Still Waters

by John Moss

  Morgan telephoned the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto. There were no records of a book ever being published under the name Robert Griffin. They asked for a title; there might be something under a pseudonym. Then it suddenly came to Morgan that the notes meant nothing. He hung up abruptly.

  Griffin had fantasized that he was the author of esoteric works beyond comprehension. Meanwhile he had written little missives about language and the nature of being. He had imagined a parallel universe made only of language where as a creature of words he might leap out of this world and come into his own over there.

  The wretched old bugger hadn’t even been real to himself.

  Morgan glanced over at the polished surface of the Rongorongo tablet. The hieroglyphs aslant to the light appeared as nothing more than random incisions. The curiously cavalier lodgement beside a cluster of walking sticks seemed somehow appropriate now.

  He recalled from reading the Bible as a child, and from studying scripture in university, that he had always felt the real reason humans were driven from Eden was for naming the world. Language preceded knowledge of good and evil; words separated people from primal innocence.

  He wished he could talk to Miranda.

  In Miranda’s notion of unbelief, anything was possible. Perhaps even a God still in his garden beyond the limits of language.

  He needed to talk to her. She would tell him he was being pompous or immature, or bring him to earth with speculation on where he was wrong. Where in the world was she?

  The telephone exploded into sound, and he leaped to his feet, then realized it was on the table beside him. Grasping the receiver, he sank back into the chair.

  “Miranda, where are you?”

  “Morgan, is that you?”

  “Miranda …” he repeated, this time unsure.

  “It’s Ellen Ravenscroft.”

  “Sorry. I’m expecting a call from Miranda.”

  “Hasn’t she turned up yet?”

  “No”

  “I’m sure she’s okay, Morgan. She’s a very resourceful lady.”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  “Headquarters relayed my call. They said you’re at Griffin’s.”

  “Yeah, waiting for Miranda.”

  “I’ve got an interesting bit of news.”

  “About Robert Griffin or about Eleanor Drummond? You haven’t released them?”

  “Of course not. Miranda’s responsible for their funerals. Morgan, something crossed my strange little mind, so we pushed through some DNA tests.”

  “The bit Miranda sent on from the drain? Was it blood?”

  “It was blood, but no, it’s being processed. DNA from the bodies —”

  “Eleanor Drummond is really Molly Bray.”

  “Morgan, Griffin and Eleanor Drummond —”

  “They’re both imposters?”

  “No. But they’re related.”

  “To each other?”

  “He’s her father.”

  “Whose father?”

  “Robert Griffin is Eleanor Drummond’s father.”

  “She’s his daughter?”

  “It works either way.”

  “Molly Bray, Eleanor Drummond, the woman who presented herself as Griffin’s mistress, she’s the man’s daughter?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “I knew she had something on him. I was sure of it.”

  “Morgan?”

  “I knew it. When Molly became Eleanor, there had to be something to account for the radical shift in power.”

  “Morgan, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Sixteen years old, pregnant, Molly Bray searches the provincial records at Queen’s Park. She wants to find out about herself. She finds her birth registration papers. Elizabeth Clarke told us she was listed as the mother, and her doctor friend wrote himself in as the father. Okay, but Molly would have known that was unlikely. She called her grandmother, and the woman was in her fifties when Molly was born.

  “So then Molly would have researched her own name. I don’t think she would have found any Brays in the Detzler’s Landing area, but she was a very savvy young woman. She would have traced the name in other villages where Griffin owned mills. She would have found Brays living in one of them. And I’m betting there was an Eleanor Drummond in the Bray’s family tree. So she figures Griffin is her own father as well as the father of her unborn baby. And she confronts him with the good news.”

  So Miranda wasn’t the first, Morgan thought. Strange relief.

  “I’m still trying to figure out where Detzler’s Landing is, Morgan! You’re talking about things I know nothing about, and it’s scary. It’s beginning to make a certain amount of sense, though. Not a lot, but I’m assuming she was pregnant with Jill, the girl waiting for her at the morgue. But why would she think to check out other mill locations?”

  “I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  “Then back up a bit.”

  “Molly must have found information in township records, through the public library computer system, about the house where she grew up. She would have discovered it belonged to Robert Griffin. You with me?”

  “Did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m with you.”

  “Elizabeth Clarke lived there rent free.”

  “And she is?”

  “A lovely old woman who drinks tea that tastes like pavement. It’s imported from England.”

  “Lapsang Suchong.”

  “We know Griffin bought her house in 1972, the year Molly was born. It was Elizabeth’s ancestral home. But she didn’t work and she was on her own. Maybe the doctor helped her out, but when Griffin offered to buy and to let her live there free for the duration of her life, she would have jumped at the chance. In turn she looked after the baby. That was the deal.”

  “And Molly figured out the arrangement?”

  “More so than her grandmother. Elizabeth Clarke may never have known that Griffin was the child’s father. She didn’t want to know. The baby was a godsend to a lonely woman.”

  “Not all single women are heartbroken if a baby doesn’t turn up on their doorstep, Morgan.”

  “No, but some might be. Let’s say she had a tragic love affair with the old guy, Dr. Howell. Maybe he married the wrong person, knocked up his housekeeper, and did the right thing. Then Molly became a bond between them. Genetics superseded by love. She was their child, as the certificates say. But she wasn’t. When Molly left, Elizabeth knew she had never really been hers.”

  “That’s a very sad story.”

  “Molly needed something more than a real-estate deal to explain the connection between Griffin and Elizabeth. She must have guessed she was the link between them. Her own name was a good place to start. That was the only thing she had from her natural mother. She had to find a Bray girl who would have been at a vulnerable age and within Griffin’s reach.”

  “So he could seduce her?”

  “Griffin didn’t seduce. He raped.”

  “He raped the mother and he raped the daughter, and he made them both pregnant. That’s quite despicable.”

  “It makes you want to weep for what happens in the world,” Morgan said. “And it makes you enraged.”

  “I wonder what happened to the original mother. Do you think her name was Eleanor?”

  “Probably. And her own mother’s maiden name was likely Drummond. There’s a strange continuity here between mothers and daughters, some related by blood, some by affection, and it’s not over yet. I’d say Eleanor Bray, Molly’s mother, moved on, with her past tucked away in remission. She’s out there somewhere living her life. She would have checked out Elizabeth Clarke — maybe old Dr. Howell made the actual arrangements. He might even have been involved in forcing Griffin to buy the old house. Sixteen years later I don’t imagine Molly much cared about tracking down her birth mother. She had no reason to be sentimental. And fourteen years after that she hoped the spiral of sex and death would collapse when sh
e passed on responsibility for Jill to Miranda.”

  “Oh, my goodness, love. It’s a funny old world. It’s always about sex and death, at least from this perspective.”

  “From the morgue?”

  “Story of my life. Sex and death. More of the latter, I’m afraid.”

  There was a long pause.

  “What made you suspect he was her father?” he asked.

  “Coroner’s intuition. They were lying there side by side. I don’t know. Him, nondescript. Her, lovely even in death. But there was something … They had similar feet, long fingers, eye teeth the same, you know, an accumulation of details.”

  There was another long pause. Morgan didn’t want to break the connection.

  “So,” Ellen said at last, “confronted with the fact that he was Molly’s father, as well as being the father of her unborn child, Griffin had no choice but to look after her. It all came down to negotiating the details. And she became his mistress …”

  “I doubt it.”

  “And the murder-suicide, suicide-murder — all this, Morgan, doesn’t explain that.”

  “No, there’s a huge gap between motive and intent. The intention? Well, she was confident we’d discover Jill’s parentage. So, to ensure that Jill was recognized as Griffin’s heir, to protect her daughter’s interests, and at the same time to keep Jill from finding out that her father was also her mother’s father, she counted on us to be just good enough at our jobs to reveal and obscure as directed, from beyond the grave. Motivation? Why start the ball rolling? It’s a mystery.”

  “Gap? It’s more like a yawning abyss! The woman killed herself in the most horrendous way, Morgan. To endure such appalling pain, to put herself through that, there had to be something unthinkably worse that she was trying to obscure.”

  “Yeah,” said Morgan. “There’s more to the story. Where the hell is Miranda?”

  “I gotta go. My clients are getting impatient. You take care now. She’ll turn up one way or another. She always does.”

  Morgan sank deeper into the cushions of the wing-back chair, aching from Miranda’s absence, wanting to toss these latest revelations and speculations around with her to see if she could sort them out, take them farther. His anxiety was becoming more focused, and curiously, as he worried about her, he needed her warmth to assuage his fears. Caught up in anxiety, he was hardly aware of where he was, and virtually went limp at the sudden sound of a voice out of nowhere.

  “Well, don’t we look cozy.”

  It wasn’t the utterance of a fiend or mischievous sprite but merely Mrs. de Cuchilleros speaking from an alarmingly unexpected position behind him.

  “Hello, Detective Morgan! I thought you were outside.”

  “No,” he said without looking around. “I’m not.” He needed a moment to construct in his mind what was happening. “Please come around where I can see you,” he finally said, remaining seated in the chair.

  “Yes, certainly,” she responded cheerfully. “I would be happy to. I knew you were here somewhere. I wanted to speak to you.”

  “How did you get in, Mrs. de Cuchilleros?”

  “Through the tunnel, dear. Come along, Dolores. Dolores came with me, of course. I wouldn’t come alone.”

  Morgan was nearly as disconcerted when the maid came into view and stood beside Mrs. de Cuchilleros, who had made herself comfortable on the sofa. He felt foolish. He hadn’t conceived of the passage between houses as going both ways.

  “It’s not the easiest route,” he suggested.

  “Oh, but it is, and here we are.”

  “Do you often do this?”

  “No. Not since my husband died. One time Mr. De Cuchilleros thought there might be burglars. Mr. Griffin was away, of course.”

  “You must have been compelled to examine the place thoroughly.”

  “Oh, yes, we went through the entire house.”

  I’m sure you did, he thought. “Did you have a weapon?”

  “Good grief, no. Just a flashlight. The late Mr. de Cuchilleros was a very accomplished boxer.”

  “Boxer?”

  “When he was a youth.”

  “Good thing you didn’t run into a burglar.”

  “Oh, yes, it would have been very unpleasant. My husband was a strong man even at seventy. He had an excellent physique. He lifted dumbbells every morning of our married life.”

  “Mrs. de Cuchilleros, could you explain why you’re here? This is a crime scene.”

  “We’re not going to contaminate anything, dear.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “The Chinese boy is walking about like he owns the place.”

  “Mr. Nishimura is a man, and he’s Japanese. He’s a Canadian of very long standing, he’s an authority in his field, and he belongs here by invitation of the police and the executor of the deceased.”

  “Well, I wanted to speak to you personally.”

  “Perhaps we should go outside,” said Morgan as he rose to his feet and shepherded the two women through the French doors.

  “It’s chilly out here,” Mrs. de Cuchilleros said.

  Dolores looked at her sympathetically but didn’t offer her cardigan, seeming to know the gesture would be wasted. Since Morgan didn’t offer his own jacket, the old woman braced her shoulders and marched over to the pool where her neighbour’s body had been floating when she discovered it from her aerie next door. She waited for her maid and Morgan to catch up, then made a declaration. “Dolores and I cleaned out the leaves.”

  “You what!” Morgan was annoyed both at her presumption and at the triviality of her announcement.

  “Dolores and I cleaned out the leaves.”

  “You came here?”

  “Early this morning, and we raked the leaves off the

  top of his pond.” She paused for dramatic effect, then pointed at the green pond. “That one.” Ominously, she added, “It looks like mine … on the surface.”

  “You’ve done this before?” asked Morgan, irritated by the way she was trying to position herself in a drama with pregnant pauses and curious inflections.

  “I’ve only been here … once … since poor Mr. Griffin was found dead in his fish pond.”

  “They’re all fish ponds.”

  “Oh, no. I would say the two greenish ponds are ponds with fish in them and this one, where he was floating, that’s a fish pond.”

  “Fair enough,” Morgan said, appreciating the distinction. “Did you come here through the house?”

  “Yes, but we didn’t disturb anything. He had more leaves on his pond than we ever have in ours. It’s the trees, you know, and the wind. So I could see his needed caring for and I wanted to be neighbourly.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, I did. Dolores came over with me and we skimmed all the leaves, but a few were waterlogged, and when Dolores tried to scoop them up, they sank. That’s when we discovered it.”

  “Discovered what?”

  “The discrepancy.”

  “Mrs. de Cuchilleros, what are you talking about?”

  “Be patient, Detective. Dolores’s net went down so deep in the water she reached the end of the long handle and could just scrape the bottom.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. You see, that’s the point!”

  He didn’t see, and nodded a solemn invitation for the comic relief to proceed.

  “Well, we went home and had our morning tea. But then I began thinking. I asked Dolores if the pond froze around the edges last winter. Our pond, I’m talking about. It seems to come closer to freezing each year. Didn’t I ask you that, Dolores? And what did you say?”

  “It seems to come closer to freezing each year,” the maid said.

  “Mrs. de Cuchilleros —”

  “Detective, you’re in such a hurry. I told Dolores we had to get a long pole. So we went out into the carriage house and found a long bamboo pole. And just as I suspected, our pond wasn’t as deep! That’s why it’s been freezing up.�
�

  “Mrs. de Cuchilleros, where is this going?”

  She smiled.

  The old woman had read Agatha Christie, Morgan thought. She knew how these things worked. Pacing was as important as the details being revealed.

  “Detective Morgan, the bottom of our pond is lumpy. The bottom of Mr. Griffin’s pond is smooth.”

  Morgan was uneasy. He cocked an eye quizzically and waited for an unpleasant denouement.

  “So there we are, Detective, prodding away with the pole, but it broke. We couldn’t get hold of anything. Then a few bits of plastic floated up.”

  “From the lumpy bottom?”

  “That’s how we would describe it, isn’t it, Dolores? Our pond, not Mr. Griffin’s.”

  The maid nodded ambiguously. Dolores appeared to be more and more reticent as the story unfolded, as if she might avoid some grotesque revelation through affected indifference.

  “Dolores,” Morgan pressed, “what do you think is down there in your pond, in the de Cuchilleros pond?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s down there,” said Mrs. de Cuchilleros.

  “All right. What do you think is down there?”

  “Dead bodies.”

  Morgan had been afraid she would say that. He looked at the Filipino maid for confirmation and grimaced when she receded into inscrutability. In contrast Mrs. de Cuchilleros seemed to rise more and more with each passing moment to the role fate had cast upon her as central protagonist in a drama of unimaginable proportions. A small facet of Morgan’s mind clung to the serio-comic performance, even as a suffocating fear rose inside him for what lay ahead, a dread that must inevitably connect with Miranda’s disappearance.

  Mrs. de Cuchilleros smiled solemnly, the way people did at funerals, and lowered her voice to a whisper as if she feared being overheard by the dead. “I felt down there with a rake — we taped a garden rake onto the handle of a hoe — and I could feel things. They felt slippery and mucky. We stirred up a lot of clay. There are bodies covered in silt and clay and wrapped in plastic. I didn’t want to puncture anything, so I let the rake slide around, but I could feel them. I don’t know whether they’re cut up into pieces or not. It’s hard to tell with a rake.”