Still Waters (7 page)

Of course: still water, the clay, freshness, the opacity.

“Have you ever tried to catch hold of a fish when you're underwater? You wouldn't even see it in here. A perfect growing environment for prize koi.” She scraped the clay off her hand, rinsing in the opaque water.

“There's apparently a grate of some sort along the fence side,” said Morgan. “The diver didn't think it went anywhere, part of an old drainage system. She said there was no current. Maybe fish were hiding behind the grate.”

They walked back toward the house, agreeing the best fish might be hidden in the lower pond.

Like diamonds in a vault, a mink in cold storage, a stolen painting kept under the bed. Like a bottle of 1967 Chateau D'Yquem buried in the deepest recesses of a wine cellar, too valuable for an honest cop to consider drinking.

“‘Fallen rain on autumn leaves,'” said Miranda as they stopped by the formal pond. “That's what Ochiba Shigura means. There's nothing about ‘I am sad.' I checked it out.”

He repeated the phrase. Then he added, “Nice, what you can do with words when you don't know their meaning. It's the most beautiful, the Ochiba Shigura.”

“A little austere for me. You're very Presbyterian in your fish taste.”

“Lapsed,” he shot back, “and you're fallen. We lapse, Anglicans fall. It's all predetermined.”

“The weird thing, the money — we haven't talked about that.”

“Have you told Legal Affairs?”

“They'll pull me off the case.”

“So don't tell.”

“I have to. I'm just stalling.”

“How come?”

“It's not much of a murder as murders go. A dead guy in a fish pond. And the world goes on.”

“Yeah, except —”

“I'm the guy's executor.”

“Executrix.”

“Even if I turn him down, I'm compromised.”

“Not so, unless you did it.”

“What?”

“Killed him.”

“I didn't even know him.”

“And that's the real mystery.”

“Morgan, I swear to God I don't remember the guy.”

“He knew you.”

“Or thinks he did.”

“Could he have possibly known you'd be investigating his death?”

“I don't see how.”

“Neither do I.”

“Clairvoyance? Conspiracy? Coincidence?”

“Concupiscence!” she added to his list. “I'm not sure what that means, but it alliterates.” She didn't know if
alliterate
was a verb.

He looked at her and thought about Freud. “Concupiscence means sexual desire.”

“Yuck.”

“Listen, I checked him out on the Web last night. Couldn't find much on Griffin personally — a rich lawyer, no record of ever pleading a case in court, not listed in the current
Who's Who,
no club memberships. I found more about the property than him, and the family. He was called to the bar in 1966, so he was a lawyer before he got into linguistics. He received a Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of Toronto. ‘Language Acquisition and the Descent of Man.' Two copies of his dissertation are in the Library and Archives Canada, one copy registered with the Library of Congress in Washington, two copies in the Robarts Library at U of T. Published privately in a limited edition of fifty. No ISBN. You'll be handling a sizable estate. This house is older than you'd think. The family were in the mill business. They owned a feed mill and a carding mill in the Don Valley — paved over now. Woollen mills at one time and even a shingle mill. And farmland. They owned a good chunk of prime nineteenth century Rosedale, and several more grist mills in southwestern Ontario — your part of the world. I checked out the architectural drawings for this place. Do you know there's even a registered plan for the fish garden? A son and heir, probably Griffin's grandfather, built the Tudor monstrosity next door, made it bigger than the old man's, built a stone wall between them, then put in a gate, which
looks as if it hasn't been opened in a century. He even drew up plans for a sheltered passageway, a tunnel affair, to get back and forth in inclement weather.”

“Inclement?”

“Inclement weather.”

“You know,” she paused, looking at the Ochiba, trying to see what he saw, “someday the words that swirl inside your skull are going to explode.”

“Implode.”

“You know what you know, Morgan, and then you die.”

“That's Presbyterian. Which I am not, by the way, not practising.”

“You don't need practice to be a Presbyterian. There's no point. Isn't that the whole point — there is no point?”

He smiled. John Calvin in a nutshell, and from an Anglican.

“What's a Kumonryu?” she asked.

“Spell it. Your Japanese is terrible.”

Miranda spelled it. She hadn't mentioned Griffin's email about caring for the koi.

“Known also, I think, as the dragon fish,” said Morgan. “The Kumonryu changes colour as it grows, becomes dark and furtive, dissembling behind a progression from silver to platinum to pewter. You can never be sure with a dragon fish that it is what it seems.”

“Sounds like people I've known.”

“The dark side eventually takes over. A bland little fish becomes a creature of the shadows — the darkness is offset by radiant flashes of white, reminders of lost innocence.”

“Dragons can be complex,” she said. She couldn't always tell when he was quoting some esoteric text
and when he was constructing his own modest parallel universe.

He didn't pursue her Kumonryu query. Sometimes the suppression of curiosity was strategy, sometimes carelessness or indifference.

Inside the house, in the den, they examined bins of chemicals behind the bar — sodium thiosulphate, salt, a canister of potassium permanganate. It had all been catalogued by the forensic squad.

“It's like a medieval alchemist's place,” Morgan observed.

“More like a drug lab.”

“I don't think so. This is how lawyers with fish fetishes live.”

She reached down to open the door of a refrigerator under the bar. It was stocked with diet ginger ale and plastic bottles of something which, as Miranda read aloud from the label, turned out to be an aquaculture management product containing non-hazardous and non-pathogenic naturally occurring microbes, enzymes, and micro-nutrients. “If they're naturally occurring, why are they in plastic bottles?” There was a side-by-side freezer. She opened it. “Shrimp, and space for more shrimp. Ice cubes.”

“Shrimp?”

“Treats for the fish.” She looked down at the carpet. “Morgan, you knew this was antique and Kurdish from Iran. Persia. And I knew that you wouldn't keep a rug like this on a slate floor without an underpad. The other carpets in the house — he has a beautiful collection — are on wood floors, all of them on pads. Or displayed on the walls. So, what's happening here?”

“Damned if I know.”

“And damned if you don't.”

“Now that's Presbyterian,” he said. “Let's go find the Chagoi.”

“First, let's talk carpets.”

After a tour of the house to show him the carpet collection, which was even better, according to Morgan, than she had imagined, they wandered back out to the garden, chatting about carpets and fish and dead lawyers. Here was a dead lawyer who worked on his own, who lived on his own, the last heir apparently of an old family fortune, truly to the manor born, in spite of his elderly neighbour's reported intimations to the contrary. Morgan had also checked out Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros during the night, guessing that it was the neighbour in the attic who had called 911. She was old-world money, her family was a “name” with Lloyd's; she was an only child from the other Rosedale, by the other ravine, where estates had gatehouses and the help lived in. She had married into impecunious European aristocracy.

As Morgan and Miranda talked by the formal pond, they watched a great shadow emerge from the depths, slowly rise, and take on colour that resolved in the sunlight into muted bronze, like crinkled foil. As the nostrils appeared above the surface and then the sad limpid eyes looked up at him, Morgan knew he had his Chagoi.

“Hand me the net,” he said without breaking eye contact with the sad fish. “The big black one under the trellis. And the plastic tub.”

When he slid the tub into the water beside the Chagoi, before he got the net into position to guide it, the big fish glided with a slight flutter of its pectoral fins into the container. Together Morgan and Miranda lifted the tub onto the low wall of the pool, then Morgan picked it up himself, carried it over to the pea-green pond, and gently lowered it into the water. After a few minutes to adjust
while pond water flooded the container, the Chagoi flicked its tail and disappeared into the murky deep.

Morgan and Miranda waited so close that their clothing touched like the rustling of dry grass on a still day or the sound between calm water and the shore of a northern lake. They both knew northern lakes from working as students in the summers. They both loved summer, and the heart of winter. And the suddenness of spring, the slow advent of autumn. They agreed that March and November were the dismal months.

After a while, the big Chagoi surfaced and mouthed the air to express a healthy appetite, then faded back into opacity until Morgan returned with food. The fish rose to feed from his hand, and as it did, softly shifting patterns of red and white slowly came into focus in the water behind it. Heartened by the Chagoi, a myriad fish hovered randomly below the surface. Then, gradually, as the Chagoi swam away and back, taking food and releasing pellets into the surrounding water, they all began to eat.

“Okay,” said Miranda. “We were right. These are fabulous Kohaku. There must be a fortune tied up in this pool. People pay astounding sums for fish like these.”

“Yesterday you thought koi were pond ornaments. Miranda, the woman next door is watching us from her attic. Don't turn around! I saw her glasses, maybe binoculars. Okay, let's both look at once.”

Miranda wheeled, and they both gazed at the attic window. There was the briefest flash, then the window emptied of even that much of Mrs. Jorge de Cucherillos.

“Who talked to her?” asked Miranda. “Don't you love the name? I knew someone called Snot once.”

“You did not.”

“I knew Finks and Risks and Underhills and Over-dales, and I went to school with Juliet Smellie —” She
stopped suddenly, her banter overtaken by an observation. “Someone was here last night.”

“How so?”

“There are no leaves on the ponds. There's a skimmer thing sucking most of them away on the upper pool, but not this one.”

“It wasn't the pond maintenance people,” said Morgan. “They checked out as water mechanics. They don't know much about the fish themselves. There was a guy here this morning when I arrived, just after sunrise. He seemed more concerned about lost business than murder.”

“You were here at sunrise?”

“Got a call from a friend in the night, couldn't sleep for worrying. So, anyway, Griffin must have brought the fish directly from Japan. We can check customs, though maybe they're smuggled.”

“A fish-smuggling lawyer with a language obsession!”

“Who he could sell to is an open question.”

“Whom,” Miranda corrected. “What about Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros?”

“She's housebound, apparently. Let's go and talk to her.”

“My great-grandmother and her friends used to call each other by their last names. ‘Mrs. Nisbell came to tea,' she'd say. ‘And Mrs. Purvis and Mrs. Frank Pattinson, and so on.'”

“A bygone era when —”

“Women were women.”

“When life was gracious.”

“For the rich,” said Miranda. “We weren't rich. Maybe village rich — we had indoor plumbing.”

“I want to see inside the house.”

“You weren't rich, either.”

“I remember.” He touched her on the arm as if to hold her back, though she was standing still. “I don't recall my father ever being called mister. My mother got Mrs., but only from people above her talking down.”

“My parents were Mom and Dad even to each other.”

“Mine were Darlene and Fred. And we lived in Cabbagetown when it was still Cabbagetown.”

“The largest Anglo-Saxon slum outside England — I've heard it before, Morgan. And now there's no room there for the poor.”

“I grew up on the cusp of transition, one neighbour's house derelict and the next a designer showpiece.”

“I know — if you had owned and not rented from a slumlord, and if you had waited long enough, you would have made a killing. And your mother had a Scottish accent after eight generations in Canada.”

“Yeah,” he said, pleased and irritated by her familiarity with his life. “Let's amble over and visit our voyeur.”

“Amble,”
she said. “Okay, let's amble.”

As they walked, she ruminated about what Morgan called “her part of the world.” She still owned her mother's house in Waterloo County. She thought of it that way, as her mother's, though her parents had lived there together until the summer she had turned fourteen, when her father died. Her mother passed away four years ago. She and her sister in Vancouver were orphans. You were still an orphan even in your thirties when both parents were dead.

Miranda's sister had her own life and seldom came east. She had signed her share of the house over to Miranda. She and her husband were professionals, and Miranda's welfare, according to them, was more precarious. That was a judgment on her marital and not her financial status. Single
women of a certain age inspired righteous condescension. Miranda didn't argue. It was satisfying to have the old house, though she didn't rent it out and only visited occasionally. She hadn't slept over since her mother's funeral. The village of Waldron was changing. When she walked to the general store, she sometimes recognized a familiar face but went unrecognized herself. Mostly, there were strangers now living in the old houses clustered around the crossroads, down the hill, and along the river.