Still Waters (23 page)

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

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

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

“Where was her mother?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I suppose they do,” said Morgan.

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

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

“Waldron,” said Miranda.

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

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

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

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

“Some other time perhaps.”

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

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

“What do you mean?” asked Miranda.

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

“How so? Tell us about her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She certainly understood power,” said Morgan.

“She did,” said the old woman.

“But not necessarily its consequences,” he added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She had to?”

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

“Did you call the police?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” she said.

“You're probably right.”

“It's not on the map.”

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