Still Waters

by John Moss

  Morgan strolled past reception and was greeted cheerfully by his rank, detective sergeant, rather than by name. He blushed at being recognized, feeling somehow that the young woman, whose own name he didn’t know, was privy to his intimate adventures with the Bobbsey Twins.

  The twins and he were history now; they had made choices that weren’t his doing. Nancy with the big blond hair had married a cop, was pregnant with her second child, and lived in the depths of Scarborough. Anne had tried modelling, he had heard, but her voluptuous lips had led only to lingerie catalogues of the second order, and she was now a vice squad cop in Vancouver.

  Still, whenever a pretty young receptionist smiled at him, Morgan was discomforted by a vague sense of the erotic. He would hurry past with a shy smile, avoiding eye contact, and would feel a tickling sensation of relief when he was safely on the elevator. Sometimes he would flirt with women his own age to prove to himself that he was normal.

  Morgan slumped down at his desk and began to wade through the accumulated paperwork. Mostly, he came in when Alex Rufalo, the superintendent, wasn’t present. Rufalo tended to work executive hours — long but with weekends free. Others around Morgan, after initial salutations, left him alone.

  By early evening he was on top of things. Not finished — “things” were never finished — but they were under control. He reached into a bottom drawer and took out a crumpled linen jacket. Lying under it was his standard-issue 9 mm Glock semi-automatic and a shoulder holster. Despite regulations, he seldom carried his gun. Miranda did more often, but it always seemed to him that homicide was the one detail where guns were redundant. The critical focus was on people who were already dead.

  On the way home he stopped in at a bookstore on Bloor Street and picked up a short-story anthology, along with a gourmet sandwich and a yogourt shake to go at a place next door. He was too tired to read, so he ate in front of the television, watched back-to-back episodes from the Law & Order franchise, and went to bed. He dreamed sporadically of full lips and police procedures and judges on high benches, some of them comic and others quite sinister.

  Sunday morning Morgan woke up feeling queasy, as if he had endured a train ride in a windowless sleeper, conscious the whole night of the tracks clicking beneath him. He called Miranda again, but there was no answer, and hung up before having to deal with her voice mail.

  Settling in for a good read, he selectively worked his way toward the Yukio Mishima story in the middle of the collection he had bought. The first piece was Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” He was struck with how a story about female empowerment could have been written by an icon of machismo. Perhaps Hemingway had had no idea what he was doing. Maybe that wasn’t at all what he had wanted and that was why the story was subversively powerful. Then there was a story by D.H. Lawrence — “The Rocking Horse Winner” — that blew him away. It was about a kid’s pact with the devil. The boy wins and dies. He read William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” twice. It was the most masterfully grotesque story he had ever encountered — the horror of necrophilia and a mouldering corpse not just macabre but a haunting representation of Faulkner’s American South. Next he read a story by Alice Munro with the disingenuous title “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” Disingenuous was the operative word. The detailed idiosyncrasies of a few charming characters in small-town Ontario gradually resonated with each other to reveal genteel emotional mayhem, suicide, and possibly murder.

  While he read “Patriotism,” the Mishima story, through his own sensibility, Miranda was always in mind. And Eleanor Drummond. Following the course of the warrior’s blade, driven by will through the intricate design of his gut, Morgan felt an overwhelming sense of estrangement. Seppuku meant nothing to him, a horrific gesture; and it was undermined, as Miranda had said, by the quiet devotion of the wife dying without vainglory as if death were a domestic detail.

  Morgan felt like a voyeur peering into a world so different from what its author must surely have meant to convey. He closed the book and thought of Miranda living in a parallel world, utterly estranged from her watcher. He thought of Molly. He thought of Eleanor Drummond, the absurd humility of her end, the outrageous conceit. He wanted to phone Miranda again to share his reading, but the more he considered it the more he realized he had nothing to say.

  Miranda touched her eyes, trying to affirm that she was awake. A faint hum from the ventilation system accentuated the darkness clenched tightly around her. She was shivering and drew up the blanket. Her mouth was dry, but when she ran her hands over exposed skin it felt clammy. The air was thick and warm. She removed the blanket, not wanting to sweat. She needed to vomit, but she didn’t want to lose fluids and fought the spasms in her gut by opening her eyes wide and focusing on an imaginary horizon above her. After a while, the nausea began to subside.

  She knew she had to move around or she would strangle on fear. Her mind would take flight. Entropy would set in. She would die. Miranda listened intently until she could hear the walls. The hush in the room reverberated softly in her ears, and she started to reconstruct the dimensions of her cell in her head. She got up carefully and groped for the edge of the table to steady herself, the way one did when blindfolded in a children’s game. She kicked the bedpan and heard a splash.

  “Damn!” she said out loud, and the sound of the voice startled her.

  “Damn, damn, damn!” she repeated. “Miranda calling Earth, can you hear me?”

  She felt better. Hearing her own voice was proof she was alive. I am afraid, therefore I am, she thought. Her throat was constricted from lack of moisture, and speaking was painful.

  “I am afraid, therefore I am,” she said aloud.

  No one answered, and she fought a feeling of dread emanating from the silence by taking a step away from the table toward the back wall. When she reached it abruptly — it was closer than she had anticipated — she slid her hand along and up to the grillwork where ducts would connect to humidity control and heat. It was absolutely flush with the wall. She tried to force her fingers into the metal grid to get a grip until her fingernails split and she felt blood spurt. Miranda moved away, feeling her blood smear across the rough wall. She edged around to the door. The glass was impervious to blows. She felt dents in the sheet-metal back of the door and wondered if these were marks of Jill’s rage at confinement.

  Jill had read stories. Griffin had left the lights on even when she slept.

  Which would be worse? Miranda wondered. Light was confining: in darkness the end of the world could be glimpsed.

  She worked her way back around to her bed, kicking the bedpan again as she sat down. The sound of slopping against the steel made her thirsty. It was dry and warm. She felt moisture leaking through her pores. Her lips were beginning to crack. She lay back, waiting. She didn’t know for what, though.

  Would Morgan find her? Would Jill relent? Miranda didn’t think she would. In the mind of a girl so morally distraught, what surely wasn’t a premeditated act wouldn’t weigh on her conscience now, at least not enough to offset the respite gained by Miranda’s erasure. She winced at the notion of being erased, but she directed resentment only at herself. Jill was the heir to Miranda’s fall from grace, a notion Morgan would have vigorously rejected — the implications of fall and of grace. She felt the inevitability of her imprisonment, that it was somehow her own doing.

  Eventually, she would be discovered.

  Would her corpse be mouldering in the bed, her desiccated remains inseparable from the bedclothes and mattress, or dried into dust? Images of the grotesque and macabre entertained themselves in her brain, stopping her from slipping into a state of calm that scared her more than the taunting illusions of death.

  Suddenly, the window in the door flashed with illumination, her cell reverberated with light. Gasping, she struggled to the door, her eyes searing in the dim glow. She couldn’t see or hear anything through the thick, narrow window. Miranda banged against the dented sheet metal, b
ut could feel the door thud against the flesh of her hands, feel her efforts dissipate into the depths of its thermal layers. She walked around the room, straightening and tidying. The light suddenly flicked off, and she felt relieved as she stepped carefully through the darkness back to her bed.

  That would have been Eugene Nishimura. It must be Sunday afternoon. She hadn’t thought to check her watch, which was under the edge of the bed. She leaned over, picked it up, and set it on the table. It was either Sunday or Monday. Surely, she had been here more than twenty-four hours. Her body felt drained and depleted. She had to conserve. She was leaching vital energy and fluids into the air.

  The absence of humidity, the warmth, these were conditions that could easily be controlled by a system ostensibly set up for wine. This place was designed as a prison specifically to hold captives. Jill wasn’t the first. Those weren’t Jill’s dents on the back of the door. Miranda hadn’t noticed any bruises or abrasions on the girl.

  Her mind raced. Griffin had kept other victims locked in here, warm and dry, had let them take showers and use the toilet, or at least empty the bedpan. He could have kept them on hold indefinitely for his personal use. She shuddered. How many rapes had occurred in this room? How many women had died here? She settled into the bed, feeling it rise to her weight, feeling a strange kinship with the girls and women who had preceded her in this terrible place.

  Morgan went out for Sunday dinner to a restaurant on Eglinton Avenue. He walked there and worked up an appetite. After a pasta dinner, savouring the pleasant taste of garlic in his mouth, he ambled back along Yonge Street and into Rosedale.

  Eugene Nishimura’s van was parked in front of the Griffin house, and though it was dark, enough light from Mrs. de Cuchilleros’s side windows enabled Morgan to see his way around to the back garden. Nishimura was inside. Morgan saw his head bobbing through the abandoned casement that was all that remained of the outside entry into the pump room.

  “You’re working late,” he said when Nishimura emerged from the house.

  Nishimura called out, “Is that you, Detective Morgan? Just a sec. I’ll turn on the pond lights.”

  Suddenly, the most astonishing tableau flashed before Morgan’s eyes. He had been trying to make out the shapes of separate fish in the indirect garden lighting. Now a spectacular cube of illumination and colour opened in the ground, the depths of water resonating with absolute clarity.

  “What an amazing collection!” said Nishimura. “I moved the grand champ up from the lower pond. Look at her! Have you ever seen red so wonderfully intense? Asymmetrical continents floating in absolute stillness, perfectly balanced. Such harmony! There’s a perfect tension between all the parts. She’s beautifully healthy. She’s a living haiku, a perfect living haiku.”

  “Speaking of which, what does Ochiba Shigura mean?” Morgan asked. “Isn’t it something about autumn leaves and still water?”

  “It just means Ochiba Shigura. That’s what kind of fish it is.”

  “Don’t the words mean something? Translate it into English.”

  “It means Ochiba Shigura. That’s a beautiful name for a fish.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I don’t know. My Japanese isn’t that good.”

  “It’s my favourite. Except for the Chagoi. You’ve moved it back up, too.”

  The two men stood mesmerized, staring into the pel-lucid depths at the fish weaving patterns of colour and form, lazily ignoring the laws of gravity as they expounded the dimensions of their home in soaring slow motion.

  Eventually, Nishimura said, “I’ve got to get going. My wife thinks I’ve got a new mistress.”

  “A new one?”

  Nishimura looked at him with an embarrassed smile. “I am a family man.”

  “Lovely.”

  “I fed them earlier. I’ll be back tomorrow to clean the filters.”

  “I’ll walk out with you,” said Morgan. “I don’t want to be left in the dark.”

  Miranda slept fitfully for an indeterminate period of time. Getting up with excruciating effort, she sat at the table, propped on her elbows, and fiddled with her watch. She had no desire to eat, but a craving for water sent burning cramps through her abdomen. Miranda contemplated opening one of the small wounds in her fingers and sucking on her own blood, but she was afraid the strain in processing the rich fluid might deplete more than nourish. She had no stomach at all for drinking urine, which now smelled sour. She had gone again a couple of times. Nothing much had come except a few drops and a sensation in her urethra as if she were trying to pee needles. She hadn’t been able to have a bowel movement, but a heavy urgency hovered painfully in her lower gut.

  She decided she needed to think. Despite the miserable depletion of her physical resources, her mind seemed clear. Thinking would make the time pass, keep her focused. Images of the sun-glowing youth in the Speedo drifted through her mind. The last thing she felt was sexy. Her lips seared with pain, and she knew she had to be smiling. He had been a lovely temptation. Like seeing something sinful on a menu — too many calories, too much money. What if she had splurged? Why not? When she got out of this room, she was going to hop on a plane, fly to Grand Cayman, and find that luxuriously endowed young man. She was going to go scuba diving with him and dance beyond gravity in an erotic undersea ballet. Then she would take him back to her hotel room and do it and do it and do it.

  “My goodness!” she said aloud, and this time she was strangely reassured by the resonance of her voice, despite its distortion.

  Her throat was so dry that the utterance had nearly strangled her, and the deep fissures opening on her lips had caught at the words as they had emerged from her body. Her voice sounded familiar, but not like herself. She whispered, refusing the silence. “When I get out … I want …”

  She couldn’t think of what she wanted. Miranda tried to redirect her thoughts. She knew she had to exercise her mind or she would lose control. She didn’t know what that meant, but it frightened her.

  If Griffin had died the way she thought he had, and Eleanor Drummond had only killed him after he was dead, he couldn’t have known he was going to die. Miranda’s mind seemed separate from her body and was clearly a better place to be.

  Two things. Why had Eleanor come to Griffin’s house if she wasn’t expecting her daughter to be there? Where had she thought Jill was? If Jill had run away before, say, downtown, and hung out with street kids, then her mother must have known she would come back. Eleanor had recognized how headstrong Jill was: bull-headed, determined, and smart the way she had been herself — a survivor. She had expected Jill to return home in due course after sorting out the revelation of her mother’s double life. Eleanor Drummond, or Molly Bray, hadn’t known that the issue for Jill was her father’s identity, not her mother’s deceit.

  So Eleanor had come here and found Griffin dying or dead. It hadn’t mattered which. Then, for some reason, she had entered the wine cellar, this godforsaken room, and discovered her ravaged daughter. She had looked in here because it was a place she had habitually checked! The last thing she had expected to find was her daughter. She was shocked. Eleanor had murdered the man in her mind — redemption for the suffering of her daughter. She had planned her own murder — atonement for complicity in her daughter’s brutalization.

  Eleanor had come down here because she had known what this place was! She had investigated this room because she had been a prisoner here herself!

  No, she had looked in because she had known there had been other young women. She was checking.

  Miranda got up and walked around as if the lights were on. She was adjusting to the darkness, to the walled limitations on her existence, to the limits of perception, of being.

  Molly Bray wasn’t a psychopathic deviant, nor was Eleanor Drummond. Therefore — Miranda moved toward the idea with steely determination — she was some sort of guardian, policing her Faustian mentor, monitoring his perversion, trying to protect others, to control or subvert his
predatory appetite for young women. Was she guilty of collusion? Why hadn’t she reported him? Her life, not just her constructed identity as Eleanor Drummond, but her life as Molly Bray with Jill and Victoria in Wychwood Park, the intricate contrivance of her life, would have collapsed without Griffin, had perhaps existed because she had used what she had known. She had sold her soul to protect her life. And with terrible irony she had failed to protect her own daughter.

  That vile man had savaged their daughter, his own child. Oh, my God! Miranda thought, shuddering. Oh, my God!

  Morgan woke up Monday with what felt like a hangover. Before he shaved he got on the telephone to Miranda, but she must have already gone out. There was no response on her cell phone. A little troubled by his inability to reach his partner, he showered, shaved, and got dressed.

  The Griffin affair was going to break very soon. He had the feeling he got when the disparate details of a case started falling together. But he was wary, uneasy. Murder-suicide in a Rosedale mansion didn’t resonate like this without complications. Where the hell was Miranda?

  Morgan went out for breakfast. In an attempt to kick-start his body, he ordered a hungry-man platter of sausages, bacon, pancakes, eggs, and toast, which when placed in front of him seemed obscene. He stared into the unnaturally orange fluid in his orange juice glass. Oranges could be too orange, he thought. Sometimes things weren’t what they were. Griffin was a deviant, but he was a student of semiology. They weren’t mutually exclusive. He had followed Miranda into an academic program. He was already an ineffectual lawyer — not the first. She must have known at some level who he was, his name if not his face.