Still Waters

by John Moss

  “My goodness,” he said as if his responsibility for the Showa’s mortality had only now sunk in. “Here.” He held the fish out to Miranda. “I’ll get a tub of pond water. Tap water would kill it. Chlorine and all that chemical stuff.”

  “You look after it.” She surveyed the room for something to remove the slime from the Showa on her hands, which was more imagined than real since the fish had been virtually dry when she picked it up. She reached over and wiped her hands on Morgan’s shirt sleeve, over his bicep.

  Morgan tightened his grip on the fish. Holding it directly in front of him, he backed out the study door and descended to the den, strode out the French doors, and found a blue plastic tub in the portico. He edged it with his feet over to the pond, set the Showa down on the grass, and filled one-third of the tub with pond water, then picked up the fish and gently deposited it in the tub. It seemed to revive immediately, indicating its revitalized condition by hovering perfectly still in the lucent water, moving only its pectoral fins in a slow, fanning motion, almost imperceptibly passing water in and out through its gills.

  He carried the tub back into the den and placed it on the floor by the wingback chair, then sat in the chair so he could keep an eye on the fish and waited for activities to commence upstairs. He would listen, see what he heard.

  After a few minutes, he realized he should be doing something. He could check the front door for forcible entry — no, he and Miranda had come in that way. He could check other rooms for signs of violence, but it was clear that the murder had occurred in the study. He walked back up the stairs with the Showa held out in front of him. How could a woman die such a grisly death two storeys above him? He looked up, he looked down. Maybe the old ceilings and floors were so thick that the drum rolls of hell would be muffled.

  When he returned to the crime scene, Miranda was sitting comfortably in a leather desk chair, contemplating her surroundings.

  Apart from a broken aquarium, everything in the room seemed in place. Morgan figured the fish must have been there, away from the pond, for observation. Maybe it was sick. If so, it was lucky they hadn’t put it back in the pond. Or maybe it was a bonding thing, and Griffin kept it in the study for company.

  Morgan stared at the dead woman’s eyes, wishing he could capture what they had last seen, that he imagined was burned into her retinas, seared into the dead flesh of her brain. Despite the violence of the tableau presented by her seeping corpse, he thought she looked remarkably composed.

  “What do you make of it?” he asked.

  Miranda, too, was staring at the corpse. There wasn’t much either of them could do until the forensic team and the coroner arrived. A siren wailed in the distance. When Miranda called in, she had said the woman was dead, but there were sirens and flashing lights, anyway — the full regalia of murder.

  There was no rug on the floor. Miranda remembered there had been a small rug between the desk and the door. She found it rolled neatly with its pad in the closet. When she spread it out in the hall, half expecting a clue of some sort, there was nothing.

  Returning to the study, she squatted close to the corpse. She peered at Eleanor Drummond’s garish midriff. Taking a pen from the desk, she leaned over and drew soaked linen a little away from the torso. There was angry bruising around what she recognized as a sucking wound — deep, gaping, inflicted with considerable force, yet the blouse wasn’t torn, as if it had been carefully pulled aside.

  “What do I make of it? Don’t know,” she answered at last.

  Morgan asked Miranda for the keys to the car out front and walked away so abruptly, holding the blue tub with the Showa in front of him, that she didn’t think to inquire about where he was going.

  Left alone with the dead woman, Miranda shifted in her ruminations to consider what she felt about Eleanor Drummond. Yesterday Griffin’s mistress had appeared so in control, entering a murder scene as if it existed to offset her own subtle elegance. She seemed as shallow as invisible makeup. Now, as a corpse, she was infinitely more complex.

  Gazing at her, sprawled awkwardly with her legs twisted under as if she had been kneeling, with the wound in her gut leaking viscera and blood, Miranda was struck by the absurd poise the woman projected. Her hair wasn’t in the least dishevelled, her face was a tight mask of what could almost be taken for serenity, her hands from having clutched at her wound were smeared with blood, but her nails were perfectly manicured, not a cuticle askew. Miranda felt herself warming to Eleanor Drummond.

  She looked around. There was a Tod’s purse on the desk, there were shoes, Jimmy Choo, placed neatly by the closet door. Apart from the mess on the floor there was no evidence of a struggle.

  There was no murder weapon. The assailant would have wiped it clean before leaving; but there was no evidence of blood beyond the victim’s reach. This was a carefully managed and brutal crime.

  Nearly two hours later Morgan returned and picked up their conversation as if he had just stepped out of the room. “The expert said she was a beauty, one of the better koi he’d seen outside Japan. I took her up to that fish place in North York. He said she isn’t sick and offered to look after her, but I said I’d bring her back and put her in with the others. He said he couldn’t believe there were more. He thought he knew all the collectors in the Toronto area, in the country, for that matter. This one’s a female. Plump and ripe, he said. I told him that was sexist, and he got flustered because I’m a cop.”

  “Welcome back.”

  “Thanks.”

  As they walked downstairs, trying to stay out of the way of forensic investigators intent on doing their job, and the coroner’s people, doing theirs, Morgan told Miranda he had to show her the pump room. Since the koi were in her charge, he said, she should get to know the system. She said she didn’t need to, that she would make arrangements for them. But Morgan wanted her to see the subterranean maze, wanted to show her the wine cellar and find out if they could get into the tunnel if indeed that was what lay beyond the other locked door.

  “All in good time,” said Miranda. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “You don’t want to go in there, do you?”

  “Implying what?”

  “Nothing. It’s part of the crime scene. It’s spooky. I kept running into myself, things I’d forgotten, ancestral memories, love and sex. Mostly love and sex. But you’ll be okay. I’ll be in there with you.”

  She glanced at him with exasperation and affection. “Morgan, I’m not afraid of Kafkaesque cellars, and what-ever’s buried inside me is too deep to rise on a ramble down memory lane. Love and sex can wait. And speaking of secrets exposed, look what I found in her bag.” She slipped a worn photograph from an envelope and handed it to him. “It looks like her, doesn’t it? I’ve never seen a purse so organized. Everything else is connected to this address. Her secret identity must be exceptionally self-contained except for this — a carry-over from one life to the other.”

  “But not this life to the next.”

  “At least we know she had a life.”

  “Maybe Eleanor Drummond was her secret identity. You know, not the other way around.”

  Miranda slid the photograph back into the envelope. Somehow she felt closer to Eleanor Drummond now than when the woman was alive.

  When they reached the den, Morgan puttered around the room, reading titles on book spines, running his hands over the miniature laboratory on the bar top, fingering a kit that measured chlorine and chloramines in water, observing his reflection in the window, gazing out at the ponds in the garden.

  Miranda noticed that the roses were gone from the Waterford vase. She found their dried-out remains in a waste container under the bar beside the freezer and refrigerator. A conscientious floral enthusiast on the forensic team must have thrown them out.

  They browsed. Forensics and the coroner had finished here while Morgan had been off with the fish in his charge. They had gravitated to this room because it was the only place in the house that suggested
the presence, or absence, of a defined personality. Morgan found the living quarters as eerie as a deserted museum — everything arranged by design, institutionally antiseptic. Miranda ascribed the soulless quality to Griffin’s solitary occupation of his ancestral heritage. The house was a mausoleum where bodies had turned to dust and been vacuumed and polished into oblivion.

  Miranda was aware that Morgan’s eyes were following her. As she sauntered about, she sensed the languid feeling of her skin against the inside of her clothes. She didn’t like it when men watched her without being implicitly invited, but Morgan was an exception. When she caught him looking at her that way, he was never embarrassed. He would smile with his eyes and say something distracting or just glance away.

  Not wanting to confront his gaze, she walked down the hall to the bathroom. While she was there she thought she might as well pee. Her own brief rush of water startled her by the images it evoked of being in an undersea grotto. This was a very strange room — a combination of sensory deprivation chamber and comforting womb. She sat there, in no hurry, and recalled the thrill in diving deep among the banks of coral in the Cayman Islands, how sensual it was with the warm salt water enfolding. Her dive partners had varied through the week, but they hadn’t mattered, really. They were a presence off to the side as she had moved in gentle undulations of her body against the water’s caress.

  Still sitting, she swung slowly on her pedestal, searching for a focal hook in the room, something to give her assurance that she hadn’t slipped into a different reality. The bathroom seemed so unconnected to anything else in the house. The tiles were green stone, not ceramic. Beneath the dull lustre a patina of crevasses and gouges betrayed their sedimentary origins. The floor tiles were a complementary grey and possibly a simulation of rock dust and glue, with a sheer surface to allow water from the open shower to slide into the drain.

  By the drain, caught against the silicone gap between the lip of the metal and the surrounding stone, was a dried smudge the familiar colour of blood. She stood up quickly, arranged her clothes, and bent over to retrieve the bit of detritus, whatever it was, scraping it carefully into a small plastic envelope.

  “Lovely,” Morgan said through the door that she hadn’t bothered to close, observing her, bottom uppermost. “Today it’s Calvin Klein, is it?”

  She knew he was bluffing. She was wearing a sky-blue thong. It made her feel sexy to be a little outrageous under the tailored couture she affected for work. “Bad guess. Look at this.”

  “Blood?”

  “How could Forensics have missed it?” she asked.

  “It happens.”

  “Maybe you had to be sitting on the toilet …”

  “Contaminating the crime scene?”

  “Could have cut himself shaving,” she mused as she folded over the plastic pouch.

  “A man? In the shower? I doubt it. There’s not even a mirror.”

  “Do you want to put this in your Filofax? It’s your case.”

  “I left it at home. Here …” He reached for the envelope.

  “I’ll keep it for now,” she said, implying it might be safer with her. “Must have been Eleanor Drummond. I can’t imagine why she’d shower down here, though. She doesn’t strike me as the type to shave her legs at her lover’s. Or anywhere else …”

  “No?”

  “She’d wax. So, are you ready to go spelunking?” Miranda led the way to the cellar door but stood back and waited for Morgan to open it. Then together they entered the Gothic gloominess — as if, she thought, they had passed over into another dimension.

  They went through a confusion of passageways down to the pump room. She looked around, listening to his guided tour, amused at his having worked it all out. As long as the fish were all right until she could figure out what to do with them, she wasn’t very interested.

  They had once gone together to see a renowned magician at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. She had revelled in the illusion of an elephant disappearing from the stage. Morgan had wanted to know where it had gone, how it had been done.

  “That’s not the point,” she had said. “It’s magic.”

  But he had talked about the machinery behind the illusion for the rest of the evening over drinks and on the walk home. He was always fascinated by his own understanding. It wasn’t the system but how he worked it out that excited him.

  “What’s this?” she said now, unravelling the fragment of lingerie from around the base of a brass spigot over the sink.

  “Yeah, I noticed that. What do you think?”

  “Well, it’s not his. I’d say it’s a gusset.” She had said that just to annoy him. He wouldn’t know what a gusset was. “A crotch panel, Morgan. From an old pair of nylon panties. Maybe a rag from the cleaning service — not something Eleanor Drummond would wear.”

  “It could be Darlene’s. She had stuff like that.”

  “Your mother’s?” Miranda always found it disconcerting when he referred to his mother by her first name. His father was Pop, or Fred, and his mother was Darlene. Her own mother had always been Mom, not Mummy or Mum, and certainly not Margaret. Her father had died before graduating to “Dad.” She would think of him until her own end as Daddy. Her mother called him Daddy, too, in the old-fashioned way. His first name was Herbert, though. She knew that.

  “You seem distracted,” Morgan said. “What are you thinking about?”

  “My mom. Underwear. Dying. You know, the usual.”

  “C’mon, I want to show you the wine cellar. Have you got a flashlight?”

  Of course, she did — a small penlight. She would be Sigourney Weaver. Not as tall, but intelligent, beautiful. Younger, of course. When the movie was over, her name wouldn’t be in the credits, either. She would still be inside the story with him.

  Miranda shone her light through the double glass panes in the door, which the glare turned nearly opaque, then she laughed. “I thought you said it was filled with wine. That’s a curtain — a plastic shower curtain with a wine bottle motif!”

  “Let’s see. My gosh! Isn’t that bizarre?”

  “That I’m right?”

  “The guy had a sense of humour.”

  “Do you think there’s actually wine in there?”

  “I hope you’re not part of the joke.”

  “That’s a sinister thought.”

  “We’re in a sinister business,” he said. “We’ve got two bodies on our hands — one who slipped effortlessly away and the other impaled. And you’re in the middle of it all, connections unknown.”

  “Some joke. Let’s pray it stays out of the press. Did you see the death notice in the Globe?”

  “This morning? The guy’s barely dried out at the morgue.”

  “It said, ‘died suddenly, at home.’ That’s obituary code for suicide. I’d say Eleanor Drummond put it in.”

  “Her death is more likely to draw attention.”

  “She didn’t die naked.”

  “No, but this has all the tabloid ingredients — big house, dead lawyer, mystery mistress, handsome detective, attractive detectives. And a really weird arrangement in estate management.”

  “Give it a rest,” she said.

  “Yeah, there must be wine in there,” he said as if they had been talking about nothing else.

  “The door looks formidable.”

  “Under the facade it’s a thermal vault. The wood in the frame is so dry that the bolts would pull out by hand, but it’s virtually impregnable. There has to be great wine in there, or why bother? You need to do an inventory, right? Let’s check it out.” He started feeling around along the overhead beams. “There must be a key…”

  “If there’s wine, it’ll wait. Delayed gratification, Morgan.”

  Mildly irritated by her chirpy forbearance, he went back to the pump room to get a hammer to whack open the padlock on the farthest door leading to the adjoining property.

  Miranda peered through the mottled light as she walked along on her own, imagining the
orientation of the world outside. She felt the chill she had anticipated. It was being afraid that bothered her, not anything she feared. She couldn’t hear Morgan; she could see nothing to be alarmed about. The walls closed ambiguously around her like the setting of an ancient memory or a dream on the edge of nightmare.

  She heard Morgan shuffling along, catching up from behind. His wavering shadow crept by her as she slowed, then loomed over her, rendered headless in the niche of illumination surrounding the light bulb in front. She was unnerved for a moment by what wasn’t there.

  Something wasn’t right, evaded perception. In this Faustian maze of rough-cut stone reinforced with brick patchwork and horsehair plaster that had crumbled away from its lath, of supporting beams that were solid after generations entombed in the darkness, with great gaps where the grain had split open, there were innumerable habitations for spiders. But there were no spiderwebs. She doubted that anyone had actually cleaned here in a hundred years, but clearly there had been traffic through these passageways.

  Morgan was determined to see what lay beyond the remaining unexplained door. He was curious about the wine cellar, but he displayed the ingenuous enthusiasm of a small boy bent on great tasks, insofar as the possibility of a tunnel was concerned. Miranda didn’t buy much of what Freud had to say, but certainly it was amazing how grown men revealed such a childish predilection for exploring secret corridors.

  He seemed genuinely excited, poking away in the musty nether regions. She couldn’t think of a female alternative that would command a comparable response. She would rather be upstairs where natural materials were transformed by artifice into furniture and fireplaces, but these weren’t phallic — well, possibly the candlesticks and the bedposts, she thought, mocking the essentializing contructs of the sad little doctor from Vienna. She had never been to Austria’s capital, or anywhere in Europe for that matter.

  When Morgan drew alongside, she turned on him and blurted, “It’s all about sex.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Freud. What are you talking about? Do you know I’ve never been to Europe?”