Still Waters (25 page)

“We cooked some of them once — the crayfish. Celia said her friend Russell Livingstone used to roast them on a stick when they didn't catch any trout, and the shiners weren't worth bothering with. Russell was like Celia's brother, but he moved away. It was like he died.”

“Did you eat them?”

“No. I don't think so. We let them go. But don't you see? We didn't release them out of kindness. We were cruel. We just didn't know what else to do with them.”

“You weren't cruel. You were just kids.”

“Innocent?”

“Innocent. In Toronto we used to hunt along the ravines with slingshots and BB guns.”

“Did you ever kill anything?”

“Not even close. I had a friend who cut the tail off a road-kill raccoon and we took it to school as a trophy, but everyone knew it was road kill and that we'd get rabies or leprosy. The teacher made us throw it out in
the big garbage bin and then wash our hands in boiling water and go home and change.”

“In boiling water?”

“Near enough. The teacher was really scared of dead things.”

“I can see Molly Bray as a girl catching crayfish,” said Miranda, changing the subject. “She's wading in the shallows. You can see her. Scrunch up your eyes and stare into the sun.”

Morgan thought perhaps he could, by shielding his eyes from the light.

They sat close together beside the dam, both with their knees drawn up, gazing out over the pond, feeling the soft autumn breeze on their faces.

Morgan envisioned a grown-up Eleanor Drummond, realizing she had never been a child. She was dressed in city clothes, her tailored skirt hiked up and tucked into a black leather belt, her Jimmy Choo boots set neatly on shore. She was wading with slow, deliberate movements through water up to her calves, with a small net in her hand, staring intently through the fractured glare, able to see down among the rocks where her own reflection rippled the sun.

At first it seemed she was just across from them, with the sun at her back, then she was in the shallows by the house where the old woman lived. Every few minutes she would reach down and fastidiously turn over a rock, careful when she straightened not to let water drizzle along her arm into the sleeve of her blouse. She had a crystal bowl in one hand. He couldn't see her pluck crayfish from the bottom. The net was gone, maybe there had been no net, but the crystal bowl was slowly filling with crayfish.

She turned and looked at him, directly away from the sun, so that her face was haloed in light, and yet it
wasn't in shadow but softly radiant and he could see her features clearly. Her expression was serene. She bore the look of composure he had seen on the lovely dead face of the figure in the morgue, but she caught his eye and smiled. She gazed into her bowl with satisfaction, then back to the water, peering intently into the shallow depths for her quarry.

The old woman sat on the porch of the farmhouse off to the side, rocking in a painted chair near the railingless edge, watching Eleanor Drummond gradually fill up her bowl with small scrambling creatures.

Miranda saw Molly Bray splashing in the shallows across from them, spraying sunlight into the air. There were no sounds. It was a silent vision, but vivid in every detail. Molly was thirteen, old enough to have abandoned crayfish hunts, still wanting to play, refusing to submit to the maturity her body was taunting her with this summer for the first time, like a promise and threat rolled into one unnerving sensation that wouldn't recede except when she played fiercely, as she was now, at childish games.

She was between her grandmother's house and the mill. She was swinging an old metal grain bucket, scooping up water and swinging it around so that the stream-lets of water leaking out the bottom bent through the air in fine splattering rainbows. She would suddenly stop and look down, drive her hand through the surface, and come up with a crayfish caught between pincers of her thumb and forefinger. Then she would wave it around to her grandmother back on the porch, toward the old wooden mill like a talisman, warding off evil so trivial that it was funny.

Miranda felt what the girl felt. She was her emanation, not her likeness or double, but connected as if they were joined in another dimension, two minds not yet born
into the world that would drive them apart. Miranda looked through Molly's eyes and thought she could see eyes staring back between the boards by the flume. The mill was rumbling against the silence. The slow, laborious groaning and keening of wooden shafts turning and wooden gears grinding on iron and wood filled her head as she gamboled forward through the shallow water, defiant.
Let him watch.
Her clothes were soaking, her T-shirt and shorts clinging to her supple young body as she stepped up onto the roadway above the dam, squarely in front of the peephole, shaking like a puppy, spraying the air with fine rainbows of mist, turning toward the old house and strutting haughtily home.

“My God, Morgan! He used to watch her!”

They withdrew from their separate reveries, which had converged more than they knew on images of water and innocence: the defiant innocence of a wilful young girl and the illusory innocence of a worldly woman on a break from too much reality.

“What is it we were after, going to Detzler's Landing?” she asked, sliding away so she could address Morgan face to face. “Why did we go there?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “I wanted to get a feeling for who Eleanor Drummond was. You wanted to find Molly Bray. We went to detect. That's what we do. And now we're here. In Waterloo County.”

“Detzler's Landing isn't that far away.”

“Maybe not from Waldron, but it's a very long way from Toronto. There's a huge leap from Molly Bray to Eleanor Drummond.”

“But, Morgan, in Toronto she was both.”

“From the girl to the woman, the foundling who grew up in the sticks to the sleek-city woman who tortured them both unto death, there's an abyss …”

“Maybe so. But I'm the bridge! I
am
the bridge.”

“You?”

“I know that girl, Morgan. She wasn't like me, but I know her, and I knew Eleanor Drummond. In spite of myself, we connected.”

Morgan stared into the depths of reflected water shining in her eyes and then dropped his gaze so she could think out loud

“Look,” she said, “I can imagine Molly, from what Miss Clarke described, flaunting her adolescence if she knew he was watching. She did. She would do that.”

“How so?” He hadn't meant to speak up.

“It's a matter of power. She's being watched, she watches. He knows she's onto him, but he can't stop. He's obsessive-compulsive, excited by knowing she knows.”

She proceeded, forgetting that Griffin peeping through from the mill hadn't been revealed to Morgan, who at the time had been imagining the woman from the city, not the girl. He struggled for a moment and caught up, glancing at the mill tower and back at Miranda, whose features were bathed in the soft light of the late afternoon.

“When they occasionally pass on the road, when she walks by the mill to the store and he's out tinkering, maybe building that absurd picket fence, they're cordial. It's part of the game. He's a balding man in his early fifties. She's a country girl, barely into puberty, a socially nondescript pretty young thing. But from the shadows he sees her as purity incarnate, his own mother restored to primal innocence.”

“There's a lot about innocence I don't understand.”

“That's probably true, Morgan.”

“Where do you fit in?”

“A decade before … and I was older. I mean, she wasn't naive, but she wasn't Lolita. That's male fantasy, that a girl
that age understands what she's doing. It makes it exciting. But she doesn't. She feels it, her hormones are burning her up inside, but she doesn't understand. It's imagination and hormones, powerlessness and power …”

“And neither did you. You didn't understand. You and your friend.”

“By that summer we were seventeen, Celia was sleeping with Donny, we weren't kids. Not sleeping. Doing it in Donny's car. There were lots of better places, but sex and back seats of cars were tradition.”

“Not where I came from. We didn't have cars.”

“No premarital sex?”

“Working parents and living-room floors.”

“So he was repeating history. There was a pattern.”

“It takes more than two.”

“But how likely is it that we were the only ones? It could have been something he did over and over. Sometimes it ended with sex, other times rape. It's a matter of perspective — no, judgment. There's a fine line between. Anyone watched by a predatory voyeur is a victim but doesn't know she's a victim until she submits to his gaze.”

“Miranda, you were —”

“No, Morgan, I wasn't.” She paused. “How did he poop? That's a long time. Sometimes I stayed most of the day. What did he do?”

“It wouldn't be hard to go five, six hours, but he'd have to pee. He must have peed in a bottle.”

“Can you do that — pee in a bottle?”

“Yeah, I can,” he said.

“I can't. I tried once, but I wasn't very good. In a tent, in a jar in a tent. I peed my initials in the snow in front of Hart House one night. You could read it, too, but it dribbled down my leg and I got really cold and had to go home.”

“You were drunk.”

“I was not drunk. I was making a statement.”

“About what?”

“I don't know. What is it about when you pee in the snow in the middle of a university campus?”

“He probably had a jar,” said Morgan. “Maybe he kept them and his wine cellar is filled with jars of old urine.”

“I wrote an entire name in the snow once.” She didn't want to return to questions of moral responsibility. “It wasn't my own pee, of course …”

“Your handwriting's legendary, Miranda.”

“Is it? He watched me. I let him, and then we were lovers.”

“You weren't lovers.”

“I was eighteen.”

“A virgin?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Well?”

“What? I forgot losing my virginity, Morgan. If time heals, why didn't I forget enough to remember? All these years I never thought about it. Isn't that funny?”

“Time doesn't heal. It creates scar tissue. I remember.”

“You weren't there!”

“Losing my own —”

“I don't want to hear about it. God, Morgan!”

“Sorry. I'm not too smart sometimes, but I have good instincts, and I'm sensitive.”

“You're relentlessly intelligent, Morgan, with the sensitivity of a watermelon.”

“And?”

“The instincts of an aardvark.”

“Now that's funny. So what do you think happened?
Why did Molly suddenly leave town?”

Miranda seemed from her benign expression as she faced the breeze drifting over the millpond to be almost passive, sorting things out, following things through. It was difficult, Morgan thought, to connect the dots when they were swarming like gnats or mosquitoes. You didn't want to rush the design; it was all in the perception.

“Did you notice that Detzler's mill closed in 1988?” she suddenly asked. “That was the summer she was sixteen. Griffin left. Oxley bought the abandoned mill nine or ten years later. Yes, well. Then. No. Yes! Yes, they did. They did it! That last summer, that's what happened!

“At sixteen I wasn't a foundling, but I
was
sixteen. You want desperately to know the limits of identity from the outside in … from the immeasurable genetic sea, to know the current that flows through your veins. Know what I mean? So you endlessly analyze your parents, you find them wanting. Maybe they were exchanged at your birth. But she had no parents at all, not even an origin myth, just a girl at the door with a baby, and a self-professed spinster and her old friend who pooled their affection to make a place for her in the world, but it wasn't a place of her own.

“So she turns to Griffin. She'd been pushing and pushing. He was like a great ugly mirror, but she could see herself in the glass. She was exploring her awakening sexuality, maybe skinny-dipping or sunning on the grass between the mill and the house. She loved her old granny, but she needed to know who she was, from the inside out as well as the outside in.

“After summers of playing him, not knowing whether he was walleye or pike, fresh fish or foul, she needed to connect. She walked in on him literally. He was her prince, and he raped her, Morgan. There's a precedent,
there's a pattern. He raped her inside the mill, in the shadows, on a cot on the planks over the watercourse, inside the mill. I know he raped her. And then he closed down the mill and left.”

“And next?” he asked.

“She was pregnant.”

“Pregnant!”

“Pregnant with Elizabeth Jill.”

“Named after Elizabeth Clarke.”

“Molly Bray went to the city.”

“What happened?”

“She tracked him down to his Rosedale mansion. It would have seemed like a mansion to her.”

“And?”

“Griffin sent her packing. Maybe he gave her some money. My guess is she spent the next few months on the street learning Toronto.”

“How do you figure?”

“There had to be a period of metamorphosis. Where else could she go? I know about metamorphosis, Morgan. I can imagine what she must have endured. You don't just shuck off one identity and unfold your wings to dry in the air. Transformation is traumatic. There had to be time. She didn't just pass from being a girl to being a woman during the course of her pregnancy. She remade herself …”

“Became her own creation.”

“She worked on it.”

“No one was looking for her.”

“Even if they had been, she was invisible.”

“Seven thousand, maybe ten thousand kids on the streets last winter, just in TO.”