Still Waters

by John Moss

  He stood and walked a short distance to the edge of the shadowy cedars. From the sounds she heard, she figured he was dressing. Then she heard nothing. He must have approached her naked, she thought. He must have felt ridiculously vulnerable. What if she had laughed? Would he have run off, would he have hurt her?

  Slowly, Miranda rolled over. She didn’t know whether to cry. Her whole frame shivered violently and then became very still. She was confused by the strange diffusion of pain that spread from a sharp centre between her legs through her entire body. She wasn’t revolted, and if she was stunned, she conveyed this by acting with deliberation, as if everything were the same. She got up and walked over to the dam, dived cleanly into the dark water, swam to the shallows where she squatted and splashed waves of water against herself. Then she went back to where her clothes were still neatly piled on the grass beside the towel, got dressed, folded the towel, opened it again, shook it out, spread it in the sunlight, stained and ugly, and left it there. She walked out along the race, past the mill, where the green sports car was gone, strode up and over the hill and down into the village, into her house where her mother and sister were watching Days of Our Lives, into her room where she changed her underwear and threw her panties into the disposal bag in the bathroom reserved for used sanitary napkins. After a scalding shower, she dressed in a loose shift, went back into the living room, sat beside her sister and mother, and watched the rest of the soap opera, never admitting to her innermost self until now that the incident had happened, or that she might have known who her first sad lover had been.

  8

  Red Herring

  Morgan sat on the edge of the formal pond, arranging his thoughts in a neat rhetorical design as if he were preparing to address disciples in the Athenian agora. Dogs didn’t have a vocabulary; they didn’t respond to language itself. He was sorting Griffin’s notes in his mind, trying to cope with the unaccustomed discipline of reconstructing a formal argument.

  A large and purposeful German shepherd loped across the garden, circled the pool, stood for a moment with his forepaws on the elevated wall, then, with the free end of his leash in his mouth, sat directly in front of Morgan and stared at him. The handler had set the dog loose in the yard when he went back to his van and had asked Morgan to keep an eye on him. Morgan’s indifference offended the dog, who dropped his leash so that it dragged on the ground as he trotted over to the base of a Japanese maple, cocked a leg, and peed. Then, skirting the lower pond, he came back, stepped lightly up onto the wall, and nudged his reluctant custodian, who was thinking about dogs and hadn’t noticed the German shepherd’s absence.

  Morgan didn’t understand dogs. In Cabbagetown they were guards and scavengers. He didn’t think of animals defining themselves by their connection with humans. Morgan edged away while the big German shepherd manoeuvred to maintain contact, then gave up and gazed wistfully into the water. The dog leaned forward until his nose touched, withdrew with a sneeze, and leaned forward again, teetering in a very fine balance, threatening to topple into his own reflection.

  The end of the German shepherd’s leash dangled below the surface, and the dog growled at the fish shimmering in flight. Distracted, Morgan spoke to the dog; inconsiderately, his tone ambiguous. Sensitive by training to verbal nuance, the dog heard only a jumble of words, without the slightest inflection to indicate the required response.

  Unable to resolve his confusion, the dog wagged his tail with greater and greater vigour until his entire hindquarters quivered. Then, suddenly bounding away in apparent embarrassment, he tore around the big trees, leaped over shrubs and through compost remains, sent divots of grass flying askew, and careened through the air past Morgan, over the wall of the pond, and into the water.

  Morgan smiled and turned away to protect the dog’s dignity. The fish would be safe near the bottom.

  The dog clawed against the side of the pool. Each time he reached up to drag himself over the stone wall, the compromised ratio of buoyancy to displacement plunged him backward and under. Each time he rose sputtering to the surface, he was closer to drowning and even more bewildered by the man who ignored him.

  The handler finally appeared, reached across, grasped the dog by the scruff of the neck, and hauled him over the edge with relative ease despite his size. The dog raced away and shook vigorously, then crept back to sit directly in front of Morgan. He leaned forward and burrowed his damp head deep between Morgan’s arm and body, shivering in gratitude and affection.

  “You’ve made a friend for life,” the handler said. “He thinks you’re his saviour. He could have bloody well drowned.”

  “No,” said Morgan. “I was right here.”

  “His pecker nearly did him in. Male dogs can’t haul themselves over stuff. Like, if they fall through the ice, they often drown when their pecker gets caught on the edge of the ice.”

  “I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have let him drown.”

  “He likes you,” said the handler. “Generally, he doesn’t like men.”

  Morgan decided he was partial to dogs, though his armpit was saturated and smelled like a wet sofa. If he ever got a dog, it would have to be a terrier. They weren’t so needy, he had heard. A Scottish terrier. They had interior lives of their own.

  The German shepherd, its world restored by the return of his handler, and not yet being given a task, wandered away to explore. His leash was dragging, and he came back so that the handler could unclasp it from his collar. Then he resumed his peregrination, sniffing and peeing, covering unseen markers with his own scent. Periodically, he stopped and stood alert long enough to confirm his handler’s location. As a gesture of affection, the handler pretended to ignore the dog, conveying his trust that the dog wouldn’t stray beyond the radius of control they had established between them.

  “Nice fish,” the handler said.

  “They’re down deep right now. What’s your dog’s name?”

  “Rex.”

  “Did you think about Prince?”

  “We’re not supposed to give them a fancy name. It’s gotta go with commands. I call him Schnitzel at home with the kids. On duty he’s Rex.”

  “And what does he call himself?” asked Morgan indistinctly, not really wanting to be heard.

  “Dog,” said the handler.

  “What?”

  “He calls himself Dog.”

  Morgan looked up at the man and smiled. “My name’s Morgan.”

  “I’m McGillivery. They sent me up from College Street. Said you wanted us to sniff around. What are we looking for?”

  Morgan shrugged. “I’ve gotta have something to look for. We can’t look for nothing.”

  “I thought that’s what you did.”

  “I take it you’re not the one who put in the request. I’ll see what we can come up with.”

  “Hold on a minute,” said Morgan. He walked over to the house and disappeared through the French doors, then returned. “Work gloves are the best I can do. He wasn’t the type to leave dirty laundry around. You think you can trace where he went before he died. He was in the pond.”

  “Out here? I don’t know.”

  McGillivery set Rex to his task, then motioned Morgan to stay still beside him so that their own scent wouldn’t interfere. The dog moved methodically, but at times seemed confused, darting back and forth between the trellised portico and the formal pond. McGillivery reassured him. The dog circled, stopped to gaze into the depths at the fish, then walked nose to the ground in a direct line down to the larger opaque pond, to the green water’s edge. He looked around, sniffing the air as if he were trying to catch a distinct and elusive odour, then abruptly dropped his head and trotted in a straight line back to the upper pond where he came to rest at his handler’s feet.

  “That’s about it,” said McGillivery. “Sorry. It seems likely the victim walked about quite a bit between the house and the fish-pond.”

  “There are fish in the other one, too.”

  “And he m
ade at least one foray down to that pond. It looks kind of grim.”

  “It’s just mud. There’s a natural spring. It leaches into the ravine.”

  “There was something down there Rex didn’t recognize, something in the water, maybe the fish.”

  “It’s sweet water, from clay.”

  “He doesn’t know clay from kitty litter. Up closer to the house, the scents are untidy. Your victim came out through the back door and puttered around, then disappeared, maybe back to the house. That’s about all we can tell you, but I’m pretty sure of that much, anyway.”

  Morgan admired McGillivery for his aplomb, and Rex for his capacity to recover his dignity through diligence, however unproductive.

  Miranda appeared with two coffees in Styrofoam cups and a bag with gourmet sandwiches. “Sorry, McGillivery. I didn’t know you were here.”

  “That’s okay. I had lunch on my way up. Rex doesn’t eat on duty.”

  The dog wagged his tail and looked hungry.

  “Find anything?” she asked. “No, ma’am, not much,” he answered quite formally. He had a faint Scottish burr.

  McGillivery proceeded to describe the final outdoor movements of Robert Griffin in the late afternoon before he was murdered, speaking with more authority to Miranda than he had to Morgan, but with a trace of humility that might have been almost subversive. Listening to him recount the obvious, she was distracted. For Scots, proscribed from their homelands by the English, there was always an air of laconic defiance about deference — as there was irony in the voices of the Irish, who endured the unpleasantries of alien rule through a fine gift of words. Miranda recognized this in McGillivery’s voice. It made her feel Irish.

  Her family had been in Waterloo County since it first opened for settlement. Some of her earliest forbears were Mennonites who had trekked up from Pennsylvania by Conestoga wagon after the revolutionary defeat, not for loyalty to the Crown but in fear of closing horizons in the new republic, a nation cobbled from wishes and dreams and given to values of enterprise and self-reliance they admired in themselves and feared in others. She was German, as well, from Bavaria, and English from Northumberland and Kent, and family lore had it that there was Mohawk blood in their veins. But she identified most with her Irish progenitors who had arrived out of famine and were thrust into agricultural wealth beyond their imagining in the lush, fertile landscape of Waterloo County, so strange from Connemara it faded out of their memories in only a few generations, but stayed deep in their hearts, that mixture of cool detachment, wild passion, and an inordinate fondness for language. McGillivery’s subversive burr made her feel oddly at home.

  Being Anglican for the last couple of generations was like flying a flag of convenience, tattered as it was at this point in her life.

  “What about inside?” she asked. “Did you take Rex into the house?”

  “Why?” asked Morgan.

  “I don’t know, she said. “Let’s take him in.”

  When they opened the French doors, McGillivery released the dog without giving him a particular scent to pursue. Rex walked to the armchair, then looked back at Morgan. He walked over and sniffed Miranda, and she resisted her impulse to pat him. He seemed to be assimilating their scent, sorting them out from a complex pattern of odours. Then he paced back and forth, testing different scents that were unfamiliar but suggested only the purposeful activities of police investigators going about their business. Nothing spiked, nothing caught his attention, until he sniffed by the sofa where Eleanor Drummond had been sitting. Rex followed her scent to the chair and around and about the room, losing it in the din. He walked to the open door leading to the main floor, went back to the sofa as if he were confirming a suspicion, then walked purposefully upstairs, through the foyer, and up the next flight to the study door, which he pushed open with his nose. Standing very still, he blocked entry into the room, awaiting instructions.

  Morgan glanced at the stains on the floor and explained to McGillivery that Eleanor Drummond had been found here in a pool of blood.

  On a command from McGillivery, Rex moved one step at a time through the room, surveyed the patterns of scent, careful to avoid the space the body had occupied, and returned to sit at the feet of his handler, pensively waiting. McGillivery snapped his fingers, and the dog turned and trotted back down to the den. Miranda, Morgan, and Rex’s handler followed, the detectives expecting a revelation of some sort, but when they caught up to him, the dog was curled on the Kurdish runner, feigning sleep.

  “So what’s he telling us?” Morgan asked.

  “That he’s hungry,” suggested Miranda. “How did he know where Eleanor Drummond died?”

  “He recognizes violence,” said McGillivery. “Even weeks later there’s a residual smell.”

  “The lingering presence of evil,” said Morgan, assuming with a name like McGillivery that the handler was a Calvinist.

  As if on cue, the dog unfurled, rose to his feet, shook himself, and went to the door that led past the bathroom into the nether regions of the house. McGillivery opened it for him. He stopped at the bathroom, entered, sniffed at the drain, gazed uncertainly at the tile walls, then abruptly went out and along to the next door, which stood ajar, and plunged into the dark, subterranean maze of cellars and passageways.

  “He’ll get lost in there,” said Morgan.

  Miranda responded by flicking a switch that drowned out the darkness with pools of light. They saw Rex disappear around a corner and caught up with him near the wine cellar, where he seemed for a moment distracted, standing unnaturally still. Then he gathered himself, veered around them, and disappeared back down the long passage leading to the tunnel. Barking, he returned, sniffed Miranda and Morgan, as if sorting out something, then almost slunk back to the wine cellar door. He stared up toward the small window, lowered his head, and began scratching against the stone and dirt floor by the sill.

  “He’s got excellent taste,” Morgan observed. “He smells what they call ‘the portion of the gods,’ the infinitesimal seepage of great wine through old cork. I think we’ll have to sample a few before it’s all gone.”

  Miranda smiled. The wine fell under her jurisdiction, not his.

  Rex moved on, abandoning his digging project. His focus shifted to the pump room, but when he got inside he seemed disinterested, as if it wasn’t what he had expected.

  “It’s the noise,” said McGillivery. There was an audible hush of electric motors, the soft rush of water surging through enclosed spaces. “It muffles the scents. My God, is all this necessary to run a fish pond?”

  “They’re koi,” said Morgan. “Highly valued. The proof is the expense you see to maintain them.”

  “What do you think he thought he’d find?” said Miranda, not sure whether the word thought was appropriate.

  “Rex? Hard to say. He’s picking up too much. He can’t process it all. He gets bits and pieces, but no overall pattern. He’d show me if he could —”

  “Searching for the master narrative,” interjected Miranda. “The story of the stories. He’s probably getting undisturbed scents down here from generations, a hundred and fifty years or more, everything from trysts between servants to the depravity of children playing games of fear and retribution.”

  “Normally called hide-and-seek,” Morgan said. “You’re in a mood.”

  “Yeah,” said Miranda, surprised that it showed. She hadn’t had the opportunity to tell him about the previous night’s revelations. She was in no hurry; she had a lot to assimilate. “Let’s get back into the light. I don’t like it down here. It’s all too obsessive.”

  As soon as they re-entered the passageways, Rex starting dashing about again. He went down to the tunnel door and back, then to the wine cellar door, where he lingered briefly, then back to the door into the garage, which he scratched at and abruptly abandoned, then back once more, pushing his way out into the den with the others, striding ahead of them outside into the sunlight.

  Rex trotted over to t
he pool, rested his forepaws on the top of the raised wall, and gazed down at the koi swimming below him quite calmly, having recovered from his intrusion. He cocked his head to one side, quizzical, the observer observed, his work in the cellar already forgotten.

  Morgan was puzzling over the way Rex had avoided contaminating the crime scene when they went up to the study. The dog carefully stepped around the specific area where the body had been. Did his handler give him a command, or did he just know? He asked McGillivery, and the man explained he had used the word steady, and that was all it took.

  “Would it work for me?” asked Morgan.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I gave the same command.”

  “If it made sense. There would have to be something to avoid.”

  “Okay, here’s where Griffin was laid out on the ground. You try it first.”

  McGillivery moved so the dog would have to cross over the site where the body had been to reach him when he was summoned. On command, after the handler said “Steady,” Rex came directly to him, stepping through the phantom corpse as if nothing were there. “There must have been a groundsheet under the dead man, something to obscure the scent.”

  Morgan insisted they go back to the study, while Miranda stayed by the pool.

  When they returned, Morgan explained. “He wouldn’t walk across where the body was, and when I tried it, same thing. He refused to cross over. When I asked McGillivery to vary the command from ‘Steady’ and say ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ instead, Rex carefully sidestepped the spot and moved to his side. He wasn’t about to violate the crime scene.”

  “Good show,” said Miranda.

  McGillivery seemed amused. He walked around a bit. “Sorry, folks. We just didn’t have a grasp on what you wanted us to find.”

  As dog and handler disappeared through the walkway and up the steps to street level, Morgan said, “He’s an olfactory psychic, you know. He can smell the past. It’s not his job to make any sense of it.”