Reluctant Dead

by John Moss

Miranda thought the answer was obvious, but it was not what she expected.

  “Revenge. How long have you lived in Toronto, Detective Quin?”

  “Me, I came as a student, went to U of T. Nearly twenty years.”

  “And you, Detective?’

  “Just over forty, I was born here. Why?”

  “Then you will remember 999 Queen Street West. And you, Ms. Quin, may not.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Miranda. “Notorious asylum, palatial on the outside, mayhem and squalor within.”

  “We used to go over from Cabbagetown just to scare ourselves when we were kids,” said Morgan. “We’d boost each other up to look over the wall, or jump around on the north side of Queen Street, yelling at inmates peering out through the windows. With the huge dome and the columns and porticos, it looked like a cathedral — of the damned, I suppose.”

  “It was a majestic building,” said Rove McMan.

  “Yes, it was,” said Morgan.

  Miranda remembered her parents telling her that when visiting Toronto was a big thing for people from Waldron, before the 401 was put through with a cloverleaf right on the edge of the village, they used to do three things: they went to the Royal Ontario Museum, they went to the top of the Bank of Commerce Building (this was before the CN Tower), and they strolled past the hospital for the insane, 999 Queen, as it was universally known, which had once been the grandest building in the entire province of Upper Canada, surrounded by a wall twenty feet high. Egyptian mummies with their toenails showing, a modest skyscraper, and being literally a stones-width from bedlam, these were the thrills of the city, punctuated for the more sophisticated by an elegant lunch in the Georgian Room at Eaton’s College Street store, or rounded off with a magic show at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

  All this came flooding back on a wave of nostalgia for times before she was born. She smiled wistfully at Morgan. She knew his memories of the past were of a different city, a city of streetcars and sirens, of rules to be tested and strangers to be taunted. She painted him an almost Dickensian childhood that somehow had fallen away like an old set of clothes when he entered university — just like her village childhood and the trappings of a small-town high school had fallen away.

  “My sister died there,” said McMan.

  Morgan had been anticipating this, but Miranda was horrified, and in part for the depths of emotion she had forced the unfortunate man to suppress while she pursued her own meandering thoughts about the asylum. It was not at all what she had expected to hear.

  “I read about it,” said Morgan. “In a fire.”

  “She was older, she looked out for me after my father died.” McMan’s voice was dispassionate and yet carried utter conviction. There was no room for argument or interpretation. This was how it was. “My mother was focused on finding my father’s replacement, upgrading to a superior model, which she did. My sister was there for me. And then she went mad. Just like that. I went to visit her once, but she didn’t know who I was. I never went back. She wouldn’t have wanted me to, or so I thought. My mother pretended my sister had eloped with a princeling leftover from the Austro-Hungarian empire and several years later she announced her death by Porsche in Provence. She was pleased Princess Grace crashed her car in Monaco — it gave her own story validity.”

  He paused, then asked Morgan, “Where did you read it? My mother kept it out of the papers. There was a small news release saying two inmates had perished and their names were being withheld until the families were notified, which they weren’t.”

  “They weren’t notified?” Miranda exclaimed.

  “The names weren’t released. My mother saw to that. She paid for both funerals.”

  “It was in the coroner’s report,” said Morgan. “There were two of them. The other woman was somebody Sinclair.”

  “Somebody.” Rove McMan repeated the word with a wry smile. “Her name was Kaitlin Sinclair.”

  Now Miranda was anticipating where the story was going. If the death of his sister was only a prologue, then what was to come was going to be big.

  “Harrington D’Arcy and I lived parallel lives in a number of ways,” McMan continued. “His mother also married twice, also after the suicide of his father. She married a man by the name of D’Arcy.”

  “A man who adopted him. His birth name was Harrington Sinclair, wasn’t it?” exclaimed Miranda.

  “And he had a sister,” Morgan observed, catching up with the story.

  “He had a sister and she was an inmate in 999. She was a younger sister. His sister and Elizabeth —”

  “Your sister?” Miranda was now leaning close and the closer she leaned the quieter McMan’s voice grew so that Morgan had to lean forward, as well, until the three of them were huddled like conspirators in the light that was now quite luminous, the sun having sunk below the leaf-line to glimmer off the water surface and shine into the cabin.

  “My sister Elizabeth and Kaitlin Sinclair, they shared a room. Harrington used to visit them, they’d sit out on the great pillared verandah at the end of the broad corridor and they would order tea to be served and the nurses would bring tea and biscuits, it was a lovely and loving domestic scene. Except Harrington’s sister forgot who he was. But still he went to visit, especially in the spring and the summer when the silver maples outside the verandah would shut out the city.”

  “It sounds perversely idyllic,” Miranda observed.

  “It was the worst of times and the best of times,” said McMan, distorting the Dickensian allusion with an ironic smile.

  “And what was the worst?” Morgan asked. “The fire?”

  “The life. They were inmates in a notorious madhouse, a palace for the insane. They were madwomen who recognized only each other. According to Harrington, they were blissfully happy and entirely out of touch with the world. It almost sounds like a nice way to be, islands unto themselves. In retrospect, I wish I had gone in to visit, to see Elizabeth.”

  Rove paused to let his emotions catch up with his narrative, and then he continued. “I have often wondered if they were lovers. I don’t know. They were smokers. They were not allowed to smoke in the corridor, and not in their room. They were only allowed to smoke on the verandah. One day in the winter, they barricaded themselves in a linen closet and they lit up. The nurses couldn’t get them out. A resident doctor was called. His prescription was time. They would get bored or hungry or need the toilet. Lock the door from the outside, cause them sufficient distress so they wouldn’t do it again. So he locked the door. Doors in an asylum are thick, all doors in an asylum lock. He pocketed the key and left.

  “A nurse telephoned Harrington and he came onto the ward. He talked to Kaitlin. He talked to Elizabeth. He asked the nurses to release them. That wasn’t so long ago, but back then the psychiatrist was God. They needed his authorization. He was nowhere to be found. They didn’t have a key. Harrington was insistent. The only person more powerful than God in most people’s eyes is a well-dressed lawyer. They sent for a janitor, someone with a master key. The doctor had gone home for the night. The janitors couldn’t track down the right key.

  “Harrington talked to the two women through the door. The girls, that was the affectionate name among the staff for them, the girls talked to him. They went through stages of panic, and then they seemed calm, quite cheerful, he explained when we met at the funeral. Then smoke began seeping out from under the door. Elizabeth and Kaitlin had lighted the linens on fire and they sang an indecipherable hymn and burned themselves to death in a fierce embrace, their bodys clenched together so that it was impossible to separate their remains. They had a common funeral, as I said, courtesy of my mother. At D’Arcy’s insistence, what was left of them was placed in a single casket. With cosmic absurdity, they were buried, not cremated, and the empty casket and the shared casket were laid in the ground side by side. That was something negotiated between my mother’s lawyer and Harrington D’Arcy.”

  “And the doctor?” Miranda asked. “W
as there an inquiry?”

  “Essentially what the Brits call ‘death by misadventure.’ No charges.”

  Morgan had not forgotten where McMan’s story had begun. With the D’Arcys’ mutual love for Rapa Nui. He asked Rove McMan to explain.

  “It was where his wife was from. That was important. But, it was where he abandoned his conscience. In what to him was the ultimate moral act, he transcended morality. It ceased to be a factor in Harrington D’Arcy’s life although he acknowledged morality in others. That’s what made him such a good lawyer, apparently.”

  “I can understand this as a response to the fire,” said Miranda. “He listened through a door while his sister died. But how does the island fit in?”

  “We met at the funeral. He became a sort of mentor, but in some ways we were alter egos. You’ve met us both, Detective Morgan. You’ll know what I mean. In so many unexpected ways our lives had merged. We sailed together. We went to Rapa Nui. We —”

  His story came to an abrupt halt. Neither Morgan nor Miranda said a word. He needed time. He was on the verge of exonerating his mentor for unspecified crimes or condemning him to the judgment of the morally righteous. That’s what they guessed he was thinking, although his face seemed curiously impassive.

  “The doctor’s name was Levesque,” he continued. “Quite young. Apparently he was shaken up by the misadventure. His marriage broke up. He drank. He disappeared.”

  “Disappeared!” Miranda exclaimed.

  “He turned up doing good works in a very remote part of the world. Putting his medical training to use, seeking redemption. But redemption is not absolution. No one on earth or in heaven could absolve him of those deaths at the asylum. No one.”

  “He went to Rapa Nui, to work as a volunteer in the island hospital.” Morgan didn’t ask this as a question, but offered it as a link, for narrative continuity.

  “And you and D’Arcy went after him.” Miranda, too, offered this as a statement of the obvious, the inevitable.

  “I am a sailor. We sailed to Isla de Pasqua. Dr. Levesque was still drinking. Many on the island feared him. He was careless, but worse, he was angry. An angry doctor is dangerous.” He stopped talking again, this time as if his story had come to an end.

  Morgan and Miranda both wanted more — Morgan, to illuminate his investigation into Maria’s death, possibly into D’Arcy’s death, and Miranda, to round out her knowledge of the island, itself, to shade in the grey areas with colour.

  “Were you there when Dr. Levesque died?” Miranda asked.

  He had not expected such a direct question. He looked into her eyes. He smiled. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose I was.”

  “But you didn’t kill him?”

  “Not as I remember.”

  “Maria knew about this?”

  “We were close friends with her family.”

  “D’Arcy killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Strangled him?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “At the farmhouse. You buried his body under the ruins of a moai. I believe I have met the late Dr. Levesque. In trying circumstances. We didn’t have the opportunity to become well acquainted.”

  Neither of the men knew what she was talking about. Somehow McMan’s story had merged with her own.

  Strangulation? Because D’Arcy wanted revenge. Only his bare hands would do. Murdering a man might have broken a civilized person, no matter how much he felt morally obliged, or it might have cast him free from morality forever. The latter, she assumed, was the case. She had gazed into the empty eye sockets of the man whose cavalier judgment had condemned two creatures so vulnerable and innocent to a terrible death.

  “Rapa Nui was Harrington’s Calvary,” McMan murmured and proceeded to clarify. “The person he had been died there. What remained was something quite different.”

  “Not a god,” Morgan protested.

  “No, not at all. Nor the Devil. A hollow man with a great heart and no soul.”

  “A man with a great heart and no soul,” Miranda repeated, turning the phrase in her mind like a spindle on a very slow lathe, trying to smooth the words into something she could comprehend. “A man who could love deeply or despise, but could not endure the consequences of either.”

  The two men said nothing.

  Shifting abruptly from the abstract to the concrete, she said, “Matteo and his sister, even their mother, Maria Pilar, they were all there at the farmhouse.”

  “Not in the room. Matteo, myself, and Te Ave Teao, we were witnesses. Later, the women prepared the body. The men, the brothers, they disposed of it in a makeshift crypt that islanders would never disturb. It was a pile of rubble, really, where another burial had taken place following retribution for a crime that was only of concern to the family. It carried its own sort of unofficial tapu. Police sometimes know when to let things lie, even dead things.”

  Miranda thought of her explanation to Morgan about why the RCMP chose to close the case on the deaths in the Arctic. “What was your connection with Matteo’s family?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. Ironically, it was Dr. Levesque who introduced us to them. We met him at a hotel bar in Hanga Roa, a tiny hotel, there wasn’t much there for tourists at the time, and he knew immediately who we were but he said nothing, we said nothing. We shared tapas with him over drinks. Matteo came in and the doctor introduced us. We didn’t see much of Levesque after that. He worked slavishly at the hospital or drank in his small house by himself. Young Matteo and D’Arcy warmed to each other. We spent many evenings in their compound in town, and they showed us around the island, they showed us the old farmhouse out by the quarry, Rano Raraku, we spent evenings out there, talking. Sometimes I stayed on the Tangata Manu, but Harrington seemed driven to connect with the island, with the remnants of its lost past, with this place he knew he would not leave before committing murder.

  “And when he was ready, we did it. We all participated. He left the island with Maria. I stayed until I could forget the look in Levesque’s eyes.” He paused, then resumed. “While Harrington’s fingers choked the life out of him, Levesque gazed at his killer with a sort of affection that still haunts me, as he embraced his own death. When I see those eyes in my sleep, I dream of my sister, when we were young and she was my refuge, and I wake up lonely, but happy she died with someone she loved.”

  Miranda wondered if Rove McMan had ever opened up so much to anyone in his life. It’s not us, she thought. It’s because our stories merge.

  She recalled vividly how she had felt as she stared into the gaping eye sockets in the dead man’s skull, but she couldn’t have summoned the words to describe those feelings if her life depended on it. And Morgan knew, now, with a certainty that Gloria Simmons had murdered Harrington D’Arcy, he knew why, he just didn’t know how. She had sucked the life right out of him. The phrase lingered in his mind as they prepared to leave.

  It was almost dusk, the ducks were raucous, the channel was rippled in anticipation of an evening breeze, halyards clattered restlessly against hollow masts and the willows had turned a deep green as sunlight on the western horizon seemed to shine up on their leaves from below. The Tangata Manu dipped gently under their weight and rocked gently away as Miranda and Morgan stepped off.

  Lost in their own thoughts they made their way to the ferry, leaving Rove McMan alone with his. “Kai i te au,” he had said when they left. “Whatever the question, kai i te au, the question cannot be answered. I can live with that. Ia orana, Detectives. Goodbye.”

  Neither expected they would see him again.

  12

  Things That Go Bump in the Night

  Eddie Block was still on duty and welcomed them aboard with a deferential clasping of their hands in his own, then ushered them across the gangway with unnerving solemnity. Once they cast off, he tried for congeniality, pointing out to Miranda how Lake Ontario itself could be reached through the Eastern Gap to the east and the Western Gap to the west, and when they were
well across the harbour he directed her to look south, away from the city, where she could see the lighthouse at Gibraltar Point towering over the low terrain.

  “I wonder did you know the city’s first murder happened there in 1815? Mr. Rademuller, he was the lighthouse keeper, he died and they didn’t find his skeleton until years and years later.”

  “Possibly, it was the first unsolved murder,” said Miranda, amused that he felt murder was the politic topic of conversation with a homicide detective.

  “Nobody got hung, anyway.”

  “Hanged, Eddie, not hung.”

  “Like I said, Mr. Morgan. They didn’t catch the scoundrels.”

  He was quoting a tourist brochure. Miranda doubted Mr. Rademuller was Toronto’s first murder, solved or otherwise. The city had been ravaged, with killing and plundering, by American forces in 1812, treachery that necessitated the burning of Washington in retaliation, two years later.

  “At least we showed restraint and only burned down their public buildings,” she said. Eddie Block smiled and retreated to pursue other duties. Morgan went off in his mind on tangents of his own until they docked.

  Curiously, Eddie followed them ashore and made a point of stepping squarely into their path. Morgan tried to move around, but Miranda sensed an urgency in the young man’s awkwardness and stopped right in front of him.

  “Detective Quin,” he said with a scowl intended to convey the high seriousness of his mission. “A man asked me to give you a message.”

  “Really,” she responded. “And why would he ask you to do that?”

  “He saw you go over, I think. He made it seem pretty important.”

  “We’ve been there for hours, Eddie. Why didn’t he just come over if he needed to see me?”

  “I suppose because I’m the person in charge and he wasn’t a member.”

  “Or he wasn’t wearing a jacket and tie,” Morgan suggested.

  “Eddie, why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I was working,” he explained.

  “Well, now that we’re on dry land —” She stopped herself. “Who was this guy and what did he want?”