Still Waters (6 page)

She called back. “Morgan, listen —”

“You're not hurt, not in danger?”

“No, but —”

He hung up again.

She had once called him in the small hours of the night after wakening from a nightmare; she was weeping and residual images of violence were still flooding her mind, refusing to coalesce into the shattered narrative from which she had emerged, refusing to fade. “Morgan,” she had said into the phone beside her bed, into the darkness. “Help me.”

“Turn on the lights,” he had told her. How had he known? She was afraid the walls might be drenched in blood; she was afraid of the light.

“It's okay,” he said. “Turn on the lights, Miranda. You've been dreaming.”

She tried to tell him about the nightmare. Her voice was tremulous. She could only remember shrieking, and terrible silence, fragments of horror, images of shattered flesh.

“I've been there,” he said. “We see too much. You can't suppress horror forever, Miranda. Are you in bed? You relax and just listen. Did you ever consider, during surgery maybe you feel the scalpel at work? Anaesthetic isn't a painkiller. It just snuffs out the memories of what you've been through. Dreams are like that — they absorb the pain. It isn't the nightmare. It's waking up in the middle. Doctors have nightmares about patients on the operating table becoming suddenly conscious.
Ambulance drivers and firemen…”

He let his voice drone, reassuring her with empathy and morbid detachment, and then he told her to lie back with the phone on the pillow beside her and try to empty her mind.

After a while she wasn't sure whether the sounds of breathing were her own. “Are you still there, Morgan?”

“Yeah, you go to sleep.”

And she did. And when the natural light of morning filled the room, she awoke with no recollection of further violence. She mumbled into the phone beside her, “You still there?”

“Yeah. You have morning breath.”

“Thanks, Morgan. It's okay now. See you at work.”

“G'night,” he said, and a dial tone displaced the open line.

“Good morning,” she had said into the room. “Good morning, David.”

Now she grabbed the black receiver again and dialled his number. It rang for a long time, then he picked up.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was taking a pee. So what's the crisis?”

Morgan listened, envisioning his partner in bed. It made him feel lonely. He was sitting on the blue sofa in his living room in boxers and a T-shirt. The city through open blinds loomed under a canopy of dismal light that erased the stars.

“He doesn't say who's going to do it? He doesn't say why?”

“No,” she said.

“He doesn't say how he knows?”

“No.”

“The mistress, Eleanor Drummond, she said nothing?”

“No.”

“She witnessed a bizarre codicil to her lover's will. He dies. She says nothing?”

“Yes.”

“He couldn't anticipate you'd be on the case, Miranda.”

“I wonder if he knew how he would die?”

“Surrounded by koi?”

“He seems almost to welcome it.”

“He accepts — there's a difference.”

“He doesn't say why he's picked me or how we connect.”

“You don't remember him? Nothing?”

“Complete blank. When I heard his name today — I mean, WASP names are always familiar, you know what I mean? There are only so many to go around. But I never saw him before. His face in the class photo is indistinct. It was a grad course and I was an undergraduate. Everyone was older. He must have been in his forties if he's the guy in the pond. Morgan, I was the only undergraduate in linguistics to receive a graduate award. I noticed everything, everything.”

“I got a philosophy scholarship in my last year. I didn't use it, either.”

“But this is not about you.” She waited for a response, then decided to override his silence in case he was sulking. “Griffin wants the Institute to be Semiology not Semiotics — in deference to Sandhu's Continental bent, I assume.”

“It's extortion, you know.”

“If I'm not onside, the Benevolent Fund loses big and the Canadian future of signifiers and signs is in peril. Morgan, maybe he didn't want to save himself.”

“Or maybe that's what this is all about — saving
himself.” They both considered the implications; the quiet of their shared breathing held them together. “Chateau Mouton Rothschild came out with a Balthus line drawing on the label of its 1993 vintage — a naked prepubescent vixen, and a threat to neo-puritan propriety. Outside of Europe the vintage was marketed with a blank label. And that's the one collectors want. Not the Balthus. They covet the empty label.”

“Which only has meaning if you know the story.”

“Exactly. You have to know what isn't there.”

“That doesn't help,” said Miranda. “Everything about this guy escapes me. What if we were friends or lovers and it's all gone away?”

“Unlikely!”

“But what if?”

“Then it will come back.”

“Do you think you could have a real relationship with someone you don't know?”

“I saw a woman on the subway once when I was a kid, and she looked like I thought my mother could have looked if the world was different. I think of that woman sometimes, even now. She stayed the same age while I've grown old and cranky and my mother grew old and cranky and died. That woman I never knew has been a shaping influence in my life, and I just saw her once standing on the Rosedale platform, not even on the train. I was the one passing through.”

“You wanted to become a Rosedale matron?”

“Good night, Miranda. We'll sort this out in the morning.”

He didn't wait for her to respond but hung up gently. She wandered into the bedroom and turned out the lights.

The screen saver was still on. She sat in front of the
computer, stared into the vacuity of a virtual undersea world, and let the computerized parrotfish transform in her mind to real fish swimming beside her in crystal-clear water, butting their beaks against coral to free up nutrients, sliding lazily between dimensions like colourful ideas drifting at random, hovering asleep against boulder outcroppings, darting toward her bubbles, and swinging away in disdain from their urgent ascent.

Breaking from the sensual languor that was closing around her, withdrawing her hands from between her thighs where they had settled palms out, afraid the soporific of sex with herself might bring on nightmares, she punched up her email account. She dragged the entire bundle of new messages into the delete folder. As they flicked from view, a return address caught her eye. Retrieving the message, she slotted it back to the in box. The vaguely obscene Anglo-Saxon resonance of
kumonryu. ca
was overridden by the hint of something mysterious, and the message opened on the screen, confirming her instincts. It was a note from Robert Griffin.

Enough for one night, she thought. After skimming Griffin's detailed instructions on the care of his prize fish, which struck her as a not very odd directive, given their current relationship, she opened her Web browser and wandered from site to site, looking at koi, looking at fashion design websites, coming back to koi, looking at travel destinations, and more koi, until her personality was soothingly extinguished among worlds of pure information. Leaving the monitor on, she lay down and faded into a sleepless torpor that lasted until dawn broke open the day and she fell into herself once again.

The 911 call was from an elderly woman who had a clear view of the Griffin garden from her attic. She admitted it readily to the officers who came to her door early the next morning, and she ignored their query about why she hadn't given her name. The woman made it clear it would be an impertinence to ask why she had been in the attic. She enjoyed being interviewed. She didn't know Robert Griffin, she said, though her house had once belonged to his family.

As neighbours, they had exchanged occasional pleasantries, and when her husband died, Griffin delivered flowers in person. It was several years since they had last spoken. He employed cleaning and gardening services that came every week. And he had a
friend
.

His
friend
visited on a regular basis, usually midweek, late afternoon, and never stayed over.

Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros had observed nothing unusual on the day of Griffin's murder. She referred to
“he” and “him” when he was alive as if that were his name, finding in the pronouns an appropriate distance from the sordid events and their tantalizing details. She couldn't imagine how the “remains” — said with the relish of an habitual Agatha Christie reader — how “it,” as she thereafter referred to the body, depriving Griffin in death even of gender, got into the pond. She just glanced out, and he was dead. She felt it was her civic duty to inform the police. The uniformed officers assured her she had been very neighbourly and that real detectives would call by if there were any more questions.

When Miranda arrived at the Griffin place with two black coffees and cinnamon-raisin bagels, toasted, with light cream cheese, Morgan was beside the upper pond, talking to the officers who had interviewed the woman next door.

She handed Morgan his coffee and bagel. Information at this point was sparse. She had checked on the way over with Ellen Ravenscroft. A preliminary examination confirmed no evidence of significant wounds or bruises. A superficial cut on the forehead, nothing more.

Miranda sat on the limestone parapet. After a while, Morgan joined her. They consumed their breakfast without talking. Why would someone practise law on his own? she wondered. Why semiotics? It wasn't a middle-aged hobby. She couldn't get a grasp on Griffin as a living person, only as a corpse. Why would someone want to work homicide? Things like that just occurred — here they were, Morgan and her, hovering on either side of forty, with murder in common. At the moment, with the chimerical Robert Griffin in common. No, not a chimera; he was real. Yet she connected with him only in death.

Sometimes it happened that way. Both of them felt tremulations on occasion, returning to a crime scene where they had seen a locket around the neck of a derelict beaten to death, emptiness clutched in the dead hand of a rape victim. This was different. It wasn't empathy she felt, but a strange anxiety. Despite the lack of emotional hooks, Griffin's murder had taken on an eerie life of its own.

Was he the architect of a plot gone awry, or a victim of malevolence beyond his control? There was a lot of money involved, there was his stunning asexual mistress, there was Miranda's connection, there were the koi.

Miranda had absorbed more than she had thought the previous night, reading about koi on the Net. She had checked out Chagoi and wasn't convinced that every good pond would have one. She thought she could tell a Sanke from a Showa, a new-style Showa from an old. The intensity of black pigmentation against slashes of red on vibrant white was more intricate on the actual fish, and as they carved elusive patterns through the water she faltered, not sure she could tell one from another.

“We'd better feed them,” she said.

“I did.”

“How did you get into the house? I have the keys.”

“There's food in the bin by the door.”

“And you knew how much, of course. Nice Sanke, that one.”

“Which one?”

“The big one.”

“Which big one?”

So, she thought, those two were Sanke. The other big guy, the length of her arm with black on its head, had to be a Showa.

“I like the Showa best,” she said. “Old-style. Lots of black.”

“Sumi,” he said. “Black is sumi, red is hi.”

“What got you going on koi, Morgan? It's unusual even for you.”

“A magazine cover in one of the big box stores. I was grazing through the magazine section, looking at gardening journals —”

“You don't garden.”

“I know, but it was spring.”

“Right.”

“I saw the word
koi
in bright orange letters across the top of a magazine for the English country gardener, and I didn't know what koi meant —”

“You would hate that.”

“So I've been reading. Good thing, too.”

“For sure — if this is a crime about fish.”

“Exactly.”

“I was on the Net last night,” said Miranda. “Emailed an old friend of mine, a marine biologist in Halifax. I asked her about the water swirling in the wrong direction. She's one hour ahead of us, so I got my answer this morning before I left home.”

“We figured it was the filter.”

“Yeah, but do you know why? It returns perpendicular to the wall to create a current, so the fish are always swimming. To keep them in shape. It can probably be reversed, so they swim both ways.”

He chewed his bagel and sipped his coffee, resisting what to him seemed an obvious quip about swimming both ways. “Have I ever met her?”

“No, you don't know everyone I know, you know.”

“I know.”

They walked over to the lower pond. It was skirted by rocks placed with casual artifice as if by the hand of a thoughtful god. Set off against shrubbery, grasses,
moss, and well-placed Japanese maples, close under the towering silver maples, there was a lovely decadence about it, haunting, like a Southern mansion from Faulkner drifting toward ruin.

“Must be a spring down there,” said Miranda. “And enough seepage through the embankment to keep it fresh.”

“Must be,” said Morgan. She was right, of course. There had to be considerable flow if there were no filters or even an aerator.

“It's lined with bentonite clay.” She settled down on her heels to scoop a handful of muck from below the waterline.

Of course, he thought.

“I'll bet there are fish in there,” she said. “The diver missed them.”