Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

  He smiled and rose to his feet. He felt very shy, as if he had been unfaithful. “No,” he said, moving closer to her and touching her shoulder. “You need your sleep.”

  “I meant on the sofa, Morgan. It’s late.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But you wouldn’t sleep well on the sofa and I’d feel badly taking over your bed.”

  She walked into the bedroom so that he couldn’t see her facial expression. “Let yourself out. See you tomorrow, love.”

  * * *

  When Miranda woke up it was noon. It felt good to be in her own bed after a month of sleeping in bunks and berths, or curled up in chairs designed by committee, stretched out on rented mattresses, or in absolute darkness on a mattress of dried reeds. After a quick trip to the bathroom, she nestled under a sheet and luxuriated in being home. She tried to remember how much she had told Morgan about the divine comedy she had just emerged from. Or was she still in purgatory and her comfort was merely the calm at the heart of a storm?

  Damn it, she thought. He’s the Presbyterian. If a person felt good, that wasn’t bad. “Don’t pull the rug out from under yourself.” She got up and made herself a coffee. To get back on track, she self-consciously reviewed what she knew of the Maria D’Arcy murder.

  What struck her most about Morgan’s summing up of the case had been how graphic some aspects were and how vague were others. She accepted that it was murder, but she was puzzled by the circumstances he had described. The body had been found exposed in the cockpit of the Pemberly. It seemed unlikely it had been brought on board post-mortem. The only indications of violence were scratch marks in the inside of a forward hatch, but D’Arcy himself seemed to have been below decks when she died and not a prisoner bent on escape. And he had apparently covered his dead wife’s exposed breasts for the sake of propriety.

  Miranda mentally moved to the morgue. She struggled to comprehend how a body could be compromised while in the coroner’s possession. It had been washed down, eliminating the scent of Fleurs de Rocaille, which you couldn’t get anymore, not the original blend she used to wear before they changed the formula. Instead of wildflowers it now smelled like perfume. No smell in a bottle should evoke only itself! Morgan insisted Maria had been wearing the original scent. And then, whoever cleaned her up left a hint of poisonous powder on the nape of her neck, but there was none found in her bloodstream.

  The suicide note. It was in her handwriting, but Morgan was convinced it was written by a person in full possession of her faculties. This seemed to prove she did not die by suicide, but that she knew her death was coming. And why address the note to Morgan? Her husband had requested him as lead investigator into the possibility that he was the killer, that was strange enough, but for the wife to engage his sympathies with a note apparently intended to exonerate her killer, that was truly bizarre.

  Miranda moved back to the yacht club. It was the only place where she could envision the real Harrington D’Arcy. And suddenly she shifted to the farmhouse where Maria grew up playing with Matteo in the long shadows of the moai on the slopes of Rano Raraku. She struggled to bring the two visions together and, curiously, the name Rove McMan came to mind. While Morgan seemed to find McMan a bit of a world-weary poseur, he trusted the sailor’s judgment that the D’Arcys were enthralled with each other and completely in love. On the basis of McMan’s apparent relationship with Matteo, Miranda trusted him completely.

  Then Harrington D’Arcy — and here she had made one of those intuitive leaps that, once made, seemed inevitable — D’Arcy must have been working for the Pinochet cabal. Not because he believed in fascism nor for the money. For his wife, for her cause. To Miranda, this line of reasoning led inexorably to the conclusion that D’Arcy could not have murdered Maria. It struck her as equally certain that Gloriasimmons, representing the opposing interests, was therefore instrumental in the deaths of D’Arcy and his associates in the Arctic. The woman had used Morgan as her unwitting accomplice — and paradoxically, as a witness to her innocence. Innocence be damned, she thought.

  Miranda moved finally to envision herself in the cave with Matteo, breaking open the secrets of the Heyerdahl book that had assumed the stature of a holy text, the early-morning harbinger of a new day for the island, the secret that he and his sister and friends were willing to die for. Miranda too had been an accomplice. She had been sent by Maria. This did not seem possible, and yet she had performed exactly as if her whole journey had been scripted in advance.

  The telephone rang and she rolled onto her side to reach it, rolling back as she answered.

  “Is this an awkward time,” Morgan asked. “You seem to be breathing hard.”

  “Morgan, it’s noon.” She paused. “Two conclusions: Maria was murdered, but not by her husband. And two, if you’re counting: we need to look into your relationship with Ms. Gloriasimmons.”

  There was a long pause coming from Morgan’s end of the line. Finally, he said, “I’m on my way over to Rosedale to talk with her mother, do you want to come?”

  “Maria’s mother? For sure.” She had already told him she wanted to meet her. “Can you pick me up.”

  “With what? I’m walking. I’ll be at Bloor and Yonge in half an hour. We’ll walk up together.”

  He clicked off and stared contemplatively at his feet thrust out in front of him on the blue sofa. One of his big toes was threatening to poke through his sock and he wondered if he should clip the nail before putting his shoes on, but decided the socks were done for, anyway. He figured if he left immediately it would take him half an hour to get from the Annex to Yonge. If he walked very slowly. He assumed that he thought more lucidly when he strolled, more in an approximation of rational coherence than in the usual concentric ruminations that sometimes rendered him brilliant and sometimes a little befuddled.

  Turning east onto Bloor, he discovered he was still unnerved by Miranda’s persistent reference to his relationship with Gloria Simmons. Linear thought was getting him nowhere.

  He let his mind wander until random phrases and images coalesced, not around Gloria Simmons, but around Miranda Quin, and not sexually focused, but around the strange gaps in his comprehension of her unlikely escapades south of the equator. Morgan knew most of the places she had described in graphic detail, although the only caves he had been in while on the island were little more than weather-worn caverns gouged out of rock faces along the shore. Yet none of what she described seemed quite real to him, or perhaps it seemed too real to fully comprehend.

  When she mentioned the village of Hanga Roa, the overgrown quarry at Rano Raraku, the beach at Anakena, it all came back to him, but as memories of his own experience. A woman’s eyes, brown and green and golden in the tropical sun, traced out his imagined movements as he slipped from one place to another in response to Miranda’s story, but they were not Miranda’s eyes. He couldn’t place her there, at all. He had fallen briefly in love with a woman on the island who wore sky-blue underwear and a battered Stetson. When he came home, she had merged in his mind with Miranda so that he hardly missed her, Beverley Weekes, because he felt she was with him, despite having returned to Wyoming or to her research as a paleoethnobotanist on Bora Bora.

  Bora Bora! That’s how he connected to an island he had never visited — when Miranda described it, he felt like he had been there already.

  Her experiences on Rapa Nui were so beyond his own, which were cast in the afterglow of a romantic interlude, that they might have been in different realities. Her time on the island was a perilous journey; she had been immersed in revolutionary politics with brutal and horrific consequences.

  This man who went by the name of Ross, he seemed to be the rather insidious factor connecting each of the separate episodes in her account. He was always there, first on the plane where he switched books, then bleeding all over her at the Hotel Victoria, later at the farmhouse, then at the cave providing rescue or betrayal, and finally as her invisible benefactor on the Island Queen.

  Her fr
iend Matteo. Maria D’Arcy’s brother. Connections on so many levels. The friend of Te Ave Teao, who plunged to his death for an arcane belief about violating an ariki’s cave. Or, more likely, who died to create a diversion so Ross could go ahead into the cave and hide Miranda from the execution squad. Was that Ross’s intention? Te Ave Teao may have read him wrong. Ross may have been giving her up to the soldiers and it was only through the good graces of Matteo that she escaped.

  The book. He was fascinated by how she had broken the code, but at a loss as to what her discovery could mean. A cave on Gibraltar, halfway around the world? He had spent a few days on Gibraltar during his wanderings after university. It was simply a stopover where people spoke English between Tangier and the island of Ibiza, where he had worked in a bar and pretended he didn’t speak English.

  Morgan wondered about the book, how he had been the conduit between Maria D’Arcy and Miranda, except he had been given the wrong book to pass on. The right copy, introduced into the story by Ross, had somehow taken on scriptural significance and yet it wasn’t Heyerdahl’s text or the handwritten notes that were important. but what they obscured. Not unlike the holy books of religion, he thought.

  The channels in Morgan’s mind formed endless connections and he enjoyed wandering through them, but there was an urgency now, as he approached Yonge Street and could see Miranda in the distance. He was pleased she was working with him on resolving the murder of Maria D’Arcy, unofficially at least, and a little perturbed that she was seeing nefarious dimensions to the deaths on Baffin, but most of all, he was concerned for her safety. There was no way she could emerge from the carnage on Rapa Nui without a trail of blood in her wake. Her fare wasn’t paid on the cruise liner or her flight covered from Tahiti without future consequences to which she seemed oblivious.

  As soon as he reached the corner and she turned from gazing through her own reflection in a store window, he proclaimed, “You’re compromised, you know.”

  She stared at him for a moment, trying to penetrate his thought process, then responded, “Morgan, he wasn’t even on board. I wasn’t on police business. We didn’t have sex. And I can’t pay back what he spent on bringing me home because, one, I don’t know who he really is, and two, as far as the Island Queen is concerned he died with you in the Arctic and his account is closed.”

  When they came to the D’Arcy residence, she was surprised. He had described it as a seigneurial manor set among Rosedale mansions. But it was more like a medieval gamekeeper’s cottage on a great landowner’s estate that had been diminished over the centuries to a few metres of grass and some shrubs. The woman who opened the door was equally unexpected, not at all a ghost from the feudal past. She was handsome, dressed in black, and despite redness in her eyes that suggested weeping, she stood fiercely proud. This was not someone Miranda would have mistaken for a housekeeper. The woman nodded at Morgan, but as she stood back to let them in she fixed her gaze on Miranda’s eyes so intensely that Miranda felt surely they had met before.

  Morgan and the woman exchanged a few words and she led them into the library where the three of them sat down. Miranda recognized something in the room that suggested a strong but feminine presence, perhaps coming from the artfully haphazard arrangement of silver-framed photographs or the display of artifacts from Easter Island, set out not like they were trophies, but for their aesthetic effect. Among small carvings of volcanic tuft and toromiro wood, she recognized a narrow slab incised with Rongorongo glyphs. She could see through into a small study to the side that must have been Maria’s special place, the inner sanctum of a descendent of the last ariki, so painfully far from Te Pito o Te Henua, the centre of the world.

  Miranda became aware that the other two were waiting for her to finish her survey before speaking. Morgan knew his partner was responding to something in the study and library he had missed. What he had taken to be emotional austerity concealed behind a rich and impersonal decor, Miranda read as the expression of self-reliance, an ambience created by two people absorbed in one another’s lives. She knew this perhaps from the sadness conveyed in these rooms by their owners’ absence, reinforced by the old woman quietly grieving as she sat poised on the edge of a sofa, watching the rich play of emotion sweeping over Miranda.

  At last, the woman in black spoke: “I am sorry to tell you, Miss Quin, Matteo, he is dead. I talk to him yesterday by telephone, he said you will come, señorita, and then after when I call back they say he is gone. I am sorry.”

  Miranda was stunned. She rose from her chair and sat down on the sofa, clasping the woman’s old hands between hers, almost in a gesture of prayer. She could feel on her lips the kiss she had shared with Matteo on the bus in the lea of Rano Raraku. Her eyes welled with tears.

  “There is so much death,” said the old woman. She looked around the room, seeing perhaps more of what Miranda had sensed, a place haunted by absence. “I will go back, I will not die at Toronto. Perhaps I go back, señorita, I don’t know.”

  Miranda drew in a deep breath. She wanted to hold and comfort the woman, but drew herself back. “Do you know what happened?”

  “They kill him.”

  “Who?”

  “He is dead, his sister is gone, Señor D’Arcy is dead. It is all over. They say Matteo die in a fishing accident, their boat smash on the rocks, Matteo and Te Ave Teao, his friend since they were childrens. But I speak to him only an hour before. He was not in his boat.”

  “And I know Te Ave Teao was killed falling on the rocks at the ariki’s cave,” said Miranda. “They did not die together.”

  “Together, no, and their sister and Señor D’Arcy, Mr. Harrington D’Arcy, they all die for their island.”

  “Maria.” Miranda said the woman’s name. She simply wanted proof of continuity.

  “Yes.”

  “Maria, I am so sorry.” She leaned over and whispered in the woman’s ear the message of love her son had asked she convey. The woman shuddered and squeezed Miranda’s hand so firmly her fingers ached — almost as if they were sharing the pain.

  Morgan stood up and moved away to give them privacy. In the small study, his eye was drawn to a gap in the bookshelves where a large book had been removed. He returned to the library and sat down on an ottoman in front of the two women. He knew Matteo had made a profound impact on Miranda and that she must be hurting deeply, and he was moved by how she was able to comfort the old woman.

  Both women looked up at him in expectation. “Maria,” he said, “señora, do you know what book is missing from your daughter’s library?”

  She gazed at him through glistening eyes, pausing for a moment to gain her bearings. “Yes, it was by Mr. Thor Heyerdahl.”

  “Aku-Aku, about Easter Island?”

  “Yes, that book. Maria asked me to give it to the lawyer.”

  “Which lawyer?”

  “To Mrs. Rufalo.”

  Morgan and Miranda exchanged glances. Miranda realized she needed to suppress her grief as Morgan continued.

  “You gave the book to Mrs. Rufalo. This was because your daughter asked you to. Do you know why she would do that?”

  “It was for you,” she said, turning to Miranda.

  “Do you know why?” Morgan asked.

  “I know first I give to Mrs. Rufalo the wrong book. I walk over to her house, it is not so far. There were two copies.” That explained the gap in the bookshelf larger than a single volume. “Maria was very unhappy I give the wrong book, but I told her the other copy was special from grandfather, her father’s father, also Matteo, Matteo Ak-ariki-tea.” She broke down the syllables a little differently than Morgan had, to make the word more accessible to her listeners. “That Matteo, he lived for more years than my husband, Maria’s father, and he wrote things in the book which Mr. Thor Heyerdahl signed for him personally.”

  A rather austere signing, thought Miranda. Very Norwegian, just a signature. It seemed unlikely that the other notes were by Matteo and Maria’s grandfather, a man who almo
st certainly didn’t speak English. “My daughter,” Maria Pilar continued, “she took the other one, the special book, and I thought she must give it to this lady, herself.” She indicated Miranda. “Why do you want two books the same, I did not ask.”

  Miranda straightened. “Do you know a publishing company called Taggart and Foulds?” she asked. Morgan looked puzzled, but it did not surprise him when Maria Pilar responded in the affirmative. The room seemed to stir with a rush of fresh air — Morgan recalled someone explaining that wind is sucked into available space and not forced out of a space that is occupied. A troubling gap in Miranda’s understanding had suddenly been filled.

  He waited, but she said nothing more, beyond expressing her sympathy, until they were walking down the curved street under its leafy canopy of silver maples, the arboreal product of planning and privilege. The brick sidewalk stuck Morgan as wonderfully quaint, indulgent, and not very practical.

  “There’s no doubt now,” she eventually said, as if they were sharing an ongoing conversation. “About the D’Arcys. They were on the same side.”

  “You know this because?”

  “The house, Morgan. It’s the home of adults in love.”

  He hadn’t seen it quite that way, but trusted her instincts.

  “And,” she said. “it seems a reasonable assumption to believe I was sent to Rapa Nui by Maria. The D’Arcys had major shares in Taggart and Foulds, my overly generous publishers. When word got around I was going to the island, funds were made available to ensure I didn’t back out. And then a very important book was given to me for delivery via you.”

  “But the wrong book,” said Morgan.

  “I actually ended up with the right book! Along with an inflated reputation for being very clever.”

  “Where would that come from?”

  “Probably from you, bragging to Rufalo, and Rufalo bragging to his wife, and his wife bragging to Maria.”

  “Like a chain of evidence, a chain of ego.”