Still Waters (24 page)

“Seriously, how did you find it?”

“Morgan, I'm a good detective. I phoned CAA.” She couldn't remember which one was Scully and which was Mulder in
The X-Files
, but she could see the actors who played the FBI agents clearly on a television screen in her mind. “What did you think of Miss Clarke? She was flirting with you.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“Morgan, she was.”

“I take that as a compliment — from both of you. It was curious, insisting that Molly wasn't difficult, then telling stories that would make your hair curl.”

“And with pride.”

“Yeah. I'd say she loved her foundling daughter.”

“Granddaughter. To be age appropriate she designates herself a grandmother.”

“But I'm not really sure she understood her. Must have been like nurturing a wild animal until it springs free of affection. The loss leaves you grateful and grasping, resigned and triumphant.”

“That's poetic.”

“She was a lovely woman.”

“Morgan, do you know what I like about you?”

“I'm poetic?”

“You wear baby powder–scented deodorant.”

“I do?”

“You smell nice.”

“You smell earthy,” he said.

“I do not.”

“You smell like winter. You always smell like winter.”

“That's nice, Morgan. Thank you.”

They came to the 401, but instead of crossing over to the Toronto ramp, Miranda veered west toward Waterloo County. Not anticipating the turn, Morgan lurched to the side, recovered, and slouched into the comfortable leather depths of the bucket seat. He looked for an explanation, but she was completely focused on the road ahead.

What difference would it make if he didn't go into headquarters? Alex Rufalo, their superintendent, knew Miranda was off the case. He also knew they were working together as usual. That meant they were relatively autonomous or, at the least, hard to pin down.

Neither said a word during the short ride to Waldron. Being on a monster highway that swayed across the landscape under the burden of eighteen-wheelers spewing fumes as they passed wasn't enough to erase his pleasure in the pastoral experience. The low-slung car rolled solidly along, indifferent to the contours of scenery. Miranda drove with casual confidence, but not fast.

Morgan had never been this far west except in the air. Taking the Waldron exit, Miranda drove down past her mother's house without slowing and didn't indicate to her partner that that was where she had grown up. She drove directly over the hill and parked the green Jaguar at the end of the loading dock under the lee of the corrugated steel walls of the mill. High above, in faded orange, a rampant gryphon lorded over all he surveyed, even though the mill had long since passed into local ownership. This was exactly where she had last seen the same car, parked right here, twenty years earlier.

Miranda got out of the Jaguar, strode up onto the embankment, and plunged into the cloistered canopy over the millrace. Brooding cedars tinged with autumn russet and perforated with a filigree of light cast dappled patterns between them as Morgan raced to catch up
with her. When he reached her, he took her arm and she immediately slowed to a walk, almost a stroll, as if they were lovers. They hadn't spoken for almost an hour, but driving into the rolling hills of Waterloo County, Morgan had felt perfectly attuned to her needs, if not privy to her thoughts.

When they broke into the open space of the meadow, they saw the pond water divide in the gentle breeze: one branch flowed over the dam, sliding smoothly, carving down into the spillway, where it broke and re-gathered in the trout pool and cut randomly toward the bridge in the valley beyond; and the other branch flowed to the race, where it took on dimensions of shadow and darkness as it moved between parallels under the cedars on its way to the turbines of the mill.

They both stood astonished. Morgan had never seen such beauty. He had never imagined, in all his reading and limited travels, that there could be such a place. He knew other people were moved by mountains or wilderness, the Sistine Chapel or Stonehenge, Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon, the Acropolis, High Arctic archipelagos, or the gardens at Kew. But his mind raced and found no comparisons. For him this was the right combination of nature and the gentle intrusion of human design. For Miranda there was shock, a chilling bewilderment that nothing had changed.

Stepping into the light, she walked to an imagined depression in the grass, knelt, placed her hand on the ground, and ran it slowly over where she would have been spread out so long ago, so recently that it hurt. Morgan came up and stood beside her, resting his hand on her shoulder. He looked over at the dilapidated structure of the old mill, the roof still precariously balanced in sheet metal shards on its tumbledown tower.

Crossing the dam to the mill, Morgan shifted his weight carefully over the thick walk-board. When he got to the mill, he pushed open the door and stepped into a dank maze of shadows and light, crenellations of the sun shining between separated boards of the ancient walls. He pushed against myriad cobwebs, some wheeling in small riots of intricate strategic design, some invisible in the shadows, and choked when they clasped at his face.

Morgan climbed gingerly up the suspended ladder steps into the tower loft and stepped onto the precarious floor, bracing against rafters that swooped ominously over his head. He looked down through the splayed floor-boards into a watery shimmer two storeys below beneath gaps in the ground-level floor — still-water seepage, closed off long ago by the earthen embankment when the pond was diverted to the race. Morgan crouched where the wallboard opened and peered toward the dam and down at Miranda, who was lying spread-eagled on top of her coat on the grass, fully clothed but pathetically vulnerable. She was staring up into the sky, not at the tower but into the layers of cloud and open blue.

Morgan's eyes adjusted to the chiaroscuro lattice of shadows and light that surrounded him. Tracing in his imagination where the man must have spent all those hours, he lowered his weight to the floor and found it difficult to breathe.

A hand-forged nail lying on top of an exposed joist caught his eye. He picked it up and toyed with it, imagining other hands holding it, other eyes examining the flanged head where it had been drawn and snipped from redhot iron two centuries earlier. Morgan had read about nails. He knew the different shapes of pioneer nails, each peculiar to one region or another, declaring its vintage as clearly as if it were labelled. He didn't own antiques,
but he loved reading about Canadiana, especially early Ontario furniture with its original paint. He watched the
Antiques Road Show
, both the British and American versions, on late-night reruns.

As he replaced the nail, exactly where he found it, he noticed deliberate marks etched into a wallboard. He brushed the dust away with the side of his hand, blew across what seemed to be letters.

The inscription was brief and enigmatic, like the flourish of a signature that concealed yet expressed identity. The first letter was a capital
M
, like a skull with the top carved away. The next was a
B
, crudely done with the eyes of the letter gouged out. Then there were a linked pair of letters, what seemed like a gaping mouth with a slash to one side, followed by the crooked jaw of a
G
. Leaning to the side, he spied in the shadow of an upright beam other marks scratched into the wood. When his eyes adjusted, the marks became very distinct:
M
period.
Q
period.

Griffin knew her name!

Morgan could taste bile in his throat. How many hours and years did he hide here, watching? Morgan spat into the dust.

“Mary Bingham Carter-Griffin,” Miranda explained when he described what he had found after rejoining her. “His mother. He named the semiology institute after her.”

“He knew
your
name!”

“So you said. Names aren't that big a mystery in a village. It would be easy to find out from the mill hands. Everyone knows who everyone is — you don't know them, necessarily, but you know who they are.”

“That's why I like cities. You know who you know. And who you don't know, you don't know. It's simple. That wanking creep knew it was you he was watching.”

“Why does that make it worse? Morgan, there are people in the city, you see them for years, they have your coffee and muffin ready when you get off the subway because you're a regular and you tip them at Christmas. They sell you a paper, a haircut, shoes. They nod to you in the hall, you pat their dog. They work in your office at unknown labours. On the street corner you give them a dollar once a week and miss them when they're gone, maybe in rehab or dead, you don't know. You know these people. You don't know anything about them. We all live in villages. The difference is that in a village like this you know everyone's name. You can be just as lonely.”

Miranda wasn't sure why she had added the bit about loneliness. She wasn't certain why being known made her more vulnerable, but it did, at least now, looking back.

“He wasn't just looking,” said Morgan, turning her perspective around. “He was watching. There's a difference. He was watching your life.”

“Or I was putting it out on display.”

“For goodness' sake, Miranda. You said yourself he may have been there for years.”

“We used to gather crayfish in jam jars. I wonder if he saw us. Sometimes we didn't come by the mill. You could cut across Mr. Naismith's pasture from the village if the bull wasn't out. He couldn't always know we were here. Celia and me, we'd come out when we were only nine or ten, even younger, and we'd catch crayfish in the shallows.”

“What did you do with them?”

“We talked about taking them home to eat, but we let them go. I can work out how old we were by the sequence of gatherings. When we were really small, it was bits of driftwood and pebbles. Then we graduated to crayfish for a couple of summers. Then it was gathering flowers. We'd pick great bunches, and naturally they'd
die. We'd pluck water hyacinths and lay them out in the mud like drowned things, and lilies with long, snaky stems. Then we got old enough and we'd come and just admire the flowers, wade out and smell them, and swim by the dam and lie in the sun. We wore bathing suits then. We were modest until we hit puberty. Celia was fully mature at twelve. I think we sunbathed naked after that, except we kept our panties on. I'm not sure why. It seems reckless now to strip down like that, even here, but we kept our underwear on, for periods I suppose, not propriety, and we read romances aloud, graduating year by year from the most romantic drivel with pastel covers to almost Jane Austen. By the time I was reading Jane Austen, Celia was married or close enough to it. Donny was all the romance she could handle, and I preferred Austen in solitude.”

She took a deep breath and glanced up at Morgan, who seemed to be listening, seemed to be waiting. Miranda felt under pressure, as if something were expected of her and she wasn't sure what it was. “Perhaps he was our necessary witness,” she went on. “Scrunched up in his tower. Dreaming of his dead mother. We had him trapped there, Morgan. We kept him locked away day after day. Rapunzel, a bald-headed wanker. In all our innocence we had the power.”

“Not if you didn't know he was there until later.”

“But maybe we did. I can't remember. Sometimes there were pigeons, sometimes maybe there weren't any pigeons.”

“Pigeons?”

“You know how kids play, as if there's an unseen audience applauding, or being horrified. Kids play to ghosts, before they grow up and lose them.”

“They just lose them?”

“You were a kid, too, you know. We lose our familiars when we get big enough to know they can't possibly exist. That's what makes them go away. We stop unbelief.”

While she talked she wondered how she had avoided immediately connecting the green sports car in Rosedale with the car parked by the mill. No one in Waldron drove a Jaguar. She would have known. Would she have known it was him in the tower?

“No one would want to stay innocent forever,” she said. “But after the Fall, amnesia settles in. We forget what Eden was like.”

“No,” said Morgan. “We forget the Fall, not the Garden.” He paused. “Pre-lapsarian nostalgia,” he said, just to see if the words worked, out loud. Then he added, “When we start talking like televangelists, at least one of us is being evasive …”

“Maybe that's what I want.”

“We came here to deal with things, Miranda. You brought me here.”

“It's still beautiful, isn't it? An interlude from the world.”

“A strange sanctuary.”

“Strange sanctuary,” she repeated, listening to the sounds echo deep in her mind.

“He was probably up there wanking all day.”

“Is that anatomically possible?”

“Only if he was really bad at it.”

“I imagine it was creepier than that,” said Miranda. “I mean, you wouldn't come back day after day through the long hot summer to ejaculate in the shadows.”

“I don't know.”

“Not for sex. It's about needing to watch to prove you exist. Like taking photographs of Niagara Falls to confirm you're there. Making connections.”

“The connection, of course, is illusion. Even for non-voyeurs. An orgasm is the most solitary act in all of creation.”

“Speak for yourself, Morgan. He must have loathed us, you know, in direct proportion to how much he despised himself. We're lucky the bodily fluids being spilled weren't blood. Not ‘we.' The summer I was eighteen, Celia was getting legitimately laid. I was on my own.”

The car, she wondered, had Celia and she gossiped about the Jaguar? It was always there. It had seemed as if it had always been there. If they had known who had owned it, they had known he was older, an outsider, and rich. From another world. They were trespassing technically. It was his property. Perhaps they wouldn't have given it much thought.