Still Waters (33 page)

“What an amazing collection!” said Nishimura. “I moved the grand champ up from the lower pond. Look at her! Have you ever seen red so wonderfully intense? Asymmetrical continents floating in absolute stillness, perfectly balanced. Such harmony! There's a perfect tension between all the parts. She's beautifully healthy. She's a living haiku, a perfect living haiku.”

“Speaking of which, what does Ochiba Shigura mean?” Morgan asked. “Isn't it something about autumn leaves and still water?”

“It just means Ochiba Shigura. That's what kind of fish it is.”

“Don't the words mean something? Translate it into English.”

“It means Ochiba Shigura. That's a beautiful name for a fish.”

“Meaning what?”

“I don't know. My Japanese isn't that good.”

“It's my favourite. Except for the Chagoi. You've moved it back up, too.”

The two men stood mesmerized, staring into the pel-lucid depths at the fish weaving patterns of colour and
form, lazily ignoring the laws of gravity as they expounded the dimensions of their home in soaring slow motion.

Eventually, Nishimura said, “I've got to get going. My wife thinks I've got a new mistress.”

“A new one?”

Nishimura looked at him with an embarrassed smile. “I
am
a family man.”

“Lovely.”

“I fed them earlier. I'll be back tomorrow to clean the filters.”

“I'll walk out with you,” said Morgan. “I don't want to be left in the dark.”

Miranda slept fitfully for an indeterminate period of time. Getting up with excruciating effort, she sat at the table, propped on her elbows, and fiddled with her watch. She had no desire to eat, but a craving for water sent burning cramps through her abdomen. Miranda contemplated opening one of the small wounds in her fingers and sucking on her own blood, but she was afraid the strain in processing the rich fluid might deplete more than nourish. She had no stomach at all for drinking urine, which now smelled sour. She had gone again a couple of times. Nothing much had come except a few drops and a sensation in her urethra as if she were trying to pee needles. She hadn't been able to have a bowel movement, but a heavy urgency hovered painfully in her lower gut.

She decided she needed to think. Despite the miserable depletion of her physical resources, her mind seemed clear. Thinking would make the time pass, keep her focused. Images of the sun-glowing youth in the Speedo drifted through her mind. The last thing she felt was sexy. Her lips seared with pain, and she knew she had to be
smiling. He had been a lovely temptation. Like seeing something sinful on a menu — too many calories, too much money. What if she had splurged? Why not? When she got out of this room, she was going to hop on a plane, fly to Grand Cayman, and find that luxuriously endowed young man. She was going to go scuba diving with him and dance beyond gravity in an erotic undersea ballet. Then she would take him back to her hotel room and do it and do it and do it.

“My goodness!” she said aloud, and this time she was strangely reassured by the resonance of her voice, despite its distortion.

Her throat was so dry that the utterance had nearly strangled her, and the deep fissures opening on her lips had caught at the words as they had emerged from her body. Her voice sounded familiar, but not like herself. She whispered, refusing the silence. “When I get out … I want …”

She couldn't think of what she wanted. Miranda tried to redirect her thoughts. She knew she had to exercise her mind or she would lose control. She didn't know what that meant, but it frightened her.

If Griffin had died the way she thought he had, and Eleanor Drummond had only killed him after he was dead, he couldn't have known he was going to die. Miranda's mind seemed separate from her body and was clearly a better place to be.

Two things. Why had Eleanor come to Griffin's house if she wasn't expecting her daughter to be there? Where had she thought Jill was? If Jill had run away before, say, downtown, and hung out with street kids, then her mother must have known she would come back. Eleanor had recognized how headstrong Jill was: bull-headed, determined, and smart the way she had been herself —
a survivor. She had expected Jill to return home in due course after sorting out the revelation of her mother's double life. Eleanor Drummond, or Molly Bray, hadn't known that the issue for Jill was her father's identity, not her mother's deceit.

So Eleanor had come here and found Griffin dying or dead. It hadn't mattered which. Then, for some reason, she had entered the wine cellar, this godforsaken room, and discovered her ravaged daughter. She had looked in here because it was a place she had habitually checked! The last thing she had expected to find was her daughter. She was shocked. Eleanor had murdered the man in her mind — redemption for the suffering of her daughter. She had planned her own murder — atonement for complicity in her daughter's brutalization.

Eleanor had come down here because she had known what this place was! She had investigated this room because she had been a prisoner here herself!

No, she had looked in because she had known there had been other young women. She was checking.

Miranda got up and walked around as if the lights were on. She was adjusting to the darkness, to the walled limitations on her existence, to the limits of perception, of being.

Molly Bray wasn't a psychopathic deviant, nor was Eleanor Drummond. Therefore — Miranda moved toward the idea with steely determination — she was some sort of guardian, policing her Faustian mentor, monitoring his perversion, trying to protect others, to control or subvert his predatory appetite for young women. Was she guilty of collusion? Why hadn't she reported him? Her life, not just her constructed identity as Eleanor Drummond, but her life as Molly Bray with Jill and Victoria in Wychwood Park, the intricate contrivance of her
life, would have collapsed without Griffin, had perhaps existed because she had used what she had known. She had sold her soul to protect her life. And with terrible irony she had failed to protect her own daughter.

That vile man had savaged their daughter, his own child.
Oh, my God!
Miranda thought, shuddering.
Oh, my God!

Morgan woke up Monday with what felt like a hangover. Before he shaved he got on the telephone to Miranda, but she must have already gone out. There was no response on her cell phone. A little troubled by his inability to reach his partner, he showered, shaved, and got dressed.

The Griffin affair was going to break very soon. He had the feeling he got when the disparate details of a case started falling together. But he was wary, uneasy. Murder-suicide in a Rosedale mansion didn't resonate like this without complications. Where the hell was Miranda?

Morgan went out for breakfast. In an attempt to kick-start his body, he ordered a hungry-man platter of sausages, bacon, pancakes, eggs, and toast, which when placed in front of him seemed obscene. He stared into the unnaturally orange fluid in his orange juice glass. Oranges could be too orange, he thought. Sometimes things weren't what they were. Griffin was a deviant, but he was a student of semiology. They weren't mutually exclusive. He had followed Miranda into an academic program. He was already an ineffectual lawyer — not the first. She must have known at some level who he was, his name if not his face.

Was that why she had turned down the scholarship? She had tried to get away as far as possible. That meant joining the RCMP and loving a man, Jason Rodriguez in
Ottawa, who couldn't love her enough. Meanwhile, Griffin stayed on and earned a Ph.D. What a wasted mind, he thought. What a pathetic creep.

Eleanor Drummond. He glanced down at the meal in front of him and pushed it away, retrieving only the toast, which he mouthed, dry, with a bit of coffee to wash it down. She had killed herself. She had wanted them to think she was murdered. She had needed them to think there was an intruder, an interloper in the scene,
deus ex machina
, an operative from outside the narrative. Put that together with Griffin's murder. She had wanted them to think he was murdered, too. She had diverted them long enough to work out her own death. Simple. They were looking for something too complicated. Eleanor/Molly had known they wouldn't see the trees for the forest.

It made sense, yet her motivation defied comprehension.
Why, why, why?
Miranda would be able to shed light on this conundrum if he could ever find her.

Knowing she should be conserving her physical resources but fearing, even more, that stasis invited the onset of death, Miranda paced back and forth in the darkness, not rapidly enough to force a sweat but sufficient to create a modest breeze as she moved. She had stripped to her underwear, keeping that on in morbid anticipation of being found dead, wanting to maintain a certain propriety in front of forensics, whatever her condition of degradation, and in front of Morgan, who always displayed an endearing curiosity about her undergarments. Once at the morgue, pretensions would collapse, of course, particularly after being here a while. Eleanor Drummond was the only corpse she had ever encountered whose beauty seemed enhanced by death. And they had gotten
her before she was cold. Miranda hoped she didn't get Ellen Ravenscroft. Anyone but that marauding coquette, her old and dear friend and acquaintance. She figured the cooling air was keeping fluids inside her, though she knew, in fact, from her goose bumps that she was losing water through her skin, which was why she felt a chill.

Sometimes she slept. She was painfully numb, her lips were bleeding, and she had cramps, but she kept moving when she could, occupying her space like a prowling animal rehearsing the limits of its cage. It had to be Monday or even Tuesday by now.

In the absolute darkness, words seemed tangible, as solid as flesh. Eleanor, Molly, Jill, Miranda — she shuffled through names in her mind. Griffin? Had he written her a letter when he knew he was dying? But it was unlikely he had known that, especially if Jill's second-hand diagnosis of sleep apnea was a factor. Could he have caused his own death? Not with enough certainty to write Miranda beforehand.

She could envision the manila envelope. It had been recycled — at least the label had been stuck on where another label had been removed. Lots of people reused envelopes. Millionaires? Maybe. Then, as Miranda studied the postmark in her mind, she thought perhaps it was the cancellation date that was being reused. She saw the deep creases in the envelope and realized it had been stuffed through her mail slot. The postman had a key. He always opened the whole panel of boxes and put the mail in without scrunching it up. Even her Victoria's Secret catalogues, which the postman obviously thumbed through, came out folded but not creased. That meant the envelope had been delivered by someone else.

Miranda lost track of the darkness. Slumping down on the chair, she continued her interior discourse. People
didn't send posthumous mail. So who had access to his stationery? Who knew about his souvenir clippings? Who knew about her, could draft a document, witness it, and forge his signature? And then, to be authentic, in her own spidery handwriting label the envelope because she was, after all, his amanuensis, his accomplice and wicked familiar.

Miranda was ecstatic. She would have to discuss this with Morgan. He would like
amanuensis
.

The passageway light suddenly flashed through the door. Pressing close to the glass, she saw a shadow slip by, probably Eugene Nishimura again. She overrode the reluctance of muscles and joints that had begun to seize up as her body shut down, lurched back across the room, and collapsed onto her hands and knees, feeling for the bedpan in the murky gloom. Dumping its contents on the floor, she struggled to her feet and scrambled as fast as she could manage back to the door. She held the bedpan up where she could see the polished steel gleam and aligned it carefully, trying to mirror the light that penetrated her window back into the corridor, tilting the pan gently to make the beam dance. Peering around the bedpan through the glass, she waited for an interminable time. Then she spied a shadow moving across the opposite wall and cast her frail beacon against the stone and brick at eye level. But the shadow disappeared, and the light was suddenly extinguished. Miranda threw the bedpan into the darkness, strode over to her bed, lay back exhausted, and allowed herself for the first time to let tears drain precious fluids from the corners of her eyes.

When Morgan arrived back at Robert Griffin's house, Eugene Nishimura was already on the scene. A woman dressed in jeans and a sweater was with him. She introduced herself.

“My name is Ikuko. You are Detective Morgan? I have come to see my husband's mistress. She has many parts, all of them beautiful, like a geisha.”

Morgan and Ikuko sat on the limestone parapet, talking and observing the fish, while her husband worked around the pool and inside the house.

“I know that one is best,” observed Ikuko, pointing to the champion Kohaku when her husband was in the pump room. She lowered her voice to a whisper: “I like the Ochiba Shigura.”

“Me, too,” said Morgan. “Do you speak Japanese?”

“Oh, yes, I was born in Kyoto. I am
issei
, a true pioneer. My husband is
yonsei
. Our children are
gosei
when they will be born — old-style Canadian.”

“Can you translate Ochiba Shigura?”

“I don't think so.”

“Doesn't it mean anything?”

“Not in English.”

“In Japanese.”

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes it is difficult to translate from one culture to another, Mr. Morgan.”

Her husband came out, bringing food that he divided among the three of them. They each leaned over and hand-fed the more confident fish. The Ochiba Shigura came directly to Morgan, trying to shunt aside the Chagoi, which was voraciously mounting his half-closed hand. It gave up and swam to Ikuko where it ate delicately from her open palm tilted almost to water level.