Still Waters (29 page)

“All right. Tell Victoria I'll get you back in a couple of hours. We'll have lunch downtown. Tell her I'll have you back after lunch.”

When Miranda pulled into the Rosedale garage, she knew Jill had been at Robert Griffin's before. They were both a little windblown. Jill had insisted they drive with the top down.

Miranda was self-conscious about the Jaguar. She expected Mrs. de Cuchilleros would be watching them from among the ferns in her receiving-room window. As far as the neighbours were concerned, she was a police detective investigating a possible homicide and she was driving the dead man's car. She hadn't returned it the previous night, and somehow that made her feel even more truant.

As they had approached, Miranda saw Jill avert her eyes, keeping the house out of her line of vision, then stare
up at it abruptly when they turned down the ramp and descended into the depths. Parked, Miranda smoothed her hair back while Jill resolutely got out of the car as if she were obeying a command. Together they raised the top back up into position, and Miranda locked the doors. She started toward the inside entrance, then realized Jill was already striding back up the ramp. She followed her onto the front steps where the girl was pushing at the door.

“It's locked,” said Miranda.

“I've got the keys.” Inside, Jill's eyes followed the stairs in the direction of the study where her mother had died, but she walked through the hallway to the side, down the stairs into the den, and stopped at the French doors, waiting for Miranda to catch up, looking out through the portico into the garden. Miranda moved beside her, careful to give her enough distance.

“Jill, tell me about it. Why did you want to come here?”

The girl turned to her and stepped back. “To see what it was like.”

“You've been here before?”

“No.”

“Jill, you have.”

The girl looked angry and hurt. “What do you want from me?”

“Jill?”

“I can be anything you want.”

“What do you mean?”

“I could be the daughter she wanted. She would see if she came back. I can be his Shiromuji girl if that's what he wants. I didn't mean for all this to happen. I can be whatever, whatever.”

Miranda was stunned by her compliant ferocity. “Did he call you that?” Panic rose in her gut.

The girl didn't answer.

“Did Robert Griffin call you that?”

No answer.

“Did he?”

“Yes.”

“Jill …” A great wave of despair rolled through Miranda from deep inside to the surface, where it was quelled by an icy chill, and for a moment she felt nothing at all. She stood very still. Then her skin seemed on fire. “I was there, too …” She didn't know if she had said that aloud. Miranda touched the girl, and neither of them burned. She took the girl in her arms.

At first they stood stiffly upright, the girl defiant. Then Jill leaned into Miranda, letting her body weight slump against Miranda, and together they sank to the floor, holding each other on the Kurdish runner, swaying gently in a silent embrace, both of them waiting without apprehension for something to happen.

“Jill,” Miranda said after a long time had passed, “I need you to tell me about it.”

“You knew him before?” Jill asked in a conspiratorial whisper. “Like before he died?”

“Yes, I did. I was a girl your age …” She didn't know how to avoid the euphemism. It was more honest than anything she could think of. “When he came into my life.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“Yes, I think he did very much. He hurt me more than I understood, perhaps more than I understand even now.”

They were sitting now, facing each other on the Kurdish runner, hunched forward like girlfriends.

“Did he hurt you, Jill?”

“He hurt my mother. Did you know she worked for him? She had an office and managed his money. Not the
money he had invested — you know about that. It was money he used for buying things and running his life. She looked after him.”

“Do you know where her office was?”

“I could find it. It's over a fancy gallery in Yorkville. I was only there once. That's when I discovered she called herself Eleanor —”

“You knew at the morgue! Of course you knew.”

“Only after I followed her. I just found out.”

“You followed her?”

“We had a really bad fight. She caught me smoking with my friend Alexandria. She said I couldn't see Alexandria for a month, like that was worse than being grounded. The fight was about that, more than about smoking. I mean, she knew I wasn't really a smoker.”

“Did she ever smoke?”

“My mother? Are you kidding? She was death on tobacco. She had what I'd call a counter-addictive personality.”

“You would?”

“No way she'd give up control, not to a vice, not to a pleasure.”

“Where did you come up with ‘counter-addictive'?”

“We looked it up, Alexandria and me. We researched our parents.”

“Okay. So you had a fight. And you skipped school and followed her to work.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I was researching, like I said. There was a picture in the paper. I wasn't supposed to see it, so I knew it was important. She threw it out without reading it, so I dug it out of the garbage. There was a picture of her with some guy I'd never heard of.”

“Robert Griffin?”

“Yeah. She was in the background, but you could see there was a connection between them. Well, it said she was Eleanor Drummond and she managed the Gryphon Gallery. Surprised much? So I didn't exactly follow her. I just went there. Anyway, he paid a huge amount of money for a paddle with some writing on it.”

“Rongorongo, does that sound familiar?”

“Yeah, maybe. So suddenly I discover she has a whole other life.”

“To protect you, Jill.”

“A life without me. Maybe it was. I think it was. I think she needed to keep me away from him.”

“What happened?”

The girl glanced over her shoulder toward the corridor into the bathroom and cellars as if she were expecting someone to appear. Then she looked back at Miranda. “He was my father. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I think I did. When did you find out?”

“When I went to my mom's office … to Eleanor's Drummond's.”

“Are you mad at your mother for being someone else?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you won't let yourself grieve?”

Jill stared at her intently. She seemed relieved to be sharing her secret world and, at the same time, angry that her secrets were being exposed.

“How did he hurt you?” she asked Miranda.

Miranda wanted to keep the focus on Jill.

“The same way he hurt me?” asked the girl, answering her own question. “The same way he hurt my mother. That's why I was born, you know. Because he hurt my mother. I wasn't a love child.”

“I'm sure your mother loved you very much,” said Miranda, feeling the words hollow in her mouth. It was more complex than love.

“Which mother? Molly Bray was my mother. Eleanor Drummond was my mother. Victoria is my mother. You want to be my mother?”

Miranda flinched. “I want to be your friend.”

“Okay,” said Jill. “That's reasonable.”

Miranda almost laughed.
Reasonable
wasn't a word sufficient to the relationship, but perhaps it would do for now. “Tell me about going to the gallery. This was just a few days ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“It's not listed under your mother's name. I put a trace on her name and only came up with Griffin's address here. The gallery was in his name.”

“I think the building was in my name, and maybe the business was in his.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because that's what she'd do. Because I went through her files.”

“You went through her files! Is that how you found out about Griffin being your father?”

“She wasn't in her office when I went there. She was in a smaller room at the back of the gallery. She didn't see me. I went upstairs. As soon as I opened the door, I knew it was Molly Bray's space, whatever she called herself. You know how everyone has colours? I mean, the decoration wasn't the same as at home, but I could tell from, you know, the arrangement of things, textures and colours, the feel of the place, that it was hers.

“So I snooped. I found letters. Nothing compromising, but they showed an unhealthy connection between them. So he was a mystery. I couldn't figure out who he was.
But I knew from the way his name was in my mother's files that he was my father.”

Miranda continued to be amazed by Jill's use of words such as
compromising
and
unhealthy connection
and found herself scrutinizing the girl-woman seated on the carpet in front of her, searching for a sign of childishness to balance the preternatural maturity. But right now Jill seemed composed. “You knew, like there it was, a paternity file?”

“Sometimes a connection that doesn't make sense, makes sense,” the girl said.

“Point taken.”

“So she didn't come up to her office for a long time. At first I was just doing research, making mental notes to share with Alexandria. But there was more stuff than I wanted. And then my mother came in. She seemed hurt rather than angry … that I had discovered who she really was.”

“Jill, she was Molly Bray, you know that.”

“Do I? Okay. So you don't get to be my age without wondering about your parents. I think real kids wonder if they were adopted, or maybe exchanged at birth. In my case it was my mother who was exchanged, and at my birth, not hers.”

Miranda thought of the same quip passing less poignantly between Morgan and her on their trip to Waterloo County. “And you're not a real kid?” she asked.

Jill ignored her and continued. “I knew, just the way she was upset, that he was my father. Her files were proof positive. She cried. I never saw my mom cry before, and the way she cried, I knew he had hurt her. My father wasn't a nice man. But there she was, running an office or gallery or whatever. She was his partner. Only I wasn't part of the equation. I was off living in a bubble in Wychwood Park.”

“She was the one in the bubble, Jill — Eleanor Drummond. When she went home to you and Victoria, that was the real world. She was Molly Bray. That's what was real. You can see it in the furniture, the art, the loving attention to detail and design in your home. You can see it in you, Jill, how you've turned out to be you.”

Jill smiled sweetly. Miranda figured the girl wanted to believe her, needed to reconcile with her natural mother.

“Did she know you thought Griffin was your father?” Miranda asked. “Did you rush over here directly from Yorkville?”

She wanted to let the revelations come without being forced, to suppress the urgency welling inside her, generated perhaps from the inextricable connections between herself and this girl. She wanted to know everything.

Miranda recognized the name of the gallery. She had browsed there a few times, trying to look prosperous, not at all sure she was carrying it off. The staff — they could hardly be called clerks — had treated her with unwavering cordiality. But the time she had gone in with Morgan they were almost obsequious. It must have been the way Morgan subverted snobbery, wearing quality clothes as if he dressed in the dark.

Morgan had almost bought a bronze sculpture, then had decided against it, possibly because they were asking the price of a new condo. She didn't remember seeing Eleanor Drummond, but then she would have had no reason to deal with management in the little back room with the Salvador Dali on the wall, or in the office upstairs. If they had met, she would have remembered.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” she asked Jill.

“Nothing happened.” The girl rose from the Gabbeh and started pacing, fingering books on the
shelves. Suddenly, she withdrew a fat book and tossed it onto the floor beside Miranda. “Have you read any of these?”

Miranda picked up the book. It was a collection of international short stories. She knew there would be a story by Yukio Mishima. Miranda expected Jill to say the book was her mom's. She opened the volume to the Mishima story and wasn't surprised to find that passages detailing the grisly procedures of seppuku had been underlined in ballpoint. With a different pen someone had put a large exclamation mark beside the brief description of the wife's modest death.

The book felt familiar. Miranda opened it to the flyleaf. “Miranda Quin.” Her name leaped out at her. Underneath were the words “Annesley Hall.”

Grasping for an explanation, she realized this must have been one of the books she had sold when she moved into her apartment at the end of her first year at university. The bastard had followed her, gone through the bins, bought her old books.

She recalled being deeply disturbed back then that her own reading of Mishima's story, according to her professor, was diametrically opposed to the author's intent, which had acquired awesome authority by his real-life disembowelment. Seeing into Mishima's world from such a different perspective had disrupted her moral equilibrium, far more than the obscenity of his pleasure in the details of death. It was a book she had gladly discarded.

“I read that,” said Jill, “about the warrior's wife.”

Miranda waited for her to continue. Instead she walked to the corridor exit. Miranda assumed she was going to the bathroom. The girl stopped outside the door, waiting for Miranda. Together they went into the bathroom.
Jill slumped onto the shower ledge; Miranda sat squarely on the toilet, curious about the unusual intimacy. Jill stared at the drain in the tile floor.

“I was bleeding. I had a shower, and then because I didn't have a towel I jumped around to get warm, and blood came out, so he gave me a towel and I dried myself off.”