headed, determined, and smart the way she had been herself — a survivor. She had expected Jill to return home in due course after sorting out the revelation of her mother’s double life. Eleanor Drummond, or Molly Bray, hadn’t known that the issue for Jill was her father’s identity, not her mother’s deceit.

So Eleanor had come here and found Griffin dying or dead. It hadn’t mattered which. Then, for some reason, she had entered the wine cellar, this godforsaken room, and discovered her ravaged daughter. She had looked in here because it was a place she had habitually checked! The last thing she had expected to find was her daughter. She was shocked. Eleanor had murdered the man in her mind — redemption for the suffering of her daughter. She had planned her own murder — atonement for complicity in her daughter’s brutalization.

Eleanor had come down here because she had known what this place was! She had investigated this room because she had been a prisoner here herself!

No, she had looked in because she had known there had been other young women. She was checking.

Miranda got up and walked around as if the lights were on. She was adjusting to the darkness, to the walled limitations on her existence, to the limits of perception, of being.

Molly Bray wasn’t a psychopathic deviant, nor was Eleanor Drummond. Therefore — Miranda moved toward the idea with steely determination — she was some sort of guardian, policing her Faustian mentor, monitoring his perversion, trying to protect others, to control or subvert his predatory appetite for young women. Was she guilty of collusion? Why hadn’t she reported him? Her life, not just her constructed identity as Eleanor Drummond, but her life as Molly Bray with Jill and Victoria in Wychwood Park, the intricate contrivance of her life, would have collapsed without Griffin, had perhaps existed because she had used what she had known. She had sold her soul to protect her life. And with terrible irony she had failed to protect her own daughter.

That vile man had savaged their daughter, his own child. Oh, my God! Miranda thought, shuddering. Oh, my God!

Morgan woke up Monday with what felt like a hangover. Before he shaved he got on the telephone to Miranda, but she must have already gone out. There was no response on her cell phone. A little troubled by his inability to reach his partner, he showered, shaved, and got dressed.

The Griffin affair was going to break very soon. He had the feeling he got when the disparate details of a case started falling together. But he was wary, uneasy. Murder-suicide in a Rosedale mansion didn’t resonate like this without complications. Where the hell was Miranda?

Morgan went out for breakfast. In an attempt to kick-start his body, he ordered a hungry-man platter of sausages, bacon, pancakes, eggs, and toast, which when placed in front of him seemed obscene. He stared into the unnaturally orange fluid in his orange juice glass. Oranges could be too orange, he thought. Sometimes things weren’t what they were. Griffin was a deviant, but he was a student of semiology. They weren’t mutually exclusive. He had followed Miranda into an academic program. He was already an ineffectual lawyer — not the first. She must have known at some level who he was, his name if not his face.

Was that why she had turned down the scholarship? She had tried to get away as far as possible. That meant joining the RCMP and loving a man, Jason Rodriguez in Ottawa, who couldn’t love her enough. Meanwhile, Griffin stayed on and earned a Ph.D. What a wasted mind, he thought. What a pathetic creep.

Eleanor Drummond. He glanced down at the meal in front of him and pushed it away, retrieving only the toast, which he mouthed, dry, with a bit of coffee to wash it down. She had killed herself. She had wanted them to think she was murdered. She had needed them to think there was an intruder, an interloper in the scene, deus ex machina, an operative from outside the narrative. Put that together with Griffin’s murder. She had wanted them to think he was murdered, too. She had diverted them long enough to work out her own death. Simple. They were looking for something too complicated. Eleanor/Molly had known they wouldn’t see the trees for the forest.

It made sense, yet her motivation defied comprehension. Why, why, why? Miranda would be able to shed light on this conundrum if he could ever find her.

Knowing she should be conserving her physical resources but fearing, even more, that stasis invited the onset of death, Miranda paced back and forth in the darkness, not rapidly enough to force a sweat but sufficient to create a modest breeze as she moved. She had stripped to her underwear, keeping that on in morbid anticipation of being found dead, wanting to maintain a certain propriety in front of forensics, whatever her condition of degradation, and in front of Morgan, who always displayed an endearing curiosity about her undergarments. Once at the morgue, pretensions would collapse, of course, particularly after being here a while. Eleanor Drummond was the only corpse she had ever encountered whose beauty seemed enhanced by death. And they had gotten her before she was cold. Miranda hoped she didn’t get Ellen Ravenscroft. Anyone but that marauding coquette, her old and dear friend and acquaintance. She figured the cooling air was keeping fluids inside her, though she knew, in fact, from her goose bumps that she was losing water through her skin, which was why she felt a chill.

Sometimes she slept. She was painfully numb, her lips were bleeding, and she had cramps, but she kept moving when she could, occupying her space like a prowling animal rehearsing the limits of its cage. It had to be Monday or even Tuesday by now.

In the absolute darkness, words seemed tangible, as solid as flesh. Eleanor, Molly, Jill, Miranda — she shuffled through names in her mind. Griffin? Had he written her a letter when he knew he was dying? But it was unlikely he had known that, especially if Jill’s second-hand diagnosis of sleep apnea was a factor. Could he have caused his own death? Not with enough certainty to write Miranda beforehand.

She could envision the manila envelope. It had been recycled — at least the label had been stuck on where another label had been removed. Lots of people reused envelopes. Millionaires? Maybe. Then, as Miranda studied the postmark in her mind, she thought perhaps it was the cancellation date that was being reused. She saw the deep creases in the envelope and realized it had been stuffed through her mail slot. The postman had a key. He always opened the whole panel of boxes and put the mail in without scrunching it up. Even her Victoria’s Secret catalogues, which the postman obviously thumbed through, came out folded but not creased. That meant the envelope had been delivered by someone else.

Miranda lost track of the darkness. Slumping down on the chair, she continued her interior discourse. People didn’t send posthumous mail. So who had access to his stationery? Who knew about his souvenir clippings? Who knew about her, could draft a document, witness it, and forge his signature? And then, to be authentic, in her own spidery handwriting label the envelope because she was, after all, his amanuensis, his accomplice and wicked familiar.

Miranda was ecstatic. She would have to discuss this with Morgan. He would like amanuensis.

The passageway light suddenly flashed through the door. Pressing close to the glass, she saw a shadow slip by, probably Eugene Nishimura again. She overrode the reluctance of muscles and joints that had begun to seize up as her body shut down, lurched back across the room, and collapsed onto her hands and knees, feeling for the bedpan in the murky gloom. Dumping its contents on the floor, she struggled to her feet and scrambled as fast as she could manage back to the door. She held the bedpan up where she could see the polished steel gleam and aligned it carefully, trying to mirror the light that penetrated her window back into the corridor, tilting the pan gently to make the beam dance. Peering around the bedpan through the glass, she waited for an interminable time. Then she spied a shadow moving across the opposite wall and cast her frail beacon against the stone and brick at eye level. But the shadow disappeared, and the light was suddenly extinguished. Miranda threw the bedpan into the darkness, strode over to her bed, lay back exhausted, and allowed herself for the first time to let tears drain precious fluids from the corners of her eyes.

When Morgan arrived back at Robert Griffin’s house, Eugene Nishimura was already on the scene. A woman dressed in jeans and a sweater was with him. She introduced herself.

“My name is Ikuko. You are Detective Morgan? I have come to see my husband’s mistress. She has many parts, all of them beautiful, like a geisha.”

Morgan and Ikuko sat on the limestone parapet, talking and observing the fish, while her husband worked around the pool and inside the house.

“I know that one is best,” observed Ikuko, pointing to the champion Kohaku when her husband was in the pump room. She lowered her voice to a whisper: “I like the Ochiba Shigura.”

“Me, too,” said Morgan. “Do you speak Japanese?”

“Oh, yes, I was born in Kyoto. I am issei, a true pioneer. My husband is yonsei. Our children are gosei when they will be born — old-style Canadian.”

“Can you translate Ochiba Shigura?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Doesn’t it mean anything?”

“Not in English.”

“In Japanese.”

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes it is difficult to translate from one culture to another, Mr. Morgan.”

Her husband came out, bringing food that he divided among the three of them. They each leaned over and hand-fed the more confident fish. The Ochiba Shigura came directly to Morgan, trying to shunt aside the Chagoi, which was voraciously mounting his half-closed hand. It gave up and swam to Ikuko where it ate delicately from her open palm tilted almost to water level.

“Eugene,” Ikuko announced, “I do not like the Takai Kohaku best. I like the Ochiba Shigura.”

Miranda sat up suddenly, coming into consciousness in an upright position. Words tumbled through her mind. She was in mid-argument, anticipating the next twist in a convoluted rhetoric. “Thirdly,” she muttered with a throaty rasp into the darkness, “number three, Morgan, is why?” The words sounded less convincing outside her head where they floated hollowly in the thick air and dissipated into the darkness. “My third point …” she continued sub-vocally, trying to recover her composure, knowing illusion was everything in a debate and she had to seem to be in command of her inner voice. What were points one and two? “My third point, Morgan …” she ventured, a little reassured by the sound of his name reverberating inside her skull. “Morgan, the tertiary element to my deductive argument is —”

She must have passed out from the effort of sitting up, because when she became aware again she was sprawled across the bed with her knees on the floor. They were bruised as if she had fallen in a posture almost of prayer.

Without moving she drifted into a dream where everything was bright and beautiful but nothing was distinct or familiar.

Flung suddenly back into wakefulness, she crawled onto the bed and stretched out. She had to think. If she could think through the pain, the pain would leave.

One — it was as though she could see a number one shaped like a child’s giant birthday candle. Eleanor Drummond had come here to monitor Robert Griffin’s proclivities for nasty behaviour. She was his conscience; he had none of his own. She needed Jill to see his death as righteous, to restore innocence to her daughter. Ambiguous! To prove Jill’s innocence to herself.

Miranda rehearsed the scenario so that she could explain it to Morgan. Time passed.

Two. The number hovered over her head, crudely formed like a numeral made from a twisted balloon. The letter authorizing her as executor was delivered posthumously. Eleanor must have known she would figure that out and go along with it, anyway! The dead woman had known things about her even she didn’t fathom.

Number three must be coming up! Miranda waited for a numeral to appear. A constellation of stars hovered in the middle distance, forming the number. An image of three crosses on Calvary loomed into focus in the guise of a Roman numeral. Threes swarmed her like the aggressive graphics on Sesame Street, then faded to black.

Okay, she thought. Eleanor had recognized Miranda when Morgan and she were beside Griffin’s body. The woman had already planned to die. She had set up a scene where Griffin might have been reading, then had impulsively, on a morbid whim, walked out to the pond and ended it all. She had seeded obvious notions of suicide in his case, but why? So the police would suspect murder. Later they’d do the same when her body was discovered. Terrible crime, a double homicide. Distasteful perhaps, but not a disgrace. One problem: how could Eleanor guarantee her daughter’s inheritance?

And then Jill’s mother saw Miranda!

Miranda searched the darkness for numbers, but there were only a few strands of dazzling red surging against the insides of her eyelids.

What if they had driven Griffin to it?

No, Morgan, listen! You can’t leave me out of the equation.

And what if Molly’s transformation into Eleanor Drummond was the beginning of murder? Perhaps until then he could have justified rape as a response to his victim’s desires, the voyeur seduced by his vision. But she had backed him against the wall, the way she had Roger Poole, the man who beat up his kids. Instead of retiring, perhaps into fantasy, Griffin had turned to something more sinister — a metamorphosis of his own. He again had the power. What if she had known that and believed it was her fault?

A brief thought snapped like a whip through her mind. The horror, that summer, was learning she had the capacity to make a man monstrous! That was what she couldn’t forgive herself for.

They — Griffin and Eleanor — had sustained each other by mutual hatred, but Eleanor had another life. He had only this dungeon and his beloved koi.

Miranda doubted they were lovers.

He had needed Eleanor’s soul. Dried walnuts?

No, Morgan, no. That’s your expression, but no. The soul is whatever’s inside that gives a human being moral dimension, like air in a balloon. You can’t see it, but it’s there. Don’t give up on souls because you’ve given up on God.

Griffin had needed Eleanor’s soul because he didn’t have one. And after he finished with their daughter, he knew Eleanor’s soul would be gone, as well, and it would be time to die.

And he did finish with her, with all his victims. Perhaps because of their enfeeblement or their desperate affection. Maybe because they were no longer innocent; no longer incarnations of his virgin mother.

You check, Morgan. I bet she died just before all this started, before his watching got out of hand. You check it for me, okay?

And he had left them in here, turned up the controls. They had died by desiccation, their juices gone, their corpses dried to the bone. This was an execution chamber. How many had died here between Molly and her? Was she the first?

Oh, my God, Morgan, I’m tired!

Miranda could feel the overwhelming rage rising within her, and with bitter irony she realized she no longer had enough strength to sustain it.

Eleanor had wanted them to think they were lovers. That was strategic. Better her daughter was the offspring of a wealthy eccentric and his mistress than sired by a serial killer. Better they were lovers than she was the keeper of his conscience, and a failure at that.

Jill’s mother had counted on Miranda being compelled to understand her connection with Griffin. She had sent her daughter to the morgue. She was sure Molly Bray and Eleanor Drummond would merge when Miranda met her daughter. The dead woman had known everything about her. She was a knowledge broker — that was her power, and her downfall.

She was right, Morgan. Jill is my responsibility. I’ll look after Molly Bray’s daughter as if she were my own.

Morgan tried sporadically through the day to locate Miranda, pacing his initiatives to keep his rising apprehension in check. When she didn’t turn up at Robert Griffin’s house before Nishimura and Ikuko left, he went inside and used the telephone. His cell phone was back in his kitchen where it usually was when it wasn’t with his pager in his desk at headquarters. He called her cell phone, he called her at headquarters. He called her at home and listened to her voice mail greeting.

When Nishimura came to the door, Morgan looked up from where he was comfortably ensconced in the wingback chair and explained he would wait for Miranda here. She had said nothing to suggest she would come to Griffin’s, but he didn’t know where else to look.

He dozed awkwardly in the chair, wanting, when she walked in, to seem as if he had been thinking with his eyes closed. When he awoke and glanced at his watch, it was mid-afternoon. He called the office again. No one had seen Miranda. Maybe she was sick, they told him. He knew that wasn’t it. She would have called him. Morgan thought of trying to call someone in Waldron to see if she had gone up there on family business, but where? He tracked down her sister in Vancouver, and she said they hadn’t been in touch, but if Miranda did call she would let him know that he was asking about her. Morgan gave her Griffin’s number and said she should phone him collect. He expected no resolution from that quarter, but it amused him to be building up the outstanding balance on Griffin’s bill. Miranda would have to deal with it. She would be exasperated but tolerant.

Morgan walked through the corridor and into the labyrinthine crypt under the oldest part of the house, heading directly to the pump room where the door opened easily. He surveyed the elaborate convolutions of pipes and tanks, went over and picked up the rag draped across the tap. He knew what a gusset was and tossed the rag aside.

Striding out to the main passageway again, he turned and stopped at the wine cellar door without noticing there was a key in the lock. He leaned forward to peer through the glass but could see nothing, not even his shadowed reflection. Returning to the main passage, he made his way to the door of the tunnel connected to the de Cuchilleros estate, pushed it open, and stared into the darkness. Another dead end. He returned to his chair.

Morgan was too restless to settle for very long, and after a while he rose, put on his rumpled jacket, though it wasn’t cool in the cellars, and picked up a pewter candle holder. Taking the Zippo from his pocket, he lit the candle and went back to the tunnel entrance. There was an imperceptible breeze that made the flame flicker as he entered the darkness. The tunnel took several abrupt turns, and Morgan felt increasingly claustrophobic. Then a turgid movement of air snuffed out the candle, and for a moment he froze. The floor was suddenly a dark abyss, as if he might step off the earth into a terrible void.

The lighter dropped when he took it from his pocket and clattered against the cobbles. As he squatted slowly toward the sound where it had landed, warm wax dripped onto his wrist. In surprise he released his grip on the candle holder and was startled by the resonant thud of pewter on stone as it fell to the floor. Shifting to his knees, he made a sweep through the darkness with his hand and almost immediately brushed against the holder, but the candle was gone. He was amused and annoyed at his fear. His fingers closed around the lighter, and he rose to his feet. His mind, even before a flame leaped into the darkness, summoned an image of Jill at the morgue.

Locating the candle, he relit it, carefully shielded the flame with his cupped hand, and moved forward inside the flickering aura of light until he was confronted by two heavy oak doors, one of which opened with considerable effort onto a stone stairway. At the top of the steps he discovered he was in the de Cuchilleros carriage house, which was attached to the main house and was used as a garage. Descending, he tried the other door, which swung freely as if the hinges had been oiled, and found himself staring out into the widow’s back garden.

Morgan was strangely unnerved by his feelings of violation as a trespasser, and he returned through the tunnel. He had been enthralled by the cellars and passageways, but now it all seemed more sinister, perhaps because for a moment the darkness had closed around him like the walls of a grave.

Before going home he went down to police headquarters, did a search of hospital admissions with no result, and finally decided Miranda had gone off on a fling. When he got home, he sat in front of the television, angry at her and worried. If she was touring the Muskoka colours, it was a dumb way to do it, not telling him first. No one at headquarters had showed any concern. Alex Rufalo had pointed out that she was on compassionate leave, so she could do what she wanted.

Morgan fell asleep sprawled across his sofa. When he woke up, the television was flickering grey. He shivered while he stood beside the toilet to pee. Weighed down with the excessive gravity of early morning, he struggled to get up the stairs. After he crawled into bed, he dreamed of autumn leaves falling on still water.

Miranda awakened in bone-wracking pain. She tried to raise herself, but her body was a dead weight. Her mind seemed uncannily lucid, her mental world separate from its violated container, reaching to float free. Her body was holding her back, urging her that it was time perhaps to leave it behind.

I remember the victims, she thought. I try to remember the victims.

Miranda had known the names of all fourteen young women who were shot to death at École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1989. But then they began to slip away, and she jumbled first names with last, distorting their identities, and was ashamed. And she was angry that she couldn’t forget their killer’s name.

She recalled reading about Kitty Genovese who had died in New York in the 1960s while witnesses had looked out their windows and watched her being stabbed, then watched again when her assailant returned a half-hour later and stabbed her some more until she was dead. She remembered Mary Jo Kopechne at Chap-paquiddick, Massachusetts, who may have been implicated in her own demise, or maybe not.

She remembered she had never been to Europe.

Envisioning her subterranean prison of stone and plastered brick and old timbers, she summoned images of European timelessness, the walls of medieval towns weaving through cities, and these pictures gave way to visions of utter depravity, the mounds of human corpses she had witnessed with fascinated horror in old newsreels, trying to pick out among the twisted limbs and torsos and gaping misshapen heads whole figures, somehow as if she could restore dignity to a few of them if only she could recognize individuals, not a jumble of parts.

She thought of Safiya Husaini, the woman in Nigeria condemned to be buried to the waist and stoned to death with rocks of a prescribed size because she had submitted to forced sex with an elderly relative. This was her fate under the jurisdiction of sharia, proclaimed by some as the fundamental laws of God. Sometimes Miranda felt sorry for God. To her horror she couldn’t recall whether or not the execution had been carried out. She didn’t know whether Safiya Husaini was alive or dead.

In Ontario sharia was accepted as law. Was it? Her eyes burned without tears to wash away pain.

If she walked through a slave market, should she stifle her outrage because it was custom, or tear off the manacles, even of slaves who found comfort in slavery?

Fadime — that was the name of the young Kurdish woman in Sweden who was killed by her father for loving a Swede. Honour killings in Canada. Surely dishonour.

A poem by Margaret Atwood came to her in precise, cruel images; there was no beauty in them. The poem was called “Women’s Issue,” or it should have been, but that was close enough. Nameless women give birth to the men who arrange to have stakes driven between other women’s legs and their vaginas sewn up, and to the men who line up for a turn at the same used prostitute, adding their semen to the spilled waste of the world. She couldn’t sort out the poem’s grisly imagery from her own memories of brutalized women, nameless, blood-drenched, in ditches and bedrooms and cars, and splayed out on stainless-steel trays at the morgue.

When did political correctness become moral compromise? That was her last, pellucid thought, which she associated with burkas, with cultural brutality, with the infinite pain of bearing and not bearing children, with tolerance for death.

Miranda’s whole system was shutting down. She could feel her guts shrivel, could identify each organ by its unique tremulations of pain as she did a ghoulish inventory. Her heart beat like a fist clenched over nothing, expanding and contracting in exhaustion; her breath grated against her throat, her lungs were in flames.

Thinking was suddenly unbearable. One minute she was filled with ideas, the next almost vacant. Except she knew something. She knew she had been the victim of a crime, of rape, and of consequences fast approaching closure. Not through her death. Through the revelation of suffering.

She groped with her hands until they found each other over her stomach. Then she let her elbows drop and her forearms settle against the bed by her thighs. She gave a mighty heave and swung herself forward through a muffled scream so that her legs draped over the side, pulling her upright, and a dry sob emerged from deep in her chest. She felt her feet scrape against the floor as she struggled to get them under her weight, and slowly she rose to her full height.

Miranda stood, wavering, getting her bearings. She brought words up through the raw flesh of her throat to whisper into the darkness.

“My name is Miranda Quin!”

Her lips cracked open and bled as she spoke, and her throat seized so that she clutched it with her hands, pressing hard against the pain until she could breathe. She edged her way along the wall between the bed and the door. Stopping, she pressed the fingertips of her right hand against the rough concrete.

In violent movements she ripped skin from her fingers until she felt warm blood flow back over her wrist. She turned and shuffled slowly across to the far wall, which she knew was already streaked with her blood. Steadying herself against the wall with her extended left hand, she began to inscribe with fresh blood, using her right hand. Her message was simple: “I am Miranda Quin.”

Her fingers had lost all feeling when she finished, and she felt a strange sense of ease as she sank to the stone floor. After unmeasurable time, she crawled to the bed, hauled herself up onto it, and stretched herself out, reconciled now to her imminent death.