“Well, I wanted to speak to you personally.”
“Perhaps we should go outside,” said Morgan as he rose to his feet and shepherded the two women through the French doors.
“It's chilly out here,” Mrs. de Cuchilleros said.
Dolores looked at her sympathetically but didn't offer her cardigan, seeming to know the gesture would be wasted. Since Morgan didn't offer his own jacket, the old woman braced her shoulders and marched over to the pool where her neighbour's body had been floating when she discovered it from her aerie next door. She waited for her maid and Morgan to catch up, then made a declaration. “Dolores and I cleaned out the leaves.”
“You what!” Morgan was annoyed both at her presumption and at the triviality of her announcement.
“Dolores and I cleaned out the leaves.”
“You came here?”
“Early this morning, and we raked the leaves off the
top of his pond.” She paused for dramatic effect, then pointed at the green pond. “That one.” Ominously, she added, “It looks like mine ⦠on the surface.”
“You've done this before?” asked Morgan, irritated by the way she was trying to position herself in a drama with pregnant pauses and curious inflections.
“I've only been here ⦠once ⦠since poor Mr. Griffin was found dead in his fish pond.”
“They're all fish ponds.”
“Oh, no. I would say the two greenish ponds are ponds with fish in them and this one, where he was floating, that's a fish pond.”
“Fair enough,” Morgan said, appreciating the distinction. “Did you come here through the house?”
“Yes, but we didn't disturb anything. He had more leaves on his pond than we ever have in ours. It's the trees, you know, and the wind. So I could see his needed caring for and I wanted to be neighbourly.”
“You did?”
“Yes, I did. Dolores came over with me and we skimmed all the leaves, but a few were waterlogged, and when Dolores tried to scoop them up, they sank. That's when we discovered it.”
“Discovered what?”
“The discrepancy.”
“Mrs. de Cuchilleros, what are you talking about?”
“Be patient, Detective. Dolores's net went down so deep in the water she reached the end of the long handle and could just scrape the bottom.”
“And?”
“And nothing. You see, that's the point!”
He didn't see, and nodded a solemn invitation for the comic relief to proceed.
“Well, we went home and had our morning tea.
But then I began thinking. I asked Dolores if the pond froze around the edges last winter. Our pond, I'm talking about. It seems to come closer to freezing each year. Didn't I ask you that, Dolores? And what did you say?”
“It seems to come closer to freezing each year,” the maid said.
“Mrs. de Cuchilleros â”
“Detective, you're in such a hurry. I told Dolores we had to get a long pole. So we went out into the carriage house and found a long bamboo pole. And just as I suspected, our pond wasn't as deep! That's why it's been freezing up.”
“Mrs. de Cuchilleros, where is this going?”
She smiled.
The old woman had read Agatha Christie, Morgan thought. She knew how these things worked. Pacing was as important as the details being revealed.
“Detective Morgan, the bottom of our pond is lumpy. The bottom of Mr. Griffin's pond is smooth.”
Morgan was uneasy. He cocked an eye quizzically and waited for an unpleasant denouement.
“So there we are, Detective, prodding away with the pole, but it broke. We couldn't get hold of anything. Then a few bits of plastic floated up.”
“From the lumpy bottom?”
“That's how we would describe it, isn't it, Dolores? Our pond, not Mr. Griffin's.”
The maid nodded ambiguously. Dolores appeared to be more and more reticent as the story unfolded, as if she might avoid some grotesque revelation through affected indifference.
“Dolores,” Morgan pressed, “what do you think is down there in your pond, in the de Cuchilleros pond?”
“I don't know, sir.”
“I'll tell you what's down there,” said Mrs. de Cuchilleros.
“All right. What do you think is down there?”
“Dead bodies.”
Morgan had been afraid she would say that. He looked at the Filipino maid for confirmation and grimaced when she receded into inscrutability. In contrast Mrs. de Cuchilleros seemed to rise more and more with each passing moment to the role fate had cast upon her as central protagonist in a drama of unimaginable proportions. A small facet of Morgan's mind clung to the serio-comic performance, even as a suffocating fear rose inside him for what lay ahead, a dread that must inevitably connect with Miranda's disappearance.
Mrs. de Cuchilleros smiled solemnly, the way people did at funerals, and lowered her voice to a whisper as if she feared being overheard by the dead. “I felt down there with a rake â we taped a garden rake onto the handle of a hoe â and I could feel things. They felt slippery and mucky. We stirred up a lot of clay. There are bodies covered in silt and clay and wrapped in plastic. I didn't want to puncture anything, so I let the rake slide around, but I could feel them. I don't know whether they're cut up into pieces or not. It's hard to tell with a rake.”
Morgan grasped for alternative explanations, but nothing took hold. Details and patterns careened through his brain in slow motion as if he were in a car spinning out of control and a part of his mind was poised off to the side, waiting to see how everything turned out.
Griffin had forced himself on Miranda. Before that, on Molly's mother, and after, on Molly, his own daughter. This history alone, foreshortened by the intensity of the moment, seemed proof of the man's rapacious depravity. A whole range of ghastly scenarios radiated out
from the probability that Robert Griffin was responsible for multiple murders and that Eleanor Drummond had known about his homicidal proclivities.
Molly Bray had become part of her assailant's world. She had brought up her daughter with Griffin's resources and assumed strange authority in his life. Was her control not only through using the sordid particulars of her birth like a weapon, but in knowing he was a serial killer, knowledge that would implicate her in his crimes? If power corrupted, wielding power over evil might corrupt absolutely.
Morgan was intrigued, as his ideas coalesced, that he had immediately accepted the explanation offered by Mrs. de Cuchilleros for the unnatural contours at the bottom of her pond. There was a ghastly inevitability to the revelation of profligate death. The bodies, he was sure, were there.
And Miranda was part of the equation, an inextri-cable and vital link between Molly and her mother, between Molly and her daughter. Among the convoluted relations revealed about daughters and fathers, the release of Miranda's suppressed memories was strategic. Molly, playing with death like a puppeteer, had died with the conviction that Miranda would fiercely protect Jill's interests.
Morgan turned directly to face Mrs. de Cuchilleros. “We'll drain the ponds. We can do yours from over here. I believe they connect.”
“Oh, my goodness!” she gasped. “Really?”
She was stunned, faced with the sudden possibility that what she imagined was real. It was as if she had been anticipating the relief of being scolded and sent home. Morgan's response had thrown her into giddy confusion. She grasped Dolores by the arm, obviously wanting to withdraw.
“My goodness is right,” said Morgan. “You've been a great help.”
Mrs. de Cuchilleros seemed to have suddenly aged, and Dolores glanced furtively around like an anxious tourist yearning for something familiar.
“You should leave now and make sure the door in the tunnel isn't locked. The police will need to get back and forth. And please unlatch your gate so we have access from the street.”
“I don't know what we've got ourselves into, Dolores. Come along now. It was very nice talking to you, Detective Morgan.”
He grimaced at the woman's genteel formality as the old woman took her accomplice by the arm to steady herself. Leaning precariously forward, they made their way to the French doors and disappeared into Griffin's den.
Mrs. de Cuchilleros's closing words drifted back to him. “I believe we both need a nice cup of Tippi Assam.”
Morgan forced his way through the undergrowth outside the pump room and rapped on the glass of the low window to summon Eugene Nishimura. Then he went back to the formal pool and watched the fish weaving colours in the transparent depths. When Nishimura appeared, they both gazed into the water as Morgan explained the situation, looking up at each other several times to confirm the horror of their expectations.
They discussed how best to drain the slime-green water. The simplest thing, Nishimura suggested, was to pump it over the bank from Griffin's pond. Assuming they were connected, that would empty the de Cuchilleros pond with the least disturbance. They would have to check both ponds, anyway, smooth bottom or not. Nishimura had a portable two-inch pump in his van that could keep ahead of the natural seepage.
Eugene Nishimura got started on that while Morgan went in to call headquarters. He explained to Alex Rufalo that he thought he had multiple human remains and asked the superintendent to notify the coroner's office.
After he got off the phone, he walked through the tunnel and out into the de Cuchilleros garden. The water level in the widow's pond was already beginning to recede. He called over the wall to Nishimura but couldn't be heard above the sputtering of the pump's gasoline engine. Shrugging, he went back to Griffin's place to check that Nishimura was removing the fish, which he was, transferring them to the formal pool.
Morgan returned to watch the water drop slowly down the clay edges of the de Cuchilleros pond. He splashed the water periodically with a rake to make sure the fish swam through to the Griffin side. Turning, he saw Mrs. de Cuchilleros and Dolores, side by side in the dining-room window, each of them holding a bone china cup of Tippi Assam. He waved and they waved back.
By the time a lump at the bottom of the pool emerged into open air, the place was swarming with police personnel, a forensic team, an emergency unit from the fire department, and a squad of coroner's people, including Ellen Ravenscroft, to whom he nodded without speaking.
Everyone watched in horror as the water receded and the extent of the atrocities became apparent. At first it looked like a series of clay drumlins rising from the depths, the long thin deposits of silt from a glacial retreat. As glistening contours of limbs and torsos and heads took shape, Morgan grieved. He mourned because no one had missed these girls and women enough to resolve the circumstances of their disappearances.
Just as he had immediately accepted that Robert Griffin was a serial killer, Morgan knew with certainty that the man's victims were female. How many had gone missing each year from the streets, how many would have leaped at a ride in a sleek convertible, driven by a man getting on in age who would easily be satisfied and undoubtedly generous? He might just want to bring them home to talk.
Someone turned a hose on the pile with a gentle spray. Morgan's assumption that they were female was confirmed as body after body separated in the wash from the mass, each of them wrapped naked with plastic sheeting and duct tape, in various stages of dilapidation. Their flesh seemed shrivelled to the bone despite the water. Decay had been arrested and the effects of putrefaction had been controlled by the clay silt that shrouded each body in layers stirred up by the fish, season by season over years, and by the coldness of the water and its continuous flow through the soil, leaching through the embankment into the ravine.
Morgan felt an overwhelming loneliness. It should never have happened this way to these human beings, most of whom were known only to God. He was drawn, he wanted to hold them, and he was repelled by what they revealed of human depravity and the human condition. Morgan gazed away, up into the foliage of the silver maples, then down into the gaping hole. His eyes were dry, his mouth was dry. He could taste his own blood.
On impulse he looked around and saw that Mrs. de Cuchilleros and Dolores were absent from the window, but striding toward him from the direction of the door below the carriage house was the young woman he had last seen at the morgue. Before he could stop her she was at his side. He tried to steer her away from the hellish
scene, but she was focused on him. Her eyes were raw and her expression was resolute. She had clearly been coping with demons of her own.
“Jill, for goodness' sake, you shouldn't be here!” he declared.
“I need you to come with me, Mr. Morgan.”
“Jill, I can't. Wait for me over at Griffin's. Tell them I said it's okay. You should be at home.”
She pulled on his arm. “Please, you have to come.”
She wasn't a young woman; she was a terrified child.
When he resisted, she turned and peered into the gaping hole at the tangle of bodies, and emitted an involuntary moan of pure anguish. Morgan gazed down at her, confused by her unflinching refusal to look away and by the incomprehensible pain she seemed almost to share with the dead. He put his arm around her, intending to guide her back up the lawn.
Abruptly, she took the lead and drew him toward the door leading into the tunnel. He stopped at the darkness and indicated the scene behind them. “Did you know about this?” he asked.
“I knew there were others.”
“Others?”
She pulled away from him. “Mr. Morgan, you must come with me. Now.”
Jill wheeled about, striding ahead of him through the tunnel. When they emerged in the den, instead of taking the bypass that led directly into the bowels of the labyrinth, he expected she would lead him to the garden. But she turned and entered the corridor and went past the big door that was slightly ajar from Nishimura's comings and goings. She walked past the bathroom, with Morgan two paces behind, so that he had to step back when she swung open the second big door and plunged into the gloom.
Unexpectedly, she veered to the right. They hurried past several side passages and stopped at the wine cellar.