by John Moss
Miranda wheeled, and they both gazed at the attic window. There was the briefest flash, then the window emptied of even that much of Mrs. Jorge de Cucherillos.
“Who talked to her?” asked Miranda. “Don’t you love the name? I knew someone called Snot once.”
“You did not.”
“I knew Finks and Risks and Underhills and Over-dales, and I went to school with Juliet Smellie —” She stopped suddenly, her banter overtaken by an observation. “Someone was here last night.”
“How so?”
“There are no leaves on the ponds. There’s a skimmer thing sucking most of them away on the upper pool, but not this one.”
“It wasn’t the pond maintenance people,” said Morgan. “They checked out as water mechanics. They don’t know much about the fish themselves. There was a guy here this morning when I arrived, just after sunrise. He seemed more concerned about lost business than murder.”
“You were here at sunrise?”
“Got a call from a friend in the night, couldn’t sleep for worrying. So, anyway, Griffin must have brought the fish directly from Japan. We can check customs, though maybe they’re smuggled.”
“A fish-smuggling lawyer with a language obsession!”
“Who he could sell to is an open question.”
“Whom,” Miranda corrected. “What about Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros?”
“She’s housebound, apparently. Let’s go and talk to her.”
“My great-grandmother and her friends used to call each other by their last names. ‘Mrs. Nisbell came to tea,’ she’d say. ‘And Mrs. Purvis and Mrs. Frank Pattinson, and so on.’”
“A bygone era when —”
“Women were women.”
“When life was gracious.”
“For the rich,” said Miranda. “We weren’t rich. Maybe village rich — we had indoor plumbing.”
“I want to see inside the house.”
“You weren’t rich, either.”
“I remember.” He touched her on the arm as if to hold her back, though she was standing still. “I don’t recall my father ever being called mister. My mother got Mrs., but only from people above her talking down.”
“My parents were Mom and Dad even to each other.”
“Mine were Darlene and Fred. And we lived in Cabbagetown when it was still Cabbagetown.”
“The largest Anglo-Saxon slum outside England — I’ve heard it before, Morgan. And now there’s no room there for the poor.”
“I grew up on the cusp of transition, one neighbour’s house derelict and the next a designer showpiece.”
“I know — if you had owned and not rented from a slumlord, and if you had waited long enough, you would have made a killing. And your mother had a Scottish accent after eight generations in Canada.”
“Yeah,” he said, pleased and irritated by her familiarity with his life. “Let’s amble over and visit our voyeur.”
“Amble,” she said. “Okay, let’s amble.”
As they walked, she ruminated about what Morgan called “her part of the world.” She still owned her mother’s house in Waterloo County. She thought of it that way, as her mother’s, though her parents had lived there together until the summer she had turned fourteen, when her father died. Her mother passed away four years ago. She and her sister in Vancouver were orphans. You were still an orphan even in your thirties when both parents were dead.
Miranda’s sister had her own life and seldom came east. She had signed her share of the house over to Miranda. She and her husband were professionals, and Miranda’s welfare, according to them, was more precarious. That was a judgment on her marital and not her financial status. Single women of a certain age inspired righteous condescension. Miranda didn’t argue. It was satisfying to have the old house, though she didn’t rent it out and only visited occasionally. She hadn’t slept over since her mother’s funeral. The village of Waldron was changing. When she walked to the general store, she sometimes recognized a familiar face but went unrecognized herself. Mostly, there were strangers now living in the old houses clustered around the crossroads, down the hill, and along the river.
Morgan and Miranda were greeted at the door by a Filipino woman who showed them into a formal receiving room that was dark and excessive, with numerous old photographs in sterling frames propped in strategic formation, a genealogical gallery that seemed to have reached its terminus about the time of the Great War and before the Great Depression. Everything was “Great” back then until the age of irony set in. There were heavy velvet drapes pulled back and ferns in the window, a perfect camouflage for someone observing the street without being seen.
When Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros entered the room, it was with a sense of occasion, as if her presence gave the encounter significance in excess of what a dead lawyer might conjure, especially one found in a fish pond. Yet she was herself neither stately nor ancient, and while she may have preferred to avoid crowds since Toronto had become so cosmopolitan — as she would describe it, her tolerance for ethnic diversity implicit — she wasn’t bound to stay in by virtue of any crippling condition. She simply enjoyed the role of reclusive widow, which she did with relish for Mormons, meter readers, and homicide detectives, even for policemen in uniform. Since the Georgian Room at Eaton’s had closed a generation ago, she hadn’t been south of Bloor Street.
On the floor was a magnificent carpet. Morgan recognized the stylized peacocks of an antique Akstafa from the southern Caucasus. In spite of that the room made him uncomfortable. While the women talked, he assessed the furnishings. Apart from the carpet, it all seemed in opulent bad taste, a sad relic of Victorian imperialism. He asked for the bathroom and was surprised when the Filipino maid answered the ring of a small crystal bell to show him the way.
There was a convenience on the same floor at the back, he was told. He was led through a panelled dining room and caught a glimpse of the garden. When the maid seemed about to wait for him outside the lavatory door, he motioned her away a bit awkwardly, trying in the gesture of his hand for casual civility, neither excessively familiar nor imperious. It was the first time in his life that he had encountered someone in the role of servant who answered to a bell. Instinctively, he wanted to call after her that he was from Cabbagetown, at least as alien from all this as Manila.
Back in the dining room, he examined the huge Heriz carpet spread almost wall to wall, then gazed outside. The garden was rather dismal, compared to its neighbour, but to his surprise there was a large green pond.
When he returned to the receiving room, he asked Mrs. de Cuchilleros if she kept koi. No, she explained. Not really. A few, nothing to speak of. She wasn’t sure. Thirty years ago, when they bought the property, Robert Griffin had asked if he could keep a few fish in her pond, and on several occasions, she didn’t know how often, she had looked out very early in the morning and seen him by the pond as if standing vigil. He would stare into the water like an Inuk hunter — which meant Eskimo, she explained — and then without coming to the door he would leave. There was no upkeep; it was a natural system. Sometimes in the autumn he came over and skimmed leaves off the surface. It never froze over completely in winter. She had seen movement in the murky water but couldn’t say if it was fish, flesh, or foul. She spelled out the last word for the sake of the pun.
“Does it smell?” asked Miranda. “The pond next door is fresh.”
“No,” said Mrs. de Cuchilleros, annoyed that her jest had provoked a literal response. “Not at all. It is as fresh as his.” She summoned her maid and said something to her in apparently fluent Spanish. A colonial habit, Miranda thought. Spanish is the old language of the Philippines, supplanted by English and Tagalog, but both women would regard it as the appropriate language of servitude — the maid speaking it out of deference and Mrs. de Cuchilleros, because she could.
The maid responded with a brief expletive and left. “No,” Mrs. de Cuchilleros repeated. “I asked Dolores if she ever noticed a smell — I hardl
y ever go out there — and she said no. So there you are, my freshwater oasis. If there are fish in it now, I expect they’ll stay for the duration. No one feeds them, they get enough wild insects, as opposed to the tame ones, and they live longer than people. I have a gardener come in most days, but he just mows to the edge of the pond. It’s clay, you know, brought in by the Griffins generations ago, the one who built this place. It’s a nice old pond. My first husband loved it.”
“Mrs. Cuchilleros, were you married before?” asked Miranda in surprise.
“De Cuchilleros, my dear. Jorge de Cuchilleros was my only husband, my first and last.”
“Oh,” said Miranda.
When they said goodbye and were outside, Miranda took Morgan by the arm and led him around through the walkway into the lawyer’s garden, talking all the way. “My first husband. How quaint. De, and my dear. Her little jokes. She’s a caricature. What she said to the maid, besides asking about the smell, was ‘Do not serve tea.’ Did you notice she called her Dolores, almost the same as your mother’s name?”
“Darlene.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
“Sorry. I thought it was Delores. Did you find anything when you went to the bathroom? She gave me the creeps. We should have asked to see the attic. Reminds me of Psycho, Anthony Perkins rocking in the window. I wonder if she had children.”
Morgan said nothing.
“She killed him!” Miranda blurted.
“Anthony Perkins?”
“She killed Robert Griffin.”
Morgan smiled. He liked when she held his arm. He knew he wasn’t supposed to, but he could feel the curve of her breast as they strolled through the garden.
“I’d better check in with Legal Affairs,” she said, pulling away from him. “See you about five.”
He watched as she walked away. She should always wear skirts. How did a woman decide if it was a skirt or pant day? He never understood the subliminal conspiracy in the way women dressed, how one day it was décolletage and another short skirts. One short skirt in the morning, and he knew it would be legs and short skirts for the day. He thought of a joke: would a community of nuns aspiring to sainthood all experience stigmata at the same time of the month? It was a woman’s joke. To him it was more of a mystery.
4
Kumonryu
Miranda left with the keys. Morgan could still feel the weight of her hand on the inside of his arm. Walking around to the front of the house, he descended the ramp from street level to the garage where the door was still open from the night before. He ducked under the yellow tape marking it a crime scene and entered a large vault with enough space for three or four cars. Only a classic Jaguar two-seater was parked there at the moment. He didn’t know the model; he had never developed an interest in cars. Growing up where buses, the subway, and trolleys were the alternatives to pedestrian transit, he had never known anyone who actually owned a car until university. Even then he wasn’t much interested in students who insinuated cars into the sanctuary of a campus with gardens and manicured lawns in the heart of the city. He didn’t learn to drive until after his degree, teaching himself on a rental automatic, using fake ID, graduating to standard shift a few weeks later.
Morgan had never worked traffic. His university specialization in the sociology of deviance got him into investigations from the start, so he didn’t work his way up from the streets. He liked to present himself as an academic bumbler, but as Miranda surmised, he had been a stellar student and might have pursued an academic career except he had an undisciplined imagination and too many enthusiasms. Though he majored in the human sciences, he preferred philosophy. Morgan was a Heideggerian, as he recalled, no longer sure what that meant.
He would have to learn about cars. There was a certain perversity in his sustained ignorance, however, that gave him the same kind of pleasure as not knowing about hockey. Only a fact junky can appreciate the pleasures of purposely not knowing. He could name complete rosters from the old National Hockey League before 1967 when there were only six teams and every player was a star. He had no idea what teams out of Tampa and Pittsburgh were called. He could name every player on the women’s Olympic team that won in Nagano. He was the only person in Canada who had never played hockey, according to Miranda, who used to play shinny on the Ice Pond outside Waldron — called that because ice had been harvested there long before she was born.
There were two doors from the heated garage into the house. Both were locked. The one he tried opened easily enough with a little persuasion. From an efficiently rectilinear space that smelled of machine oil, he stepped into a musty confusion of brick work and stone, muffled odours of other times, shadows converging, the air ominously still.
As he made his way among the convoluted inner foundations, he had the sense of walking outside the boundaries of history. The original structure of the house was virtually intact, though on the exterior it had been tarted up with Victorian turrets and verandahs and gingerbread trim. He knew he must be on the same level as the garden out back and the den, but this was a world apart.
Morgan stopped beside a great oak door with huge hand-forged hinges. He sat on a makeshift bench in the bleak light of bulbs strung sparingly between hand-hewn beams, their illumination barely extending through the darkness from one pool of light to the next. Here were remnants of a Toronto beyond his experience.
This city was his place of origin, his genetic source, not Ireland or Wales, as his name would suggest, or Scotland, where his mother’s people originated. He came from nowhere else. In the motley assemblage of clay brick, rough plaster, and stonework over a cobbled floor, in the adze marks gouged into the squared oak beams, the hammered ironwork on the door, he saw the residue of a past that was strangely familiar. Like discovering a fingerprint embedded in the surface of an ancient relic; it wasn’t someone else’s history he sensed, but his own.
His ancestors had built these walls, or maybe they had owned them. Class and money had a way of sideslipping in Canada every few generations. He was at home here, connected to cobwebs and dust, though there were surprisingly little of either. The echoes of dead artisans’ dreams resounded around him, and he rose to go about his silent business, moving by stealth, it would seem to a ghostly observer, to take in the emanations that might be clues to the mystery of their lives.
He returned to the oak door. Beside it was a control panel with a thermostat and humidistat, the keyboard to an alarm system, and a light switch. There was a small window in the door. When he peered through the glass, which was two layers thick with a space between, he realized the oak, despite its mighty appearance, was a facade for a thermal door. He flicked the switch, but the room remained dark. He could make out rows of bottle ends in a rack opposite the door, which was securely locked, though the alarm, oddly enough, was disarmed. This was what a real wine cellar was like.
Wandering through the subterranean maze, Morgan was surprised at the images that popped into his mind, some of them curiously macabre, some strangely erotic. He thought of his first encounter with sex, with Francine Cardarelli in the janitor’s closet near the end of grade eleven at Jarvis Collegiate. He thought of a severed head in a garbage container under a sink. Frankie married Vittorio Ciccone. They sent him a wedding present, but he was working homicide by then and returned it despite Lucy’s objection. Nothing was proven; the Ciccone family might not have been involved.
A strange underground concatenation of opposites, he thought — it was warm but cool on the skin, bone dry and musty, darkness striated with light, sounds reverberating in the hushed air, closed in and endless … endless. It was like walking through the inside of somebody’s brain, maybe Griffin’s, maybe his own, or the collective mind where disparates converged.
Approaching what he estimated to be the back corner of the house closest to the garden wall, he came to another oak door. It, too, appeared to be elaborately bolted and locked. Backtracking to the near side of the labyrinth, he discover
ed two more massive doors. One had to lead into the den, perhaps through the hall where the bathroom was. It seemed to be bolted from the inside. The other was at the bottom of a further descent into the depths of the earth and, to his surprise, it swung open with a tentative touch.
Walking through he found himself in what looked like the inner workings of a submarine. There were pumps and pipes and tanks in profusion. A symphony of small motors and the muffled gurgle of water moving against smooth surfaces filled the room with the aura of inspired efficiency, like listening to Rimsky-Korsakov at low volume.
Morgan slid back the cover of one of the cylindrical chambers that narrowed to a cone at the bottom and observed a vortex of water with a pump-like contraption at the centre that seemed to filter particulates from the flow. He had read about filter systems when he took up virtual koi, but since he had no experience with real fish, he generally glossed over the details of polishing water to absolute purity.
Moving methodically about the room, he traced the flow from a series of three converging intake pipes coming through the outer wall below the frost line — these would be from the bottom drains in the formal pond — into the self-cleaning filter in the first vortex chamber and the other chambers, through a two-speed pump into a huge bead filter where little nubules devoured nitrites and ammonia from fish waste and released harmless nitrates back into the water, past a sequence of three ultraviolet lights enclosed in chrome tubes the size of torpedoes, and finally to an outtake pipe leading underground back to the pond.
There were various configurations of short pipes and shut-off valves whose purpose he couldn’t quite divine, a couple of tanks that looked like hot water heaters that were on a bypass, a completely separate smaller system to activate and flush out the skimmer, and an outlet accessed from the main line by a series of valves that led in the direction of the lower pond, perhaps to top it up if the natural system broke down.
Against the wall beside the door he had come through there was a computerized control console, and beneath the raised window that looked out through shrubs at ground level across the garden there was an old-fashioned concrete laundry tub. Draped over the brass waterspout, inconspicuous in its everyday utility, was a rag that on close examination might once have been lingerie.