Still Waters (21 page)

“It's beautiful here,” she said.

They were the only ones eating outside. Cool air rising, lifted by the September breeze pushing through
the gorge, carried the scent of the river, sending a shiver through Miranda.

“You want me to get your coat from the car?” Morgan asked.

“I didn't bring a coat, Morgan. Thank you, really. It was a nice thought.”

“This is another world. A stone's throw from TO.”

“You've travelled through Europe …”

“When I wasn't much more than a kid. I know. I've lived in London, hung out in Rome. You would love Italy. Siena's the most beautiful city in the world.”

“You were in love in Siena?”

“It's possible. I remember sitting in the Campo. It's a huge cobbled catchment for rainwater. It dips to one edge. There's a system of cisterns under the city. I remember sitting at a café, day after day, watching tourists, trying desperately not to be a tourist myself. I don't remember if I was alone or not.”

He did; he wasn't. But it seemed inappropriate to mention a woman whose name he couldn't even recall.

“But you've never travelled near home?” she asked.

“When I first joined the force, I'd go to New York for the weekend, Chicago, New Orleans a couple of times, San Francisco. Just to make sure they were there.”

“What about north?”

“It's big and empty.”

“Absolute nonsense! Have you ever been to Muskoka? It's a ninety-minute drive.”

“To see where Rosedale spends the summer? Never had the need.”

“Do you know why?”

“Just didn't.”

“No! Everyone goes there. It's beautiful. Goldie Hawn has a cottage in Muskoka.”

“No kidding, Miranda. Kate Hudson's mother? Kurt Russell's life partner? I'm astonished. Let's drive up this afternoon.”

“Go to hell!” She smiled.

Morgan had hated it when they had to deal a couple of times with movie actors. He liked movies. When he was a kid, he sneaked into the big downtown theatres through the fire exits. And when he was a student, he spent more time at films than at pubs. He watched DVDs at home. Movies were life in the perpetual present. He liked that. They were parallel worlds that made sense if only because they had limits. Actors as people, especially celebrities, undermined the illusion. He was fascinated by how people made movies, not how movies made people.

“I'd like to go to Muskoka,” he said. “I like Muskoka chairs.”

“Also called Adirondack chairs.”

“In the Adirondacks. I like Muskoka chairs and I like Muskoka launches, the old-fashioned inboards.”

“Where did you see those?”

“Along the Toronto waterfront.”

“Fall colours in Muskoka, Morgan! Just imagine walking out of a black-and-white newsreel into a Cinemascope romance with wraparound sound. Let's go together. I used to go with my parents. We'd get up really early and drive to Muskoka and back the same day. Let's get this business over with and we'll take a vacation. Not boy-girl. Just a trip to see colours.”

“Next year for sure.”

“Next year …” Her voice dwindled into awkward silence.

They had talked in the car on the way from Toronto. After waiting a day to sort out memories and responses, emotion and judgment, she had poured it all out in a
torrent. It was like a confession on the verge of hysteria, but he was neither analyst nor priest, just a friend. At one point she had had to pull over to regain composure, but had insisted on not giving up the wheel. He had listened, and when her account rounded out to completion, he had talked about ordinary things. He had felt it was important to keep up the usual banter, to give her confidence in who she was now.

“You're a really bad driver, Morgan,” she now told him.

“What made you say that?”

“If we go to Muskoka, I drive.”

“Are you okay?” He gazed through the gaps between the floorboards of the verandah at the river beneath them and looked over at the restored mill made from the stones of the gorge.

“You know, being his executor? You don't have to do it.”

“I'm not a little girl, Morgan. He can't hurt me now. And maybe a lot of good can come from this. I'll squeeze something out for Molly's daughter …”

“Jill.”

“Don't worry about me. For weal or woe, I'm involved.”

He frowned, with a twinkle in his eyes. “This place isn't one of his mills. You don't see any gryphons embla-zoned on menus?” Why had he said that? Was it meant to be funny? He might have become morose, interrogating himself, but Miranda drew him out.

“I think the Griffins' mills were smaller,” she said straightforwardly. “Except for the ones in the Don Valley. Most of their wealth came from real estate. They kept the country mills for Robert Griffin's amusement — his country adventures. He didn't sell the one at Detzler's Landing until the late 1980s.” She paused. “It was him, you know,
Morgan. I'm not sure it really matters if it was him or not. Knowing the enemy is a snare and delusion.”

“Sometimes I wonder about you,” he said. “‘Snare and delusion,' I've heard. ‘Weal or woe' — where did you get that?”

“Voices from other times. It's an ancient expression. Check out
Caedmon
. I'm bluffing. My dad used to say it. So did his dad. It means for better or for worse.”

“I figured out what it meant. But mostly we don't go around speaking in medieval epithets. Or is that what we do now when we're being evasive?”

“What am I evading? I'm not saying it wasn't him. I'm saying I'm not sure it matters — if it was him or not. Do you want coffee?” She signalled for two coffees.

“The bastard must have been in his forties.”

“Does that make it worse?”

“Miranda, for goodness' sake.”

“I don't know if it was rape.”

“For God's sake!”

“To hell with God. It was sexual. Understand that!”

“Damn! It wasn't your fault. It was rape!”

“Listen, it was the culmination of a summer of testing, flaunting, I don't know, playing with fire. It was after a year of wondering, dreaming dream lovers, a winter of waiting, playing kissy-face with Danny Webster, who turned out to be gay, and then it was summer again and I went out there of my own volition …”

“You were raped.”

“I don't know.”

“You were seventeen.”

“Just turned eighteen. What's your hang-up on age? My friend Celia got pregnant with her second child when she was eighteen.”

“Eighteen is only grown up when you're eighteen.
You were playing with sunlight and shadows. And then it was real, this guy in his forties. He raped you, Miranda.”

“I just don't know,” she said, looking wistfully into the gorge, shuddering again from the chill air rising.

“That's the point. You blocked it out for twenty years.”

“It was traumatic, for weal or woe.”

“There's no ‘weal,' Miranda, no good side to rape.”

“You're a lovely man, Morgan. Someday I'd like to marry you.”

“For weal or woe.” He smiled. “Miranda, if you don't think it was rape, that's simply not fair to the girl you were.” He paused, thinking of her as an eighteen-year-old. She looked like Susan, her dark hair turned auburn. She looked like herself, through a lens softly. “It's not fair to the woman you are. You were foolish perhaps, but Griffin had all the power.”

“Guilt, Morgan. The fact that I feel guilty implies responsibility.”

“No way! Guilt is how you deal with something. It's not the thing itself.”

“Do you want me to admit I'm a victim, that I've suffered? I didn't even remember until Wednesday night.”

“Blanking out doesn't make something not happen, Miranda. Anaesthetic doesn't mean the surgery didn't take place, or leave scars.”

“It wasn't violent. I didn't get beat up.”

“I don't believe you said that, Miranda. The charge of sexual assault has misled us. There's no such thing as non-violent rape.”

“It was him, Morgan.” She was looking over at the British racing green Jaguar XK 150 parked by the railing at the side of the mill. “That car — for Christ's sake! What are we doing driving that car?”

“Vengeance?” he suggested.

The coffee came. Miranda glanced away from the waitress, who asked if there was anything else she could get them, fussing over them, trying to catch hold of the drama. “No,” said Miranda. “Not another fucking thing.”

“I'll get you your bill,” the waitress said, scurrying back into the mill.

Miranda looked up at Morgan and smiled through tears. “I don't swear, Morgan. I do not swear.”

Morgan leaned across to cup her hands in his. “Why don't you cover the bill? It'll make you feel better.”

She stared at him with a depth of affection that disturbed them both. “I'll write it off against the old bastard's estate. Let's give the waitress a fifty, no, a hundred-dollar tip. She'll wonder about us for weeks.”

“Grab immortality where you can,” said Morgan. “However conditional.”

Miranda shifted into reverse, started to back up, muttered, “Vengeance is mine,” jammed the gears into first, and roared forward to an abrupt halt, bumper to the rail.

“Glad you stopped,” Morgan said, gazing out over the precipice ahead.

“Don't move,” she declared, leaping from the car. In less than ten minutes she returned, wearing a first-of-the-season ankle-length black shearling coat, tags still fluttering from a sleeve. “Let's go. Detzler's Landing. Let's get outta this ‘puke-hole.'”

As they drove down a side road, Morgan said, “
One-Eyed Jacks
.”

“Marlon Brando, the only film he directed,” she confirmed. “‘Scum-sucking pig' — from the same film. That's all I remember.”

They drove on in silence until Morgan leaned over and said, “He followed you.”

“Where?”

“To university.”

“Morgan, you're scaring me.”

“Well, how else —”

“I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying it's very disturbing to think about that.”

“Can you remember him in your other classes besides semiotics?”

“I don't remember him anywhere. He's in the photograph. I don't know whether I remember him now, or the picture, or the corpse.”

“Repressed memory syndrome, you know, it isn't straightforward.”

“By definition.”

“The invented past doesn't just peel away like the husk of a coconut, and then the shell falls open and there's the meat and the juice inside. It's not that simple.”

“That's an astonishingly inept analogy, Morgan. I don't really need to go there. How about an orange? There's juicy stuff in nice neat segments. Or stripping back the skin of a banana, and there's that firm and tender shaft rising to the light. Oh, God, I hate Freud. I don't have a syndrome, Morgan. I just needed to forget. It's too easy to give something a label and then expect the symptoms to conform.”

“Your coat.”

“What?”

“It comes down to your ankles.”

“It's supposed to.”

“I like it. It's a good coat.”

“Damn right.”

They drove in silence for a while, then she said, “It's for winter.” After a dramatic pause, she intoned, “Now is the winter of our discontent … made summer … by … my new coat.”

“‘April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of —'”

“Discontent. How through the winter of our discontent do lilacs breed?”

“Doesn't scan,” he declared, counting off the iambs against his leg. “Actually, it does.”

They lapsed into silence again, pleased with themselves. She nurtured bittersweet recollections of the games she used to play with Danny Webster; he tried to recall the name of his girlfriend in Siena. In another life, they agreed, they would be students of literature. Each remembered more from English classes in high school than anything else on the curriculum.

When they came to an unheralded crossroads hamlet, they found a large pond extending from one quadrant, a dilapidated wooden mill in another, an impoverished-looking general store in another, with a nondescript service station to the side, and in the fourth, an unpainted frame house beside a huge old barn with a corrugated steel roof in bad repair. The barn loomed over the water, completing the circle.

Strategically erected against the near side of the mill was a crimson sign inscribed with gold lettering:
DETZLER
'
S LANDING GRIST MILL
, 1820–1988. Below, on a separate line, was the word
MUSEUM
. To the side was a laboriously carved, gold-enhanced rampant gryphon. In a lower corner
: R. OXLEY, PROP.
1997. An attachment fixed to the bottom of the sign gave the times of business:
THURSDAY THROUGH SUNDAY
, 8:30
TO
4:30,
MAY
24
TO OCTOBER 1. ONLY.

“Government grant,” said Morgan. “It doesn't look safe.”

“They just got enough for the signage,” she quipped.

“Want to go in?”

“With great care.”

“It's supposed to be open. We'd better check it out to justify parking here.”

She had pulled into the three-space parking area in front of an apparently superfluous picket fence. “We could park in the middle of the intersection,” she said. “No one would notice. Have you ever seen such a droopy-looking place?”

“Droopy?”

“Droopy. There's not even a stop sign.”

“Technically, Miranda, it isn't a four-way intersection. The road between the barn and the mill over the dammedup part is more like a driveway.”

“There's a house in behind. Must be the original farmhouse.”