Grave doubts qam-1

by John Moss

  “Victoria wants to go back to Barbados, Jill. She has kids of her own.”

  “I’m her kid; she can’t leave me. She wouldn’t want to.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she’ll stay with me always.”

  “And me too,” said Justine. “Victoria and me. We’re her support group.”

  “Get lost,” said Jill.

  “I don’t want you to go away.”

  “Branksome’s in Toronto,” said Miranda.

  “Mandy, it’s the wrong side of Yonge Street. And you want me to live there!”

  “And enjoy it!”

  “It’s called Branksome Hall. That sounds like a jail.”

  “Sounds ritzy to me,” said Rachel.

  “What did Victoria say?” asked Miranda.

  “Ask her yourself. Victoria!” Jill called, leaning back on her elbows and casting her voice through the screen door behind her.

  There was silence until Victoria appeared in the doorway. “Was I bein’ summoned, Miss Jill?” She rolled her eyes. “I ain’t birfin’ no baby, Miss Scarlet.” Then she saw Rachel. She opened the door and came out, extending her hand. “I’m Victoria,” she announced, as if it were in doubt. “I am this rude child’s significant other — not her mother and I’m not her guardian, and I’m Miranda’s housekeeper, not the young lady’s housekeeper, in spite of what she thinks, and I’m not her friend since Justine’s enough friend for anybody.”

  “‘Significant other’ has sexual implications,” said Jill.

  “For heaven’s sake, Jill!” Victoria snapped.

  To Rachel’s surprise, the girl looked admonished. “Sorry, Victoria. This is Rachel Naismith. She’s Mandy’s friend.”

  “And she’s twelfth-generation Canadian,” Justine chimed in.

  “It can happen,” said Victoria. “Even ’mong us black folks.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Rachel, shaking Victoria’s hand.

  “How are you? And how are you, Detective Quin? Your girl here is getting quite a handful. Off to boarding school for her — it’s the only way.”

  “Victoria! You told me I could live with you always.”

  “Or until you got too big to handle, whichever came first.”

  Jill looked devastated, then burst into laughter. “You don’t want to go home, do you, Victoria?”

  It was Victoria’s turn to look distraught. Miranda interjected. “That’s not really fair, Jill. You can’t make her choose between you and her own children.”

  “But she’s always been here — ever since I was born.”

  “But child, I do have my own children runnin’ around in Barbados, and they need their mommy. I wanna take you with me, if I could.”

  Justine interjected. “Can we come and see you for visits and things, like on holidays? Can I come too?”

  “Of course,” Victoria responded, touched by the naivete of their love. “You stand up, the both of you.” They did, and she drew each of them to her bosom, hugging them with a sweet rocking motion. “You’ll both come and stay with me any time you want. That’s okay with Miranda, isn’t it, Miranda?”

  “For sure,” said Miranda. She exchanged a knowing glance with Rachel. They had talked about Jill and her need for stability. Boarding school, Rachel agreed, was the answer.

  Miranda wasn’t prepared to move to Wychwood Park. Her work demanded a central location (she knew that argument was absurd, since her condo on Isabella was little closer to police headquarters). Her work did demand odd hours and a disruptive domestic life. Jill had only two more years in school after this one.

  “I’m not going to leave here. I love this house and I love Justine and I’m not going to leave either one. I’ll stay here without you, Victoria. Justine and I will live here alone. It’s my house.”

  “More or less,” said Miranda. “‘Less’ would be the operative word, since I’m in charge of your estate.”

  “Then I’ll move in with you.”

  “Highly unlikely!”

  “Then I’ll move in with Justine.”

  “Jill, you can’t,” said Justine. “I’m too poor. You know there’s no room. My dad and my mom, they think you’re my twin sister, but there’s no way. You’re the daughter they had to give up. I sleep on the couch.”

  “You do?” exclaimed Rachel.

  “Only since my little brother was born.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Twelve.”

  Jill turned to address them all solemnly. “You know about the working poor. Well, Justine’s parents, they work and they’re poor. They don’t live in Wychwood Park. So, we’re at an impasse.”

  “No,” said Rachel. “I think we can work it out. Let me have a brief whispering session with the boss lady here.” She took Miranda by the arm and walked her to the corner of the verandah.

  “Now, it’s none of my business, but I’m going to tell you all the same. Jill’s expenses are covered by the estate of the old bastard who owned the Jag, right? You take some of the old bastard’s money. You set up a fund. You already administer two other funds from his millions. So you set up an education scholarship in her dead mother’s name. For girls. First recipient, Justine. Is that her real name?”

  “She and Jill both read Lawrence Durrell when they were twelve. It’s from there, she’s been Justine ever since, except for a brief period when she was Balthazar.”

  “Neat.”

  Over dinner, conversation between Miranda and Rachel ran the gamut from boarding schools to Catholic saints, but kept returning to murder. They were in the nondescript Italian restaurant on Yonge Street that had become their special haunt, despite the lacklustre food and indifferent service. Rachel described her year at Alma College near London. That was all her parents could afford. She worked her way through Western, but she had been going through a brief Rastafarian phase and they figured a stint at a school for young ladies would straighten her out. It did, she observed enigmatically, in ways they could never have imagined. Miranda confessed to her own freshman admiration for private-school girls, who seemed, wherever they were, to behave like they had a perfect right to be there. They were worldly — even the ones who had never been to Europe — and they had ways of dressing down with casual authority. She and Rachel agreed: it would be good for Jill to spend her last two years of high school at Branksome Hall.

  Sainthood was more problematic. Neither of them came from a tradition where becoming a saint was an option. True, they had both encountered Mormons, with their self-proclaimed status as latter-day saints, but Rachel found them racist and too cheerfully morbid, and Miranda found them absurd. It’s not Jesus coming to North America, she explained. He could go anywhere he wanted. It wasn’t the ancient story that got to her. It was Joseph Smith, a convicted felon, translating the sacred tablets into pseudo King James English, in spite of finding them in New York State in the nineteenth century. The assumption that God spoke to humankind in a seventeenth-century dialect was, to her, both offensive and silly. Still, she admitted, the few Mormons she had known appeared blessed.

  “What does that mean?” asked Rachel.

  “Like ‘radiant’: touched by the light.”

  “You mean, smug and sanctimonious.”

  “Don’t you envy people who know the answers?”

  “Miranda, I haven’t even figured out all the questions.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, you like televangelists, exuding righteousness, oozing self-unction, offering deliverance on the wings of a buck and a grin. Yechh.”

  “No-o-o,” said Miranda. “But look at the other extreme — the spiritually humble.”

  “Where do you find them? Not saints, surely not in Sunday church.”

  “We see people doing good works all the time. What about them?”

  “Exactly. They’re the true saints. There is no correlation between religion and goodness.”

  They conceded there are good people in the world, and they also concede
d that they were both being tremendously arrogant, pronouncing on other people’s states of grace and salvation. Neither could fully comprehend sainthood in the Church calendar, although many canonized saints extended their presence far beyond the boundaries of Catholicism or even of organized religion: St. Nicholas and St. Valentine, most commonly, but others as well, like St. George and his dragon, St. Patrick and Ireland.

  “It’s nice to know she’s making a comeback,” said Rachel.

  “Who?”

  “The Virgin Mary.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you read the tabloids, Miranda? The image of Mary has appeared on the wall of a derelict church. I was reading in the lineup at the supermarket last night. Turns out, it could be the church in Beausoleil. They’re vague on the details. And they quote an unidentified authority as saying the image may only be a water stain bleeding though the plaster.”

  “You’re assuming Alexander’s the authority. There’s no water damage in his church.”

  “Well, the paper said that the authority admitted it might be a wall painting under the plaster showing through, in which case it wasn’t the Virgin but a local folk saint.”

  “Sister Marie Celeste! Amazing. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I assumed you keep tabs on the tabloids.”

  Miranda could imagine Alexander Pope’s annoyance at this turn of events. Rachel thought it an amusing bit of trivia, but Miranda knew he would be swarmed with fanatics, desperate for a sign — the same people who yearn to see Christ’s face in a tortilla, his Holy Mother in cracks on a ceiling. It was diverting enough when the followers of Sister Marie Celeste hovered silently in the background or solemnly cleaned, but tabloid salvation is a raucous affair. His work would become unbearable. And how could he protect the revealed frescoes from vandalism when zealous visitors pried bits from the wall as holy relics? She hoped whoever Alexander’s angels were, underwriting his project, they would have the power to restrict access to the building until the inevitable frenzy dissipated. As it would, once Alexander revealed the source of the image in the fresco beneath.

  “What I don’t get is why Sister Marie would not be the perfect saint, from the Church’s perspective.”

  “Because,” said Miranda, “she was beyond their control.”

  “She was dead.”

  “Exactly. It’s harder to control the dead.”

  “I would have thought it was easier,” said Rachel. “They can’t argue back.”

  “But they can. The dead can speak eloquently. It’s the living who can’t argue back. The dead have the authority of having crossed over, and even the pope can’t pretend to do that.”

  “But sainthood is all about what the living can make of the dead.”

  “What the living can make of the dead? That’s what the Church is all about. And Shelagh Hubbard. Think about what she made of the dead. We’ll have to ask her if she was divinely inspired.”

  “If you ever find her.”

  “We’ll find her,” said Miranda. “You can count on it. There’s no way someone like her can stay hidden for long.”

  “Not if she’s competing with Rome.”

  Miranda was uneasy. In spite of being an agnostic, she was not as far off the scale as Rachel or Morgan, she was sensitive to what a believer would consider blasphemy. Her conditioning in a Christian world and her affection for the rituals, her respect for the fundamental values, made her uneasily defensive about organized religion. At a visceral level, she thrilled to the idea that there was something inaccessible in her life that was holy. Yet she knew with certainty that she would never turn, in either peace or in sorrow, to what her world had constructed as God. That, she thought, would violate her sense of the truly spiritual in human experience.

  She revised their postulation. “I think what Shelagh Hubbard has done is antithetical to religious practice.”

  “You sound like my religion professor.”

  “The woman discards the souls of her victims as refuse. She uses their physical remains like so much clay. She sculpts and positions them into shapes that amuse her. I’d say that’s the polar opposite to what religions try to do. Virtually all religions celebrate the spirit within, whether to set it free or contain it with meaning. The end result may be not that much different — posing the dead for the living — but the intent surely is.”

  “So, she’s kind of an Antichrist.”

  “No, I’d say she’s the antithesis of the Mary triumvirate. At least Sister Marie Celeste and Sister Mary Joseph and Mary, the Mother of God, co-opted each other in good conscience. They brought something profound to the lives of their witnesses, even if you and I don’t have access to such things ourselves. If they offer female salvation of sorts, Hubbard exemplifies its absolute absence.”

  “So, she’s the anti-Marialogical principle at work.”

  Miranda stared at her friend, amused and yet dismayed at the cheerful cynicism that she wrapped around herself like invisible armour. She reached across the table and touched her hand. Miranda’s own hand was pale and lightly corded with blue-green veins — a beautiful, mature hand. And Rachel’s was dark and smooth, with flecks of childhood scar tissue — the hand of youth and promise.

  Rachel rolled her hand over and gave Miranda’s a squeeze, then they both sat back and for a few minutes said nothing.

  It was Rachel who brought the conversation back to murder. She wanted to work homicide eventually. The bodies at Hogg’s Hollow were her first murder victims.

  “It’s been two weeks since Hubbard disappeared,” Rachel said. “You’ve read her journals cover to cover. The forensic evidence is in: they were killed in the farmhouse. The provincial coroner’s office concurs: they died separately in the sauna — him first, and he was stored in the freezer. So, what don’t you know? What will she be able to add? You’ve got an airtight case, right?”

  “Well, she could add herself, for a start. It’s hard to prosecute without her. But at least we won’t have another deadly scenario.”

  “How so? How can you be sure?” The younger woman clearly regarded Miranda as her mentor in criminal matters, although Miranda suspected they were equally experienced in life.

  “She doesn’t have access to the tools of her trade, so to speak. Think about reducing Morgan to a bunch of old bones and secreting them in an Indian burial tomb. That would have been a very complex affair.”

  “Morgan was lucky.”

  “Yes, he was. Of course, it was probably his one shot at sainthood.”

  “Pity.”

  “He’ll live with it.”

  “A lot of what you do is wait.”

  “For comics and cops, timing is everything.”

  “You don’t really think she was abducted, do you?”

  “No, I think she staged her own disappearance. Which means she’ll stage her reappearance as well. I suspect it’ll be spectacular. I’d say she set it up just so. Even leaving her journals behind. She wanted us to know what she’s done. She’s building anticipation like an impresario. By flaunting perfidy, she stays in control.”

  As Miranda walked home from the restaurant, Rachel’s questions about Shelagh Hubbard troubled her. She had read the journals with the meticulous care of a textual scholar, but what resonated in her mind was the embedded personality, so blatant and yet obscure, taunting with its inaccessibility. It was as if from the beginning Hubbard wrote her journals for the eventual appreciation of witnesses. Were she and Morgan the only readers, so far? Presumably, yes. Morgan still had the binders at home. They had not compared notes, but she was sure their readings would differ.

  Scotland Yard had responded to her queries about Madame Renaud’s and the Chamber of Horrors with surprising delicacy. They would look into the matter, they said. But Renaud’s is a venerable institution, housing effigies of great personages from throughout British history. It was not as if the police could simply march in and start peeling wax from faces that had accrued sanctity i
n their own right by virtue of their celebrity as fakes. They would get back to her.

  It was a warm evening. The two men approaching through the dappled shadows on Isabella Street were in shirt sleeves. They had been drinking. Miranda tensed, and felt the reassuring bulge of her semi-automatic against her back. Their reeling became more exaggerated as they got closer, and on the excuse of intoxication, one of the men lurched against her. She pushed him out of the way, but the other man, on the pretence of assisting her, grasped her shoulders. She shrugged him off. Somehow, she was between them and she tried to sidestep off the curb.

  Seeming to steady himself, the first man threw his arm over her shoulders. As she slipped out, the second man took hold of her waist from behind and lifted her. She kicked out and, breaking free, she reached for her gun. As she swung it around from the holster, both men froze.

  “Hey, lady, we were — ”

  “Shut up,” she said, heaving to catch her breath.

  They looked terrified. They were young, probably university students. She motioned with her Glock for them to prostrate themselves on the sidewalk. Shocked sober, they fell to their knees and tumbled forward. One of them started to cry, sobbing softly into the pavement. A pool of urine spread between his legs. Both were shaking.

  “Now, stay there,” said Miranda. “Don’t move. Don’t move a muscle.”

  As she walked down the street, she could hear whispering. She stepped into shadows and looked back. They had lost sight of her. In a sudden scramble, they were both on their feet, stalk still, then running madly toward the lights of Yonge Street. Miranda put her gun away. She knew enough not to draw a firearm in a situation like that. She could have talked her way out of it — she only had to say she was a cop. On the other hand, she thought, they’ll think twice before hassling another woman. She might be packing a gun.

  Her recovery rate was a testament to experience and by the time she got to her condo she had dismissed her muggers as nothing more than a nuisance. She whimsically rang her own buzzer, as she always did, in a ritual meant to scare burglars out of her apartment, avoiding the confrontation if she walked in on them unannounced.