Still Waters (30 page)

“Griffin?”

“My father.”

“He brought you down here?”

“I came to the front door in a rage, all confused. I didn't know what I wanted.”

“You got the address from your mother's files?”

“I practically ran from the subway, and when he answered the door, he didn't look like my father. I could hardly breathe. He knew who I was. He brought me down to the den. I kind of walked around. He watched me. Neither of us had anything to say. What do you talk about when you first meet your father, like, when you're already grown up?”

Grown up? Miranda at about the same age had lost her own father, and there were parts of her that would never grow up.

“I kept mumbling ‘bastard,' over and over, so I guess I did say something. Bastard, bastard.” She seemed almost amused. “I didn't know if I meant him or meant me. He asked if I wanted to see his fish.”

“His fish!”

“I think I screamed. He brought me into the cellar. He didn't drag me, but he made me walk through the big door.”

“Into the old part?”

“Yeah, in through there.” She got up and thrust out her trembling hand to Miranda. “Come with me.”

They pulled the huge door open and entered what seemed even more than previously like a vast and intricate crypt. Jill's grip was as dry as soot, but her forehead glistened. They walked slowly, purposefully, the girl feeling her way into the past. “Here,” she said, stopping in front of the wine cellar.

“Here?” Miranda was puzzled and apprehensive. “It's locked.”

The girl reached overhead into the deep shadows of the joists above one of the dangling light bulbs and took down a key. “He didn't care if I saw where he kept it. It didn't make any difference.”

When the thick thermal door swung open, revealing on the other side a dented sheet-metal panel, the looming darkness was palpable. Miranda hesitated, then reached for the external light switch, but it flicked against her finger with no effect.

“Here,” said Jill, “let me do it. It's tricky.”

The girl fiddled with the switch, a loose connection made contact, and an austere vault gaped radiantly behind the shower curtain with the wine cellar motif. Miranda stepped forward, pulled the curtain aside, and gasped with a sharp intake of breath that for a moment wouldn't release so that she felt asphyxiated. The chamber contained no racks of fine wine but, instead, a bed, larger than a cot but not full-size, made up with a pillow, flannel sheets, and a blanket. A wooden chair, a small table, and a stainless-steel bedpan on the floor by the table were also in the room. Two bright lights were recessed into the ceiling. It was a cell.

Miranda turned to look behind her at Jill. The girl was fingering the shower curtain.

“This is the privacy barrier,” Jill said. “He didn't care if you ripped it down, but you didn't. It was all you had.”

“Jill, what do you mean ‘you'? I need you to explain. Were you a prisoner here?”

“Yes.”

Horrified, Miranda stared at her. The girl's face was expressionless. They sat side by side on the edge of the bed, then Miranda stood, moved over to the chair, and took a seat facing Jill.

“Is this where he …” She wanted to avoid the brutality of a certain word.

“Is this where he …” The word
rape
was hard and trite and ominous. “Is this where he did things … to you?”

“Yes.”

“He made you bleed?”

Jill looked into Miranda's eyes.

“He fucked me.” Miranda reached out to her, but the girl didn't respond. “He kept you prisoner here?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Until my mother came.”

“How long was that?”

“Maybe three days. I slept a lot. I slept when he wasn't here, and I read.”

“Did he come back? Did he do it more than once?”

“Yes.”

“How many times, Jill?”

“I don't know. Three times, five times? He let me go in and take showers. One time he watched. The next time he left me alone, but I couldn't leave. The exit doors were locked. He had the key, so I came back to my room.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Jill, did you make the bed like this?”

“Yes.”

“Before your mother came?”

“No, after.”

“Where was Griffin when she came?”

“He was dead.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know, not breathing. Lying very still. Dead.”

“Where?”

“In the den.”

“In the den?”

“She came and got me out. I tried to shout where the key was through the door. She couldn't hear me, but she knew where it was, and she unlocked the door and got me out.”

“And he was in the den and he was dead?”

“He called me Shiromuji. He said it's a kind of fish. He said I wasn't his real daughter. That things didn't work like that. He told me he fucked my mother. I tried to scratch him. He said she was a girl like me, only she was better. She was only a girl. He said he liked her better, but I was okay. He said Shiromuji means you're only okay. I was too young, he said. I wasn't purebred, he said. I said, ‘That's because you're my father.' He laughed at me. We both laughed. He called me his Shiromuji girl. I think he liked me. He just didn't want to say it. He didn't know what to say. He didn't have the right words.”

“Jill, when you went out into the study, where was he?”

“He was lying on the floor, on the carpet.”

“On the carpet that's out there now?”

“No, on the thick one with all the colours.”

“The rug at your place by the front door?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you take it home?”

“Because … it had blood on it, just little specks, and they came off. But my mom didn't want to leave it, just in case.”

“In case what?”

“Well, she killed him.”

“She killed him?”

“We couldn't just leave him lying there.”

“He didn't die from a blow, Jill, not from bleeding.”

“No. He died from sleep apnea, my mother said. Only Molly Bray helped him along. When he died, he slipped off his chair and bumped his head a little. There wasn't much blood, but my mom's fastidious.”

“Yes,” said Miranda, enjoying the girl's vocabulary in spite of the gravity of their conversation.

“Can you die from sleep apnea?”

“You can,” said Miranda.

“Especially since he took Valium and he wasn't used to it. It would relax his throat muscles. It's possible if he already had problems. Yes, he could die that way.”

“Sitting up in his chair?”

“Possibly.”

“She said she held a pillow over his face. He didn't struggle or anything. He just, you know, expired.”

Miranda thought it was more likely that Griffin had been stretched out on the sofa, possibly with his legs up over one end and his head low on the cushions. If he had truly suffered from apnea, he probably didn't need help dying.

Perhaps Eleanor or Molly — she wasn't sure whether they were separable at that point — just said she had smothered him. Maybe he was dead when she arrived and she hadn't come to find Jill at all. Perhaps when she discovered Jill, she needed to murder a man who had already “expired.” She needed to take
responsibility for what he had done by co-opting his death as murder.

“Jill, how did your mother know you were here?”

“My cigarettes. There was a package out on the table. He wasn't a smoker. He bought them for me. He let me smoke in the bathroom. I don't really like smoking. It's just to bug my mom. In here it made her seem close, knowing she'd really be, you know, pissed off. Did you ever listen to a Zippo?
Clickety-click-click.
Like a gun. Very Quentin Tarantino.”

“You like guns?”

“No. That's why I carry a lighter.”

Jill reached for the lighter in her pocket, then realized she had lost it. “I think smoking's dumb really. I'm giving it up.”

“For your mother's sake?”

“No, it's just dumb. It wasn't that big a deal between us. But she saw the cigarettes and figured I must be here, since she thought that was what our fight was about. You know, about smoking.”

“But it wasn't?”

“No.”

“Did she know how much you saw in her files?”

“She knew I discovered who she was. She didn't know I had discovered who I was! She didn't know I knew about
him
.”

“Did you and your mother have lots of fights?”

“I think it was because we're the same. It's easier when you're different.”

“You know that from your research?” asked Miranda, smiling.

“No, just from life. It's something I've learned. It's harder to be the same than different.”

“I'll have to think about that.”

“Okay.”

“Wasn't your mother worried if you were away for three days?”

“Yes, she was. And no.”

“Explain.”

“I'd run away before. I lived at a Sally Ann hostel one time for a week.”

“What did she think of that?”

“It terrified her, me being on the street. But I wasn't. I wasn't walking the streets, or streetwalking. I was living with the Salvation Army, for God's sake.”

“So to speak. She must have been worried sick.”

“I guess that was the point. But when I realized how much, I felt bad.”

“Bad, as in wicked? Or badly?”

“Both. You like words, just like me and my father. I promised her I'd never do it again. She should have known I wouldn't.”

“Jill, your mother might not have killed Robert Griffin.”

“I didn't do it. I was locked up in here.”

“No, no. It's just that he might have, well, let himself die.”

“She said he didn't struggle.”

“That's not what I mean.”

“She didn't want anyone to know she did it except me. She said the police would find him. They'd think it was suicide, especially if they didn't know we'd been here. She left me with his dead body. I sat beside him on the floor. He didn't seem like my father and yet he did. She came back with the long carpet from the hall upstairs. She said we'd have to hurry. It was almost time for the old woman next door to switch from spying out front to spying from her attic at the back. Before we rolled him
up she turned on an air bubbler thing that was on the bar. It's for fish. And she really gently put the tube in his mouth and blew air in until he burped. My mother said she didn't want him sinking out there — polluting and killing the fish.

“So we rolled him sideways in the underpad. My mom said it was top quality, or it wouldn't take his weight, but we didn't need the rug like she'd thought. So we carried him out through the big doors, sort of lifting him over the sill, and then we hauled him over to the pond in broad daylight, holding his weight off the ground so we wouldn't leave marks. Then we slipped him in. One big fish, all brassy and crinkly, came up too close just to watch, and Mr. Griffin, my dad, landed right on top of him. Mom said it would be okay. It would just go to the bottom for a while.”

Miranda listened as the gruesome account fell open before her in the strange, dispassionate voice of a young girl talking about her family reunion.

“So then we went home.”

“That was it?”

“Well, my mom spread out the carpet from upstairs on the floor, and we took that other one. It's called a Gabbeh. She placed books, big ones with pictures of koi, open on the sofa. She took the Gabbeh and its underpad to the car —”

“And the pillow?”

“The one she killed him with. We took it. She rolled it up in the underpad, which wasn't that smudged from the grass and flagstones, and we threw them into a dumpster on the way home. Oh, yeah, before we left she sent me back in here to clean up this room. That's when I made the bed. And I took the book back out to the den and put it in the bookshelf where it belongs.”

“The short-story book? He let you read?”

“Yeah, I told you. Mostly, the lights were on full blast. But I slept a lot, anyway. She was outside already, so I locked the door. Then we went home.”

“And you forgot your cigarettes?” Eleanor Drummond must have created the inept smoking business as an excuse to tuck the pack into her purse. She didn't want anybody to know Jill had been there.

“Yeah, I guess I did. And I lost my lighter. Maybe at the morgue. It wasn't for smoking, just a souvenir.”

“Of what?”

“Of whatever happened while it was mine.”

“Jill, how did your mother know you were in this cell? I don't think a package of cigarettes would be enough. You could have been and gone. They could have belonged to somebody else.”

“Well, she did.”

“But she didn't come in right away?”

“No, I guess not. It was just some place she checked when she was here.”

“Was she surprised?”

“To find me? Shocked, but not surprised. By the time she opened the door, she already knew. I could tell.” The girl seemed almost wistful. “Do you think he did that to my mother like he said?”

“I think he did bad things to many people.”

“I didn't really have a father, you know. Not if he raped her.”

“No, you didn't, not a real father.”

“How come you're looking after my interests?”

Miranda smiled at the arcane description of their relationship.

“You didn't know my mother until after my father was dead. If he hurt you, why would you care?”

“Because.” Miranda gazed into the girl's troubled eyes, acknowledging the truth of their common experience. She rose and reached out. “Come on, Jill. Let's get you out of here.”

“Okay,” said the girl, allowing Miranda to take her hand and rising from the edge of the bed. They stood side by side and surveyed the chamber, Miranda with an overwhelming feeling of horror, Jill with unreachable memories and surface indifference.