Still Waters

by John Moss

  The screen saver was still on. She sat in front of the computer, stared into the vacuity of a virtual undersea world, and let the computerized parrotfish transform in her mind to real fish swimming beside her in crystal-clear water, butting their beaks against coral to free up nutrients, sliding lazily between dimensions like colourful ideas drifting at random, hovering asleep against boulder outcroppings, darting toward her bubbles, and swinging away in disdain from their urgent ascent.

  Breaking from the sensual languor that was closing around her, withdrawing her hands from between her thighs where they had settled palms out, afraid the soporific of sex with herself might bring on nightmares, she punched up her email account. She dragged the entire bundle of new messages into the delete folder. As they flicked from view, a return address caught her eye. Retrieving the message, she slotted it back to the in box. The vaguely obscene Anglo-Saxon resonance of kumonryu. ca was overridden by the hint of something mysterious, and the message opened on the screen, confirming her instincts. It was a note from Robert Griffin.

  Enough for one night, she thought. After skimming Griffin’s detailed instructions on the care of his prize fish, which struck her as a not very odd directive, given their current relationship, she opened her Web browser and wandered from site to site, looking at koi, looking at fashion design websites, coming back to koi, looking at travel destinations, and more koi, until her personality was soothingly extinguished among worlds of pure information. Leaving the monitor on, she lay down and faded into a sleepless torpor that lasted until dawn broke open the day and she fell into herself once again.

  3

  Chagoi

  The 911 call was from an elderly woman who had a clear view of the Griffin garden from her attic. She admitted it readily to the officers who came to her door early the next morning, and she ignored their query about why she hadn’t given her name. The woman made it clear it would be an impertinence to ask why she had been in the attic. She enjoyed being interviewed. She didn’t know Robert Griffin, she said, though her house had once belonged to his family.

  As neighbours, they had exchanged occasional pleasantries, and when her husband died, Griffin delivered flowers in person. It was several years since they had last spoken. He employed cleaning and gardening services that came every week. And he had a friend.

  His friend visited on a regular basis, usually midweek, late afternoon, and never stayed over.

  Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros had observed nothing unusual on the day of Griffin’s murder. She referred to “he” and “him” when he was alive as if that were his name, finding in the pronouns an appropriate distance from the sordid events and their tantalizing details. She couldn’t imagine how the “remains” — said with the relish of an habitual Agatha Christie reader — how “it,” as she thereafter referred to the body, depriving Griffin in death even of gender, got into the pond. She just glanced out, and he was dead. She felt it was her civic duty to inform the police. The uniformed officers assured her she had been very neighbourly and that real detectives would call by if there were any more questions.

  When Miranda arrived at the Griffin place with two black coffees and cinnamon-raisin bagels, toasted, with light cream cheese, Morgan was beside the upper pond, talking to the officers who had interviewed the woman next door.

  She handed Morgan his coffee and bagel. Information at this point was sparse. She had checked on the way over with Ellen Ravenscroft. A preliminary examination confirmed no evidence of significant wounds or bruises. A superficial cut on the forehead, nothing more.

  Miranda sat on the limestone parapet. After a while, Morgan joined her. They consumed their breakfast without talking. Why would someone practise law on his own? she wondered. Why semiotics? It wasn’t a middle-aged hobby. She couldn’t get a grasp on Griffin as a living person, only as a corpse. Why would someone want to work homicide? Things like that just occurred — here they were, Morgan and her, hovering on either side of forty, with murder in common. At the moment, with the chimerical Robert Griffin in common. No, not a chimera; he was real. Yet she connected with him only in death.

  Sometimes it happened that way. Both of them felt tremulations on occasion, returning to a crime scene where they had seen a locket around the neck of a derelict beaten to death, emptiness clutched in the dead hand of a rape victim. This was different. It wasn’t empathy she felt, but a strange anxiety. Despite the lack of emotional hooks, Griffin’s murder had taken on an eerie life of its own.

  Was he the architect of a plot gone awry, or a victim of malevolence beyond his control? There was a lot of money involved, there was his stunning asexual mistress, there was Miranda’s connection, there were the koi.

  Miranda had absorbed more than she had thought the previous night, reading about koi on the Net. She had checked out Chagoi and wasn’t convinced that every good pond would have one. She thought she could tell a Sanke from a Showa, a new-style Showa from an old. The intensity of black pigmentation against slashes of red on vibrant white was more intricate on the actual fish, and as they carved elusive patterns through the water she faltered, not sure she could tell one from another.

  “We’d better feed them,” she said.

  “I did.”

  “How did you get into the house? I have the keys.”

  “There’s food in the bin by the door.”

  “And you knew how much, of course. Nice Sanke, that one.”

  “Which one?”

  “The big one.”

  “Which big one?”

  So, she thought, those two were Sanke. The other big guy, the length of her arm with black on its head, had to be a Showa.

  “I like the Showa best,” she said. “Old-style. Lots of black.”

  “Sumi,” he said. “Black is sumi, red is hi.”

  “What got you going on koi, Morgan? It’s unusual even for you.”

  “A magazine cover in one of the big box stores. I was grazing through the magazine section, looking at gardening journals —”

  “You don’t garden.”

  “I know, but it was spring.”

  “Right.”

  “I saw the word koi in bright orange letters across the top of a magazine for the English country gardener, and I didn’t know what koi meant —”

  “You would hate that.”

  “So I’ve been reading. Good thing, too.”

  “For sure — if this is a crime about fish.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I was on the Net last night,” said Miranda. “Emailed an old friend of mine, a marine biologist in Halifax. I asked her about the water swirling in the wrong direction. She’s one hour ahead of us, so I got my answer this morning before I left home.”

  “We figured it was the filter.”

  “Yeah, but do you know why? It returns perpendicular to the wall to create a current, so the fish are always swimming. To keep them in shape. It can probably be reversed, so they swim both ways.”

  He chewed his bagel and sipped his coffee, resisting what to him seemed an obvious quip about swimming both ways. “Have I ever met her?”

  “No, you don’t know everyone I know, you know.”

  “I know.”

  They walked over to the lower pond. It was skirted by rocks placed with casual artifice as if by the hand of a thoughtful god. Set off against shrubbery, grasses, moss, and well-placed Japanese maples, close under the towering silver maples, there was a lovely decadence about it, haunting, like a Southern mansion from Faulkner drifting toward ruin.

  “Must be a spring down there,” said Miranda. “And enough seepage through the embankment to keep it fresh.”

  “Must be,” said Morgan. She was right, of course. There had to be considerable flow if there were no filters or even an aerator.

  “It’s lined with bentonite clay.” She settled down on her heels to scoop a handful of muck from below the waterline.

  Of course, he thought.

  “I’ll bet there are fish in there,” she said
. “The diver missed them.”

  Of course: still water, the clay, freshness, the opacity.

  “Have you ever tried to catch hold of a fish when you’re underwater? You wouldn’t even see it in here. A perfect growing environment for prize koi.” She scraped the clay off her hand, rinsing in the opaque water.

  “There’s apparently a grate of some sort along the fence side,” said Morgan. “The diver didn’t think it went anywhere, part of an old drainage system. She said there was no current. Maybe fish were hiding behind the grate.”

  They walked back toward the house, agreeing the best fish might be hidden in the lower pond.

  Like diamonds in a vault, a mink in cold storage, a stolen painting kept under the bed. Like a bottle of 1967 Chateau D’Yquem buried in the deepest recesses of a wine cellar, too valuable for an honest cop to consider drinking.

  “‘Fallen rain on autumn leaves,’” said Miranda as they stopped by the formal pond. “That’s what Ochiba Shigura means. There’s nothing about ‘I am sad.’ I checked it out.”

  He repeated the phrase. Then he added, “Nice, what you can do with words when you don’t know their meaning. It’s the most beautiful, the Ochiba Shigura.”

  “A little austere for me. You’re very Presbyterian in your fish taste.”

  “Lapsed,” he shot back, “and you’re fallen. We lapse, Anglicans fall. It’s all predetermined.”

  “The weird thing, the money — we haven’t talked about that.”

  “Have you told Legal Affairs?”

  “They’ll pull me off the case.”

  “So don’t tell.”

  “I have to. I’m just stalling.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s not much of a murder as murders go. A dead guy in a fish pond. And the world goes on.”

  “Yeah, except —”

  “I’m the guy’s executor.”

  “Executrix.”

  “Even if I turn him down, I’m compromised.”

  “Not so, unless you did it.”

  “What?”

  “Killed him.”

  “I didn’t even know him.”

  “And that’s the real mystery.”

  “Morgan, I swear to God I don’t remember the guy.”

  “He knew you.”

  “Or thinks he did.”

  “Could he have possibly known you’d be investigating his death?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Clairvoyance? Conspiracy? Coincidence?”

  “Concupiscence!” she added to his list. “I’m not sure what that means, but it alliterates.” She didn’t know if alliterate was a verb.

  He looked at her and thought about Freud. “Concupiscence means sexual desire.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Listen, I checked him out on the Web last night. Couldn’t find much on Griffin personally — a rich lawyer, no record of ever pleading a case in court, not listed in the current Who’s Who, no club memberships. I found more about the property than him, and the family. He was called to the bar in 1966, so he was a lawyer before he got into linguistics. He received a Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of Toronto. ‘Language Acquisition and the Descent of Man.’ Two copies of his dissertation are in the Library and Archives Canada, one copy registered with the Library of Congress in Washington, two copies in the Robarts Library at U of T. Published privately in a limited edition of fifty. No ISBN. You’ll be handling a sizable estate. This house is older than you’d think. The family were in the mill business. They owned a feed mill and a carding mill in the Don Valley — paved over now. Woollen mills at one time and even a shingle mill. And farmland. They owned a good chunk of prime nineteenth century Rosedale, and several more grist mills in southwestern Ontario — your part of the world. I checked out the architectural drawings for this place. Do you know there’s even a registered plan for the fish garden? A son and heir, probably Griffin’s grandfather, built the Tudor monstrosity next door, made it bigger than the old man’s, built a stone wall between them, then put in a gate, which looks as if it hasn’t been opened in a century. He even drew up plans for a sheltered passageway, a tunnel affair, to get back and forth in inclement weather.”

  “Inclement?”

  “Inclement weather.”

  “You know,” she paused, looking at the Ochiba, trying to see what he saw, “someday the words that swirl inside your skull are going to explode.”

  “Implode.”

  “You know what you know, Morgan, and then you die.”

  “That’s Presbyterian. Which I am not, by the way, not practising.”

  “You don’t need practice to be a Presbyterian. There’s no point. Isn’t that the whole point — there is no point?”

  He smiled. John Calvin in a nutshell, and from an Anglican.

  “What’s a Kumonryu?” she asked.

  “Spell it. Your Japanese is terrible.”

  Miranda spelled it. She hadn’t mentioned Griffin’s email about caring for the koi.

  “Known also, I think, as the dragon fish,” said Morgan. “The Kumonryu changes colour as it grows, becomes dark and furtive, dissembling behind a progression from silver to platinum to pewter. You can never be sure with a dragon fish that it is what it seems.”

  “Sounds like people I’ve known.”

  “The dark side eventually takes over. A bland little fish becomes a creature of the shadows — the darkness is offset by radiant flashes of white, reminders of lost innocence.”

  “Dragons can be complex,” she said. She couldn’t always tell when he was quoting some esoteric text and when he was constructing his own modest parallel universe.

  He didn’t pursue her Kumonryu query. Sometimes the suppression of curiosity was strategy, sometimes carelessness or indifference.

  Inside the house, in the den, they examined bins of chemicals behind the bar — sodium thiosulphate, salt, a canister of potassium permanganate. It had all been catalogued by the forensic squad.

  “It’s like a medieval alchemist’s place,” Morgan observed.

  “More like a drug lab.”

  “I don’t think so. This is how lawyers with fish fetishes live.”

  She reached down to open the door of a refrigerator under the bar. It was stocked with diet ginger ale and plastic bottles of something which, as Miranda read aloud from the label, turned out to be an aquaculture management product containing non-hazardous and non-pathogenic naturally occurring microbes, enzymes, and micro-nutrients. “If they’re naturally occurring, why are they in plastic bottles?” There was a side-by-side freezer. She opened it. “Shrimp, and space for more shrimp. Ice cubes.”

  “Shrimp?”

  “Treats for the fish.” She looked down at the carpet. “Morgan, you knew this was antique and Kurdish from Iran. Persia. And I knew that you wouldn’t keep a rug like this on a slate floor without an underpad. The other carpets in the house — he has a beautiful collection — are on wood floors, all of them on pads. Or displayed on the walls. So, what’s happening here?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “And damned if you don’t.”

  “Now that’s Presbyterian,” he said. “Let’s go find the Chagoi.”

  “First, let’s talk carpets.”

  After a tour of the house to show him the carpet collection, which was even better, according to Morgan, than she had imagined, they wandered back out to the garden, chatting about carpets and fish and dead lawyers. Here was a dead lawyer who worked on his own, who lived on his own, the last heir apparently of an old family fortune, truly to the manor born, in spite of his elderly neighbour’s reported intimations to the contrary. Morgan had also checked out Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros during the night, guessing that it was the neighbour in the attic who had called 911. She was old-world money, her family was a “name” with Lloyd’s; she was an only child from the other Rosedale, by the other ravine, where estates had gatehouses and the help lived in. She had married into impe
cunious European aristocracy.

  As Morgan and Miranda talked by the formal pond, they watched a great shadow emerge from the depths, slowly rise, and take on colour that resolved in the sunlight into muted bronze, like crinkled foil. As the nostrils appeared above the surface and then the sad limpid eyes looked up at him, Morgan knew he had his Chagoi.

  “Hand me the net,” he said without breaking eye contact with the sad fish. “The big black one under the trellis. And the plastic tub.”

  When he slid the tub into the water beside the Chagoi, before he got the net into position to guide it, the big fish glided with a slight flutter of its pectoral fins into the container. Together Morgan and Miranda lifted the tub onto the low wall of the pool, then Morgan picked it up himself, carried it over to the pea-green pond, and gently lowered it into the water. After a few minutes to adjust while pond water flooded the container, the Chagoi flicked its tail and disappeared into the murky deep.

  Morgan and Miranda waited so close that their clothing touched like the rustling of dry grass on a still day or the sound between calm water and the shore of a northern lake. They both knew northern lakes from working as students in the summers. They both loved summer, and the heart of winter. And the suddenness of spring, the slow advent of autumn. They agreed that March and November were the dismal months.

  After a while, the big Chagoi surfaced and mouthed the air to express a healthy appetite, then faded back into opacity until Morgan returned with food. The fish rose to feed from his hand, and as it did, softly shifting patterns of red and white slowly came into focus in the water behind it. Heartened by the Chagoi, a myriad fish hovered randomly below the surface. Then, gradually, as the Chagoi swam away and back, taking food and releasing pellets into the surrounding water, they all began to eat.

  “Okay,” said Miranda. “We were right. These are fabulous Kohaku. There must be a fortune tied up in this pool. People pay astounding sums for fish like these.”

  “Yesterday you thought koi were pond ornaments. Miranda, the woman next door is watching us from her attic. Don’t turn around! I saw her glasses, maybe binoculars. Okay, let’s both look at once.”