Still Waters (15 page)

When they were gone, Morgan picked up a chrome-plated Zippo lighter from the bench and fiddled with the unfamiliar mechanism until it flared into an orange-blue flame that burnt his finger. With a rapid flick of his hand he let the lighter drop to the floor. Then he leaned over, retrieved it, and slipped it into his pocket, where he could feel its residual warmth.

After the time it would have taken him to have a cigarette, Morgan went back into the autopsy room. “The big question is why?” he mumbled as he moved close to Ellen to follow her progress. He was thinking about smokers, not the corpse on the table.

“I can't tell you that, Morgan. I never know why. No matter how much I cut and probe, I can't get there. I can slice and dice the brain, but the mind is something else. I know that's trite, but it's true. I've never seen a soul, either.”

“Maybe you'll surprise yourself someday and find a cavity the size of a walnut near the hypothalamus, but it's empty and the occupant has fled. There's a whole galaxy of souls out there, billions of walnuts rattling along the corridors of heaven. And I don't even know what you mean by the mind.”

“The potential inherent in the functioning brain for awareness…” She paused and leaned low with a bright light to peer into the depths of the body. “I don't know, Morgan. You tell me. What is the mind?”

“Maybe it's like a grasp, something shaped in the air with your hands, the way your fingers move to catch water. It's not the hand or the water but what they can do. More like the content in a computer, not the hard drive or a memory stick, but the content itself. And it can be erased. Look at her, just like that, and all you're left
with is machinery.”

“Late night at the morgue — the chatter never stops! Can you pour us some coffee? I don't know how much more I'm going to get out of her tonight.”

Morgan got two cups of coffee and came back. “What about him?” He nodded in the direction of the stainless-steel drawers. “Robert Griffin. What's the last word?”

“Died from asphyxiation. No trauma to speak of apart from death. His lungs were rosy and plump. Seems to have died without protesting.” She walked to a drawer, pulled it open, and peeled back a white cloth so that Griffin's face gleamed in the phosphorescent light. “There was a fair dose of Valium in his system. Maybe that explains it. Apart from a little water damage he looks quite passable. Death becomes him, I think.”

“More so than life. He seems to have had an impoverished existence despite his wealth. No family, no friends, an indifferent lover, an obsession with fish. There was no water in his lungs, right?”

“Right.”

“No sign of a struggle?”

“Right. A small cut on his left temple, nothing much.”

“Would there have been blood?”

“I doubt it. It happened, as far as I can tell, virtually at the point of death. There would hardly be any to speak of.”

“Unless someone cleaned it up.”

“Who? He was busy expiring.”

“The killer.”

“I don't think there was anything much, not if his heart had stopped pumping.”

“But it must have bled a little. I can see veins.”

“His face was underwater.”

“He didn't drown?”

“Right.”

“But he was asphyxiated?”

“Right.”

“So it was almost as if he co-operated in his own murder, let someone smother him.”

“Possibly.”

“Then maybe he had a burst of air pumped into him, say, from an aerator used for an aquarium. Just to make sure he would float.”

“He was gassy. It must have gone into his gut. Why bother?”

“The killer wanted it to look like suicide but didn't want him to sink, to remain undiscovered. Or didn't want us draining the pools.”

“Surely a killer would know we'd find his lungs dry.”

“The killer didn't expect an autopsy. The killer thought we'd find him, write him off as an accidental drowning or suicide, and that would be that. She could bury him and get on with her life.”

“You think Eleanor Drummond did it?”

“Yeah, that's what I think. And then killed herself in a sort of Grand Guignol fit of housekeeping.”

“So it's all wrapped up then?”

“I think the fun has just begun,” said Morgan. “How do we tell victim from villain? What about the daughter? Why the double life of Eleanor Drummond? There'll be a registered birth for Molly Bray. And what about the fortune in fish? There's Miranda's connection —”

“Miranda's connection?”

Morgan explained.

“And Eleanor Drummond witnessed the document naming Miranda executrix?”

“Executor. Yeah, and since Griffin knew he was
going to die, he must have known Eleanor would be his executioner. That's strange enough. But why bring Miranda into it? And why wouldn't Eleanor intercept the request? What could she gain from Miranda's involvement? That's as much a mystery as why Griffin would ask in the first place.”

“And bribe her with bequests she could hardly refuse …”

“She's not his beneficiary.”

“Well, whoever is, is in for a lot of money, I guess. I'm going to clean up here. It's getting late.”

“Sure,” he said, prodding at Griffin's effects lying inside a plastic bag near his head. He took a wallet out, opened it, and removed a folded piece of yellow paper. “I knew there would be one of these here. The guy left notes all over the place.”

He read aloud, his voice sepulchral in the sterile chamber. “‘A farmer in Waterloo County once showed me a peculiar phenomenon. We were standing in his barnyard near a cow and her newborn calf. He walked over and stood between them, edging the calf away from its mother. The cow became visibly anxious as the distance increased, and in spite of being wary she came trudging forward in her calf's direction. The farmer then lifted the calf off the ground, cradling it with one arm under its rump and the other under its neck. He lifted it maybe six inches. The cow suddenly stopped and gazed around in bewilderment. She could no longer recognize her own calf; she had lost it. As soon as the farmer set the calf's feet on the ground, the cow saw it again, even though it was still in the farmer's embrace. Several times he lifted it a few inches off the ground and each time the mother became confused by its disappearance. The point is, the cow had no concept of her calf. Her maternal instinct
was directed toward a particular set of stimuli. When one of these was removed, namely that her calf was connected to the ground, the set collapsed. She could not extrapolate from the remaining stimuli.'

“I can't get any sense who he's addressing.
Whom
. He owned a bunch of feed mills. I suppose he knew farmers. I guess he even owned a couple of farms up near where Miranda's from. Can't see him in a barnyard, though. He strikes me as urban to the core. Anyway, there's more.

“‘Bees are remarkable navigators. They travel far afield in random flight and yet like most foragers they return home by the most direct route possible. This in itself suggests mental activity no less astonishing than the migration of monarch butterflies to the place of their ancestral origins in Mexico. The bee flies home from three miles away with unerring efficiency. Within the hive she conducts a sound and motion seminar, instructing fellow workers on the distance and direction to a particular nectar trove. They travel there directly, following the path of the explorer's return flight. Communication precipitates action. In fact, it is only by their action that we know communication has taken place. Now, if the returning bee were to be cleaned of pollen and nectar when she reenters the hive, or lost her load along the way, the same patterns of sound and motion would elicit no response from her peers. When one of the key factors is missing from the seminar, worker attention is absent. They cannot extrapolate from those factors remaining that it is in their interest to respond. Despite reinforcement for previous response to similar stimuli, conceptualization necessary for them to take action, even if their survival is dependent upon that action, is beyond them.'

“The folksiness is almost attractive. It's as if he's trying to create a speaking voice with a personality
that maybe he can co-opt as his own. This is less about thinking than about inventing a personality for himself as a thinker.”

“Morgan,” Ellen said.

“Yeah?”

“It's time to go home, love.”

“Yeah.”

“You want a lift?”

“Thanks.”

“To my place?”

“Yeah.”

“My place?”

“Sure.”

Miranda dropped the girl off at a well-appointed house in Wychwood Park, the most exclusive but not the most expensive residential enclave in the city, a gathering of interesting houses nestled in a small ravine west of Rosedale that was originally conceived as a refuge for successful artists and their wealthy patrons. She made arrangements with the housekeeper to call back in the morning and gave the girl a warm hug in acknowledgement of the dark secrets they shared, then drove home. Somehow she would find provision for the girl in the will. In her mother's lover's estate there were convolutions where the welfare of a young girl could be sustained if the executor was sufficiently canny. Miranda knew that, and she suspected Eleanor Drummond knew it, as well. She felt quite certain, in fact, that she had been declared, by the curious deployment of circumstances, the girl's unofficial guardian.

When Miranda got to Isabella Street, it was almost midnight. It was too late to check the car in at head-quarters.
She parked in front of her building. Since it was a police vehicle, she didn't anticipate a ticket, even though overnight parking was prohibited. It didn't really matter; it had been a long day.

Miranda closed the door of her apartment behind her and felt a sense of relief. She had left the computer on all day, and she cranked it up, half expecting to find another message from
kumonryu.ca
, but there was only junk. Miranda deleted everything from the in box except Robert Griffin's directive. Tomorrow she would have the tech people check it out, and she would call the fish man in North York, and get him on the case. She could delegate responsibilities; she had the authority and she had the funds.

She couldn't remember whether she had eaten dinner or not. It was a hot evening, the last of Indian summer, and before she was completely undressed she wandered back into the kitchen, took a yogourt container out of the fridge, and scooped a few big spoonfuls into her mouth. Then she decided she wasn't hungry anymore, resealed the plastic container, and put it back. Feeling the moral necessity for proper nutrition, she reached into a cupboard, lifted out a large jar of peanut butter, and ladled some into her mouth with a tablespoon. After she replaced the jar in the cupboard, she meandered back into the bathroom, pleased with her slovenly rebellion. Looking at herself in the mirror, with her mouth clacking from the peanut butter, she grinned. “I know better. I really do.”

With the ambient light of the city on a hot night washing through her apartment, Miranda left the bathroom, lay down naked on her bed, and covered herself with a sheet. She felt as if she were in an undersea grotto. On her back, with her head low on a pillow, her body fully extended, arms at her sides, hands folded in repose
across her abdomen, she let her eyes wander through the depths of the bedroom, the walls wavering and indistinct, details obscure. Then, quite unafraid, she grasped the sheet and drew it aside so that she could lie in exact emulation of the body of the woman at the morgue. Eyes no longer moving, she lay perfectly still except for the tidal motion of her chest, rising and falling, perfectly quiet apart from the muffled throb of her heart.

Miranda was aware of what she was doing. It didn't seem morbid but strangely comforting, as if she were connecting to another human being in an authentic way. She was naked and vulnerable, but there was no dread, only a sense of relief, as if she had discovered something about herself that couldn't be expressed in words or images but was captured in a feeling that seemed to flood over her from outside, that wasn't mystical and was vaguely erotic, that seemed to come from her memory of the dead woman in control of her own presence even in death. Miranda alive felt the immanence of death as a release and, smiling sweetly to herself, drifted into memory — dreams of when she was younger and the world was innocent.

The figure of a rampant gryphon resolved in her field of vision into the graphic design on sacks of feed. They were piled on the loading ramp at the side of the mill, and Miranda and her friend Celia were slipping by, out of sight of workers in the background who were filling bags at a chute. She could glimpse herself from a vantage overhead, and it seemed at the same time she could see through the eyes of the seventeen-year-old version of herself she observed.

The mill was up and over the hill from the village on a millrace diverted from a stream with a year-round flow. They had walked from the village. It was summer. The mill was among the oldest in Waterloo County; it had
been there before the village spread along the banks of the Grand River above its confluence with the Speed River.

They were going to a special retreat, open and private, where the race and the stream diverged. There was a small head pond, a grassy meadow kept in trim by the folds of the land and the flow of the water. The remains of the original mill were close to a small falls and sluiceway — not much more than a two-storey shed of weathered boards and broken windows, with a rusting sheet metal roof and a dilapidated Gothic tower at one end looming over the dam.

Miranda was very much aware of herself in her bedroom lying perfectly still, and she was aware of the sun beating down and of Celia chattering beside her, hunched on one elbow, talking about school things and boys. Their last year in high school was coming up — dumb Ontario with its extra year. Celia was going into the nurse's aide course at Conestoga College and didn't really need the extra year. She was going to take it in case she ever wanted to go on to university or to be a registered nurse if Donny didn't work out … It seemed to the dreaming Miranda as if all the girls in Waldron had a boyfriend called Donny. Anyway, Celia was telling her, she might as well do the extra year. She was the same age as Miranda and was in no hurry, so why not enjoy being one of the big kids at last? A senior, only they weren't called seniors unless they were self-consciously imitating Americans. It was just called “last year” or Grade Thirteen, with capital letters implied by the way it was said.