Still Waters (32 page)

“Morgan, do you have an opinion?”

“Damn right I do.”

That conversation had come back to Miranda virtually intact, perhaps polished a bit, his rhetoric improved in recollection.

They had both been eating wiener schnitzel. It was a mistake, and neither of them had eaten very much. They were sharing a nice German Riesling that Morgan had picked out. She didn't recall the names of the wine or the restaurant, and yet it seemed she remembered, word for word, the entire contents of their discussion and the endearingly pontifical tones with which Morgan had delivered himself of his views.

“Profanity,” he told her. “It's not the same as obscenity. It's about fear and conceit.”

“As opposed to privilege and conceit?”

“Like spitting in a windstorm, whistling in the dark.”

“Which?”

“Both. If you spit upwind, it hits you in the face. Downwind and it's sucked out of your mouth. Either way you're diminished. You've challenged the wind and, paradoxically, you've proved its power. A simple ‘god-damn' and you've reaffirmed your sad relationship with an indifferent God.”

“My goodness!”

“Whistling in the dark — you asked? A string of profanities is a feeble emulation of Descartes. I swear, therefore I am. Invariably, it's the believer who swears at God, since profanity only works if on some level you know it's profane, and it's only profane if God is real. And if God's real, then maybe you are, too.”

“You don't swear because you're an atheist!”

“Yes.”

“You're a strange man.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank
you
, Morgan.”

She now heard their words echoing inside her skull, and the chambers of her mind seemed to open in all directions as she fell into deep sleep.

Morgan wandered south along Avenue Road in the late afternoon, passing through what he regarded as home territory. Sauntering by Annesley Hall and Victoria University, down past St. Michael's College, he acknowledged that his roots were right here. The University of Toronto was oddly secluded from its urban setting and yet criss-crossed with busy streets that declared its relevance to the city and world at large. This was where he had stepped outside the boundaries of his upbringing. He had been raised in Cabbagetown during its transition from poor place to rich, but he grew up in a different way between Queen's Park and Bloor Street.

Walking east along College Street, he spied with satisfaction the familiar planes of glass and granite shimmering in the cool autumn sky, but until he was almost at Bay Street, nearly in front of police headquarters, he had no sense of the parts coming together. The entire complex, which took up the better part of a city block, was a building that literally worked — a marvel of materials and design. The rosy pink granite and gunmetal steel that might have been daunting deconstructed with casual elegance as one entered from the street and walked through a welcoming mélange of space sculptured on a human scale. The imposing structure, redolent with power and authority, was still a secure and accessible place for visitors and people who worked there. Morgan regretted that to truly appreciate the whole one would need to clear away the surrounding buildings. The structure must have been breathtaking on the drawing boards.

Morgan strolled past reception and was greeted cheerfully by his rank, detective sergeant, rather than by name. He blushed at being recognized, feeling somehow that the young woman, whose own name he didn't know, was privy to his intimate adventures with the Bobbsey Twins.

The twins and he were history now; they had made choices that weren't his doing. Nancy with the big blond hair had married a cop, was pregnant with her second child, and lived in the depths of Scarborough. Anne had tried modelling, he had heard, but her voluptuous lips had led only to lingerie catalogues of the second order, and she was now a vice squad cop in Vancouver.

Still, whenever a pretty young receptionist smiled at him, Morgan was discomforted by a vague sense of the erotic. He would hurry past with a shy smile, avoiding eye contact, and would feel a tickling sensation of relief when he was safely on the elevator. Sometimes he would flirt with women his own age to prove to himself that he was normal.

Morgan slumped down at his desk and began to wade through the accumulated paperwork. Mostly, he came in when Alex Rufalo, the superintendent, wasn't present. Rufalo tended to work executive hours — long but with weekends free. Others around Morgan, after initial salutations, left him alone.

By early evening he was on top of things. Not finished — “things” were never finished — but they were under control. He reached into a bottom drawer and took out a crumpled linen jacket. Lying under it was his standard-issue 9 mm Glock semi-automatic and a shoulder holster. Despite regulations, he seldom carried his gun. Miranda did more often, but it always seemed to him that homicide was the one detail where guns were redundant. The critical focus was on people who were already dead.

On the way home he stopped in at a bookstore on Bloor Street and picked up a short-story anthology, along with a gourmet sandwich and a yogourt shake to go at a place next door. He was too tired to read, so he ate in front of the television, watched back-to-back episodes from the
Law & Order
franchise, and went to bed. He dreamed sporadically of full lips and police procedures and judges on high benches, some of them comic and others quite sinister.

Sunday morning Morgan woke up feeling queasy, as if he had endured a train ride in a windowless sleeper, conscious the whole night of the tracks clicking beneath him. He called Miranda again, but there was no answer, and hung up before having to deal with her voice mail.

Settling in for a good read, he selectively worked his way toward the Yukio Mishima story in the middle of the collection he had bought. The first piece was Ernest Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants.” He was struck with how a story about female empowerment could have been written by an icon of machismo. Perhaps Hemingway had had no idea what he was doing. Maybe that wasn't at all what he had wanted and that was why the story was subversively powerful. Then there was a story by D.H. Lawrence — “The Rocking Horse Winner” — that blew him away. It was about a kid's pact with the devil. The boy wins and dies. He read William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” twice. It was the most masterfully grotesque story he had ever encountered — the horror of necrophilia and a mouldering corpse not just macabre but a haunting representation of Faulkner's American South. Next he read a story by Alice Munro with the disingenuous title “Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You.”
Disingenuous
was the operative word. The detailed idiosyncrasies of a few charming characters in small-town
Ontario gradually resonated with each other to reveal genteel emotional mayhem, suicide, and possibly murder.

While he read “Patriotism,” the Mishima story, through his own sensibility, Miranda was always in mind. And Eleanor Drummond. Following the course of the warrior's blade, driven by will through the intricate design of his gut, Morgan felt an overwhelming sense of estrangement. Seppuku meant nothing to him, a horrific gesture; and it was undermined, as Miranda had said, by the quiet devotion of the wife dying without vainglory as if death were a domestic detail.

Morgan felt like a voyeur peering into a world so different from what its author must surely have meant to convey. He closed the book and thought of Miranda living in a parallel world, utterly estranged from her watcher. He thought of Molly. He thought of Eleanor Drummond, the absurd humility of her end, the outrageous conceit. He wanted to phone Miranda again to share his reading, but the more he considered it the more he realized he had nothing to say.

Miranda touched her eyes, trying to affirm that she was awake. A faint hum from the ventilation system accentuated the darkness clenched tightly around her. She was shivering and drew up the blanket. Her mouth was dry, but when she ran her hands over exposed skin it felt clammy. The air was thick and warm. She removed the blanket, not wanting to sweat. She needed to vomit, but she didn't want to lose fluids and fought the spasms in her gut by opening her eyes wide and focusing on an imaginary horizon above her. After a while, the nausea began to subside.

She knew she had to move around or she would strangle on fear. Her mind would take flight. Entropy would
set in. She would die. Miranda listened intently until she could hear the walls. The hush in the room reverberated softly in her ears, and she started to reconstruct the dimensions of her cell in her head. She got up carefully and groped for the edge of the table to steady herself, the way one did when blindfolded in a children's game. She kicked the bedpan and heard a splash.

“Damn!” she said out loud, and the sound of the voice startled her.

“Damn, damn, damn!” she repeated. “Miranda calling Earth, can you hear me?”

She felt better. Hearing her own voice was proof she was alive.
I am afraid, therefore I am,
she thought. Her throat was constricted from lack of moisture, and speaking was painful.

“I am afraid, therefore I am,” she said aloud.

No one answered, and she fought a feeling of dread emanating from the silence by taking a step away from the table toward the back wall. When she reached it abruptly — it was closer than she had anticipated — she slid her hand along and up to the grillwork where ducts would connect to humidity control and heat. It was absolutely flush with the wall. She tried to force her fingers into the metal grid to get a grip until her fingernails split and she felt blood spurt. Miranda moved away, feeling her blood smear across the rough wall. She edged around to the door. The glass was impervious to blows. She felt dents in the sheet-metal back of the door and wondered if these were marks of Jill's rage at confinement.

Jill had read stories. Griffin had left the lights on even when she slept.

Which would be worse? Miranda wondered. Light was confining: in darkness the end of the world could be glimpsed.

She worked her way back around to her bed, kicking the bedpan again as she sat down. The sound of slopping against the steel made her thirsty. It was dry and warm. She felt moisture leaking through her pores. Her lips were beginning to crack. She lay back, waiting. She didn't know for what, though.

Would Morgan find her? Would Jill relent? Miranda didn't think she would. In the mind of a girl so morally distraught, what surely wasn't a premeditated act wouldn't weigh on her conscience now, at least not enough to offset the respite gained by Miranda's erasure. She winced at the notion of being erased, but she directed resentment only at herself. Jill was the heir to Miranda's fall from grace, a notion Morgan would have vigorously rejected — the implications of fall and of grace. She felt the inevitability of her imprisonment, that it was somehow her own doing.

Eventually, she would be discovered.

Would her corpse be mouldering in the bed, her desiccated remains inseparable from the bedclothes and mattress, or dried into dust? Images of the grotesque and macabre entertained themselves in her brain, stopping her from slipping into a state of calm that scared her more than the taunting illusions of death.

Suddenly, the window in the door flashed with illumination, her cell reverberated with light. Gasping, she struggled to the door, her eyes searing in the dim glow. She couldn't see or hear anything through the thick, narrow window. Miranda banged against the dented sheet metal, but could feel the door thud against the flesh of her hands, feel her efforts dissipate into the depths of its thermal layers. She walked around the room, straightening and tidying. The light suddenly flicked off, and she felt relieved as she stepped carefully through the darkness back to her bed.

That would have been Eugene Nishimura. It must be Sunday afternoon. She hadn't thought to check her watch, which was under the edge of the bed. She leaned over, picked it up, and set it on the table. It was either Sunday or Monday. Surely, she had been here more than twenty-four hours. Her body felt drained and depleted. She had to conserve. She was leaching vital energy and fluids into the air.

The absence of humidity, the warmth, these were conditions that could easily be controlled by a system ostensibly set up for wine. This place was designed as a prison specifically to hold captives. Jill wasn't the first. Those weren't Jill's dents on the back of the door. Miranda hadn't noticed any bruises or abrasions on the girl.

Her mind raced. Griffin had kept other victims locked in here, warm and dry, had let them take showers and use the toilet, or at least empty the bedpan. He could have kept them on hold indefinitely for his personal use. She shuddered. How many rapes had occurred in this room? How many women had died here? She settled into the bed, feeling it rise to her weight, feeling a strange kinship with the girls and women who had preceded her in this terrible place.

Morgan went out for Sunday dinner to a restaurant on Eglinton Avenue. He walked there and worked up an appetite. After a pasta dinner, savouring the pleasant taste of garlic in his mouth, he ambled back along Yonge Street and into Rosedale.

Eugene Nishimura's van was parked in front of the Griffin house, and though it was dark, enough light from Mrs. de Cuchilleros's side windows enabled Morgan to see his way around to the back garden. Nishimura was inside. Morgan saw his head bobbing through the abandoned
casement that was all that remained of the outside entry into the pump room.

“You're working late,” he said when Nishimura emerged from the house.

Nishimura called out, “Is that you, Detective Morgan? Just a sec. I'll turn on the pond lights.”

Suddenly, the most astonishing tableau flashed before Morgan's eyes. He had been trying to make out the shapes of separate fish in the indirect garden lighting. Now a spectacular cube of illumination and colour opened in the ground, the depths of water resonating with absolute clarity.