Grave doubts qam-1

by John Moss

  “The fine line between madness and genius…”

  “There’s no line at all. Let’s get outta here.”

  When Miranda woke up, Rachel was naked in bed beside her. Without lifting her head, and with only one eye open, Miranda surveyed the situation. They were lying on top of the covers. Rachel was facing her, her head on the other pillow; she opened her eyes and smiled.

  “G’morning, Detective.”

  Without saying anything, Miranda got up and went into the bathroom. She sat on the toilet with her arms propped on her knees and cradled her head between her hands. She was mildly hungover.

  Rachel stood in the doorway, legs akimbo, arms folded beneath her breasts. Miranda looked up, smiled sheepishly. She had never been with a woman.

  With calming deliberation, her eyes traced Rachel’s body, starting at the long toes and slowly rising, exploring the deep colour of the woman’s skin, sliding up past her trim ankles, knees, hard thighs, delving into the folds between her legs accentuated by the soft curly fringe of glistening hair, rising over her taunt stomach, her gently articulated ribcage and diaphragm, lingering on the sullen precocity of her small breasts, rising past her collarbone, which gleamed ebony through her skin, up the long neck to her chin, the full lips, the fine broad nose, the deep-set gleaming eyes, her face surrounded by a thick fringe of sleek, black hair. Is this woman my lover, she wondered?

  Neither demure nor provocative, Rachel let Miranda survey her body. She said nothing. After a few moments she rose to her toes, lifting her entire form into an alluring and yet innocent pose, and slowly, softly, began to laugh. Miranda glanced away in embarrassment, then looked back, catching the vulnerability and strength in her eyes, and began to laugh herself. Two naked women, one sitting on a toilet, the other holding a statuesque pose. Miranda did not know where to go from there so she began to pee. This took them both to the edge of hysteria.

  “Hurry up,” said Rachel. “Now I’ve gotta go, too.”

  “Use the shower,” said Miranda. “Don’t be shy, girl.”

  Their laughter died out as Rachel stepped into the shower and closed the door, turned on the water, squealed until the hot water came through, and began to sing in such a low voice, the words and melody were inaudible.

  Miranda brushed her teeth, handed a spare toothbrush over the shower door to Rachel, and after a few minutes Rachel opened the door and drew her in beside her. They began to soap each other with gentle exploratory gestures. Miranda wondered if perhaps the night before had been a prelude: she could summon only a vague recollection of sensuous well-being.

  Rachel turned Miranda away and worked a lather on her back, then reached around with soapy hands to cup her breasts against her palms. Miranda relaxed against her and gazing down admired how fingers against flesh gleamed ebony and alabaster in the streaming water. One of Rachel’s hands slid lower and her fingers splayed across the curls of Miranda’s pubic hair, squeezing rivulets of foamy subs, but did not descend further between her legs, making no proprietorial assumptions. Miranda turned and surprised herself by arching away to hold Rachel’s breasts one at a time, gently caressing them with suds.

  Fascinated by her own lack of inhibition, she let her arms drop to rest against Rachel’s hips and leaned forward, their bodies gently touching. Rachel’s breasts pressed softly against Miranda’s, which were a little heavier and, despite their similar heights, a little lower, and pressed into Rachel’s diaphragm; they stood like that with the water streaming over them, passively rinsing. Their lips brushed against each other, foreheads touched, they tilted their heads to the side as if to kiss. Each cocked a leg slightly, pudenda pressed warmly against the upper thigh of the other. They did not move, feeling the intimate warmth of the pressure. They did not kiss. Somewhere in the mind of each there was the ambiguous image of Rodin’s sculpture, and the remnants of last evening’s discussion about undecidability in the works of Samuel Beckett.

  Suddenly, the water went cold. They leapt from the shower, giggling, jostling each other through the narrow stall door. They did not dry each other off. Both realized their moment of intimacy had passed.

  After Rachel left for work, wearing borrowed panties under yesterday’s clothes, Miranda went back to bed. Gradually, she remembered sitting around in the living room drinking Bloody Marys after leaving the pub. She recalled how natural it had seemed, with Rachel staying over, the two of them walking into the bedroom, stripping to the buff like girls at camp, and climbing side by side into bed. Some time during the night they must have kicked off the covers.

  Her hangover didn’t amount to much but she was tired. She might have slept fitfully, being naked in bed with another woman. She was not in the least upset about compromised sexuality. She had no idea whether Rachel Naismith was a lesbian, or whether she herself was unexpectedly bisexual. Time would reveal all that. She was curious more than anything else. Miranda was comfortable with her own sexuality, if not with sex itself. If only she could get them together — sex and sexuality. She wondered if it were possible.

  She remembered sunbathing beside the mill race near Waldron, the village where she grew up. She remembered the shadow of a man looming over her. The rest she forgot until he reappeared in her life, twenty years later, driving a Jaguar. The girl in the closet had a story of her own. But she died. Miranda could refuse to remain a victim; she could not.

  They had talked late into the night, Miranda and Rachel. After meandering up Yonge Street, past shop after shop catering to bizarre sexual, psychic, and spiritual proclivities and the occasional outlet for mundane necessities like toilet paper and party balloons, they had found an anonymous trattoria and settled in for a surprisingly bad dinner with a nondescript bottle of wine. Afterward they each had a shot of grappa, courtesy of the owner.

  Halfway back to Miranda’s place, Rachel realized she had left her pack behind. When they returned to the restaurant, the proprietor was waiting inside the door with the pack in hand. He had not tried to call after her — maybe he had discovered it too late — but he was visibly pleased to find her in his debt.

  “Officer,” he proclaimed. “This is yours.”

  “I know it’s mine, paisano. Did you find anything in it of interest?”

  “Your uniform. That’s how I knew it was yours.”

  “Or how you knew I was a cop.”

  “Yes, one of those two. Ciao, ladies. Good night.”

  As they walked along Isabella Street, Rachel argued persuasively that the man was a former Mafia boss in an RCMP witness-protection program. Miranda, having once been a Mountie, thought it more likely he was the illegitimate offspring of Prince Rainier.

  Whatever the case, they agreed he was not a born restaurateur.

  “I’ve only got V-8 juice. And some gin. Does that make a Bloody Mary?” Miranda called to Rachel from the kitchen.

  Rachel answered through the open door of the bathroom. “It sounds wretched. Let’s give it a try.”

  They settled onto the living-room sofa.

  On the coffee table in front of them sat a large bottle of V-8, a bottle of gin, a salt shaker, and a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Each mixed her own drink, Rachel licking the rim of her glass and dragging it through salt in the palm of her hand before mixing the gin and juice, Miranda shaking in enough Worcestershire to turn the liquid a muddy brown.

  “I think,” said Miranda, raising her glass in a mock toast, “this drink is a Bloody Mess.”

  “What do you suppose was going through the killer’s mind?” said Rachel.

  The two women were relaxed with each other. Conversation no longer needed to proceed through a logical sequence with appropriate segues. Each could say what was on her mind and connections were made through personality, not content.

  “I mean, was it all for a diabolical show? Were the murders collateral damage? It was a thrilling display of pathological depravity — horror with an edge.”

  “An edge?”

  “Of irony, I guess. It’
s very contemporary, isn’t it? To make death a joke and a puzzle.”

  “Horror films are funny,” said Miranda.

  “They used to be scary. Think of Nosferatu, compared to Interview with the Vampire or the Scream movies, or Freddie the 13th. ”

  “You’ve made a study of horror?” said Miranda. “Have you ever actually seen Nosferatu?”

  “Only in clips, but whatever, the old films evoked our deepest fears. The new ones play to our vanity.”

  “Vanity? Like, you’re frightened, but you understand why. We’re back to irony.”

  “Death is the ultimate irony.” Rachel said this as if she were quoting someone. “There was a directness in old-fashioned horror; it was the real thing. Dracula. Edgar Allan Poe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, even Jane Eyre.”

  “The real thing!”

  “Where horror and terror converge.” She paused. “When we are terrified to be alive.”

  “Wow, Rachel. That’s scary. I’ll take irony — with an edge.”

  Rachel seemed preternaturally composed as she discussed the Hogg’s Hollow crime scene and related it to films and novels, showing an affinity for the ominous that Miranda found mystifying and strangely exciting.

  “You’re lucky, Miranda. You get to think on the job.”

  “All cops think. A traffic cop thinks. When I worked on Parliament Hill, striking in scarlet, I had to think.”

  “About what?”

  “About security, about whether my hat was on straight, about why I ever wanted to be a Mountie.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno. I wanted to be a cop. Morgan says it was for empowerment. He figures I was reacting to a subconscious sense of violation.”

  “Is he right?”

  “Maybe.”

  Rachel sank back against the sofa cushions, waiting.

  “There was a man; he was in one of my senior courses at university, much older than me. He may have…” Miranda sat forward, took in a deep breath. “I was raped when I was eighteen. I never saw his face. I didn’t know his name… Maybe I did, I don’t know. I made myself forget.

  “I didn’t connect the guy in my class with my assailant. Not consciously, not until last summer.

  “At the end of the academic year, when friends were taking off for Europe or Thailand or preparing for graduate school — I had a scholarship to go on in semiotics, believe it or not — to everyone’s surprise, including my own, I joined the Mounties.”

  “Morgan thinks you were trying to get away from this guy who was haunting your life?”

  “Shadowing, not haunting. I didn’t know he was there. Morgan thinks subconsciously I did. He thinks I was trying to take charge of my life. I don’t even know if I believe in the subconscious. It’s just a bunch of neurons in there and an infinite maze of electrical impulses.”

  “Tell me about your daughter.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ve mentioned a girl. I thought maybe it was a custody thing.”

  “Jill? She’s my ward. I’ve never had kids. You?”

  “Not even an abortion.”

  Miranda was thrown for a moment, but saw nothing in Rachel’s expression either to indicate morbid wit or incipient confession.

  “Jill’s fifteen, going on forty. And sometimes she’s four. She’s sweet and tough and smart. She’s gone through a lot.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m the administrator of her father’s charitable bequests. I was his executor.”

  “Not the girl from the fish-pond murders?”

  Miranda glared.

  “I’m sorry,” said Rachel. “That was thoughtless.”

  Miranda shrugged. Usually, she did not connect with versions of herself in the media, especially in stories as wildly exploited for gruesome perversity, despite all that went unrevealed. But Rachel’s casual reference forced a vital connection between the trivialized account in the papers and her private and painful memories.

  Rachel seemed to understand.

  “It’s so easy to lose track of the real people involved,” she was saying. “Like the fifty-some prostitutes murdered in Vancouver. Maybe their bodies were ground up as pig food. People food? It wasn’t until I saw somebody’s brother weeping on television, suddenly the numbers, the macabre speculation broke down, those women, they were individual lives, each with her own terrible agony, dying her own special death. It’s the Anne Frank syndrome. I understand more about the Holocaust, reading the account of a girl that ends just before her arrest, than from seeing the pictures of bulldozed bodies and reading statistics. I didn’t even know Anne had died at Bergen-Belsen when I read her diary. The illusions of objectivity in historical texts or in tabloids destroy empathy. You know what I mean?”

  Miranda stared at her, wide-eyed. Another person might have just apologized.

  “You talk to me,” said Rachel. “You need to talk.”

  She reached across and put her hand on the other woman’s knee. Miranda started to pull away, then placed her own hand over Rachel’s and gave it an affirming squeeze that curiously translated through Rachel’s grasp to her own knee, as if she were reassuring herself.

  Miranda placed Jill at the centre of the narrative, merging public knowledge with confidential revelations; unsure, herself, about the lines between news and gossip and confession. She explained her connection to a wealthy recluse with a vintage Jag, and she explained Jill’s connection to them both. She explained how she had been transformed by ghastly circumstances from investigating detective to Jill’s guardian and the man’s executor. She described horrors inflicted and horrors endured.

  “But you cannot suppress evil for wanting,” she said. “You can hide terrible things but you can’t erase them. You can’t forget just because you want to forget. You know what I mean?”

  “Miranda, I do. I know exactly what you mean.”

  Miranda meant to ask Rachel to go on, but instead she pursued the dead woman in the closet. That seemed more real, for the moment, paradoxically, because Rachel was willing to listen.

  “She died from dehydration,” Miranda explained. “She felt her skin parch and shrivel, felt her insides decrepitate, felt her lips crack and her eyes bleed. This young woman, she was of no interest to her killer. Do you realize how rare that must be? Murder, not to end a life but to create death. It’s beyond pathological. Almost satanic.”

  “Death as an act of creation! In that case, there will likely be more. Do you think so?”

  They talked late into the night, then went to bed.

  Miranda rolled on her side, staring at the indentation in the pillow where Rachel’s head had been. She reached over and gently rested the back of her hand in the hollow. She could smell the fresh scent that lingered in the sheets, like the smell of leaves unfurling in the morning sun. She drifted into sleep, and an hour later awakened. She would call Jill at noon, when she was home from school, and see if she wanted to go out for pizza, maybe an early movie if the homework wasn’t too heavy. They both liked movies.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Rapa Nui

  “G’morning,” said Morgan. “I’m back.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been away.”

  Miranda mumbled, struggling to assimilate his voice into her scattering dream. She rolled over on her back and stretched. At least it was morning.

  “I’ve been up all night. It’s time you got out of bed,” he said, as if there were a logical point. “I’m still at the airport; thought I’d check in.”

  “Thanks, Morgan. Where have you been?”

  “Just got in from Sao Paulo.”

  “That’s Brazil!”

  “That’s right.”

  “What were you doing there, for goodness sake?”

  “Stopping over from Santiago.”

  “Chile!”

  “Well done.”

  “What was in Chile? You are very strange.”

  “Easter Island. Santiago is the jumping off point for Easter Island
.”

  “You’re serious. You were at Easter Island.”

  “‘On,’ not ‘at.’ It’s very small.”

  “Morgan, it’s too early. Meet me on, or at, Fran’s for breakfast.”

  “I’ll meet you at Starbucks in an hour.”

  They both knew which Starbucks — the one over from police headquarters on the corner of College and Yonge.

  “So, you’ve been away?” she said when she saw him.

  He rose, kissed her on both cheeks, and slumped back into his chair. He had a large cappuccino waiting for her, with the saucer on top to keep it warm. His eyes were bloodshot and his hands swollen, but he looked content, like the cat, having swallowed the canary, who endured indigestion as a reasonable price for the pleasure.

  “Tell me.”

  “Well,” he said, “I got on an Air Canada flight at Pearson, heading for Easter Island. When I transferred to Varig Air in Brazil, I was travelling to Isla de Pascua. In Santiago, I boarded Lan Chile for Rapa Nui. And I landed on Te pito o te henua. All the same place. It was a magical journey. Did you ever read Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, where he gets on a modern train in the Metropolis, and transfers to an older train on his way to Mariposa as he travels back into another world defined by nostalgia and wit? I have just emerged from another dimension, defined by enchantment and mystery.”

  “You sound slightly demented. What on earth took you… there?” Miranda gazed across the table at her partner, who was dishevelled, buoyant with enthusiasm. He was precious in her life, she wanted to tell him. She wanted to hug him and keep him invulnerable. “You are an idiot, Morgan. No one knew where you were.”

  “On Rapa Nui. That’s what they call themselves, and their language, and the island. Te pito o te henua means navel of the world. It’s not really a name; for a thousand years they didn’t know there was anyone else on the planet. It’s a geographical declaration.”

  “I wrote an essay on Thor Heyerdahl as an anthropological entrepreneur when I was in university.”