by John Moss
They found a marker buoy flying the diagonal red-on-white flag, and swinging the stern downwind they tied off securely and lowered the ladder into the water. Quietly, they slipped into their gear, helping each other to safety-check valves, regulators, buckles, and BCD vests. Buoyancy Control Devices; was there a sport anywhere with more acronyms? Miranda wondered, trying to distract herself. Each checked the others’ auxiliary regulators and mouthpieces to make sure in an emergency a buddy could breathe from the same tank. The octopus, she thought. At least octopus is descriptive — a metaphor, not an acronym. They conferred about weights, and trusted Rachel’s judgment based on her previous experience in fresh water. They needed to dive heavy to compensate for the buoyancy of the thick suits. Better too much weight, she said, than too little. You can increase buoyancy by adding air to your BCD vest, but if you’re too light, you’ll be fighting to stay down the whole dive.
Rachel had a small dive bag that she attached to her belt, along with one of the flashlights the dive shop provided. Miranda wondered where the bag came from when she saw Rachel take it from her knapsack. They had not come north expecting to dive. “Whatcha got there?” she asked casually, trying not to further arouse the uncharacteristic crankiness Rachel had been showing for the last hour or so. Miranda realized that her friend was likely apprehensive about the dive, just as she was, and that’s how she was dealing with anxiety, just as Miranda was coping by being exceptionally quiet.
“Just stuff, don’t worry,” said Rachel, and she smiled disarmingly.
Miranda felt reassured. At this point in any diving adventure, Miranda found nerves were always a little on edge as the excitement mounted, and a display of companionable affection was welcome. She observed Alexander. He, too, was inordinately quiet. For the moment, Miranda felt a renewed bond with him, perhaps because they both seemed to be enacting a scenario that was primarily Rachel’s design.
They stepped down onto the dive platform, moving awkwardly under the heavy burden of their tanks, their limbs constricted by the thick, clammy, synthetic material of their wetsuits. They wriggled into their fins, pumped a bit of air into their vests, adjusted their masks and checked to see their snorkels were in place, slipped on thick gloves, then put in their mouthpieces. Rachel immediately took a broad stride forward and splashed into the water, her head barely going under. Miranda followed and Alexander came last.
Miranda was astonished by the slap of cold against the exposed flesh of her face and even more by the crystal clarity of the water hidden under the dark surface. She felt an icy trickle track the length of her spine between wetsuit and skin, but looking down at the panoramic scene spread out below them in glimmering detail she forgot her discomfort.
Raising her head for the last time in open air, she exchanged excited grins with the other two divers, despite mouths jammed with breathing apparatus, and each diver gave the okay signal followed by a thumbs-down sign. They slowly began their descent along the sloped length of the mooring line. At ten feet Miranda stopped, squeezed her nose through her mask, and blew until a slight popping in her ears relieved the pressure, and then she hovered, surveying the wreck below them. She felt a familiar thrill spread through her body as she slowly descended, pausing periodically to clear her ears, eyes shifting from wonderment at the wreck below to monitor her companions’ progress, ensuring that they stayed within easy reach of each other.
Twenty minutes south of Tobermory, Peter Singh asked Morgan, “What is the significance that her parents were morticians?”
“Rachel? I’m sure most kids of funeral directors grow up excessively normal. It’s almost de rigueur. But it seems likely Rachel was exposed as a child to the arts of embalming and preparing corpses for public display in ways that have shaped her life ever since. She acquired skills and a fascination with death, the way a lawyer’s kid will become a classroom advocate and end up as an adult serving hard time for manipulating the limits of power. Or a politician.”
“My goodness, I am glad my father was a grocer!”
“Grocers’ kids become cops.”
“Actually, he was a lawyer, himself, in Punjab, but that is another story.” After a few moments, when all they could hear was the hum of the tires on pavement, he asked, “Do you think Rachel could have killed the Hogg’s Hollow couple in Professor Shelagh Hubbard’s farmhouse? Is there any possibility?”
“Strong circumstantial evidence plus DNA ties Hubbard, herself, to those two. She almost certainly brought the colonial clothes from England; she arranged the corpses just so — ”
“Strangers in an eternal embrace. That really is a wicked notion.”
“Let’s say Rachel and Alexander recognized Hubbard’s grisly tableau at Hogg’s Hollow as a signature crime,” Morgan continued. “They were supposed to. But there was a problem: they would suspect that Miranda and I, and you, might eventually resolve the mystery and find it led back, one way or another, to them — an eventuality they preferred to avoid. So they created the counterfeit journals together. Rachel had the talent — she was a genius with pens and paper. Pope supplied the details of the London murders. He would, of course, know them intimately. And they adjusted the narrative chronology to coincide with Shelagh’s tenure at the museum.”
“But what about your murder?”
“My murder? No, yes, well. The Huron burial site — I think — was legitimate, if incredibly naive. Dr. Hubbard’s own genius was nothing if not erratic. It would establish her professional reputation to discover the bones of a Jesuit saint in a Huron grave. I don’t think she had any intention of putting me in there at all. But as Professor Birbalsingh said, it was a quixotic fabrication.” This pleased Morgan, to think he had not been in jeopardy. Sometimes a sauna is just a sauna. “She must have told Rachel and Alexander about her project, and about my visit. They conflated the two stories and wrote up the third journal as if my death were at the centre of her plans. That would draw our guaranteed attention… to her alone. Then they killed her. More precisely, Rachel killed her. I’m sure Alexander kept his distance. They both realized he was the more likely suspect.”
“Then why not just make her body disappear? Leave it a cold case. Why fake an abduction?”
“They wanted us to think Shelagh Hubbard was at the dead centre of another theatrical contrivance. Letting the scene fade to black would have been anticlimactic.”
“But the violets? They expected you to find her body; they practically invited you to find it.”
“They couldn’t resist a good yarn. They were sufficiently arrogant to believe we’d grow old searching for an explanation. That undoubtedly pleased them.”
“Hubris!” said Peter Singh, drawing the word from his sketchy memory of lectures in classical drama. “Seeding the grave of a saint with a fresh cadaver. That opened up a whole new story, in fact.”
“Which must have pleased them immensely. Perhaps each in a different way: morbid curiosity, to see how it would all turn out; the thrill of both directing the drama and being on stage. They both knew murders don’t just happen — they have lives of their own.”
“So to speak.”
“So to speak. In subsuming Alexander’s saint in a story where she had the power, Rachel would have made sure Pope wasn’t compromised — and we had no reason to suspect her. As far as we knew, she was in Toronto, three or four hours away.”
Suddenly, they were in Tobermory.
“We’re here, Peter. Head straight for the docks. If we’re lucky they haven’t gone out yet.” Morgan could feel his heart thumping inside his chest. He knew how important it was to remain calm, but what started as vague anxieties in the middle of the night had escalated into genuine fear for his partner’s survival.
The divers glided away from the cement mooring block and gathered in a hovering conclave just over the rocky bottom beside what remained of an early twentieth-century excursion steamer. The hull, virtually intact, lay heeled over at an angle so that the remains of the superstructure loomed omi
nously above them. Miranda checked her depth gauge. They were at about sixty-six feet, or twenty metres. Divers are ambi-dimensional. The wreck was down far enough to escape the surge from the wildest of storms, yet shallow enough to be fairly accessible. Apart from layers of zebra mussels and lucent green algae, the steel hull appeared remarkably well-preserved.
With a circular upward sweep of her hand Rachel indicated she wanted to rise partway and circumnavigate the ship in an initial reconnaissance. They swam in a delta formation, with Rachel in the lead. On the upper side they found where the hull had been staved in. From the discrete shape and shear edges of the gaping hole, and the fact that it must have been at the waterline, Miranda deduced the ship had gone down as the result of an offshore collision rather than slamming against the rocks before slipping back into the depths.
She wondered how many had died. Was the sinking ship struggling toward land so that lifeboats could reach the shore, or steaming away to avoid breaking up on the rocks? She wished she knew the history; it felt eerie to be there, not knowing how many lives had been lost and under what circumstances. It made her feel like an invader, not knowing, like a ghoul, exposing open graves to her own invidious gaze.
Once they had circled the ship, Rachel led them up to the wheelhouse, which leaned precariously, and they could see the wheel and the binnacle were intact. Now that the wreck was part of a national marine park, attached artifacts would probably remain in position for the duration. Whatever that meant.
Miranda was relieved when Rachel did not try to enter the wheelhouse but passed up and over the side of the hull, then felt her breath quicken as she realized they were descending toward the gaping wound in the ship’s upper side. Rachel hovered over the hole and signalled for the others to turn on their flashlights. Giving them the “okay” sign with thumb to forefinger, she turned and with a slight kick of her fins descended into the darkness. Alexander motioned for Miranda to follow, which she did reluctantly, and he came immediately after. She thought they had agreed there would be no penetration, but these were her friends and they seemed almost casually confident.
Once inside the hull, her eyes adjusted to the murky light. She was disconcerted by the metallic echo of their air bubbling against the steel walls and bulkheads. The rumble of her own exhaled breath as it rushed past her ears was the only underwater sound she was used to. Another sound intruded — an insistent pounding — and she was unnerved to recognize her own heartbeat. Claustrophobia pressed and she pushed back, determined to suppress even the possibility of panic. She focused on maintaining neutral buoyancy. She had fine-tuned the air in her BCD on descent to compensate for the pressure squeezing air out of her 7 ml wetsuit. She carried weights precisely matched to counter body fat. She was pleased — she weighed nothing. Strengthened by vanity, she expanded her mental horizon and took comfort in seeing Rachel immediately ahead and, finding herself a flickering shadow in Alexander’s flashlight beam, in knowing Alexander was just behind her.
The three of them edged forward in file, using only the slightest intake or exhalation of breath to modify their relative plane, careful to stir up as little sediment as possible. In the midst of the criss-cross beams of three flashlights illuminating their surroundings, Miranda felt disoriented as she tried to distinguish between ceilings and floors. Structural angles were askew but up and down were more certain, since debris was gathered beneath them and their bubbles rose overhead.
Rachel motioned with her light and they followed her through a door that opened at a crazy slant into a passageway. In file they progressed toward a doorway gaping open at the far end. Rachel veered off and entered as if she knew where she was going. For a moment she was out of sight. Miranda felt reassured as Alexander’s light beam cast her shadow into the gloom ahead and a surge of relief when she turned through the doorway and discovered Rachel at the far end of a large cabin with three portholes that previous divers had scraped clear.
The three of them gently manoeuvred until they were close enough to touch. They began breathing in unison, suspended in the middle of this alien world, their bubbles roaring. Miranda could still hear the drumming of her heart against the inside of her skull but the beat was slower, now, and regular. Rachel signalled to extinguish their lights by pressing the beams against their stomachs. Instead of the absolute darkness that Miranda expected, she was astonished by the illumination assaulting the portholes from the ambient light in the water outside, and surprised at how little of that light actually passed into the ship’s interior, where she could just barely make out Rachel and Alexander as phantom shapes beside her.
To be reassured it was them, she drew her flashlight away from her body and scanned the beam across their torsos, careful to keep it away from their eyes. Rachel gave the “okay” sign and signalled for a return to darkness. It was as if this room were Rachel’s gift and needed to be appreciated in natural light.
Profound gloom, Miranda thought. Still, she pressed the light beam into her stomach and was a little surprised when Rachel reached over and switched it off. She felt she had been admonished, until she saw her do the same with Alexander’s. Okay, she thought, it’s your show.
Miranda swung slowly on an imaginary axis below her rising column of bubbles and gazed around. The distorted angles of a room out of kilter sorted themselves out as her mind assimilated their defiance of logic. It was an oddly liberating experience and while her heart was slowly subsiding to no more than a murmur she looked for Rachel, wanting to signal her appreciation.
The other two had drifted to the lower side of the room. As Miranda peered at them through eddies of darkness, she was suddenly blinded by a flashlight flaring erratically, filling the chamber with shards of lightning before it went out. Miranda squeezed her eyes shut, veining the absolute blackness with strings of red, then opened them again to gaze through increasing swirls of silt at her friends hovering near the frame of what must have been a built-in bed. Miranda could see their bubbles intertwining in a weird configuration and, for an instant, she felt overwhelmingly lonely. She could hear voices through the water — that strange muffled parody of human speech when divers try to talk inside their mouthpieces. Then she saw one of them, the smaller, break free and move slowly toward her, coming up from beneath. Alexander on the far side was gesticulating in broad movements but the dark water, laden with particles of sediment, obscured whatever he was trying to express, and his voice seemed to come in disembodied fragments, almost like laughter.
Miranda’s renewed apprehension was immediately quelled when she felt Rachel’s touch on her ankle, then felt her hand slowly move along her leg as her friend rose up beside her. For a moment they were face to face but the dim opalescence from the portholes made mirrors of their masks and all Miranda could see was the reflection of her own mask, mirroring Rachel’s. Rachel pulled away, as if she were trying to find a better angle of light, then took one of Miranda’s arms in both hands and give it a reassuring squeeze as she drew closer again, until their merged air bubbles obscured their vision entirely.
Rachel slid her grip to Miranda’s wrist to stabilize herself while she adjusted her gear, reaching around and then straightening. To maintain equilibrium, Miranda pushed her friend gently away. She felt her wrist caught and tugged to break free. Whatever the entanglement, it was not an air hose or a BCD strap. She pulled hard and a narrow shackle of metal bit into her flesh through the shank of her glove and there was a slight give, as if she were pulling against a dead weight. She tried to turn on her flashlight but could not do it with only one hand; she tucked it into an armpit and managed to flick the switch so that the beam flared in a haphazard pattern across the upper reaches of the room.
Carefully retrieving the light with her free hand, she shone it down on the manacle around her wrist. She and Rachel were handcuffed together. Bewildered, Miranda followed the beam up Rachel’s arm to her face. Rachel’s face, even in the glare of Miranda’s light, revealed nothing. Miranda shone her light down and across a
t Alexander. He was handcuffed to a metal bed rail. He did not appear to be struggling, but clouds of bubbles surged from his mouthpiece, making it seem like his head was exploding in slow motion.
Miranda brought the light back to Rachel, tracing down her body until she saw that Rachel’s ankle was shackled to another iron rail, effectively enchaining them both to the ship. A series of throttled spasms caught at her throat, yet Miranda’s mind seemed clear, as if she were an observer, a sympathetic witness to her own imponderable predicament. She shook her manacled arm and felt a strange surge of affection as she realized Rachel was dying.
Suddenly, her gut seized in a series of lacerating convulsions; a maelstrom of razor-sharp images raked the inside of her head. She too was dying. Survival instinct kicked in and panic gave way to shock and then she felt almost disengaged, again, as if it were all happening to someone else. And again reality took hold and her blood turned to ice, a jagged shaft of pain fibrillated between her lungs and her throat, her jaw and teeth, behind her eyes and into her temples. The pain helped her focus. She let the light zigzag across the bulkhead beneath them and discovered, close together, the other two flashlights, both turned off. Rachel must have intentionally dropped hers, then borrowed Alexander’s to retrieve it and, instead, secured him to the wall in the darkness. Miranda had the only light. Clearly, whatever was happening, it was not important to Rachel that they see each other. If this was a tableau of death, it was to be enacted in murky obscurity.
Rachel hovered beside her, very still. Miranda looked again at her face through her mask. There was a flicker of recognition, but neither terror nor pleasure. When Rachel turned to spill the glare from the glass, Miranda could see what might have been tears, and yet her features appeared oddly serene, as if her face were slowly turning into a death mask, changing from flesh into sculptured stone.
Miranda reached for the hose with her gauges attached. Their dive had been almost thirty minutes to this point. More than half her air was gone. She would breathe slowly and eke out the rest as best she could. Then she would die. She was surprised by her own composure. There was nothing to do, there were no options. She was cold. The icy tremor along her spine was a reassuring reminder that she was still alive. She breathed slowly, inhaling long deep drafts, releasing short bursts, a bit at a time until she was depleted, and then again, slowly, and again, and again. She turned out her light. To save the batteries. She thought she would like to have light at the end.