by John Moss
“It would be too dangerous with the fire inside,” she explained. “You could turn the room into a raging inferno; or it would suck the air out of your lungs; or create a bone-shattering draft from under the door. Or you’d scald yourself trying to cool the flames.”
She seemed to be mocking herself, reciting her litany of possible disasters as if the full range had never before crossed her mind.
“Burn, bake, or broil,” she went on. “Steam cook, dry preserve, or boil — everything but fricassee or southern fried! It gets hot as Hell in there; it’s an oven, after all.”
He glanced at the bottom edge of the door. It looked to be a pretty tight seal.
Morgan sniffed the air like a cat trying to determine whether it is the predator or the prey. Shelagh Hubbard leaned against a workbench and watched him, apparently fascinated by his ambivalence.
His mind shifted and, leaning against the bench beside her, he relaxed. He was not used to the sensuous impress of a country place. He could separate the sweet odour of a smoky fire from the dry smells of ancient boards and musty walls that were stuffed with horsehair and dust, and the organic smells of linoleum ground through with dirt from the fields and the barn, smells of leather cracked with age, of horse collars and harnesses hanging from pegs against the stone wall. The visual scene was as rich. A couple of bicycles leaned at the end of the bench in casual clutter, an older one supporting the weight of a sporty all-terrain model. By the outer wall, between the shed door and the sauna, a derelict sideboard — with layers of original paint showing through in a medley of blues and greens — held a motley array of old bottles, canisters, and arcane culinary instruments, including a potato peeler and a small glass butter churn. Dusted off and placed on display in a shop on Avenue Road, all this would be worth a small fortune. On the floor was a hooked rug in such disrepair as to be of indeterminate design, yet strangely enough it was clean. There were several pairs of rubber boots and workboots in various stages of decomposition beside a new pair of cross-country Solomon ski boots. In the corner, by the door he had come in, a twenty-two calibre single-shot rifle leaned casually against the wall.
“There’s no bolt in it,” she said.
“What?”
“The gun. I keep the bolt with the cutlery and the bullets by my bed.”
“Why?”
“Strategic disarray — it’s a psychological prop. I would not enjoy shooting someone.”
“Really?”
“Too abrupt. With a bang, everything changes. There’s no time to consider the consequences. Guns are for stupid people, present company excepted. Are you carrying a gun?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Do you hunt?”
“It’s only a twenty-two. For varmints, really.”
“Varmints?”
“Rats, I suppose, but I’ve never even seen a rat — the barn’s been abandoned for years. Come on, let’s get something warm into you. We may be in for some weather tonight so I’ve cooked dinner. I figured we’d eat here.”
Morgan was astonished by the work in progress. The kitchen had been completely done over to create an ambiance that honoured the past while acknowledging the present. Major appliances were new, sheathed in stainless steel, and a pantry wall was staffed with all sorts of food processors and culinary paraphernalia. But the walls were antiqued plaster and the woodwork had been lovingly restored. Wood and plaster were painted in deep colours of the early Victorian era, before garish hues and wallpaper came into vogue. Beyond the kitchen, the central front hall was in a state of suspended endeavour, with a stepladder still in place and tools on the floor.
“Now you see why I admired the handiwork at your Hogg’s Hollow crime scene,” she said, gesturing with a sweep of her arm. “I’m doing this myself. It’s slow-going, but it’s coming along. Looks pretty good, eh?”
He felt a chill as he surveyed her work. Was she taunting him? Why would a person capable of devising horrors with pathological precision now run the risk of exposure, simply to show off her talent in a far more conventional context? Unless that was the point; unless she felt certain she would not be caught, and got a thrill from being under suspicion. A dangerous game, he thought.
Despite her protestations that dinner would be made up from a few odd things lying around, as she hadn’t had the opportunity to get into Meaford to shop, the meal was sumptuous. She had fresh romaine in the fridge and made up a delicate dressing of olive oil, mint, garlic vinegar, a dash of maple syrup, salt, and a grinding of pepper. While she fired up the electric grill and got the vegetables on, she sent Morgan out to retrieve a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino from the sideboard in the summer kitchen, which, while she was in residence, remained above freezing but a little too cold for Brunello, he thought. She asked him to bring in a package of lamb chops from the large chest-freezer in the drive shed. The freezer, Morgan observed, had been recently defrosted and immaculately cleaned. It was almost empty.
During dinner they chatted amiably. He told her about Easter Island and she talked about her project in the nearby Midland area, where she intended to dig in the coming summer if her grant came through. Digging up saints, she explained.
“Seriously, I’m on the trail of the bones of the Jesuit martyrs.”
“I thought they were burned at the stake.”
“Cooked; then the flesh was stripped from their bones. But their bones, Morgan, their bones were strong medicine. The Black Robes died with extreme valour, and so their bones were venerable artifacts for the Hurons who killed them — my theory is that they were treated like holy relics in the Middle Ages. At first I thought bits and pieces might be found among medicine bundles. Now I suspect their bones were gathered together at some point and buried in a sacred place.”
“What an astonishing irony,” said Morgan. “Like King Henry sanctioning Becket’s sainthood after commanding his execution.”
His allusion seemed of no interest. He shrugged as they got up and moved closer to the fire. He had grave doubts about this strange woman, which she seemed to cultivate, and her project sounded far-fetched. Research proposals were peer reviewed, of course, although perhaps her peers were equally delusional.
“So, how do you get permission to dig up a sacred aboriginal site and/or the grave of a saint?”
“You have the good fortune of being able to trace the bones to unsanctified ground on the edge of a farmer’s field.”
“You’ve done that?” he asked, a little incredulous.
“No,” she said, as she tilted a decanter of port and poured them each a good portion. “Not exactly. I have been shown a place where there is a stone cairn and what might be a burial mound, on land that may once have been a Huron settlement. The native residents have long since disappeared, pushed out by successive waves of Iroquois, French, and then settler invaders, none of whom were interested in a hallowed sight of the vanquished. I’m playing on more than a hunch, though. By reading Jesuit texts, reading the lay of the land — it would have been a perfect setting for one of the Huron people’s moveable villages, a pocket of good earth for agriculture, the stonework appears to be Huron — everything led me to think the farmer who owned it, who called me out of the blue, was on to something. He knew about the mound all his life but waited until he got old before risking anything that might interfere with working the land. Unfortunately for him, he waited too long. He died. But the new absentee owners from Toronto don’t mind me prowling about. In fact, they’re quite pleased, and they don’t even know what I suspect is interred in the mound, only that they are, as we say, stewards of our archaeological heritage.”
Shelagh Hubbard was an odd anomaly. As she leaned toward him over the table, gesticulating with her wine glass, the candle flames caught in her eyes and flickered. Morgan was drawn to her and repelled, and she seemed amused by his ambivalence.
“This is my sanctuary, Morgan. My sanctum sanctorum, where anything seems possible and all is forgiven.”
Planes of firelight gleamed on the walls, the fire burned bright and clean, the air shimmered with a timeless warmth. It had never before occurred to him how different light must have been as a medium before electricity. The air had dimension, the eyes were not passive receptacles but reached out to connect. He felt comfortably removed from the familiar world.
“It’s hard not to like it here,” she observed. “I’m glad you came, whatever your reasons.”
He glanced at her and away, looking into the heart of the fire.
“It’s always interesting,” she said. “The Georgian Bay is filled with enticements. And secrets, as well.”
She was taunting him.
“Why do you call it ‘The’?”
“Playful pretension. The nouveau riche who buy up those rambling old cottages in Muskoka say ‘The Muskokas.’ It’s parody — just a bit of fun.”
Either this was a profound revelation of character or as trivial an affectation as the one she was mocking.
“Tell me about your wife,” she asked, reaching across to replenish the blood-red port in his glass.
He could hear Miranda warning him. When they start offering consolation for your love life, Morgan, you know you’re in trouble. He gazed into the flickering fire in her eyes and sat back in his chair.
“You’ve been wounded, David. Invisible wounds leave invisible scars, but they’re there to the touch.”
She tilted her head slightly. She was so obvious, and yet emotional need overrode sense and he felt himself opening to her. Perhaps because he suspected her guilty of unspeakable crimes, he was drawn to self-revelation. Embraced by the profound amorality of a psychopath — the perfect conditions to exorcise demons. An absolute absence of judgment seemed dangerously seductive.
“We were deeply in love,” he said, “but not with each other. We loved an idea of what the other could be. It didn’t last long.”
Shelagh Hubbard swirled her port and raised it high to observe his image distorted through the crimson depths of her glass.
“Six weeks after we were married…,” he paused. This was something he had talked about to no one. “Six weeks, and she went back to her former boyfriend. Just for a weekend. She came home, told me where she had been, said she loved me, said she had to be sure. The absurd thing is, I knew all weekend where she was, what she was doing. We were supposed to meet for dinner on Friday at the corner of Yonge and Queen. Six o’clock. I waited for her in the drenching rain. I waited until ten o’clock. I was twenty-four years old. I knew where she was. I went home.
“She thought I could be a better version of him; he was a bit stupid and psychologically abusive and struck me as sleazy, the one time we met. But he understood her in ways I couldn’t. He played on her weaknesses and I played to her strengths. Inevitably the game went to him.”
“Was it a game?”
“Yeah, for her it was. Not a party game, more like medieval jousting. Tears of anguish, histrionic emotions, malevolent acts, and melodramatic confessions. And of course I wasn’t him. It sunk in, eventually. I wasn’t even a very good version of myself.”
“And what about her? What did you want her to be?”
She got up and put a hand on his arm, giving it a lingering squeeze, then stirred the embers and added a couple of split maple logs, returned to her chair, and leaned forward into the candlelight.
She was drawing him out, like a succubus ingesting his soul. There was something sexually charged about her silence that made him afraid not of her but himself.
“At that point in my life, I wasn’t after a mirror opposite, but the mirror itself. No matter how I held it, I wanted to see me. I hadn’t learned yet to be alone.”
“And have you now?”
“Yes, I have.”
“You and Detective Quin are very close.”
“Yes.”
“But she’s not like you at all.”
“No.”
“And you like that — you both do.”
“We’re good to each other. My marriage, brief as it was, was brutal and bitter. I learned that being alone is a primal condition of being. I’m okay with that.”
“How sad.”
“Not really.”
“You retreat into esoteric allusions and arcane pursuits, with a friend too close to be a lover.”
“Hardly makes me a figure of pathos.”
“But rather restricting. A good relationship can change your life without changing who you are.” She paused, as if trying to determine the truth of her own statement. “Do we have a good relationship, David?”
He did not answer. A woman quite possibly guilty of the most grisly of murders, of being a psychopath, was giving him advice. And he was listening.
“Let’s have that sauna,” she said. “You’ll find towels in your room, top of the stairs to the right. It’s the only room upstairs that’s finished.”
He wondered if it had a lock on the door. It did not.
When he came down, she was already in the kitchen cleaning up, wrapped in a large towel. He remembered when women wore slips, when Lucy used to walk around with a half-slip pulled up over her breasts, like a micro-mini just skimming her bottom. He felt a familiar surge and tugged at the towel draped over his shoulders and adjusted the other one wrapped tightly around his waist.
The room was warm from the fire and they did the dishes together without talking, except to get the job done.
When they went out into the damp chill of the summer kitchen, Shelagh excused herself for a moment and disappeared in the darkness to stoke up the fire, which must have been started in the afternoon, then returned and unbolted the sauna door. It was a larger room than Morgan had expected, with two benches banked along one side long enough to stretch out on and a single bench along the back wall holding a wooden bucket, half-filled with water, and a bundle of birch switches. There was an iron grate in the floor where water could be thrown directly onto the stove-top below. The sweet meaty smell of smoke-dried cedar was intense. As they entered, it was like passing through a wall of heat into another dimension.
Shelagh scooped water out of the bucket and drizzled it through the grate. Clouds of steam surged upward and transformed into waves of dry heat. She climbed onto the upper bench and Morgan joined her. She undid her towel and let it fall away, being careful to keep it under her to avoid scalding against the wood. He dropped the towel around his shoulders onto the bench and loosened the one around his waist. For a short time, his skin felt radiant and dry, then his pores opened and quite suddenly he was covered with beads of sweat that gathered and descended in random streamlets, tickling as they chose the courses of least resistance down his sides and over his stomach, some of them pooling in the depression between his thighs, which were clenched in an autonomic gesture of modesty, his penis tucked between in shy denial of the tumescence that threatened when he had first seen Shelagh towel-wrapped in the kitchen.
Following what he assumed was sauna protocol, Morgan avoided looking sideways in Shelagh’s direction, but as perspiration began to gather between her legs she relaxed her own posture, her towel settled to the side, and he could not avoid observing the shadowy promise as she spread her legs comfortably apart, the soft voluptuous contours of her vulva enhanced by a thin tangle of damp curly hair. He glanced down at himself; shrivelled in the heat to a mushroom, embedded in a wiry cluster of wet moss.
Unused to the extremes of a sauna, Morgan was disconcerted by the contradictory responses of his body. He felt intensely aroused, almost to the point of climax, and yet the instrument by which he normally measured such things had been rendered inoperative. For an instant, the memory flashed through his mind of his first and most troubling orgasm, when he was about seven years old and had had to pee desperately, but lay back under the covers because the sensation of holding back sent exquisite shivers coursing through his entire body, until finally he squeezed his penis between his fingers to restrain from wetting the bed, and suddenly his body and mind convulsed, and
almost immediately he had to run to the bathroom, still pinching the end of his penis to stop the pee from flooding out. He had been so frightened by the experience, for the next year he would stand beside the toilet and practice peeing without touching himself. By the time he was nine, he discovered the delirious thrill was a separable experience from urination. Thus began an odyssey of self-gratification that carried him through adolescence in seemingly infinite expressions of self-loathing ecstasy.
He shifted away from her and she immediately responded by swinging gently around to face him, raising her legs and pushing against him to wriggle and slide across the towel until she could lean with her back against the wall, which she did after placing his second towel between her flesh and the searing wood.
The light was muted red from a coloured bulb recessed in the ceiling and, while much of the illumination was absorbed in the rough-cut cedar surrounding them, a residue gleamed radiantly on their sweat-drenched skin.
Morgan was not normally shy — he was comfortable with his own body, but Shelagh Hubbard was a different experience. As he turned slightly toward her, he recognized the strange feeling within as a blend of sexual and intellectual excitement tinged with unmistakable fear. For the first time since entering the sauna he looked at her eyes. Her lids were draped down as if she were snoozing. He surveyed her body, touching her breasts with his gaze. They were large and voluptuous rather than pendulous, with high-set nipples. Her stomach was tight with a slight ridge of muscle. He looked up at her eyes again, still closed, then down between her legs, into the folds of glistening and textured shadow. Despite his experience with women, he was perusing unfamiliar terrain. He swallowed, aware of the moisture pooling inside his mouth, felt himself falling inside his own body, motionless but yearning immersion, the breath coming hard through his nostrils. He glanced up and saw that she was staring at him, her eyes wide open, watching his secrets revealed.
She smiled.
He looked down at himself. She lowered her gaze, continuing to smile. Yet, strangely, she seemed more amused than wary or beguiled. For an instant, he felt like the little boy, caught in his precocious act of pre-sexuality, uncertain what response was required.