Miranda woke up confused by images of the undead that flickered on the borders of consciousness. The undead. In the real world people were either dead or they were not. Life and death were mutually exclusive. There was being and non-being, with nothing between, except zombies and vampires. Nonsense, she thought. A stick of celery in the refrigerator was dead, but it had being — it existed. A body existed, no less in the world as a corpse than when it was alive. The Jewish man from the States and the young lesbian student who were posed in Shelagh Hubbard’s grotesque parody of the eternal embrace were more real from certain perspectives after they had died than before.
That is the problem with working homicide: the bodies have more significance than the lives they led. Miranda shuddered. We have that in common, she thought. Shelagh Hubbard and I, we both see life through the eyes of the dead.
The telephone rang.
“Morgan? Thank God it’s you. I’ve been thinking — ”
“What a destructive thing to do, this hour of the morning.”
“It really is. Is there such a thing as philosophical morbidity?”
“Philosophy is morbid by definition. Any concern with the meaning of life is inseparable from knowing how it all turns out.”
“That’s pretty profound for seven a.m.”
“What’s the problem?”
“What? Oh, I was lying here ruminating. I think I’m like Shelagh Hubbard in some ways. It’s very distressing.”
“I told you, she’s like my ex-wife. More so, the more we know of her. And you are nothing like Lucy at all. Ergo, you and the genius of depravity are nothing alike. You have nothing in common with Shelagh Hubbard except you both find me quite attractive.”
“She found you resistible, Morgan. I’ve read her account of your night at the farm.”
“And you?”
“You’ve got good bones.” She shuddered. “But I find you more useful alive. What’s up?”
“Up?”
“You called me.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“I got a wake-up call from the superintendent. London’s in an uproar. It appears certain effigies in Madame Renaud’s Chamber of Horrors are human cadavers with a wax veneer. The museum has been closed down while every figure in the place is punctured with needles in a search for human tissue. It seems the tabloids are having a field day. They’ll even have to test out the queen in her various ages and stages. The British love cheeky scandals.”
“It’s only figures of murder victims who were replaced with corpses. I made that clear to Scotland Yard. Why bother with the rest? Shelagh Hubbard’s only interest was to replicate the obviously dead.”
“Also — ”
“There’s an also?”
“This morning’s Globe has a story buried — ”
“No,” said Miranda. “They’ve picked up on Alexander’s Virgin, haven’t they?”
“They have. How did you know?”
“Don’t you read waiting at the supermarket checkout? That’s how I keep up with current events.”
“Yeah, well the Globe names Pope as an authority on apparitions. As I read it, the Virgin Mary has appeared on a plaster wall of his church. Why, I cannot imagine. If she wanted to communicate with believers, why such an inept mode of expression? You’d think between Mary and God they could come up with something a little more substantial than blobs on a wall.”
“They work in mysterious ways, the celestials.”
“They do. But Alexander Pope seems unmystified. He’s declared the manifestation nothing more than a seepage stain from a fresco underneath the plaster. Sounds to me like he’s getting a bit of publicity for his reclamation project.”
“Which I cannot imagine he wants.”
“It depends, doesn’t it, on his motivation for restoring the paintings? It may be a labour of love, but love for what?”
“For a job well done? For giving us back a bit of our past?”
“You can’t give back the past. By definition.”
“Morgan, it’s too early for pedantry. What’s past is prologue, et cetera. Can I go now?”
“No. I called to tell you three things. Ready for number three?”
“Shelagh Hubbard’s been arrested?”
“No, but close.”
“Sighted?”
“Almost. They’ve found her car.”
“Where?”
“In the bush. Someone phoned Officer Singh — ”
“ Our Officer Singh? Peter the Pointer?”
“The same.”
“Why him? Was the car found in Owen Sound?”
“No, in scrub bush near Penetanguishene. It was an anonymous call — probably a local hiker. The boss asked us to drive up and take a look.”
“There was blood, of course.”
“Apparently.”
“Morgan, do you trust anything about this woman? It’s a set-up. What’s a little blood? She’s a master of special effects made from authentic materials. She’s still writing the story. She’s leading us on a wild goose chase. This is more fun for her than playing with corpses; she gets to manipulate real cops. Maybe you were her inspiration.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Morgan?”
“I’m thinking.”
“About?”
“I think she’s been abducted; she could be dead.”
“When you play with life and death, you don’t easily give up control.”
“Are you thinking like yourself or like her right now?”
“As I said, I’m not sure there’s a difference, Morgan.”
“That’s scary.”
When they arrived at the scene, Morgan walked around the abandoned car in concentric circles, starting from a point where the car could barely be seen and slowly closing in. Miranda circumscribed the scene in an expanding spiral, beginning at the car and moving gradually outwards. The OPP had done the forensics, photographed the scene minutely, and as a courtesy had waited for them to appear before towing the car away.
Peter Singh, who turned up immediately after they arrived, explained in a low voice to the officer in charge that this is what made them such a formidable team. He made swirling motions with the index finger of one hand on the palm of the other, trying to replicate their complementary circuits.
“As fine an example of the difference between inductive and deductive investigation techniques as you’re likely to find,” he offered, going on to declare their legendary status. The OPP sergeant listened politely. She had never heard of them. But she was experienced enough not to expect a great revelation when they completed their perambulations and approached. Singh, however, anticipated a major pronouncement, and was briefly disappointed when neither had much to say.
“Is there anything else?” asked the sergeant. “Do you want to catch up over at detachment headquarters? I don’t think there’s anything we haven’t already sent on.”
Miranda bent down and peered in through the open door on the passenger side of the car. Morgan followed with his eyes on the trail that led through spindly hardwoods and gnarled cedars to the fire road they came in on that ran alongside a dense and orderly array of pines in a reforestation project. He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “That’s about it. I think we’ll head back.”
Miranda looked up and concurred. “Thanks for waiting,” she said. “Let us know if anything turns up. She’s long gone, wherever she is.”
“Okay,” said the OPP sergeant. “Sorry it wasn’t more productive. It’s a long drive.” She turned to the truck operator. “Let’s haul her away.”
Miranda and Morgan and Peter Singh stood in a small group to the side, watching the tow truck jockey into position, crushing scrub foliage in the process. Once it got a good purchase on Shelagh Hubbard’s car, the sergeant signalled goodbye and hopped in beside the driver, hitching a ride out to the highway where her cruiser was parked.
“Did you see that?” said Morgan, focusing for the first time on their friend from Owen Sound Police Services.
“What?” asked Peter Singh, pleased to be included.
Morgan looked at the young officer’s turban and smiled, wondering how he managed to get enough headroom in a car. He held himself tall, and the turban added several inches to his height.
“My turban,” said Singh. “Is it not clean?”
“Oh, yes,” Morgan answered. “Good to see you.” He reached out his hand and gave Peter Singh a hearty handshake, much to the latter’s bewilderment, since he had been on the scene for a half an hour or more.
“What is it I saw?” asked Singh.
“You can see this spot from the gravel road, there.”
“Yes, the fire road, number 37, for fighting forest fires.”
“But you can’t see it from the highway.”
“No,” said Singh. “The fire road has not been graded since last year. That is why we both parked at the side of the highway.”
“And?” Miranda wanted Morgan to finish his thought.
“And, it means I agree with you.”
“That’s nice. About what?”
“That Shelagh Hubbard set up this whole thing. She wanted the car to be discovered, just not too soon. She could be pretty sure no one would travel the fire road until the weather turned. Spring brings out hikers. Is it fishing season yet?”
“Walleye, last weekend, I think, said Peter Singh.
“I’ll bet there’s good water back there beyond the pine grove. She knew someone would come through. She could have driven another thirty feet and it might have been years before anyone found her car.”
“Glad to have you on side,” said Miranda. She paused, smiled at Peter Singh, and asked him, “Did you notice anything peculiar about the bloodstains in the car?”
“They weren’t hers?”
“Oh, yes, they were. You can count on it.”
“They were on the back seat?”
“Yes, but that’s where you’d expect them to be if she’d been abducted. There or the trunk.”
“And?” said Morgan. The two men looked at her expectantly, and for a brief moment she enjoyed the suspense.
“You didn’t look inside the car, Morgan.”
“I knew you would. So…?”
“The blood was spattered, not smeared.”
“Yeah?”
“Neat drops of blood distributed in a strategic design. Too neat, too strategic.”
“Then if she did it herself,” said Peter Singh, “how did she get out of here?”
“There had to be another vehicle,” Morgan suggested.
“That’s what we’re to assume. But Morgan, did you see any evidence in your meandering of a place where a car turned around?”
“Maybe he backed out,” said Morgan.
“Who?” Miranda asked.
“The person who abducted her,” said Peter Singh.
“Or he left his car parked at the road,” Morgan offered.
“Too suspicious.”
“He could have backed out,” said Morgan.
“Who?” said Miranda. “Listen to you two. I thought I had you convinced she staged this. She walked out. People walk. This isn’t a conspiracy.”
“Okay, so once she got to the highway, what then?” Morgan asked.
“She could have had a bicycle with her. No one notices someone on a bike. She looked in pretty good shape. She was in very good shape, wasn’t she, David?”
“Wherever she’s got to, she must have had transportation — maybe another car stashed near here or back at her farm.”
“We can check the registration,” suggested Peter.
“I don’t imagine she’d use her own name,” Miranda answered.
“Oh.”
“I like the bicycle explanation,” said Morgan. “But she’d need the other vehicle. This seems an extravagant device, dumping her car.”
“It’s ten years old, Morgan. I’ll bet she replaced it with a sports car.”
“A Jag.”
“I doubt it. Maybe a Miata.”
“There was a bicycle,” said Peter Singh, grasping imaginary handle bars. “I remember a very old CCM beside the back door.”
The layout of the summer kitchen came back to Morgan. “There were two bikes,” he said.
“No, for sure I know there was one bike only.”
“One bike, an old one,” said Miranda. “With a dropped crossbar, red with black piping, CCM, wide handlebars.”
“Not two?”
“No.”
“Well, there you are. She made her getaway on an all-terrain model.”
“Unisex, blue, wide tires with whitewalls?”
“Yes.”
“It was leaning against the inside back wall of the drive shed.”
“Oh, she moved it. There goes my theory.”
“Not at all, Morgan. It reinforces it, circumstantially. She had a bike, she rode it somewhere. It just means her other car was back at the farm, not somewhere closer.”
“Precisely,” said Morgan.
Peter was fascinated and a little annoyed. As soon as the OPP had left, the dynamic duo had swung into action, but not before. He had wanted them to be impressive, verifying his acumen as a judge of their worth, but they had waited until now to display their considerable skills. Still, he was flattered to be there.
“I think before you leave these parts of the country,” he said in an eager voice, “you would like to go to the church where the Virgin Mary is appearing. I have been there already and it is very strange. She can be seen by believers and non-believers alike.”
“In Beausoleil?” Miranda responded. “We know the man who discovered her.”
“The Virgin?”
“The image. He’s a friend of ours.”
“The man who is restoring the beautiful walls?”
“Reclaiming them, yes. His name is Alexander Pope.”
“I saw him there. I introduced myself. There were many, many people. He seemed quite disturbed, and he was relieved to see my uniform. This was today, on my way here. Very indirectly. He thought I would keep the people away, but I explained my jurisdiction is Owen Sound, not Beausoleil. Still, I helped him set up a barricade to keep them back. He was most gracious.”
“Okay, Morgan? Let’s go and see what Alexander’s come up with.”
“It could be a scam to raise funds for his project.”
“He’s got money. He has angels behind him.”
“Haven’t we all!”
Several concessions before they got to Beausoleil, even before the church spire was in sight, they noticed the traffic. Normally on a back road like this there might be the odd pickup or a tractor rumbling along, hauling farm implements or a hay wagon. But a modest congestion of cars such as this was remarkable. Morgan and Miranda parked a ten-minute walk from the church, but Peter Singh, who had followed them in his clearly marked cruiser, picked them up and drove right to the door, where he double-parked with the unabashed authority of his office.
What Morgan noticed most was the silence. There were crowds milling around in clusters outside, and parallel streams of people shuffling in one side of the double-door archway at the front and out the other, having organized themselves spontaneously to give everyone the opportunity to witness the apparition. But there was virtually no conversation among them. It was eerie how quiet they were. Even the children played noiselessly, either in deference to their parents’ solemnity or in imitation of their awestruck behaviour.
With Officer Singh leading, the three of them slipped through and into the building. The crowd was moving in an orderly column down the centre of the nave, so they cut behind the pillars to the side and past the frescoes they had seen before, all of them now beautifully illuminated. The scaffolding was still against the wall beneath the fourth panel that Alexander Pope had been working on a fortnight ago. The plaster had been peeled off entirely. Sister Marie Celeste appeared to be hovering in mid-air, toes pointed like a ballet dancer to display additional stigmata where nails had been thrust through the flesh of her elongated feet. Smaller figures could now be seen toiling at the ordinary tasks of a farming community. She was clearly one of them, yet divinely enhanced, with size and evanescent colour and an ethereal demeanour testifying to her inspired estrangement from the world.
Alexander Pope was standing in front of the window beside the fifth and final panel, which, from the oblique angle of their approach, was nothing more than hand-smoothed white plaster. He seemed an ambiguous presence. He might have been a security guard or Charon at the gates of Hades. He looked haggard, as if he had not rested in a long time, and yet somehow triumphant. Was this, Morgan wondered, what he had secretly been working for all along? The adulation of the masses for the gift of his genius?
Yet no one seemed to be paying him much attention, apart from responding to his solitary posture, facing away from the wall, as a warning not to approach too closely.
When Pope saw them, his wan smile suggested long-suffering forbearance. Miranda gave him an awkward hug, Morgan shook hands, and Peter Singh made incomprehensible gestures meant to indicate he had returned under forces over which he had no control, his pantomime ending with an open-palmed shrug.
“Alexander,” said Miranda. “What on earth have you been doing? Your gentle pilgrims have multiplied.”
“Exponentially,” he responded. “It’s all quite unexpected, and…,” lowering his voice, he continued, “quite undesirable.”
“What do your sponsors think?” Morgan asked.
“Oh, well, you know, I’m not sure.”
“If they wanted a tourist attraction, this could be another Lourdes.”
“No, I think not. One is more than enough. The object of this project was not to arouse shallow religiosity, but to bring an aesthetic wonder back into the world. I have not the genius to create such a work, but perhaps I do, to give it new life.”
“A not-modest undertaking,” said Morgan, mimicking what he heard as mildly condescending locution.
“But humbly undertaken,” Miranda countered, a little defensively.
Alexander Pope seemed unaware of or indifferent to the subtleties of their discourse. “These people interfere with my work,” he declared. “The quiet and calm is deceptive. I would be torn limb from limb as a heretic should I resume my labours by peeling away their sacred image.”
“They seem a gentle crowd,” Miranda interceded.
“Hell hath no fury like a zealot denied.”
“They do not seem zealous,” she responded. “Maybe the zeal is your own, and the fury, your suppressed rage at the intrusion.”
He looked down at her and curled his lips in a tight smile. “I am at a standstill, an impasse.”
“Celebrity is fickle,” Morgan observed, without lack of sympathy. “Fame interferes with what you are famous for doing.”
“It is not about me, Detective, I assure you. I am merely a talented enabler. I reveal what already exists. But they see what they wish, not what is there.”
Alexander Pope blinked several times and leaned back to his full height, gazing over at what, from their side-view perspective, still looked like a blank plaster wall. Morgan was intrigued by the arrogance of the gaunt man peering down at him. Miranda felt sorry for him. He was obviously distressed by his reduced role. The apparition was no longer his to present, but rather his to protect; it was the property of those who saw in it a miraculous vision. Peter Singh found the whole situation entertaining; he was bemused to see this rather austere and pompous man bereft of authority.
“Well,” said Miranda. “Let’s take a look. Lead on, Peter. You have the uniform.”
Singh walked straight into the double columns of people who were shuffling up through the nave and circling at the chancel to pass down in front of the panel before moving out through the vestibule. The crowd parted and let them through. From the far side, they looked across and Pope’s three visitors were astonished to see a brilliantly illuminated portrayal of Mary’s Assumption.
“My goodness,” said Morgan.
“My God,” said Miranda. “It may not be a miracle, but it’s magnificent. Alexander, I had no idea.”
“It is very beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It is the Virgin Mary on her way to Heaven,” Officer Singh observed.
“Actually,” said Alexander Pope, “it is Saint Marie Celeste. These people,” he said, lowering his voice to a discreet whisper, “most of them have never heard of Sister Marie. For them, it is Mary. They want miracles, but they want them familiar. Nothing too taxing on the imagination.”
“I would think your pilgrims are wonderfully imaginative,” said Morgan. “These people invest a beautifully rendered apparition with supernatural powers. Faith outruns reason; surely that’s imagination. Just not yours or mine.”
Miranda listened to Morgan with some surprise. He was the one who’d admonished her for saying she was an agnostic, when clearly, he would say, she’s an atheist, the same as him. And here he was, rising to the defence of the spiritually desperate. Yet she looked at the faces in the stream flowing by and saw no desperation, only a kind of suspended worldliness, a wishful innocence, a haunted yearning to touch with their eyes a vision of God.
“It is beautiful, Alexander,” she said. “Did you do it?”
Taken aback, he stammered, “No… I… How… I have not started on that wall. The plaster… perhaps it is what lies underneath. Somehow the image shows through.”
Miranda laughed. “I didn’t mean literally. But, like, did you orchestrate the phenomenon? Did you make all this happen?”
“No, absolutely not. I’d rather get back to my work.”
“But what do you think?” Morgan asked. “Where did the picture come from? Is it by the same artist who did the others? Maybe the plaster covering peeled away in the night — ”
“And was cleaned up by the pilgrims,” Miranda added, wanting to be part of the resolving discourse.
“It is possible,” said Peter.
The other three looked at him as if he had overstepped an invisible boundary. He brushed an imaginary speck of lint from his chest and repeated, “It is quite possible.”
“No,” said Alexander Pope. “It is not. The plaster on this one is the same vintage as the shrouds I have removed from the other four panels. It is not the same age as the original frescoes.”
“Is it possible for a fresco to bleed through?” Morgan asked.
“Perhaps, but not spontaneously. Perhaps over years the colour might seep, but not like this. It would not be such a clear replication.”
“Do we know what lies underneath?” Morgan continued.
“No, although logic suggests it would be the ascension of Marie Celeste, affirming her rise to the heavenly order. That in itself would have made the picture blasphemy in the eyes of the Church. Only Rome confers sainthood; God merely affirms the decision.”
“And this is clearly Sister Marie,” said Miranda. “You can follow her progress. In the fourth panel, she is beatific, but still of this earth. Here she has broken free of mortality; she’s not just floating, she’s soaring. Her stigmata have faded away. Her eyes are no longer raised heavenward — they look straight ahead and are radiant. Her dress is sky blue and her hair is the colour of sunlight. Alexander, she is breathtaking, stunning, a portrait of the truly divine. But it is clearly Marie Celeste.”
“Are we assuming this is by the same person?” asked Morgan.
“Oh, it is, Morgan. It has to be.”
“I’m inclined to agree,” said Alexander.
“And I as well,” said Peter.
Abruptly, Pope pulled away from their little enclave and pushed through the crowd, back to the base of the panel. When the others joined him, he said, “Sorry, I thought they were getting too close. They weren’t actually. They seem to be self-policing. Still, I worry.”
“You look absolutely exhausted,” said Miranda. “Why don’t you take a break, go out to your van for a nap, take a run into Penetang and have dinner? We’ll stand guard for a while.”
“I have a better idea,” said Morgan. “Close the place down for the night.”
“They’ll riot,” said Officer Singh.
“No they won’t. Believers climb mountains on bloodied knees for a glimpse of the shadow of God. Waiting overnight in a car will be welcomed as penance for imagined sins. They’ll feel they’ve earned their revelation if they have to wait.”
“How do you propose we go about this?” said Miranda.
“Simple. We close the door. Put up a sign that says ‘Visitors Welcome,’ followed by a clear indication of hours, say ten a.m. to four p.m. Make them feel welcome, but control their access. Let those in here file out. Close the other door. Alexander then has eighteen hours to do what he wants. Daily.”
“Let’s do it,” said Peter Singh.
“Agreed,” said Alexander Pope. “A very good idea, Detective. And with Officer Singh in his uniform, and you two looking like police — ”
“We don’t,” said Miranda.
“A compliment, my dear. You both carry yourselves with unmistakable authority.”
Miranda looked at Morgan’s habitual rumpled demeanour and laughed.
When the building had been cleared, the four of them stood in front of the revealed apparition. From the centre of the nave it was not quite so distinct as it had been from farther away. The closer they got to it, the more blurred it seemed, until right beneath it the lines were quite vague and the colours, while still somewhat opalescent, were subdued. As Miranda had noticed before, when they moved to the side, the bright illumination virtually washed the colour away and the entire panel glowed in a white sheen.
It is interesting, she thought, that the people filing through, while they could see it more clearly from across the nave, did not really respond until they were closer. Close up, perhaps, it was less an aesthetic experience. In the dramatic blur, when they could almost reach out and touch the holy apparition, there might be satisfaction of a deeper kind, one she did not fully apprehend.
They heard a shuffling noise in the shadows. Miranda wheeled around. Two of the original pilgrims moved quietly into the light and walked by them, brooms in hand. These were true believers in Saint Marie Celeste, who somehow had access to the building through the sacristy. It did not occur to Miranda or Morgan, or Alexander Pope, or even Peter Singh, to interfere.
Stepping up onto the chancel where the altar would have been, they turned and looked down into the empty church, each of them imagining what it must have been like when Marie Celeste was alive. There was something quite moving about the empty building, restored to meaning by a picture on a wall. Three more acolytes appeared from the shadows and busied themselves cleaning and dusting. It was eerie, Miranda thought. And satisfying, somehow. And strangely affirming.
She was the first to notice. “Do you smell something?” she asked.
“What?” said Peter Singh.
“Fleur de Rocaille,” said Morgan.
“What?” said Miranda.
“It’s a perfume.”
“I know it’s a perfume. Is that what you smell?”
“Lucy used to wear it.”
“Who’s Lucy?” asked Peter.
Morgan ignored him. Miranda answered, “His wife.”
“What is it?” said Alexander. “I’m not sure I smell anything.”
“Oh, you do,” Miranda insisted. “A strong odour of violets.”
“Yeah,” said Morgan. “Violets. Was it here all along or did it just come in with the pilgrims?”
“I think it was here. It was masked by all the people, but it’s here.”
“The smell of saints,” Morgan observed, his voice suggesting he found his own statement at the edge of credulity. “When they’re dead, their bodies exude the odour of violets.”
All five pilgrims had gathered at the edge of the chancel and stood watching them, listening.
“Well, what do you think it is?” Morgan said to the one closest.
“I think it is Saint Marie Celeste,” he responded in a matter-of-fact tone. “We sometimes smell violets when we work here at night. She is buried beneath where you’re standing.”
Miranda instinctively took a step to the side, the way she would in a cemetery when she became aware she was standing over a grave. But here there was no marker. Just slabs of limestone, each big enough to cover a body.
Morgan smiled at the man. It was the first time he had heard one of them speak. “Do you think she is still here?” he asked. “Perhaps the Church removed her body.”
“No,” the man answered. “It was the Church who left.”
Morgan nodded.
“They left; but this is a holy place. You cannot change what the Lord has done, though you speak with the words of the Lord.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Morgan. “So where do you think she is? About here?” he said, indicating a slab at his feet.
“No,” said the man, stepping up. “Under this rock, here.”
“Shall we look?” said Morgan.
“If you wish,” the man responded.
“Morgan!” said Miranda. Turning away from him to address the pilgrim, she asked, “What do you think of the…,” she paused, nodding in the direction of the wall panel, “… the Virgin Mary?”
“It is a picture of Saint Marie Celeste,” the man said in a quiet voice. “It is only a picture. Her remains are beneath this stone — of no use to her, now — and she is with Mary in heaven.”
Alexander spoke up. “Would you have no objections if we took a look?”
“None at all,” said the man. “It is your building. But only what is in it. The unseen… that is ours. Do as you wish.”
Morgan and Alexander exchanged looks. Like boys engaged in a conspiracy, Miranda thought.
“Is it legal?” she said.
“Yes of course,” said Morgan. “Alexander has the authority. If he says it’s okay, it’s okay.”
Alexander stepped down and walked over to his scaffold where he reached underneath and retrieved a crowbar and a smaller pry bar. Together, he and Morgan prodded the cracks between the slabs, relieved to find as they pushed accumulated detritus away that there was no mortar between them.
“We might as well start with this one,” said Morgan, looking at the pilgrim for confirmation.
Miranda breathed deeply, inhaling the odour of violets into her lungs. She exhaled slowly, trying to prevent herself from hyperventilating. She was very uncomfortable with their ghoulish behaviour, and yet oddly curious.
The two men got their bars under a corner of one slab and lifted. It was five to six inches thick. Peter Singh rushed over to the scaffold and retrieved several four-by-fours, one of which he slipped under the raised corner. They moved around the slab, prying and lifting, until it rested on the beams. The odour of violets had become intense, almost sickening. The pilgrims moved close. Everyone except Miranda leaned down without orders being given and grasped the edge of the limestone and simultaneously lifted, walking it off to the side.
Miranda gasped. As the shadow of the stone slid across the opening and light flooded the cavity in a small stone crypt, she could see a woman’s body dressed in sky blue lying on rock, with only a smooth boulder beneath her golden hair to support the head. Her skin was the colour of alabaster and her lips were as bright as blood. Her eyelids curved softly over closed eyes. Her lashes flickered in the bright illumination as if they were going to flash open, and her lips were poised as if she were about to speak. She was full-bodied and lithe in her absolute stillness, sensuous and innocent. All gazed at her in a profound hush, the mystery rendering them silent.
Then Miranda spoke. “It’s Shelagh Hubbard,” she said. chapter thirteen
Yonge Street
The old church took on new life, swarming with Provincial Police. Peter Singh watched closely as they poked and prodded into every corner and shadow, assessing infinitesimal details of forensic interest, from dust motes to cobwebs. They had questioned him and Morgan and Miranda separately, hoping to find some anomaly in their description of events that might yield unexpected insights. They questioned Alexander Pope at length, but he seemed bewildered, as if his sacred trust had been violated. They interviewed the five pilgrims, finding them forthright and elusive, and of little value, it seemed, to the investigation. The pilgrims were told to go home, which they did.
Peter Singh observed all the activity in utter amazement. How did he have the great fortune to witness such an astonishing turn of events? Detectives Morgan and Quin had read the scene at the abandoned car like a novel, but they had been wrong, for their villain was here in a cold, stone crypt and very dead. Yet, inexorably, they had been drawn here — he seemed to have forgotten it was at his suggestion — and the body had been revealed. They had been redeemed, and he marvelled that he had been with them. He was inextricably a part of the plot.
“It must be disappointing for them,” Miranda observed as they left through the sacristy.
“I don’t think so,” said Morgan. “As far as they’re concerned, Shelagh Hubbard never existed. What they have seen tonight is the body of a saint, and it is exactly what they expected: smelling sweetly of violets and un-decomposed. I’d say the evening has been a singular success from their point of view.”
“Do you really think they believe it was her?” said Peter Singh, spreading his hands out to indicate a body lying in state. “We have told them it is not.”
“And who would you believe?” said Morgan. “Us or God?”
“God?”
“Their God has given them the corpse they believed would be there. He has confirmed their faith. Anything we say is irrelevant. Faith overrules facts every time.”
“It’s almost enough to make me a believer,” said Alexander Pope. Miranda looked up at him; he was pale as a ghost.
“It’s not your fault, Alexander.”
“But it is. I created the context. I revealed the frescoes, I set up the scene.”
“Alexander, this is not about you,” said Morgan, not unsympathetically. He found the man more likable now, when he was standing on unknown ground and his project seemed to be slipping from his grasp. “How could you know this would happen?”
“I’ve been here most of the time, or sleeping in my van. Sometimes I drive into Midland or Penetanguishene for supplies. Otherwise, I’ve been here.”
“One thing is certain,” said Miranda. “Good though she was at her craft, she didn’t put herself in there without help.”
“She has never looked better,” said Morgan, staring over the forensic team clustered at the opening of the small crypt.
“Blue suits her, although I must say the cut of her dress isn’t quite au courant,” Miranda observed. “It’s obviously meant to look like the outfit Saint Marie is wearing for her ascension.” She stepped down from the chancel and walked along the nave until opposite the fifth panel, in which Mary the Mother and Marie Celeste seemed to merge as one. The other three followed. “Look at that,” said Miranda. “Funny, though, I didn’t see it before. I thought she looked familiar but I didn’t make the connection. That could be an inspired portrait of Shelagh Hubbard!”
“And then there were four,” said Morgan. “Saint Marie Celeste and the Virgin Mary and Sister Mary Joseph and Saint Shelagh herself. It’s not a coincidence she’s laid out in a pale-blue habit.”
“Robe.”
“Habit. Anyway, the resemblance is uncanny, and it’s not a coincidence that Shelagh Hubbard and Lorraine Eliott are dead ringers.”
“What an unfortunate choice of words.”
“So, where are the bones of Lorraine Eliott?” said Miranda aloud, but more to herself than the others. Then, addressing Morgan, she said, “We’d better caution forensics to check the crypt carefully for residual traces of a much older body.” She stepped up onto the chancel to confer with the OPP.
“Where do you think they got to?” Morgan asked Alexander Pope.
“The bones? I have no idea. What would a person do with old bones?”
“Discard them, I suppose, or set up a morbid tableau. But there would have been more than a skeleton in the tomb. It’s a stone crypt, cool in summer and frozen in winter, and we saw how well it was sealed. I would imagine there was a mouldering corpse in there, swathed in the remains of a pale-blue robe.”
“Unless, of course, she was truly a saint,” Alexander observed. “Then she would have been perfectly preserved and smelling of violets. Perhaps the violets we smell are a lingering reminder of her inviolate flesh. How very eerie.”
When the county coroner’s people lifted Shelagh Hubbard’s body out of its tomb, Morgan moved closer. He watched them set her gently on the gurney. He stood beside her, looking down at her face. He felt a strange mixture of emotions. There was no doubt she was a pathological killer. His own fate had rested precariously in her power, and she had clearly articulated plans in her journal for extinguishing his life and using his bones to fabricate the charred remnants of a Jesuit saint. It seemed almost silly now, a quixotic subterfuge doomed to exposure. And he could not help but feel the pathetic irony of her present predicament, having herself been used after death to supplant another saint’s earthly remains. And as he scanned her face, her deep-set eyes pressing with suppressed vitality against the membrane of their lids, full lips poised as if about to utter a benediction, cheekbones pushing at their thin veneer of covering flesh, he found her hauntingly beautiful and it made him sad, and he felt sympathy for her powerless state as an exemplar of death.
“Morgan, you all right?” Miranda pressed to his side, holding his arm against her breast in a subtle gesture of affection no one else could see.
“Yeah,” he said. “Better than her.”
“Come on, let’s look around. It’s still our case; the abductor abducted is now the murderer murdered.”
“Okay.”
He kept staring at the dead woman’s face. Miranda spoke in a low voice — not a whisper, but a private communication. “Morgan, it’s okay, it wasn’t evil you were attracted to but the disguise she gave it. And look at her — it was an enticing disguise. Forgive yourself for being her victim, Morgan.”
He turned to her; they were standing so close, in other circumstances it might have been an embrace. He spoke in a firm voice. “Think about that.”
“No,” she said. She was not about to collapse her life story with his.
The two of them looked down at Shelagh Hubbard, who seemed to be listening.
“She’s had better days,” said Miranda.
“I wonder.”
“Death becomes the lady, Morgan. Pallor suits her.”
The implied intimacy of how close they were standing suddenly made both of them uncomfortable. Morgan stepped back and nearly trampled Officer Singh, who had just approached from behind. Miranda moved to the side and pushed against the gurney. A coroner’s assistant, taking that to be a signal, drew a white cloth over Shelagh Hubbard’s face and signalled for another assistant to help wheel her out of the building.
“Does this mean our case is resolved?” said Peter Singh.
“Well, in some sense it does,” Morgan answered, swinging around to respond and finding himself awkwardly close, but still able to appreciate the young officer’s odd gesture of closure, swiping his hand across his throat in a guillotine motion. Morgan held his own hand up, patting the air. “And in some sense it doesn’t.”
Miranda chimed in. “Scotland Yard will be pleased she’s dead. Our superintendent will be pleased she’s way out here and she’s dead. Morgan’s eventual heirs will be pleased she’s dead. But there’s a lot to find out before the story is over.”
“The important thing, apparently, is that she’s dead,” said Alexander Pope, who had meandered through the tangle of investigators to join them.
There was an awkward silence.
“This one’s definitely out of our jurisdiction,” said Morgan.
“Unless,” said Miranda, with a devilish gleam in her eye, “she was killed in Toronto and brought back here for burial. Then it’s the same deal as with the Provincials, in reverse.”
“Could that be possible?” said Officer Singh.
“Anything’s possible,” Morgan responded.
“We’re on this,” said Miranda, “until, can I say in oral quotation marks, ‘the circumstances of her death have been resolved.’ We’d like to understand what led her to do what she did, why she kept such meticulous records, where the predilection for grisly scenarios came from. That’s part of our mandate, unofficially, if not on the books.”
“Well, I must say,” said Alexander, “I will be relieved when this latest development in her story is over. I really would like to get back to my work.”
“Of course,” said Morgan. “It’s good to keep things in perspective.”
More sympathetically, Miranda said, “I think the believers have already begun to disperse. Let’s check them out.” She led the others toward the front of the building and pushed one of the double doors open. The OPP officer outside made way and they stepped into a garish glow. Miranda was startled to realize the night had fled to the west and the grey sky was streaked with pink and orange as the sun pushed upwards against the eastern horizon. The crowd had thinned to a few clusters of diehards who seemed as thrilled to be associated with murder as with the holy apparition that it had displaced.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she said, taking a deep breath of the crisp morning air. “The paintings on the wall haven’t changed, but now they’re just paintings. For these people out here, Shelagh Hubbard’s appearance in the grave of their saint seems to have taken the magic away, if not the mystery.”
“Not their saint,” said Morgan. “She’s the saint of the housekeeping pilgrims. What these other people saw was an image of the Virgin Mary, and it undermines her manifestation to be associated with a criminal investigation. Logic kicks in. Maybe it’s only a picture of the folk saint after all, and suddenly the apparition is reduced to cult status, an awkward archaic curiosity. So, home they go, to wait for another sign, next time on a pizza crust or a washroom wall.”
“You are quite cynical, Detective Morgan,” said Alexander Pope. “I think the frescoes are the very beautiful works of unheralded genius. As art they are much more significant in the long run than an apparition of the Virgin Mary or, for that matter, the recovery of a saint’s untainted corpse, or even the surprise appearance of a dead murderess.”
“And you think I’m the cynic,” said Morgan.
“‘Sailing to Byzantium,’” said Miranda, who bristled at the word murderess.
“What?”
“Yeats. ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’ ‘Art above life.’”
“You’re speaking cultural shorthand,” said Morgan, unsure whether he was complimenting her or censuring her for inappropriate erudition.
“How long was she dead?” said Peter Singh.
“Who, the saint or the sinner?” Miranda responded.
“The woman we have been looking for.”
There was a pause. Then Miranda answered. “It’s hard to tell. She had been embalmed, she was sealed in, the crypt was icy cold. I’d say she could have been there a week or more.”
“And the violets?”
“Injected through her veins, I imagine, with the embalming fluid.”
“Oh, dear.”
Miranda turned to Morgan, who seemed radiant in the morning sunlight. “Well, partner, it’s time to go. Let’s check in with the OPP and then check out.”
“My goodness,” said Peter Singh. “I’m on duty in an hour. Goodbye. We will keep in touch.”
“For sure,” said Morgan.
“As for me,” said Alexander, “if no one wants me for anything further, I’m off to Midland and a good day’s sleep in a choice motel.”
“Very reasonable,” said Miranda. “I’ll tell the OPP they can reach you here later on. I imagine they’ll want you to keep clear of the crypt, but you can carry on with your project. I’ll ask, but I don’t see why not. I’m anxious to see how the story turns out.”
“The fifth panel? I’ll leave it for the time being. It is what it is: a stunning trompe de l’oeil. The panels on the other side of the church, I don’t anticipate anything special. The apotheosis of Sister Marie Celeste would be hard to top.”
“Unless her body turned up,” said Morgan, “unravaged by time.”
“Morgan,” said Miranda, “let’s let these guys get on their way.” She took him by the arm and turned back through the door. “Come on, we’ll go in and say our goodbyes.”
Six weeks later, Morgan was walking down Mount Pleasant Boulevard, taking in the green of mid-June despite the traffic roaring by. Ahead, leaning against the abutment of a pedestrian overpass, he saw a half-dozen girls in school uniforms. Their blouses were untucked, draped loosely over their skirt bands, and their knee socks were scrunched around their ankles. These were older students, intent on declaring their personal style by compromising the prescribed apparel of their school, looking as dishevelled as possible. Nothing and no one, thought Morgan, will test the limits of privilege like those born within it. Still, there was something dangerously sexy about their wilful abandon.
Feeling a lascivious twinge of guilt, Morgan looked away as he walked by. A familiar voice shrieked an indecipherable inanity, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that one of the girls was Miranda’s ward and another was her friend Justine. He stopped dead in his tracks. The girls went silent, then Jill recognized the slightly unkempt pedestrian who seemed poised on the edge of a decision. She dropped her cigarette to the ground. Justine did the same. The other four girls, unaware of the implications, kept on smoking.
“Jill,” Morgan said, awkwardly. “Good to see you. Good to see you, too, Justine.”
The two girls rushed him, Jill throwing her arms around his neck and giving him a smoochy kiss on the cheek, Justine hugging them both and blowing kisses into the air.
“Do you know this man?” said the tallest girl.
“No,” said Jill. “But isn’t he handsome!”
“He’s my mother’s boyfriend,” Justine announced.
“Your mother is married,” said the tall girl. “I met her, remember? And your father.”
“Well, he would be if he could.”
“Actually, he is the favourite boyfriend of my official guardian,” said Jill.
“Morgan!” said the tall girl. They, of course had heard of Miranda and Morgan and some of the sordid details of Jill’s past. That is how she chose to maintain control of her own narrative: by being forthright about the publicly known story, and perversely whimsical about the details.
Before Morgan could mumble that he was not Miranda’s boyfriend, the other girls gathered around him. Justine maintained a proprietorial grasp on his arm. He was embarrassed by the attention, and several times tried to excuse himself. Finally, he explained that he was on duty and really had to get going.
“Murder,” Justine announced. “Murder is Morgan’s business.”
Morgan took Jill gently by the arm and said, “Walk along with me a bit.” The others, even Justine, picked up the hint and fell back.
Once they were out of earshot, Jill said, “I know what you’re going to say.”
“What?”
“Miranda is death on smoking.”
“But she’s not as much against it as I am.”
“Oh.”
“I thought you had more sense.”
“I do.”
“Then — ”
“It’s not about sense, Morgan. It’s peer pressure.”
“Bull!” He couldn’t help but smile. “Peer pressure is no match for intelligence and a modicum of imagination.”
“Right. Actually, I’ve been conned by subliminal advertising. Did you notice cops in movies smoke?”
“Only the ones who can’t act.”
“Yeah. Dumb, eh?”
“Really dumb, Jill.
“So okay, let’s make a deal. I’ll never have another cigarette if you bribe me. And Justine. You have to bribe her, too. You see, what happens is, like a girl in my dorm, her parents wrote her a cheque for a thousand dollars when she turned twelve, and postdated it a decade ahead. If she makes it to twenty-two without smoking, it’s hers. Neat, eh?”
“And what if she smokes? How would her parents know?”
“She’d tell them.”
“Simple as that.”
“Simple as that. Being a rebel and a renegade and a maverick doesn’t mean you’re dishonest, Morgan. So how about it? Wanna bribe me?”
“Sure.”
“How much?”
“Twenty.”
“Each?”
“Each. But I pay you now. Then it’s your problem, not mine.”
“Agreed. I agree for Justine, too.”
Morgan took out his wallet and handed her two twenties. She took them and tucked them down the front of her blouse just as a police cruiser pulled to the curb. She leaned up and kissed him. “Love ya,” she said, and she strolled with an exaggerated swing of her hips back to her friends.
“A little young for you, buddy,” said a voice from the cruiser. The driver leaned forward to look up at Morgan through the passenger window. “Detective Morgan! Still, she is a bit young.”
“Officer Yossarian.” Morgan was amused and a little disconcerted by Yossarian’s assumption. “You found me.”
“No, sir, I wasn’t looking. Just cruising.”
“Can I use your radio?”
“Sure. Where’s your cellphone.”
“At home with my gun.” Morgan slid in beside Yossarian. He waved to the girls, who were clustered together in excitement. The cruiser made his credentials more authentic. “Let’s drive,” he said.
“Groupies?”
“Yeah, well, you know. It goes with the job.”
“Me, I like working uniform.”
“Yeah. I never did it.”
“You started in plainclothes?”
“Yep.”
“I’m going back to school.”
“Yep, good idea,” said Morgan. They were driving up Mount Pleasant and Yossarian wheeled left onto Lawrence Avenue. “So where are you taking me?”
“Dunno. Are you working?”
“Yeah,” said Morgan. “I was thinking.”
“You got a case I should crack for you.”
“If you’ve got time.”
They bantered until they got to the Yonge Street intersection.
“Pull over here,” said Morgan. “I’ll walk down Yonge for a while. Do me a favour: call my partner, tell her where I am, and tell her I’m working.”
“Sure thing, Detective. Keep thinking. You take care, now.”
Morgan got out and ambled south down the east side of the street to enjoy the foliage along the cemetery boundaries and the TTC lines where the subway is elevated to ground level and the tracks carve through green ravines. He was deep in thought, but aware of his surroundings. It troubled him that the Shelagh Hubbard murder had not been resolved. They couldn’t lower the curtains on the Hogg’s Hollow drama until her file had been laid to rest. Initially, there had been a certain relief over Shelagh Hubbard’s death. There would be no more horrific tableaux. But as time passed, he and Miranda both struggled with the lack of resolution. She wanted to understand. Morgan wanted closure.
They kept in daily contact with the regional OPP through the woman in charge, who was the sergeant at the scene when they had gone up to check out the abandoned car. They had had several routine cases after that: one in Rosedale — a situation that was euphemistically described as justifiable homicide. Politically sensitive. No charges were laid. There was a shooting in Yorkville, and another on lower Jarvis Street. Both saw the demise of pathetic outsiders — social misfits murdered by friends. Arrests were made without incident. The paperwork for all three cases was staggering.
Morgan had fled the office earlier in the day, before Miranda got in. Sitting hunched over his desk, images kept intruding on words. He was haunted by the memory of Shelagh Hubbard when they saw first her inside the stone crypt. For a fraction of a second he had thought it was the sanctified body of a dead saint! Perhaps he saw Lucy, he wasn’t sure. Marie Celeste seemed to obscure the edges of identity, even when she wasn’t there. Perhaps that’s what a saint does, he thought. He wanted to avoid Miranda until the images sorted themselves out.
Despite the early onset of summer, the case had turned cold. The confusion of saints and sinners refused to unravel. The OPP had focused on Alexander Pope for a while, but as Morgan pointed out, the guy was a harmless eccentric. Sure, his prints and residual bits were everywhere in what was formerly the Church of the Immaculate Conception, but the place was, in effect, his studio. There wasn’t so much as a fleck of skin, a fingernail paring, a loose hair on the elevated chancel near the opening in the stone floor — apart from his DNA adhering to the slab where they had lifted it away when they opened the crypt. Morgan’s was there as well. There was, indeed, a connection between Pope and the murder victim, but he had been her teacher, not her mentor, and more recently his involvement was at Morgan’s request.
Alexander Pope, himself, was apparently undeterred by the macabre turn of events. Miranda talked to him several times on the phone, getting progress reports on his project. Officer Peter Singh dropped in on him periodically and let Morgan and Miranda know how he was doing. Morgan envied Pope — a man consumed by his work to the exclusion of anything else; an artist obsessed.
In London, the Chamber of Horrors affair was already forgotten. Once the tabloids realized the Canadian involvement, they lost interest. Few Britons knew the notorious Dr. Crippen had practised in London, Ontario, where he refined his lethal techniques before dispatching so many English women to their untimely departures. Canada is too culturally bland to inspire much interest, even in murder, thought Morgan, wondering whether it was the fickle British or Canadian diffidence that made it so.
In Toronto, the Hogg’s Hollow murders had slipped from the public mind into the irretrievable past. Despite the fact that the bodies were of recent vintage, the whole affair was smothered by a general indifference to the city’s colonial heritage: it was as if they really had been long-dead lovers, not unfortunate strangers visiting a modern metropolis.
In Owen Sound, and all the way from Meaford in the east to Southampton in the west, and north to Wiarton, the reputation of Officer Peter Singh had spread like a rumour. Even his parents were now firm supporters in his choice of career, despite his father’s earlier disappointment that he had not gone into the military, or at least the RCMP.
In Beausoleil the deconsecrated church was once again a cultural curiosity. The significance of the frescoes had been greatly enhanced by renewed secular interest in Sister Marie Celeste. The true pilgrims came only in the dead of night and eventually stopped coming even then, but museum curators and art historians were received by appointment during the day.
“Whoa, Morgan! Where are you going?” It was Miranda, stepping out the door of Starbucks just over from police headquarters on College. “Talk about a man lost in thought.”
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about anything. My goodness, I’ve walked all the way down from Lawrence Avenue. Holy smokes, that’s a walk.”
“I knew you’d be coming. Yossarian called. Said you were determined to walk the length of Yonge Street. Thank God you turned south. Come in for a coffee — take a break from your travails and travels. I’ll buy you a cappuccino.”
“How long have you been waiting?”
“I figured you’d walk the distance, so I didn’t come over ’til maybe twenty minutes ago.”
After they settled in with their coffees, Morgan asked, “What’s up?”
“Well, I had a call from Sergeant Sheahan.”
“Who?”
“OPP. In charge of the investigation at Beausoleil.”
“So, what’s Sergeant Sheahan got to say?”
“Nothing. That’s the point. Nothing, nada. They found DNA traces at Shelagh Hubbard’s. Our Hogg’s Hollow bodies were processed at the farm, for sure. Beyond that, nothing. They’re virtually closing down their investigation. That’s what they mean when they say ‘leaving it open, pending further developments.’”
“Yeah. So where does that leave us?”
“With a mystery of unknowable proportions.”
“They’re the worst kind.”
“Or best. The most mysterious mysteries are best.”
“For whom?”
“There’s got to be something to connect with,” said Miranda. “If it won’t deconstruct, it’s indecipherable. There has to be a way in.”
“My dad used to say, ‘If it ain’t broken, you can’t fix it.’”
“A wise man.”
“And Ellen Ravenscroft once said ‘The hardest autopsy is when nothing seems wrong.’”
“Except the patient is dead.”
“Yeah, the client.”
“Is that what they call them? ‘Clients’?”
“I dunno,” said Morgan. “But ‘patient’ implies recovery.”
“‘Client’ implies payment for services rendered.”
“Dead people. Let’s say they call their clients ‘dead people.’ And they do get paid, just not by the dead people. By taxpayers.”
“I do not like to think I pay Ellen Ravenscroft’s salary. I prefer knowing she pays mine.”
“Miranda?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you waylay me here? I could have been to the harbour by now.”
“And then what?”
“I would have turned around and begun to walk north.” He sipped his coffee. “Let’s go back to our theatrical analogy. Shelagh Hubbard was creating drama, recording the scenes she created; killing was an extension of the authorial imagination.”
“Okay,” said Miranda. “Then someone else cleverly reduced her to one of the characters in a narrative that swallows up hers. A meta-narrative.”
“And disposing of her as an aesthetic diversion, her killer subsumes her achievement, such as it was, into his or her own.”
“We sound more like literary critics than detectives, Morgan.”
“Okay, but if we see the whole thing, her grisly machinations in London and Toronto, and her disappearance, her death, and the Gothic disposition of her body, all as part of the same story, one continuous narrative by several authors, where does that lead us?”
“Exactly. Where? A single text; so what?”
“How did she die?”
“Poison.”
“Where?”
“At her farmhouse.”
“How did the blood get in her car?”
“The killer, her killer, put it there. Drained a bit during embalming, kept it fresh.”
“Same story as if she had written it, to this point. The killer wanted her death to be gentle, her car to be found. They wanted us to think she had staged her own abduction. Left the heat on in the house. Moved the bicycle. Arranged all the details, even the blood. Why?”
“To buy time.”
“Exactly. To buy time. Why? To merge their stories, to make her an inextricable part of the revised script. To process her corpse, to encrypt it beneath the altar.”
“There’s no altar. The chancel. But why there? To implicate Alexander?”
“To subsume her in a story larger than her own but under the killer’s control, to give it the mythic status of Sister Marie Celeste. Why the odour of violets?”
“To make her seem like a saint.”
“Or! To make sure her body was discovered.”
“In a saint’s grave.”
“Exactly,” said Morgan. “A diabolical irony: drop a depraved killer into a saint’s tomb. With flamboyant finesse.”
“Why?”
“Why not? Whoever is devising the plot enjoys the perversity.”
“Remember,” said Miranda, “the literary thing — the writer getting off on his own creation — it’s only an analogy. The killer as a killer is real.”
“Whose creation is not yet complete. It’s not over, so we wait.”
“That could be dangerous,” Miranda said, and she smiled.
“Yes,” said Morgan. He didn’t smile. chapter fourteen
Penetanguishene
Miranda left police headquarters early to miss the Friday traffic. Morgan was working at home, but when she called him he wasn’t answering. This didn’t mean he was out — he could have been in the bathroom or he was just being perverse. Sometimes when she left a message, he would pick up midway through, explaining he was screening his calls. From whom? Whoever. But she was used to checking in with him. She felt reassured if he knew where she was. She turned outside the building and looked back up at it, thrilled at how articulate architecture can be, enjoying the fact that she worked within this splendid postmodern extravaganza where glass and multi-hued granite the colour of the Canadian shield create shapes in the eye that celebrate through artifice the natural world. She loved working in a building that spoke so eloquently of great things over small, like a medieval cathedral. Not, she thought, like skyscrapers, which celebrate the tyranny of commerce and trade.
Feeling quite pleased with her train of thought, she wheeled around into Morgan’s arms.
“Admiring the scenery?” he asked, steadying her, then standing back. “It’s a great building, isn’t it? Powerful, psychologically accessible. Just what a cop shop should be.”
“I left a message on your machine.”
“Okay, so tell me.”
“I’m in a rush. You’ll hear it when you get home.”
“I can listen from here. I’m clever that way.”
“Well, I said, ‘Hey, Morgan, see you on Tuesday. Alexander’s invited Rachel and me up for the weekend. He’s nearly finished, he wants to show off. So we’re taking the Jag, top down, and going camping. She’s got three days, we’re going to set up a tent, there’s a campground outside Penetang. He invited us to pitch it in his parking lot, but, like, it’s not all about him. I haven’t camped since I was a student. We’re going to have fun. You too. Have a good weekend. Bye-bye.’”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Press erase and you’re gone.”
“I’m gone. Outta here. You take care.”
“You taking your cellphone?”
“We’re going camping, Morgan. Living in a tent for the weekend.”
They chatted for a couple more minutes, then she wheeled away, blew him an ironic kiss, and went striding along the sidewalk toward the subway. He watched her go and for an instant he felt lonely. After she descended underground, he turned and entered the ambiguous embrace of steel and granite.
When she got home, Miranda had a quick shower and called Rachel to see if she was ready. They had both packed up the previous night, conferring by phone about just what to bring in the event of hot weather and cold, rain or shine, mosquitoes and sunbathing. She drove to Rachel’s with the ragtop up and together they tucked it away. Miranda tied a kerchief around her head and Rachel pulled a Metro Police ball cap out of her kit that she put on backward at a rakish angle, so the band cut across high on her forehead with a feathering of hair poking beneath it.
They told Alexander they wouldn’t be there until Saturday, so they drove straight to the campground and set up their tent on a rocky knoll overlooking Severn Sound. It was a tent Miranda had purchased specially for the occasion — a good quality all-season tent, in case she ever wanted to try winter camping. It was cozy without being cramped, and as long as there was a breeze, it wouldn’t be too hot with the zippered doors open and the flaps of the vestibule set to catch the currents of air.
After a picnic supper, they chatted in the waning light of the evening. The mosquitoes came out in force but were easily discouraged by the flapping of hands. Miranda talked about her mother and about her sister in Vancouver who had kids and a career and patronized Miranda for being in police work. At least when she was with the Mounties, she had a certain panache, but with the Toronto Police, according to her sister, well, she could have been a lawyer if she’d set her mind to it. Rachel described her own family life, growing up with three brothers and two sisters. “My parents were influenced by our Catholic neighbours. Everyone around there had big families. It was a form of self-defence. If you can’t out-buy the buggers, outnumber them. That’s what my father used to say. Never was clear who ‘the buggers’ were.”
Rachel’s father was still alive, in his fifties, but her mother was dead. “Just wore out, my dad says. But does he ever miss her. We all do.”
“I miss my dad, too. I was just hitting puberty when he died. It was like everything changed, you know, everything. Sometimes I wonder if I really remember him, or if it’s a fantasy I’ve constructed to take his place.”
“That’s what all memories are,” said Rachel. “They’re stories we tell ourselves to keep the past alive. I remember my mamma differently every day.”
“Wanna go for a swim?” said Miranda.
“Skinny dip?”
“Sure. It’s dark enough; and it’s cool enough that the mosquitoes are pretty well gone, and the water’s gonna feel warmer. Georgian Bay is notoriously cold, you know.”
They edged their way down the smooth stone to the rocks by the shore, stood up in the light of the moon, stripped off their shorts and tops, giggled like girls, and slipped out of their underwear. Each lowered herself carefully into the frigid water, quietly so as not to attract attention. They could hear voices and see several campfires glowing against the dark landscape, and the water rippled with dazzling striations of moonlight. They swam away from shore in companionable silence until they couldn’t make out what people were saying, then floated on their backs, sculling with fingers at their sides, so that only their faces and breasts and their toes broke the shimmering surface, and the rest of their bodies were swallowed in the impenetrable black of the water beneath them. Sometimes as they arched, their pubic hair caught tangles of moonlight, and in the cold their nipples stood proud. Each looked at the other sideways from time to time, lifting her head so that her body sank into the darkness, admiring the gleam of wet skin. After fifteen minutes or so, without exchanging a word, they began manoeuvring back to the rocky shore.
The air was cold when they stood up, but the smooth stone by the tent still glowed with the residual warmth of the sun. They lay down side by side on towels, shivering from the air, their backs warmed by the stone. Rachel reached over and clasped Miranda’s hand and together they stared into the depths of the night. The moon washed the sky clean of all but the most brilliant stars as it shone through a thin veneer of cloud covering. Tomorrow would be rain.
Shortly after midnight, the rain began, waking them both from sound sleep, beating on the tent fly in a sustained fusillade as wind whipped against the flimsy dome structure that had seemed snug and secure when they dowsed their flashlights and settled into their sleeping bags only hours before. They sat up together, surrounded by shuddering darkness and the crackling shriek of the thin yellow membrane that shielded them from the fury of the elements.
“Oh, my God!” Rachel shouted over the din. “We’re gonna be blown away.”
“Or the tent’s gonna tear into ribbons.”
“Or we’re going to float into the lake. My God, can you feel the water flowing beneath us? No wonder no one else pitched a tent here. Pine needles in a depression on the rock. Great place for a tent, you said. It’s a pool — we’re practically floating.”
“Look on the good side,” Miranda shouted. “It’s not leaking.”
“Not yet. Is it guaranteed?”
“It’s a North Face, guaranteed for a lifetime.”
“Against acts of God?”
“It’s in the fine print.”
“That’s a relief.”
“I’ve gotta pee, all this water swirling around — ”
“Pee in a cup.”
“We don’t have a cup. Kitchen gear’s outside, probably washed away. I’m gonna batten down the tent lines, anyway. Rather drown than be airborne.”
The words were swept from her mouth as she crawled across Rachel and unzipped the inner door, then extended her upper body out into the tiny vestibule and slid the zipper on the outer door open. The material flapped violently against her face as she crawled out into the wild night. She stood up, the wind and the rain beating against her, plastering her pyjamas instantly to her skin in a clammy embrace. Diffused moonlight filled the sheeting air with a sublime evanescence and the whitecaps on the sound rolled gloriously against the shore, smashing in waves of thunder. She stood tall, and felt her skin burn in the furious onslaught, and grinned, catching rain-laden wind in her teeth.
She leaned down and shouted into the tent, which Rachel had zipped tight behind her. “You gotta come out here! It’s beautiful.” The outer zipper lowered a palm’s width and fingers appeared in the slit, wiggling it wide enough for a voice to pass through.
“You’re nuts. No way.”
“Rachel, it’s magnificent. Come out here.”
Slowly, the zipper edged downwards, then with a sudden movement Rachel leaped from the tent, grabbed Miranda, and hugged her, shivering against the storm, shocked by her own audacity. Then she released her hold and they stood side by side, pyjamas drenched, facing the luminescent lake, addressing the storm with silent grace as it swarmed roaring around them. They looked at each other and grinned, water streaming over their features, disguising them as sea nymphs. Miranda reached for Rachel’s hand and clasped it in hers. It was a magical human moment in the midst of natural chaos.
When they began shivering too vigorously to endure, they gathered small boulders and placed them against the sides of the tent and on top of the pegs anchoring the guy lines. Miranda walked shyly to the side and as the wind whipped strings of rain against her she squatted and peed. Then they crawled back into the tent, pushed their sleeping bags into a corner while they stripped off their sopping pyjamas and dried off with beach towels. The floor of the tent was spongy from the water pooled underneath, but only damp; there was no seepage. Next, time, Miranda thought, I’ll bring a sleeping mat like the guy was trying to sell me.
Miranda tossed their wet pyjamas out into the vestibule and when she zipped up the door, there was a momentary hush in the storm, then it picked up with renewed fury. They wriggled into their clammy sleeping bags. Before either zipped up, Miranda leaned over and kissed Rachel on the lips. They held the embrace for a long time, then Miranda slipped back into her own space. Both of them knew this was a turning point — that somehow they were destined never to be more intimate than at this moment, and that morning would bring with it an enduring friendship. Miranda smiled to herself, feeling strangely relieved. She turned her head to look at her friend. The wind howled wildly outside and the rain rattled against the shuddering walls, and in the diffused light of the hidden moon she was surprised to see that Rachel had fallen asleep.
When they pulled up in front of the Beausoleil church, they were taken aback to find that Alexander’s van was not there. The front doors were locked but they walked around the side to go in through the sacristy. There was an imposing padlock on the sacristy door, but Miranda knew that a bit of a shake would open it. She had watched the pilgrims come in and out the back way, and clearly Alexander was content to provide them access, although he had explained on the phone that none had returned since not long after the discovery of Shelagh Hubbard in Sister Marie’s crypt. He was mildly complaining, since now he had to clean up after himself.
“They will be back,” he had assured her. “They’re waiting for the publicity to die down. The curiosity seekers and the desperate, false pilgrims, they’re gone for good. But the true believers, when they see my pictures again, they’ll realize their beloved saint is still here. Her burial niche was desecrated, but the entire building stands as a testament to her enduring presence as a mediator between them and their God. One or two will come, then more and more. The true pilgrims will come back, I’m sure of it.”
Miranda had listened, pleased by his confidence although perturbed by his proprietorial description of the frescoes as his. She agreed with the implication, in any case, that the pilgrims were the lifeblood of the place — the living manifestation of the story’s vitality, if not its veracity.
“Where do you think he is?” Rachel asked, gazing around from their vantage beside the open grave in the floor. “This place is eerie. It gives me the creeps.”
Miranda grimaced. This was where the altar would have been, she thought. Instead, there’s a hole. She followed Rachel’s gaze and saw a vast empty vault of grey stone and white plaster, with light washing through narrow windows, catching myriad dust motes hovering in the air. There was a strong smell of solvents, and a hint of violets emanating from the cavity in the floor at their feet. They could not see Alexander’s pictures without stepping off the chancel, although Miranda noted that his scaffolding on the far side of the nave was still in front of the last panel, where the font for holy water might have been. Or did Catholics place the font somewhere else?
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you the frescoes. Let’s start at the other end — you’ll get them in sequence.” She walked over to a switch by the sacristy door and flipped it on. The entire building suddenly flooded with illumination, staunching the flow of natural light seeping through the windows and bringing the colours of the pictures into striking incandescence. As they moved from panel to panel, Miranda made a few comments, but Rachel was already familiar with the story.
“My God, they’re wonderful,” said Rachel. “I had no idea. I love the changes in her face. It’s the same face and yet it gets more and more radiant. She’s almost homely in the first panel, pretty maybe, and by the last she’s Botticelli at his most inspired, but it’s the same face, the same painter, same technique. Wow. The settings aren’t Botticelli — they’re pure Ontario Gothic — but the faces are Italian Renaissance, especially in the last two panels, and somehow they fit with the scenes.”
“How do you know so much?” exclaimed Miranda.
“I’ve got eyes. Look at her.”
“I see, I agree. But — ”
“When I studied art history at Western, I spent two months in Florence for a double course credit, mostly walking around the Uffizi or drinking Chianti.”
“Something obviously sunk in. Botticelli? That’s neat, because she looks late-Victorian to me, sort of Pre-Raphaelite, but yeah, I can see the face in Botticelli’s… what’s it called?”
“The Primavera.”
“No, the one with Venus poised on the half shell.”
“What about you? How do you know such erudite things?”
“I’m old… I paid attention… I don’t know. I’ve never been to Italy.”
“Well, girl, you must go. There’s no place in the world like Florence — Firenze! Unless it’s Sienna — we spent almost a week in Sienna. Not so touristy, great buildings, lovely textures, like you’re walking through architectural history. Italians, they live inside history. Why don’t we go sometime? I’ll show the old girl around.”
“One thing I like about me is my age. And when I turn forty, I’ll like that too.”
“And fifty and sixty and seventy?”
“You bet.”
“So tell me,” said Rachel, almost whispering as she looked around over her shoulder and then leaned in conspiratorially.
“What?”
“Why isn’t Alexander Pope a suspect?”
“He checked out.”
“And?”
“He’s our friend.”
“So?”
“No motive.”
“Shelagh Hubbard wreaked havoc without a motive.”
“She’s a psychopath.”
“Was.”
“Was. Psychopaths don’t have motives. That’s why they’re psychopaths.”
“Did you decide she was a psychopath before or after you couldn’t come up with a motive?”
“Point taken. But you should read her journals. There’s an absolute absence of conscience.”
“Clinically detached?”
“Morgan described them as ‘self-justifying.’ More like an application for a research grant.”
“Detailed and aggressively impersonal?”
“Yes. And no. I don’t find them impersonal. They’re not emotional, but she’s there in every word and sketch and turn of phrase. I find them chilling precisely because she is there in her text and yet shows no emotion.”
“Sounds psychopathic to me. So, back to our friend Alexander.”
“There’s no evidence here or at the farm.”
“Not of his presence, but not of anyone else, either.”
“There’s no reason to connect him to her death. As far as the melodramatic disposal of her body, it’s unlikely a man so immersed in recovering the story of this place would violate his own project. I mean, why?”
“Why not? He had opportunity on his side, and maybe there’s a perverse satisfaction, bringing his saint to life.”
“Dead. She was brought here dead.”
“Figure of speech, dear. Confusing, isn’t it? New bodies passing for old — that was Hubbard’s specialty. It’s fitting and proper that hers should be used for the same.”
“Agreed,” said Miranda. “Someone’s idea of poetic justice. But not Alexander’s — the connection’s so obvious it’s untenable.”
“I’m glad you’re on side,” said Alexander Pope, stepping out from behind one of the columns separating them from the nave.
“Good God,” Rachel shrieked, recovering immediately with a muffled laugh. “How long have you been there?”
“Just arrived, just arrived. Had no time to hear accusations — ”
“Suspicions!”
“Suspicions, my darling Rachel, are the poor cousins. Same family. I stand accused. And — thank you Miranda — exonerated.”
“Oh, hell,” said Rachel. “I guess you didn’t do it then. What a relief.” She leaned up and kissed him, first on one cheek, then the other. “I’m glad. I could cope with the killing part, but embalming, yuck. Even embalming with violets. Doesn’t seem an Alexander Pope thing to do. ’Course, you have an ancestral interest in gardens.”
“And in couplets that rhyme. That doesn’t mean I go around coupling.”
Miranda looked from Alexander’s face to Rachel’s. He obviously did not feel threatened by her and she was not intimidated by him. In fact, there seemed to be an indefinable current between them, Miranda thought, that despite their radical differences in character and world experience suggested they were, as they say, kindred spirits. Stupidly, she felt excluded.
Alexander Pope turned to her. “Well, Miranda, what do you think? The place is looking good, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it make a lovely gallery? I’m thinking of moving up here and turning myself into a purveyor of fine art.”
“And leaving Port Hope? I don’t believe it.”
“No, probably not. Maybe for the summers. I could sell antiques here, and spend the winters at home making more. Ha!”
“Ha!” she responded, feeling a lovely bond of intimacy, scolding herself for having felt left out.
“Reproductions!” Rachel challenged.
“I’m getting too old to be rebuilding old buildings,” he countered. “I need to fall back on old talents.”
“What’s with you about old? Both of you, in your dotage. Good grief, consider the alternative.”
“I have and I do,” Pope responded gravely. “All too often.”
“What would your patrons think of a gallery?” Miranda asked.
“My patrons? My angel. Oh, well, I can do with this place pretty much what I want, I suppose.”
“Does that include burying a saint in the floor?” said Rachel.
“Sinner, my dear. If there ever was a sinner, it was the late Dr. Hubbard.”
“No argument here,” said Rachel. “Sinning is as sinning does.”
“Meaning what, Forrest Gump?” Miranda envied the easy repartee. For her, banter always carried an element of self-consciousness, except with Morgan.
“What do you say we go swimming?” Rachel suggested, throwing the non sequitur into the air with dramatic effect. “You guys up to it? Not too old?”
“I swim only underwater,” said Alexander Pope casually, as if they had been talking about sporting activities all along.
“Well, good for you. Let’s go scuba diving,” said Rachel. “We’re not that far from Tobermory. Miranda, do you want to go wreck-diving? There’s a National Marine Park there; lots of wrecks. How about it?”
They had never talked about diving. Miranda remembered seeing dive gear at Alexander’s Port Hope house. Rachel probably saw it, too. And yet, they hadn’t discussed the subject with him or each other. It didn’t surprise her that Rachel was a diver. It was something else between them. Among them. All three were apparently divers.
“Sounds good,” said Miranda. “Tomorrow, if the weather clears.”
“It’s right as rain right now.”
“But it’ll take a day for the waves to subside. Georgian Bay builds up really big swells.”
“Excellent,” said Alexander Pope. “Tomorrow should be perfect. I would enjoy the break. I have never dived in a wreck.”
“Me neither,” said Miranda.
“Well, let’s do it,” said Rachel. “We’ll rent equipment and a boat in Tobermory. I love it; we’ll have an adventure.”
Miranda looked at her friend, wondering whether the eagerness was for wreck-diving or the chance to cultivate the great poet’s namesake, or for some other obscure reason she could not imagine.
The rest of the day they spent on a charmingly excruciating tour of Alexander’s project, getting a detailed explanation for every minute aspect of his work. So great were his enthusiasm and depth of esoteric knowledge about plaster and frescoes, the structure of the building and the arcane stories it held, that in spite of themselves Miranda and Rachel were captivated, and by the late afternoon all three of them were utterly exhausted.
Over a Chinese dinner in Midland, they recapped some of the highlights of the afternoon and made plans for wreck-diving the following day. They agreed to meet at the church and drive over with Alexander. He was clearly excited at the prospects ahead and actually had his complete scuba gear, including a 7 ml wetsuit, in his van.
“You never know,” he said. “I thought I might get in a dive or two.”
“I’ve never dived in fresh water before,” Miranda announced.
“Actually,” said Alexander, “neither have I.”
“But you brought your gear?” she queried. Turning to Rachel, she asked, “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Have you dived in cold water before?”
“Fresh water?”
“Cold fresh water?”
“Only. I’ve never been to the tropics.”
“So, okay, tell us…”
“As long as you’re suited up for it, you’re fine.”
“I don’t like the cold,” said Miranda, shivering as she thought about slipping into the depths of Georgian Bay.
They talked about diving for a while, about soaring free of gravity, only bubbles rising to an elliptical plane of light overhead to indicate which way was up. Alexander likened it to the illusions of weightlessness created by dancers in ballet, and Miranda thought of it as walking in space, where direction itself is only an illusion. Rachel chose flying in dreams as her best analogy.
Miranda described Morgan’s diving adventure on Easter Island.
“Without proper training?” said Rachel. “He could have died.”
“What on earth was he doing on Easter Island?” asked Alexander. “Apart from taunting mortality?”
“Good question,” said Rachel. “He probably just wanted to call people ‘buddy.’”
“Buddy?” said Alexander. “How very unlikely.”
“Divers call each other ‘buddy’ a lot,” said Miranda. “It’s like calling your lover ‘darling.’ Then you don’t have to remember his name.”
“Why does one go to Easter Island?” Alexander persisted, and then in response to his own query he continued, “I would imagine for the same reason one travels to Egypt to see the pyramids. Some people need to be confronted with things bigger than themselves. It’s a form of affirmation: you prove your own existence by witnessing works that have transcended the deaths of their makers, whose past existence is thereby indisputable even if your own is in doubt. Are there people on Easter Island, or is it only populated by giant heads?”
Miranda was slightly appalled by his presumptuous misreading of her partner’s existential needs, as well as by his ignorance about Easter Island.
“Morgan,” she said, “has no doubt about his existence — the fact of, if not the quality of — and yes, there are over four thousand islanders, called Rapanui. They call the island ‘Rapa Nui’ — two words — and they have a resounding history of triumph and doom. That’s what interested him, more than the statues, which aren’t heads, you know, but include torsos — although they’re often buried to the neck or decapitated — and they had a written script called Rongorongo, when no one else in all Polynesia had writing, and no other neolithic culture had writing. And now no one knows how to read it. The people faithfully reproduce tablets of Rongorongo for the tourist trade, but they can’t read what they’re writing.”
She realized much of her pedantic oration had been cribbed directly from Morgan, redeeming him, somehow, from the existential limbo assigned him by Alexander Pope.
“Sort of like calligraphy,” said Rachel. “The meaning is in doing it, not what it says.”
“That,” said Alexander, “is the most esoteric of the arts: to write someone else’s signature script and make it your own.”
Miranda continued, feeling Morgan had been given short shrift. “He loves to immerse himself in the details of a place, and let them swarm around him; he counts on them eventually falling into a comprehensible pattern. He’s the same with a case or a culture. Easter Island was an escape to someone else’s reality, a way to be himself in disguise.”
The other two said nothing, so she added, “He got a tattoo.”
“How unlikely,” said Alexander Pope. “A tattoo. How very odd for a grown man. Well, it takes all sorts.”
Miranda regretted her indiscretion, and seeing this, Rachel came to her aid. “I think it’s an adventurous thing to do.”
“Going to Easter Island?”
“Getting a tattoo. He doesn’t fit the demographic; that’s precisely why he would do it. I think it’s adventuresome.”
“The tattooist’s name was Tito,” said Miranda.
“There,” said Rachel. “Proves my point. Who else would know their tattooist’s name but rogues like Errol Flynn and David Morgan?”
“Errol Flynn died before you were born,” said Alexander. “Before any of us were born, even me.”
“He’s become his own name,” said Miranda. “Like Marilyn Monroe. Like the names of painters. Botticelli, for instance. Rachel thinks the faces in the frescoes look like Botticelli.”
“Does she?”
“I do,” said Rachel. “Some of them.”
“Tell us all about it,” said Alexander. Miranda winced, finding his tone condescending, as if he were asking a child to explain why she had coloured the sky orange and green. But Rachel did not seem bothered and, rising to the challenge, she responded with a brief exposition on Renaissance art, the Florentine neo-Platonists, and the achievement of Sandro Botticelli.
“And you think Sister Marie Celeste looks like Simonetta?” Alexander demanded in a quiet but authoritative voice
“Only in the first panel.”
Miranda interjected. “Who is Simonetta?”
“The beloved of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo Medici… Lorenzo the Magnificent,” said Rachel.
“He wasn’t modest, was he?” Miranda observed.
“Who?”
“Magnificent Lorenzo. Who was Simonetta in her own right?”
“The model for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, somewhat idealized, I would think,” said Alexander.
“She’s lovely, fragile, and vacuous,” said Rachel. “Appropriate for Venus arising, newborn but fully mature, generated from the cast-off testicles of a truculent god.”
“Uranus, I believe, at the hands of his son, Cronus the Titan.” Alexander spoke as if he were merely providing a reminder for a story he assumed everyone knew.
Miranda was astonished at the level of discourse. She had a general knowledge of art, gleaned mostly from reading Christmas gift-books like Sister Wendy’s The Story of Painting, but these two seemed comfortable with fifteenth-century aesthetics as a topic of casual conversation. She was especially surprised by Alexander. She knew Rachel had spent a summer studying in Florence, but how had Alexander managed to assimilate such knowledge into his capacious, undisciplined mind? No, she thought, that’s Morgan. Alexander’s mind is large, but it is quaint and orderly. She had vague recollections of him talking about art school, long before he took up reconstruction, reclamation, renovation, authentic reproduction, and the like.
Restoration. She added that to her list: art restoration. For his project in Beausoleil, Ontario, of course, he would have to know about plaster and painting in Renaissance Italy.
“Are you listening?” Rachel said, nudging Miranda out of her quizzical reverie. “I’m talkin’ here.”
“Yeah. Botticelli, Venus.”
“Right, but I think Sister Marie’s other faces come from ‘The Allegory of Springtime’ — the Primavera.”
“Do tell us,” said Alexander Pope, like a teacher examining a prodigal student.
“Okay,” she said in a voice suggesting she was fully prepared for the occasion. “Panel two, the annunciation imminent. The face is Flora in the Primavera, strangely lusty and fearful, gazing upward at the warm wind of spring. Picture the painting in your mind. Picture the frescoes. In the third panel there are two versions of Sister Marie; on one side she’s prostrate, her face turned away like the centre of Botticelli’s Three Graces, and on the other she’s enraptured, staring up at the Virgin Mary in wonder. She’s the Grace on the left, representing ecstatic desire. The fourth panel shows the face of Venus offering silent benediction. The final panel shows Sister Marie as Flora, again, now fecund with spring, an earth nymph transformed to goddess and the most beautiful, sensual face ever painted. What better way to arise into Heaven than satiated with sex and surrounded by flowers?”
Miranda turned to Alexander. “How’d she do?”
“Excellent,” he said. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”
Miranda looked from one to the other. Despite Rachel’s demand for Miranda’s attention, possibly Rachel had meant to impress Alexander Pope with her explication and Miranda was merely a witness. Rachel and Alexander sat quietly for a moment, eying each other, perhaps also trying to assess their relative roles in the rhetorical drama.
Alexander smiled, leaned across the table, and squeezed Rachel’s hand. She turned it over and responded with a brief squeeze of her own, then withdrew it. Miranda felt excluded again, and yet was impressed with them both. Rachel, for her casual erudition, and Alexander, for his forbearance. He, after all, had been listening to an interpretation of a monumental work of art that was as close to being his own creation as if he had painted the frescoes himself. chapter fifteen
Lakeshore Road
Morgan found himself behind the wheel of a police car in the small hours of early morning, driving east along Highway 401, without being quite certain why. He had awakened from a restless sleep in a cold sweat, at first thinking the telephone had been ringing and it must be Miranda. Out of the darkness the surge of a diffuse premonition that Miranda was in danger had taken hold. He had no idea why he was driving to Port Hope instead of Beausoleil or Penetanguishene, but he knew that somehow, in his sleep, apprehension for his partner’s safety had coalesced around Alexander Pope. It was no longer a matter of murders unsolved; there was an urgency to get inside the man’s mind. Where better for that than in the man’s home, especially when Pope wasn’t there?
He knew there was a connection between these feelings of dread and the fax from London that had come through just before he left headquarters for the night. Scotland Yard was reopening their inquiry into the Renaud’s murders. Their medical examiners were convinced the cadavers under their wax veneers predated original assumptions by a number of years. Forensic identification of the bodies verified their revised findings. They wanted Morgan to suggest an alternate timeline in Shelagh Hubbard’s career. Might she have been in London earlier than previously supposed, perhaps working at Madame Renaud’s in some anonymous capacity that would have given her access to the facilities but left no records of her presence?
That seemed something more likely to be determined in London. A quick check through her file, the very same file that had been forwarded to Scotland Yard more than a month previous, suggested she had pursued an academic career on the fast track without a break between doctoral studies at Oxford, a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London, and her appointment at the wax museum. Renaud’s had no record of her employment there before the dates indicated in her journal. Her undergraduate and masters work in Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia, combined with her relative age at each stage of her evolving career, left no time for earlier employment in any capacity whatsoever in the Chamber of Horrors. He had faxed back, suggesting the arcane procedures of post-mortem preparation might have contaminated the normal measures determining time of death.
He also suggested they switch to email and, on a hunch, he requested a scan of Madame Renaud’s employment records extending back at least ten years. There might be anomalies Scotland Yard wouldn’t see.
Drifting into a troubled sleep, he had been thinking about Shelagh Hubbard, but he woke up with Alexander Pope looming in his mind. Pope would be the key to resolving the anomalies of Shelagh Hubbard’s activities among the perpetual dead. His first thought had been to call Miranda. He couldn’t call her. She had declared with conviction that she was going to leave her cellphone at home.
“We’re going camping, Morgan. No phone — ”
“No pool, no pets.”
“You get the idea. I haven’t been inside a tent since I was a student.”
“Yeah, I knew that. I think I did.” Sometimes when she told him things, he was not sure whether he’d heard them before, or whether the cadence of her voice was so familiar it only seemed like he had.
A surprising number of trucks were competing for space on the road. A succession of eighteen wheelers roared up behind him and veered into the passing lane at the last moment. He was driving above the speed limit. He was thinking.
He tried to imagine Alexander Pope as a sinister figure — the villain in a strangely elusive drama, perhaps by Shakespeare, perhaps Hitchcock. He didn’t fit. In spite of Morgan’s apprehension about the danger inherent in Miranda’s relationship with Pope, Morgan found the man too much absorbed in his own predilections to be a proactive scoundrel. Shelagh Hubbard, in comparison, fit the bill to a T. She frightened him, even now, after death. It wasn’t the crimes; mostly, it was how he had been manipulated in a gruesome entertainment where he didn’t know the rules, where he wasn’t even sure of the game. He had been played for a fool.
The thought of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, reducing her ridiculous admirer to ruin, and of Mildred in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, how she led her lover into the depths of despair. These images skirted along the edge of his mind, drawing him into their company. Yet, he saw those doomed men as victims in scenarios crafted by misogynous men, while he had been the victim of his own emotional ambivalence.
He loved women. He wanted to be free, he wanted to be loved — but the two seemed incompatible. Mutually exclusive desires. Himself, alone, caught between.
He thought about Lucy as he turned off the 401 on the outskirts of Port Hope. She had drawn him inexorably into an abyss of anguish, and yet, strangely, he missed her in his life. No, what he missed was the intensity of his unhappiness; the way, like the pain of a phantom limb, she had reminded him of what wasn’t there.
Morgan clambered out of the car, admired the looming outlines of Alexander Pope’s house etched against the predawn sky, and made his way to the side door with its antique lock, which he managed to pick open in seconds. The house was huge inside — larger than he had expected from its outside dimensions — and rambling, despite the severe exterior. There were country antiques everywhere and he could not tell in the dull light of early morning which were original and which were what Alexander Pope described as “authentic reproductions.” Running his hands over a sideboard with raised panels, he thought he could feel something in the wood suggesting it was new, despite the layers of chipped and worn paint with oxblood showing through like wounds. It did not have the feel of old wood — it felt cool and dense. If it was a fake, though, it was, to his eye, brilliantly accomplished.
Lying everywhere against the walls and on top of tables and hutches were odds and ends of forged iron and articulated wood that spoke of pioneer life now as remote as the most ancient of times. He realized in a brief thought that he had no more access to his own heritage than the people on Rapa Nui had to theirs. Less, in fact, for although they might not fully understand their cultural legacy, they lived among its monuments, they replicated historical texts they could no longer read, and honoured the past in ways we have forgotten how to do.
He became annoyed with himself for dawdling; nothing would have pleased him more than to linger over each artifact and item of furniture, and to explore the interior spaces of the house itself. But working against that was a diffuse sense of urgency about Miranda’s well-being and a more immediate concern with being arrested for break-and-enter.
It was still too dark to see clearly, so Morgan decided to run the risk of turning on lights — which, of course illuminated the diverse colours of the painted furniture and made him yearn to examine each piece more closely. He forced himself to keep moving through what seemed like a vast wunderkammern, a live-in cabinet of curiosities. He found two studies, one on the main floor off the central hallway and one upstairs, adjoining the master bedroom. The downstairs study was an office and general workspace, with building plans and business files strewn casually about. The upstairs study was even more cluttered and much more personal. This was obviously Pope’s sanctum sanctorum, where only the most intimate of visitors would likely be admitted.
On display were private mementos, including clusters of photographs on a massive corkboard, numerous framed pictures and diplomas, souvenirs of extensive travel. Innumerable books littered the floor, obscuring the patterns of antique Persian carpets. As soon as Morgan entered the room, he felt he was being intrusive. That was what made him sure it was the best place to start his search. Whatever it was he was looking for, it was here.
He slumped down in a leather armchair and gazed around, taking inventory. The carpets overlapped with casual eloquence but the paintings on the walls were Renaissance reproductions. There were two works of Japanese calligraphy, done with the florid discipline of a master. The framed photographs were in pairs, the left ones of log and clapboard houses as crumbling derelicts and the right ones of the same houses rebuilt as showpieces, looking more authentic than they might have appeared to their original owners. He got up and walked about, circling, as he often did, registering everything, waiting for his gathering perceptions to give up a pattern, a revelation, something he could work with. Outside, the sky was taking on colour. The stars had faded with the promise of morning. Turning away from the window, Morgan scanned the constellations of photographs pinned to the corkboard.
Reflections on a familiar face caught his eye. Partially covered by several other pictures was a snapshot of Rachel Naismith in a country setting. He removed the picture from the board, expecting to see Miranda as well. It must have been taken when they were here in the spring. No, he thought, the background was the green of summer. They were here in March or early April. He held the picture into the light. It was a bit worn and faded. Rachel looked younger. Squinting, he recognized in the background a hill town in Tuscany, and the distinctive square towers of San Gimignano.
He scanned the other photographs on the board more carefully and found another of Rachel, this time rubbing the nose of the famous bronze boar in the Straw Market in Florence. Behind it there was a duplicate picture, only someone else was rubbing the bronze. He squinted. It was Shelagh Hubbard. Behind that was another, the same, only this time it showed Alexander Pope with the boar’s snout under curled fingers as if he were subduing a wild beast.
Methodically, Morgan began removing the photographs, which at some points were layered in clusters three and four deep. He was no longer concerned about leaving behind signs of his illicit search. He could feel his heart pounding and he had to consciously steady his hands. He lifted a framed photo from the wall and tilted it to the light.
Rachel had mentioned her interest in art as a student at Western. It was a long reach from London on the Ontario Thames to Florence on the Arno. But there she was, in a photograph lost among the pictures of reclaimed Ontario buildings, standing by the wall at riverside, with the Ponte Vecchio in the background looking more like a quaint architectural accident than a bridge. Her dark features were difficult to make out against the dazzling light of the Florentine sky. Beside her was a blond woman, Shelagh Hubbard, whose pale features were equally obscured by the brightness of the sun. It was an odd picture, and yet charming, with the ambiance of the city on full display.
As he expected, Morgan found a photograph with Rachel and Shelagh together. They were standing arm in arm like a couple of honeymooners in the Piazza del Duomo, posing near one of the Baptistery doors by Lorenzo Ghiberti, the “Gates of Paradise.” As myriad explanations swarmed through his mind, he could not help but respond to the beauty of the city that had brought this improbable threesome together. It must have been five or six years ago. Morgan had been there fifteen years before that. As personal memories surfaced, he suppressed them. This had to do with Miranda. How did she fit into the picture?
Rifling through the remaining photographs, Morgan found a Polaroid snap by a street photographer taken in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Alexander Pope’s long arms were casually draped over each woman’s shoulders, drawing them close to his side. The intimacy of their embrace seemed to Morgan a public celebration that the three of them were lovers. In his mind, however, the images of four people, not three, wheeled in freefall as he struggled to assimilate their possible relationships.
Morgan scanned the room with renewed diligence. He reached out and touched the surface of a painting with his fingertips. What he had taken as reproductions were original copies. Several were in the style of Botticelli. All were of heads only, as if the artist had no interest in the subject matter. Alexander Pope had refined his skills with colour and style in Florence. Had he also perfected the art of the fresco?
As he was leaving the room, Morgan braced for a moment against the door frame to soak in as much as possible of what he was seeing. As he looked about, he ran his fingers along the spines of books at eye level on the shelves nearest the door. His hand stopped over several familiar volumes. He turned to look at them more closely. They were the same blue colour as Shelagh Hubbard’s journals, the same size, more like binders than books. Inhaling deeply, he withdrew one and opened it, finding, as he expected, blocks of passages in her handwriting, interspersed with familiar pen sketches, all in black ink, detailing aspects of the Madame Renaud’s murders. He quickly opened another volume and discovered what seemed an exact duplicate of her journal describing Morgan’s intended fate as a pile of desiccated bones in a Huron burial mound. The final volume inevitably offered a duplicate account of the Hogg’s Hollow tableau with the same sketches and horrifically clinical descriptions.
On closer examination, these seemed to be practice copies, as if Shelagh Hubbard had done them in preparation for the final edition that he and Miranda had found at her farm. There was another blue binder lying flat on the same shelf. It was not as large, but much thicker. Morgan opened it and saw immediately that it was a collection of handwriting exercises and practice sketches all in the same black ink as the other three binders. The journals found at the farm were done in various inks, suggesting that they had been written over an extended period of time. He glanced up at the wall on the other side of the door. The framed calligraphy was done in black ink. Written neatly in Roman script on the lower right corner of each was the name Rachel Naismith and a date.
Morgan sat down in the big armchair. Had Rachel forged Shelagh Hubbard’s journals? Had she written them in the first place? For the final versions did she use a variety of inks to create the illusion of authenticity? Handwriting analysis had not been done on the volumes found at the farm. A cursory comparison with Hubbard’s academic notes seemed sufficient verification of authenticity, since their authorship was never in doubt. Now it appeared, in all probability, Rachel Naismith, with the collusion of Alexander Pope, had created both sets. How much of the content were they responsible for? Was there a possibility Shelagh was innocent?
He rose abruptly and picked up the photograph of the three of them together in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Now what he saw in their eyes was not a play of possession or submission but the sinister glee of conspirators. He looked again. Conspiracy? Lust? It was simply a street photographer’s snapshot of three friends — probably, by their demeanour, summer residents not tourists, leaning against each other in a piazza in the heart of the city.
Morgan set the picture down on the countertop with the others and shuffled them into neat, random piles. They would be there when he returned with a warrant, once things fell into place. He snapped off the light and was surprised that the room remained fully illuminated. The sun was well over the horizon; the day had begun.
He wasn’t sure whether Miranda and Rachel had planned to connect with Alexander Pope. He knew, now, with a certainty, the three of them would be together. His breath quickened and, after a quick tour of the house to fix it in place in his mind, he slipped out the side door, got into his car, took a deep breath, and drove down the long driveway, turning right on Lakeshore Road and then right again, up to the 401. After a few kilometres, he veered north to Highway 7 and cut across the top of Toronto to avoid the morning gridlock, then turned north. He was on his way to Penetanguishene. chapter sixteen
Wiarton
Miranda crawled from the tent just after dawn. She walked out onto the point of land, feeling the offshore breeze riffle her hair, and looked back along the sound to the east, where, from low on the horizon, the sun skimmed the waves like a red rubber ball. The whimsical images that bobbed in her mind belied her feelings of apprehension. She had not been diving in several years and while she was certified, she was far from confident. She had no experience in wreck-diving, which called for a whole different order of expertise. Being in enclosed spaces underwater ran counter to the freedom of movement that drew her to the sport in the first place.
Still, her friends were anxious to give it a try. The Tobermory wrecks were a world-class site. She didn’t want to let them down. It was the kind of dubious adventure that, once into it, would be incredibly exciting, like rock climbing or whitewater kayaking — neither of which she had any desire to do.
It was her father who used to describe the morning sun as shining bright like a red rubber ball. Then he would utter the mantra, “Del Shannon from Rapid City, Michigan,” and take strange satisfaction in how the words and the image and the emotional response they evoked were in perfect, private harmony. She had never heard the song; it wasn’t something her parents would actually have owned. She could feel the warmth of her father’s grin and with it came a terrible emptiness as she wondered what they might have been to each other had he lived.
She sat perched with her knees drawn up and her arms clasped around them, rocking gently against the cool stone. She turned to watch Rachel struggle through the zippered door in the tent vestibule, crawl out onto the pine needles, stand up and stretch, then amble slowly toward her in her oversized teddy-bear pyjamas, rubbing sleep from her eyes and stepping with exaggerated caution over dry grass tufts growing from clefts in the stone. Rachel sat down beside her. Neither of them spoke, and together they rocked in rhythm to the waves lapping against the sheer wall of the granite shore.
As the sun pressed higher in the sky, Miranda rose to her feet.
“You want coffee?” she offered.
“Sure,” said Rachel. “I’ll help. I hate lighting the stove — I’ll measure out the coffee.”
“It’s in little bags.”
“I’ll count them. Two, right?”
Miranda smiled broadly at her friend. Apprehension about the events ahead passed from her mind. Diving, done properly, was an exhilarating sport. She was excited by the prospects ahead.
Morgan stopped for a coffee on the outskirts of Newmarket, due north of Toronto. He patched through to Alex Rufalo, asking for a response to his Scotland Yard query the night before requesting a scan of Madame Renaud’s employment records extending back ten years.
“It’s coming through now,” said the superintendent. “Don’t go away.”
Illogically, Morgan followed the directive literally by sipping his takeout coffee in the restaurant parking lot. It occurred to him he might reach Miranda through Peter Singh in Owen Sound. He did not feel justified in calling the OPP to track her down. At this point there was nothing substantive to suggest she was in danger, although the case was building exponentially in his mind, implicating her companions in multiple murder. He was sure the three of them were together. Officer Singh could unofficially intervene, cut Miranda apart until Morgan could get to the scene.
Rufalo came back on the radio. “Morgan, there’s no earlier record that Hubbard worked at Renaud’s. Nothing under her own name.”
“I knew that,” said Morgan.
“But how about this to stifle your disappointment…”
“What? Say on.”
“Your good friend, Alexander Pope, did!”
“Did what?”
“He worked at Renaud’s — for eighteen months in the early nineties.”
“Aha!” Morgan exclaimed.
“‘Aha’ what?”
“I’ll fill you in later. Gotta go. Could you run a background check for me on Officer Rachel Naismith?”
“One of our guys?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll get someone on it. Check back in an hour. Are you on your way to Georgian Bay? Do you want me to contact the Provincials?”
“And say what? Not yet. I don’t know what you’d tell them.”
“Morgan, something else that might interest you. Your friend Alexander Pope — it seems the church property is in his name. He is the registered owner of the crime scene in Beausoleil.”
Morgan signed off, his mind racing as he wheeled onto the highway. An oncoming pickup swerved to miss him without slowing down as the driver leaned on the horn. Morgan hardly noticed. He was assimilating the new information into a sequence of probable events, with Alexander Pope displacing Shelagh Hubbard as the pivotal character. Given that her journals were apparently counterfeit, a new possibility pressed inexorably forward. It still seemed likely the Hogg’s Hollow murders were Hubbard’s project, and it was certain that Rachel was inextricably linked to the revelation of her crimes, but the centre of power was shifting to Pope. He had worked at Renaud’s during the period now established as the time when the first set of murders occurred. Although his involvement in Hubbard’s murders was peripheral, and his connection with the disposal of her remains was circumstantial, it seemed to Morgan a virtual fact that he was responsible for the deaths in the wax museum and the presentation of his victims on public display.
Trying his best to think and drive at the same time, Morgan wished Miranda were riding at his side. She was better at deductive reconstruction from limited materials. Where, he wondered, would she go with this? How would she fill in the gaps? The narrative demanded a bridge between London and Florence. How did a Canadian on a postdoctoral fellowship who took a hands-on course in London from a Canadian expert in constructural duplicity end up in her instructor’s arms, apparently sharing his affection with a younger version of a policewoman from southern Ontario? It had already occurred to him that Rachel was a lesbian or bisexual, even that she and Miranda were having an affair. Were the two women in Florence lovers already, before they got there? Unlikely. The prior connection was between Shelagh and Alexander. There was nothing to suggest Rachel had a history in London, nothing to link her to Shelagh Hubbard before the snapshots in Tuscany.
Suppose, Morgan thought, trying to think like Miranda, the senior two of the threesome had become lovers while she was taking his course in London. It ended bitterly, or perhaps in an aura of doomed inevitability. Pope went to Italy. He had arranged for Shelagh Hubbard to study facial construction in wax simulations at his former employers, perhaps as a parting gesture to assuage his remorse for leaving her behind, or perhaps to ingratiate himself if it was she who spurned him. No, the latter is unlikely, given the eventual course of events.
Passing a couple of trucks, then applying the brakes to keep a third truck between him and a police cruiser scanning for speeders from the side of the highway, Morgan contemplated the brutal irony that Alexander Pope, who elevated fakery to a fine art, should reverse the procedure by transforming the patently unreal effigies of dead murder victims into genuine cadavers. Then, he wondered, suppose in her nocturnal ministrations, cleaning and repairing the wax effigies after their daily exposure to public scrutiny, Shelagh Hubbard discovered his macabre sport? Rather than recoiling, perhaps driven by obsessive love, she was inspired to have found a way back into his heart. She pursued him to Italy, armed with the capacity to renew their relationship on a different and, given their morbid dispositions, ironically revitalized basis.
Why was he in Florence? The answers to that were hanging on the wall in his sanctum sanctorum. He was studying to replicate some of the greatest painters in the Western world, having in effect moved from reconfiguring dead faces of real people to creating authentic reproductions of people long dead. As well as refining his talents with oil on wood and canvas, he undoubtedly studied frescoes. Already an authority on the subtleties of plaster, it would have been impossible to resist the study of tinting techniques at the home of the Renaissance masters.
As for Rachel Naismith, she would have been in Florence to study art in her own right, perhaps under the tutelage of Alexander Pope, an accomplished artist who spoke the same language. Quite possibly. Her talent as a calligrapher, her history at the University of Western Ontario, combined with the irrefutable evidence of her close relationship in Florence with Hubbard and Pope, insisted on her culpability in the subsequent murders. How so, Morgan was uncertain.
What an unholy threesome, he thought, especially appalled by Rachel. Did she know, then, standing arm in arm with her lovers for the snapshot, that the bond between the other two was on the dark side of death? Morgan felt an intense sense of betrayal, and mounting anger for the dreadful abuse of Miranda’s friendship. What could have driven Rachel to immerse herself in such malevolence? Was she on the road to depravity from childhood, the victim of a psychopathic mutation in her developing personality? Did her immersion in the dissociative world of Florentine aesthetics somehow exacerbate an already-screwed-up nature? Was the overwhelming time warp of immediate access to the sinister beauties of Renaissance culture enough to make her open to deadly seduction? Did the other two seduce her on the banks of the Arno, or she them? Did she somehow complete their perverse relationship, bringing them closer together, making the banalities of evil seductive? Or did she insinuate herself into the perverse dynamics of their existing affair to feed her own appetites?
Morgan cut north on old Highway 11, the continuing extension of Yonge Street that divides Ontario into east and west, to pick up the most efficient route to the Nottawasaga region of Georgian Bay.
He became aware that he was searching for ways to exonerate Rachel, and recoiled from the creeping sympathy that might compete with his concern for Miranda, who, having displaced Shelagh Hubbard in the unholy dynamics of a new and dangerous threesome, was surely in grave danger. He reached for the radio, determined to contact Peter Singh and ask him to drive over to Beausoleil or, if necessary, to the campground outside Penetang.
Alexander Pope was lounging on the front steps of the church when the women arrived with their camping gear strapped to the back of Miranda’s racing-green Jaguar.
“You want to leave your car here?” he asked, unbending his long limbs and strolling to the side of the car. “I’ve called Tobermory. We’re set up with a boat and full gear for you two. I told them we’d be there by a little past noon.
“Thanks,” said Miranda. “I’ve got a lot of work piling up. I think I’d like to head back tonight. What about if you two ride together as far as Owen Sound and we’ll drive the rest of the way together? I’ll leave my car there so we can cut south on the way back.”
“Sounds fine to me,” said Alexander Pope. “It will give Rachel and me a chance to catch up on old times.”
“Since March?” Miranda exclaimed.
“In detail,” said Rachel. “Don’t worry, we’ll find things to talk about. We’ll talk about you.”
Miranda smiled uneasily. She suspected perhaps there was a subtext to the relationship between the other two she did not grasp, and ascribed her anxiety to feeling a little left out. On the drive over from Penetanguishene, Rachel had come up with the suggestion, herself, that she ride with Alexander as far as Owen Sound. It had seemed entirely reasonable, but now Miranda felt herself resenting the petty betrayal of her friends. Somehow the three of them broke down into a configuration of pairs. They were not all three friends together. Like teenagers, she thought. In any permutation of their affections, one of them was invariably left in the cold.
She had decided early that morning she needed to get back to Toronto. She loved camping and had reconciled herself to the day’s adventure, but she felt an indefinable sense of urgency. Something was not quite right. She suggested they head back after diving. Rachel seemed content with the revised plan.
By the time Morgan reached Peter Singh, he was less than an hour from Georgian Bay. He had anticipated having difficulty explaining what he wanted Peter to do: see that she’s okay and stay with her. To Morgan’s surprise, this was not received as an unreasonable request. He felt a rising affection for the young officer and told him he’d explain when he got there.
“For sure, Morgan. I will meet you; just say where.”
“Wherever you connect with Miranda. When you find her, get back to me.”
“I will.”
“Good, go for it.”
“You mean I should drive to Beausoleil? Why don’t you contact her on your radio?”
“She’s camping with Rachel — I think you met her. She’s not carrying her cellphone. They’ll have gone to see Pope, but he’s not answering.”
“Have you tried the campground?”
“No, I don’t know the area. I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m counting on you to do that.” Morgan’s newfound affection was beginning to wane. “I really would like you to get going on this. Call me.”
“Where are you?”
“Just north of Barrie.”
“You’re probably closer to her than I am, but let me see if I can pin her down. I’ll get back to you.”
The radio went blank, then Officer Singh came on again.
“I was talking to her last night, you know.”
“You what?”
“I was talking to her last night. She called from a restaurant in Midland. They were having dinner together — Miranda and Mr. Pope, and Rachel Naismith.
“Why did she call? Was she okay.”
“Oh, yes, she was very okay. They were having a good time.”
“Why did she call you?”
“Why not? She is my friend. I suppose you would like to be analytic. Possibly she was fulfilling a social obligation, given she’s a visitor in my part of the country.”
“Did she say where she’d be today?”
“Oh, no, I do not think so. Well, she said if she comes through Owen Sound she would give me another call.”
“Why would she be coming through Owen Sound?”
“Goodness, Detective, we’ll have to ask her.” Peter Singh had lost his sense of the gravity of the situation, in his delight at the possibility of connecting with both of them.
“Peter?”
“Yes?”
“If she calls, let me know.”
“Yes, of course. And meanwhile I will call around and see if I can track down her camping ground. I suspect if you cannot reach anybody at the church, they are on their way here. Goodbye now.”
Morgan felt the first pangs of hunger since he had left home. It was well past breakfast time and still too early for lunch, so he compromised on a couple of doughnuts outside Midland.
Miranda had to concentrate not to get separated from Alexander Pope’s van. She was intent on drinking in the splendour of the countryside, which was at its most lush in June. To one side she could see beyond the gnarled groves of apple orchards the high hills of the Niagara Escarpment creeping along the edge of the coastal plain, and on the other side, beyond orchards and grasslands, she caught glimpses of the lake, dazzling evanescent in the sunlight. Ahead, the blue van snaked through what little traffic there was, and periodically she would rev the Jag and catch up behind them. Pope would honk in acknowledgement and she would honk back. She was more and more looking forward to their adventure.
They stopped for coffee at the Tim Hortons in Collingwood.
“How are we doing for time?” she asked.
“It’s too early for lunch,” said Alexander. “We’ll grab a sandwich in Owen Sound and eat on the way.”
“You two finding enough to talk about?” she asked Rachel.
“No,” said Rachel. “We don’t say a word to each other. It’s murder.”
All three laughed.
“Let’s go,” said Rachel. “It’s still a long drive. Where are we gonna meet in Owen Sound?”
“At the police station,” said Miranda. “We’ll leave my car there. A vintage Jag by the side of the road is flaunting temptation. We can pick up some food at the same time.”
Rachel and Alexander exchanged looks. He said, “It’s okay with me.”
Rachel shrugged. “Whatever. See you there.”
They pulled out in tandem, coffees in hand.
“Morgan,” said Peter Singh. “Save yourself time. I tracked down the campground.”
“Good.”
“No, not so good. She has checked out.”
“Did they know where she was going?”
“The man said she mentioned Tobermory.”
“What’s in Tobermory?”
“Beautiful scenery, I suppose. Funny rocks with holes in them. A lot of cedar trees.”
“Does she have to go through Owen Sound to get there?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you now?”
“I am in Owen Sound, at home. I am now off duty, since I talked to you before.”
“Where did she call you last night?”
“At home.”
“Stay there. She’ll call. She likes you.”
“I like her, too. Are you coming straight through? I should tell you how to get here.”
“Owen Sound’s on the map, I’ve been there before.”
“I mean my home. I am looking forward to seeing you.”
“Yeah,” said Morgan. “Talk to you later.”
He looked around. He was driving along the edge of a town. It’s big enough, it must be Collingwood, he thought. He pulled into the Tim Hortons for coffee and another doughnut at the takeout window. He thought of a sandwich, but the anxiety running in tremors through his entire body distorted his appetite. Doughnuts fill voids other foods can’t even find.
Odd, he thought. Doughnuts and cars. In Toronto he ate the occasional pastry and yet, out here in the country, driving, they seemed as indispensable as gasoline. He looked down at the fuel gauge. He was not used to either doughnuts or cars. His stomach felt bloated and the gas tank read empty.
Miranda ran into the police station and explained who she was — a Toronto detective and a friend of Peter Singh’s. No problem, said the woman at the desk. Where was she off to? Miranda explained they were going to Tobermory, and behind schedule. The woman shrugged and waved her away, telling her to have a good day.
On the outskirts of Owen Sound, Morgan got through to Alex Rufalo and pulled over to the side of the road so he could hear better. He had already called Peter Singh, asking him to meet him downtown.
“I’ve got Officer Naismith’s file, Morgan. It looks straightforward to me. Three years on the force. Good record. Good future. She’s got a degree from the University of Western Ontario, comes from the Chatham area between Windsor and Sarnia. Nothing stands out in her background.”
“What’s her degree?”
“Honours sociology. Oh, and honours art history. Double honours — very impressive.”
“Art history?”
“Yeah.”
“Sociology?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have her transcript?”
“Yeah.”
“Lots of psychology courses? Courses in deviance?”
“Yeah, not unusual for a cop.”
“Art history? Does she have a credit for a course abroad?”
“Double credit. One art, one art history. Universitat degli Studi di Firenze.”
“I didn’t know you could speak Italian, boss.”
“I read it. I don’t understand it. What’s this all about, Morgan?”
“At this point I’m trying to connect with Miranda. I’m worried about her.”
“Anything I can do from here?”
“No, it’s okay. I’m closing in. Anything else in the Naismith file?”
“That’s about it. Says her parents were undertakers. Don’t know how that connects to police work, growing up in a funeral home.”
“Undertakers?”
“Yeah. Looks like both parents were in the business.”
“Gotta go, chief. I’ll call for backup if I need it.”
“Good. I’m together with my wife.”
“You’re what?” Morgan was flustered. Why on earth would the superintendent be telling him this?
“She’s a lawyer. We negotiated a settlement. Based on renewing our wedding vows. Thought you’d like to know. Everyone at headquarters has been talking about it for months. So there you are.”
“Well, thanks for sharing. I’ll get back to you after I find Miranda.”
“Morgan — ”
“Gotta go.”
Past Wiarton the road to Tobermory runs up the spine of the escarpment. On the west side the land falls away gently but to the east it plunges dramatically into the depths of Georgian Bay. Miranda had settled into the back seat and could not hear the sporadic conversation between Alexander and Rachel clearly enough to participate without leaning forward and shouting. The van needed work on its muffler and a good tune-up. Alexander’s mind ran to less practical matters.
Miranda ruminated on what she knew about Wiarton. It had the familiar feel of an Ontario town, declaring itself a good place to live through civic pride, with floral displays and refuse containers in abundance. There were numerous signs proclaiming it the home of Wiarton Willie. Pennsylvania has Punxsutawney Phil, Ontario has Willie. Once a year on Groundhog Day, animals otherwise treated as vermin are scrutinized as they search for their shadows to forecast the coming of spring. Every year spring comes, she thought. So far so good.
She turned in her seat to survey Alexander’s scuba gear. She had seen compressed-air cylinders in the shed by the side door of his house, but he had only a single tank with him. There was also a box that must contain his regulator and a net bag with his BCD vest, fins, mask and snorkel, and other paraphernalia. She and Rachel had thrown in the gear that was strapped on the back of her car for safekeeping, and they each brought kits with bathing suits and towels.
“Hey, you guys. I’ve got to stop for a minute.”
The van pulled over and she clambered out and disappeared behind a line of cedars. She went through the motions of having a pee, but in fact she had quite suddenly felt claustrophobic in the back of the van and needed to get out for a moment. Rachel poked her way through the undergrowth, coming up beside her.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah, you know, too much coffee.”
“Let’s go, then.”
Miranda watched Rachel as she led their way back to the car. Why was she so abrupt? she wondered. She didn’t seem quite herself.
When Morgan pulled into the Owen Sound police station, he was enormously relieved to see Peter Singh leaning against Miranda’s green Jag. His heart skipped a beat, however, when he saw the sombre look on Peter’s face and realized the young officer was not moving to greet him.
“What’s the problem?” he demanded. “Where’s Miranda?”
“She was here less than an hour ago.”
“She didn’t call you?”
“No. The desk officer said she was rushed.”
“Damn it,” said Morgan.
“How bad is the situation?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think she’s in immediate danger, but she could be.”
“Can you explain?”
“Yes. No. Was she with Pope and Rachel Naismith?”
“I think so. Apparently she went off in a blue van.”
“Where? Any idea.”
“She said Tobermory. She said they were behind schedule.”
“Was that her phrase? ‘Behind schedule’?”
“Yes, I was told it precisely.”
“Let’s go! What’s in Tobermory?”
“There’s a toll ferry over to Manitoulin Island. From there you can drive across to the mainland above Lake Huron. If you want to go to the United States, you can go to the United States.”
Morgan’s sense of Ontario geography beyond Toronto was sketchy. As they raced from Owen Sound toward Wiarton, Peter Singh laid it out for him as best he could with words and many hand gestures to represent water, shorelines, and the international boundary.
“Why on earth would they want to catch a ferry?” Morgan demanded, as if an explanation was somehow Peter Singh’s responsibility as the geography specialist.
“I really don’t know. But the ferry does not leave until mid-afternoon. We have plenty of time.”
Morgan took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, and another, which came out like a sigh. She should be all right, then. We’ll get there, he thought, and bring her back with us. He relaxed a little and let his shoulders drop into a comfortable posture — he had been driving since the middle of the night with them tensed up virtually the whole time. He was exhausted. He pulled over and asked Peter Singh to take the wheel, then he slouched low in the seat and told the whole story, as much as he had figured out.
“Why would Alexander Pope buy the old church?” Peter asked, trying to stitch in a loose thread.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Morgan. “He must have known about the frescoes. He would know about Sister Marie Celeste and the pilgrims. He is a man enthralled with the dark side of mystery. My guess is he fully intended to create a miraculous apparition. He would revitalize an old building but, more important, he would control the story. The resurrection of history in a context of fanatical faith. Can you imagine the satisfaction, creating a saint that even the Church might be forced to sanction? Extreme fraud. That’s what the man lives and dies for.”
“And he substituted Shelagh Hubbard’s body for a saint’s bones?”
“No, I think that was the work of Rachel Naismith.”
“Really?”
“If all three of them were lovers and immersed in passionate depravities, there must have been terrible conflicts among them.”
“Why do you assume they were lovers?”
“How else to explain the recurrent connection between Pope and Hubbard? Only love has the capacity to accommodate such sordid desires. You will find, Peter, in our business, where reason fails, love prevails. Sometimes it is the only explanation. And how else to account for the way Rachel was able to insinuate herself between them — proof in the Florence snapshots, proof in the forged accounts of her lovers’ atrocities?”
“You think she came between them?”
“Not in Florence, at least not at first. For a while they were probably a charming menage a trois; she was seduced by the horrific allure of their demonic passion. At some point she had to have discovered the grotesque bond between them. It didn’t scare her away — it drew her closer. But life has a way of intruding on romance. I suspect they went their separate ways at the end of the summer. How else to account for the long delay until the Hogg’s Hollow murders?”
“Maybe they went about murdering people by themselves,” said Peter Singh. “Maybe it was a love game. In the publicity surrounding unaccountable deaths they would recognize each other’s signature work. Or they would let each other know, if the murders weren’t discovered. It was a way of keeping in touch. It is interesting, you know.”
Extreme as the possibility seemed, Morgan realized he could be right. He was thinking like him. “You see, I know how you think,” he heard the younger man say, as if he were reading his thoughts.
A little flustered at what seemed an invasive prescience, Morgan silently pursued the notion of unsolved murder as an expression of love. Statistically, it would appear most murders were resolved, but in fact there was no way of being certain. Gangland slayings, domestic homicide, street killings, violent deaths by assassination, by spontaneous manslaughter, were relatively public. But how many murders were premeditated, executed, and never discovered? They happened. They did happen.
“Could it be,” Peter Singh continued, “Dr. Hubbard discovered the other two had renewed their relationship? Perhaps that is so, and the result was murder.”
“Ultimately her own,” said Morgan. “The horrors of the eternal embrace. That was her final love letter — an acknowledgement she knew about their betrayal; a warning, a threat, a farewell gesture. She devised an extravagant drama, intended to be fully accessible only to her former lovers. The headless corpses — another villain would have torn out the hearts, but Hubbard located passion in the brain. The heart is merely a pump to keep the brain flush with lust and the appropriate other bits engorged with blood. Her methods were extravagantly subtle — she knew their discovery would bring Alexander Pope onto the scene. She located the reveal where she could be fairly certain Rachel would be on duty. She revelled in the details.”
“She was very good. She knew they would know it was her.”
“The ring and the cross, those were for the benefit of the police, maybe for Miranda and me. Could she have known we’d be involved? It’s our kind of case. Whether she was thinking religion or Freud, she couldn’t resist the ring and the cross. Potent symbols of a romance fated to implode. They invited lovely speculation about motive, so long as we thought it was all in the colonial past. But she needed to have the historical story explode — it wouldn’t have worked if we hadn’t realized it was a fake. She needed Miranda and me as part of the story.”
“But why the next phase? Why would Rachel Naismith kill her?”
“To seize control of the story. Again, literally. Let’s say Hubbard’s extravaganza had its desired effect and drove a wedge of doubt, or fear, or envy, between Rachel and Alexander. What better way to rekindle a precarious relationship, especially if we’re right and he was trying to manufacture a miracle in Beausoleil. Give him a body smelling of violets, the illusion of sacrosanct flesh refusing corruption. The ironies run deep.”
“Kill one lover as an act of devotion to the other.”
“God forbid if Alexander Pope did not appreciate her efforts. If Pope felt threatened by Rachel’s extravagant play for the renewal of his affections, for whatever reason, their love would sour on a cataclysmic scale. Then imagine the two of them vying for the most horrific method of exterminating the other.”
“And you think Miranda might be caught between them.” Morgan’s silent response chilled the air for a moment, then Peter Singh continued. “What happened to Sister Marie’s bones?”
“What?”
“If Rachel Naismith placed her rival in the crypt, what happened to the bones?”
“They haven’t turned up. If there was a mouldering body, she might have hauled it away for secret burial. She was experienced with both: secrets and burials. Or she might have ground up the bones and mixed them into Pope’s plaster. Saint Marie Celeste literally embodied in her own image. It would be as if Rachel had written her invisible signature across his achievement.”
“I think that is unlikely,” said Peter Singh. “Perhaps not. In any case, Officer Naismith must have known Shelagh Hubbard’s body would be recognized.”
“Yes, she would be displacing Alexander Pope’s story with one equally as good, maybe better, except this one would be hers. Perhaps meant as a tribute to Pope but taken, I would imagine, as an affront.”
“My goodness, competitive psychopaths.”
“Psychopathic lovers.”
“Deadly.”
“Very.”
By the time they passed through Wiarton, Peter felt he had a sufficient grasp of the situation to ask, “Can we arrest them?” His voice was tremulous with excitement.
“No,” said Morgan. “Not unless, God forbid, they’re in the midst of another crime. To make a case, we’ll need a warrant to search his house.”
“You said you already know what is there, in the house.”
“But I am not supposed to know. Meanwhile, if Miranda’s okay, we don’t want to spook them. Not that there’s anywhere for them to run. The easiest place to keep track of fugitives from the city is in the wilderness.”
“This is not wilderness, Morgan. It is countryside.”
“If you’re from the city, it’s wilderness.”
“The law is a most exciting field of endeavour,” said Peter, as if the idea had never struck him before.
“Yes,” said Morgan, who had never been in doubt that it was. chapter seventeen
Tobermory
Alexander Pope wheeled the blue van down into the harbour area and pulled up abruptly by the red and white sign in front of the dive shop. There were not many boats to be seen but quite a few tourists were milling about, taking in the nautical ambience. The glass-bottom vessels would be out sightseeing by this time, while the sun was high in the sky and visibility was at its best, and the larger dive boats were out as well. Tied to the wharf across from the shop was a small trawler adapted for diving. It had a waterline platform attached to the transom and rails to hold on to, with a ladder that would flip down into the water at the dive site.
When they entered the shop, a young man greeted them — obviously a diver earning his keep. He glanced at their dive credentials and told them their boat was ready to go.
“You sure you don’t want a guide?” he asked.
“I don’t mind, one way or the other,” Alexander responded, turning to Miranda and Rachel for input.
Miranda was about to say she would welcome the guide when Rachel spoke up, pleasantly but firmly refusing the young man’s offer. “I’ve been here before. Wrecks aren’t a problem. We’re not going deep, no penetration. Just give us a good map.”
“You look familiar. Not many — .” He stopped.
“Not many black women diving in Tobermory?”
Miranda flinched. She had never heard Rachel play the race card before, not so obviously and without even a touch of irony. The young man turned a deep red.
“No,” he mumbled. “Police. Not many cops come in here to dive. Usually they, you, make your own arrangements. I remember — you’re a policeman.”
Rachel thrust her breasts out against the material of her T-shirt until Miranda thought the young diver’s eyes would pop.
“Woman,” he amended. “Are you all cops?” The question was rhetorical: he was sure Miranda was, and assumed by his imperious bearing that Alexander must be as well. “The gear you’ll need is through here. Pay in advance. It’s good weather for diving. The trawler over there is gassed up, ready to go.”
He was talking to Rachel. When they came in, he had assumed Alexander was in charge. There was no question, now. This was Rachel’s show.
Morgan stared out the side window from his slouched position in the passenger seat. He looked at his watch. He gazed at the sky ahead. He turned to Peter Singh. “What time is that ferry?”
“Not for a couple of hours.”
Morgan sat up so fast the safety belt wrenched him around in his seat. “Then why the hurry? Why did she say she was behind schedule? What was the rush?”
Peter Singh glanced over at him, then back at the road, then at Morgan again, expectantly, waiting for an answer.
“How far are we from Tobermory?”
“Thirty minutes, maybe forty.”
“Let’s get moving.”
“What are we suspecting?”
“I am suspecting that they are not catching a ferry. They’re going scuba diving.”
“They are what?”
“They are going wreck-diving, underwater. Scuba, you know?”
“I know what ‘scuba’ means, I am only surprised that they would be going to do that. Do you think she will be safe?”
“No, I do not.”
Rachel cast off as Alexander revved up the engine and Miranda pushed them away from the wharf. Miranda was used to outboards at camp and dive boats in the Caribbean but she had not actually been in a boat this size and was surprised at the stability. It had probably been a saltwater vessel, she thought, retired to a freshwater job that seemed a trifle effete in comparison, after years having decks awash with the guts of innumerable fish.
Although Rachel had never mentioned previously diving at Tobermory, the other two accepted that she was directing their dive on the basis of earlier experience. They had decided on single-tank dives; they had three cylinders of compressed air aboard, including the one Alexander had brought from home. They would pick their site carefully, away from the bigger dive boats. Georgian Bay water was notoriously frigid, even in June, but if they stayed relatively shallow they could dive for an hour, even more if they were exceptionally efficient on air, although even with heavy-gauge wetsuits an hour might be more than enough. If they got too chilled, they could forego the second dive or cut it short.
Once out of sight of the harbour, Rachel directed the trawler toward an isolated area down the coast. Miranda looked back at the shoreline where the Niagara Escarpment, extending from the Falls far to the south, shambled into the bay. It was rugged and elusive, sometimes seeming closer than it was and sometimes farther away. No wonder so many ships met their doom in these waters. In a storm this would be a treacherous place, and even on a placid day in June, the water seemed ominous. Miranda had only been diving in the tropics, where the translucent surface reveals myriad depths of blues and greens. Here, the surface was like polished ebony, as if the bottom were a dark secret. So many have drowned here, going down with their ships, Miranda thought. She was used to diving amidst living coral and bright-coloured fish, not among wreckage haunted only by the drowned ghosts of the dead.
They found a marker buoy flying the diagonal red-on-white flag, and swinging the stern downwind they tied off securely and lowered the ladder into the water. Quietly, they slipped into their gear, helping each other to safety-check valves, regulators, buckles, and BCD vests. Buoyancy Control Devices; was there a sport anywhere with more acronyms? Miranda wondered, trying to distract herself. Each checked the others’ auxiliary regulators and mouthpieces to make sure in an emergency a buddy could breathe from the same tank. The octopus, she thought. At least octopus is descriptive — a metaphor, not an acronym. They conferred about weights, and trusted Rachel’s judgment based on her previous experience in fresh water. They needed to dive heavy to compensate for the buoyancy of the thick suits. Better too much weight, she said, than too little. You can increase buoyancy by adding air to your BCD vest, but if you’re too light, you’ll be fighting to stay down the whole dive.
Rachel had a small dive bag that she attached to her belt, along with one of the flashlights the dive shop provided. Miranda wondered where the bag came from when she saw Rachel take it from her knapsack. They had not come north expecting to dive. “Whatcha got there?” she asked casually, trying not to further arouse the uncharacteristic crankiness Rachel had been showing for the last hour or so. Miranda realized that her friend was likely apprehensive about the dive, just as she was, and that’s how she was dealing with anxiety, just as Miranda was coping by being exceptionally quiet.
“Just stuff, don’t worry,” said Rachel, and she smiled disarmingly.
Miranda felt reassured. At this point in any diving adventure, Miranda found nerves were always a little on edge as the excitement mounted, and a display of companionable affection was welcome. She observed Alexander. He, too, was inordinately quiet. For the moment, Miranda felt a renewed bond with him, perhaps because they both seemed to be enacting a scenario that was primarily Rachel’s design.
They stepped down onto the dive platform, moving awkwardly under the heavy burden of their tanks, their limbs constricted by the thick, clammy, synthetic material of their wetsuits. They wriggled into their fins, pumped a bit of air into their vests, adjusted their masks and checked to see their snorkels were in place, slipped on thick gloves, then put in their mouthpieces. Rachel immediately took a broad stride forward and splashed into the water, her head barely going under. Miranda followed and Alexander came last.
Miranda was astonished by the slap of cold against the exposed flesh of her face and even more by the crystal clarity of the water hidden under the dark surface. She felt an icy trickle track the length of her spine between wetsuit and skin, but looking down at the panoramic scene spread out below them in glimmering detail she forgot her discomfort.
Raising her head for the last time in open air, she exchanged excited grins with the other two divers, despite mouths jammed with breathing apparatus, and each diver gave the okay signal followed by a thumbs-down sign. They slowly began their descent along the sloped length of the mooring line. At ten feet Miranda stopped, squeezed her nose through her mask, and blew until a slight popping in her ears relieved the pressure, and then she hovered, surveying the wreck below them. She felt a familiar thrill spread through her body as she slowly descended, pausing periodically to clear her ears, eyes shifting from wonderment at the wreck below to monitor her companions’ progress, ensuring that they stayed within easy reach of each other.
Twenty minutes south of Tobermory, Peter Singh asked Morgan, “What is the significance that her parents were morticians?”
“Rachel? I’m sure most kids of funeral directors grow up excessively normal. It’s almost de rigueur. But it seems likely Rachel was exposed as a child to the arts of embalming and preparing corpses for public display in ways that have shaped her life ever since. She acquired skills and a fascination with death, the way a lawyer’s kid will become a classroom advocate and end up as an adult serving hard time for manipulating the limits of power. Or a politician.”
“My goodness, I am glad my father was a grocer!”
“Grocers’ kids become cops.”
“Actually, he was a lawyer, himself, in Punjab, but that is another story.” After a few moments, when all they could hear was the hum of the tires on pavement, he asked, “Do you think Rachel could have killed the Hogg’s Hollow couple in Professor Shelagh Hubbard’s farmhouse? Is there any possibility?”
“Strong circumstantial evidence plus DNA ties Hubbard, herself, to those two. She almost certainly brought the colonial clothes from England; she arranged the corpses just so — ”
“Strangers in an eternal embrace. That really is a wicked notion.”
“Let’s say Rachel and Alexander recognized Hubbard’s grisly tableau at Hogg’s Hollow as a signature crime,” Morgan continued. “They were supposed to. But there was a problem: they would suspect that Miranda and I, and you, might eventually resolve the mystery and find it led back, one way or another, to them — an eventuality they preferred to avoid. So they created the counterfeit journals together. Rachel had the talent — she was a genius with pens and paper. Pope supplied the details of the London murders. He would, of course, know them intimately. And they adjusted the narrative chronology to coincide with Shelagh’s tenure at the museum.”
“But what about your murder?”
“My murder? No, yes, well. The Huron burial site — I think — was legitimate, if incredibly naive. Dr. Hubbard’s own genius was nothing if not erratic. It would establish her professional reputation to discover the bones of a Jesuit saint in a Huron grave. I don’t think she had any intention of putting me in there at all. But as Professor Birbalsingh said, it was a quixotic fabrication.” This pleased Morgan, to think he had not been in jeopardy. Sometimes a sauna is just a sauna. “She must have told Rachel and Alexander about her project, and about my visit. They conflated the two stories and wrote up the third journal as if my death were at the centre of her plans. That would draw our guaranteed attention… to her alone. Then they killed her. More precisely, Rachel killed her. I’m sure Alexander kept his distance. They both realized he was the more likely suspect.”
“Then why not just make her body disappear? Leave it a cold case. Why fake an abduction?”
“They wanted us to think Shelagh Hubbard was at the dead centre of another theatrical contrivance. Letting the scene fade to black would have been anticlimactic.”
“But the violets? They expected you to find her body; they practically invited you to find it.”
“They couldn’t resist a good yarn. They were sufficiently arrogant to believe we’d grow old searching for an explanation. That undoubtedly pleased them.”
“Hubris!” said Peter Singh, drawing the word from his sketchy memory of lectures in classical drama. “Seeding the grave of a saint with a fresh cadaver. That opened up a whole new story, in fact.”
“Which must have pleased them immensely. Perhaps each in a different way: morbid curiosity, to see how it would all turn out; the thrill of both directing the drama and being on stage. They both knew murders don’t just happen — they have lives of their own.”
“So to speak.”
“So to speak. In subsuming Alexander’s saint in a story where she had the power, Rachel would have made sure Pope wasn’t compromised — and we had no reason to suspect her. As far as we knew, she was in Toronto, three or four hours away.”
Suddenly, they were in Tobermory.
“We’re here, Peter. Head straight for the docks. If we’re lucky they haven’t gone out yet.” Morgan could feel his heart thumping inside his chest. He knew how important it was to remain calm, but what started as vague anxieties in the middle of the night had escalated into genuine fear for his partner’s survival.
The divers glided away from the cement mooring block and gathered in a hovering conclave just over the rocky bottom beside what remained of an early twentieth-century excursion steamer. The hull, virtually intact, lay heeled over at an angle so that the remains of the superstructure loomed ominously above them. Miranda checked her depth gauge. They were at about sixty-six feet, or twenty metres. Divers are ambi-dimensional. The wreck was down far enough to escape the surge from the wildest of storms, yet shallow enough to be fairly accessible. Apart from layers of zebra mussels and lucent green algae, the steel hull appeared remarkably well-preserved.
With a circular upward sweep of her hand Rachel indicated she wanted to rise partway and circumnavigate the ship in an initial reconnaissance. They swam in a delta formation, with Rachel in the lead. On the upper side they found where the hull had been staved in. From the discrete shape and shear edges of the gaping hole, and the fact that it must have been at the waterline, Miranda deduced the ship had gone down as the result of an offshore collision rather than slamming against the rocks before slipping back into the depths.
She wondered how many had died. Was the sinking ship struggling toward land so that lifeboats could reach the shore, or steaming away to avoid breaking up on the rocks? She wished she knew the history; it felt eerie to be there, not knowing how many lives had been lost and under what circumstances. It made her feel like an invader, not knowing, like a ghoul, exposing open graves to her own invidious gaze.
Once they had circled the ship, Rachel led them up to the wheelhouse, which leaned precariously, and they could see the wheel and the binnacle were intact. Now that the wreck was part of a national marine park, attached artifacts would probably remain in position for the duration. Whatever that meant.
Miranda was relieved when Rachel did not try to enter the wheelhouse but passed up and over the side of the hull, then felt her breath quicken as she realized they were descending toward the gaping wound in the ship’s upper side. Rachel hovered over the hole and signalled for the others to turn on their flashlights. Giving them the “okay” sign with thumb to forefinger, she turned and with a slight kick of her fins descended into the darkness. Alexander motioned for Miranda to follow, which she did reluctantly, and he came immediately after. She thought they had agreed there would be no penetration, but these were her friends and they seemed almost casually confident.
Once inside the hull, her eyes adjusted to the murky light. She was disconcerted by the metallic echo of their air bubbling against the steel walls and bulkheads. The rumble of her own exhaled breath as it rushed past her ears was the only underwater sound she was used to. Another sound intruded — an insistent pounding — and she was unnerved to recognize her own heartbeat. Claustrophobia pressed and she pushed back, determined to suppress even the possibility of panic. She focused on maintaining neutral buoyancy. She had fine-tuned the air in her BCD on descent to compensate for the pressure squeezing air out of her 7 ml wetsuit. She carried weights precisely matched to counter body fat. She was pleased — she weighed nothing. Strengthened by vanity, she expanded her mental horizon and took comfort in seeing Rachel immediately ahead and, finding herself a flickering shadow in Alexander’s flashlight beam, in knowing Alexander was just behind her.
The three of them edged forward in file, using only the slightest intake or exhalation of breath to modify their relative plane, careful to stir up as little sediment as possible. In the midst of the criss-cross beams of three flashlights illuminating their surroundings, Miranda felt disoriented as she tried to distinguish between ceilings and floors. Structural angles were askew but up and down were more certain, since debris was gathered beneath them and their bubbles rose overhead.
Rachel motioned with her light and they followed her through a door that opened at a crazy slant into a passageway. In file they progressed toward a doorway gaping open at the far end. Rachel veered off and entered as if she knew where she was going. For a moment she was out of sight. Miranda felt reassured as Alexander’s light beam cast her shadow into the gloom ahead and a surge of relief when she turned through the doorway and discovered Rachel at the far end of a large cabin with three portholes that previous divers had scraped clear.
The three of them gently manoeuvred until they were close enough to touch. They began breathing in unison, suspended in the middle of this alien world, their bubbles roaring. Miranda could still hear the drumming of her heart against the inside of her skull but the beat was slower, now, and regular. Rachel signalled to extinguish their lights by pressing the beams against their stomachs. Instead of the absolute darkness that Miranda expected, she was astonished by the illumination assaulting the portholes from the ambient light in the water outside, and surprised at how little of that light actually passed into the ship’s interior, where she could just barely make out Rachel and Alexander as phantom shapes beside her.
To be reassured it was them, she drew her flashlight away from her body and scanned the beam across their torsos, careful to keep it away from their eyes. Rachel gave the “okay” sign and signalled for a return to darkness. It was as if this room were Rachel’s gift and needed to be appreciated in natural light.
Profound gloom, Miranda thought. Still, she pressed the light beam into her stomach and was a little surprised when Rachel reached over and switched it off. She felt she had been admonished, until she saw her do the same with Alexander’s. Okay, she thought, it’s your show.
Miranda swung slowly on an imaginary axis below her rising column of bubbles and gazed around. The distorted angles of a room out of kilter sorted themselves out as her mind assimilated their defiance of logic. It was an oddly liberating experience and while her heart was slowly subsiding to no more than a murmur she looked for Rachel, wanting to signal her appreciation.
The other two had drifted to the lower side of the room. As Miranda peered at them through eddies of darkness, she was suddenly blinded by a flashlight flaring erratically, filling the chamber with shards of lightning before it went out. Miranda squeezed her eyes shut, veining the absolute blackness with strings of red, then opened them again to gaze through increasing swirls of silt at her friends hovering near the frame of what must have been a built-in bed. Miranda could see their bubbles intertwining in a weird configuration and, for an instant, she felt overwhelmingly lonely. She could hear voices through the water — that strange muffled parody of human speech when divers try to talk inside their mouthpieces. Then she saw one of them, the smaller, break free and move slowly toward her, coming up from beneath. Alexander on the far side was gesticulating in broad movements but the dark water, laden with particles of sediment, obscured whatever he was trying to express, and his voice seemed to come in disembodied fragments, almost like laughter.
Miranda’s renewed apprehension was immediately quelled when she felt Rachel’s touch on her ankle, then felt her hand slowly move along her leg as her friend rose up beside her. For a moment they were face to face but the dim opalescence from the portholes made mirrors of their masks and all Miranda could see was the reflection of her own mask, mirroring Rachel’s. Rachel pulled away, as if she were trying to find a better angle of light, then took one of Miranda’s arms in both hands and give it a reassuring squeeze as she drew closer again, until their merged air bubbles obscured their vision entirely.
Rachel slid her grip to Miranda’s wrist to stabilize herself while she adjusted her gear, reaching around and then straightening. To maintain equilibrium, Miranda pushed her friend gently away. She felt her wrist caught and tugged to break free. Whatever the entanglement, it was not an air hose or a BCD strap. She pulled hard and a narrow shackle of metal bit into her flesh through the shank of her glove and there was a slight give, as if she were pulling against a dead weight. She tried to turn on her flashlight but could not do it with only one hand; she tucked it into an armpit and managed to flick the switch so that the beam flared in a haphazard pattern across the upper reaches of the room.
Carefully retrieving the light with her free hand, she shone it down on the manacle around her wrist. She and Rachel were handcuffed together. Bewildered, Miranda followed the beam up Rachel’s arm to her face. Rachel’s face, even in the glare of Miranda’s light, revealed nothing. Miranda shone her light down and across at Alexander. He was handcuffed to a metal bed rail. He did not appear to be struggling, but clouds of bubbles surged from his mouthpiece, making it seem like his head was exploding in slow motion.
Miranda brought the light back to Rachel, tracing down her body until she saw that Rachel’s ankle was shackled to another iron rail, effectively enchaining them both to the ship. A series of throttled spasms caught at her throat, yet Miranda’s mind seemed clear, as if she were an observer, a sympathetic witness to her own imponderable predicament. She shook her manacled arm and felt a strange surge of affection as she realized Rachel was dying.
Suddenly, her gut seized in a series of lacerating convulsions; a maelstrom of razor-sharp images raked the inside of her head. She too was dying. Survival instinct kicked in and panic gave way to shock and then she felt almost disengaged, again, as if it were all happening to someone else. And again reality took hold and her blood turned to ice, a jagged shaft of pain fibrillated between her lungs and her throat, her jaw and teeth, behind her eyes and into her temples. The pain helped her focus. She let the light zigzag across the bulkhead beneath them and discovered, close together, the other two flashlights, both turned off. Rachel must have intentionally dropped hers, then borrowed Alexander’s to retrieve it and, instead, secured him to the wall in the darkness. Miranda had the only light. Clearly, whatever was happening, it was not important to Rachel that they see each other. If this was a tableau of death, it was to be enacted in murky obscurity.
Rachel hovered beside her, very still. Miranda looked again at her face through her mask. There was a flicker of recognition, but neither terror nor pleasure. When Rachel turned to spill the glare from the glass, Miranda could see what might have been tears, and yet her features appeared oddly serene, as if her face were slowly turning into a death mask, changing from flesh into sculptured stone.
Miranda reached for the hose with her gauges attached. Their dive had been almost thirty minutes to this point. More than half her air was gone. She would breathe slowly and eke out the rest as best she could. Then she would die. She was surprised by her own composure. There was nothing to do, there were no options. She was cold. The icy tremor along her spine was a reassuring reminder that she was still alive. She breathed slowly, inhaling long deep drafts, releasing short bursts, a bit at a time until she was depleted, and then again, slowly, and again, and again. She turned out her light. To save the batteries. She thought she would like to have light at the end.
Morgan and Peter Singh stormed into the dive shop. A chill ran through Morgan’s entire body when the young man told them three cops had gone out on their own. Grave doubts about Miranda’s safety turned to gut-wrenching fear. Without understanding the urgency, the young man scrambled to get Morgan outfitted with dive gear, not even bothering to ask for his certification, while Peter Singh, flashing his Owen Sound Police identification, commandeered a boat from a couple of startled American tourists setting out to go fishing.
“You want me to come with you?” the young diver offered, excited by the prospect.
“No,” said Morgan. “Call the OPP, tell them what’s happening. Come after us pronto.”
“I don’t really know what’s happening. Is the Coast Guard okay?”
“Do it!” said Officer Singh. “Come out in their boat. We’ll need underwater backup. Morgan, do you know what Miranda’s boat looks like?”
“Yeah, and what direction it went. Let’s go!”
They skimmed over the water in the direction they had been told. There were a number of boats in the offing. They scanned for the trawler, then Morgan realized they might easily have set out in one direction and switched course out of sight of the harbour. He gazed along the coast and in the distance could make out a boat on its own. It was a gamble. If it wasn’t them, they would waste precious time, perhaps the minutes of struggle before death. He was certain, now, that Miranda would die if they did not get to her soon. chapter eighteen
The Wreck
Miranda could feel Rachel floating in limbo at the end of their tether beneath them. She switched on her light and checked her gauges. The pressure-gauge needle was grazing the red zone. She had fewer than fifteen minutes left. She sighed into her mask. The depth gauge remained constant. She was hovering at forty-five feet, fifteen metres; the higher the better, the less air consumed. She smiled to herself, despite shivering from the cold. She struggled to remain fully aware, keeping a delicate balance between panic and shock. She gazed about in the shadowy chambers of her mind but found nothing of interest. Her life didn’t flash before her eyes. She felt cheated. She wanted to be solemn, to die with grace and dignity, but small jokes kept intruding.
She lifted her manacled wrist into the murky light in front of her mask. When she turned the flashlight beam toward herself, it was Rachel’s hand that dangled lifelessly in front of her eyes. My God, she thought, she’s dead! But she could hear the echoing rumble of her breathing beside her. She would finish her air soon. Miranda worked their joined arms around and contemplated chewing through her wrist. Better yet, chewing through Rachel’s. Is it cannibalism if you chew and don’t swallow? And what if the flesh is your own? She realized that she had not thought about why Rachel was doing this. Rachel was her friend. She couldn’t bite Rachel.
Miranda reached about, inside her skull, looking for clarity. It hadn’t occurred to her before. There was a dive knife attached to her BCD. She withdrew the knife. It was titanium with a serrated edge. She could saw off her hand. She held the knife out in front of her, then extended her wrist. She would have to cut close to the joint and pry through the cartilage and ligaments. There was no way bone would yield in the time remaining. She tried to think of how she could staunch the blood flow. Tying off a tourniquet might be possible with her remaining hand. She had nothing to use, no accessible strap except for her weight belt and if she removed that, she would soar upwards and maybe be pinioned against the steel overhead. Possibly she could jam the bleeding stump into her BCD harness and bind against it, but then could she swim with sufficient dexterity to avoid getting hung up on or torn apart by twisted railings and shear metal edges?
She could feel Rachel shift her position. She grasped the knife more firmly, afraid Rachel might try to interfere, but then she realized Rachel was leaning down and away and she suddenly grasped what was happening. Even as she felt the clasp of rigid steel around her ankle, she knew it was too late. Rachel had drawn another pair of cuffs from her bag and secured Miranda’s ankle to the same iron rail she had shackled herself to Miranda opened her fingers and let the knife slip away. It hit the steel beneath them with a resonant twang. She twitched at the finality of the sound. She shone her light down on Alexander Pope. When the beam caught his eyes, his mask suddenly burst into an explosive balloon of wasted air that immediately expired, drawing a thin stream of bubbles in its wake, and then only a few random beads trickled from his gaping mouth as the mouthpiece fell uselessly into the darkness. Miranda turned her light out, shaken to witness his death, desperate to isolate herself from his hovering body.
The two women swung this way and that, as if they were caught in a haphazard current, but the movement came from their bodies turning gently together against the pain of their manacled ankles. They crashed lightly against a looming bulkhead, tanks clanging, and drifted away, twisting slowly, crashing again. Reverberations like the sound of shook metal filled the room, flooded her head. Miranda, irritated, manoeuvred until they were still, binding against the pain where the cuffs bit into her flesh. She felt Rachel running a hand up the back of her neck. Miranda flinched, realizing it was a gesture of affection. They would die with their bodies conjoined in an enduring embrace.
By the time their commandeered boat pulled alongside the trawler with Peter Singh at the helm, Morgan had set up his regulator and tank, which was large and heavy, attached them to his BCD, and was in his thick wetsuit, with boots and fins on, no gloves — he had come without gloves. Peter tied off to the other boat, then assisted Morgan with the weight belt and gear. Morgan pressed the mouthpiece between his lips and took a test breath.
“Okay,” he said, backing against the gunnel so he could flip over into the water as he had done on Easter Island. “Do you see their bubbles?”
“What bubbles?” Peter handed Morgan his mask, which he had thoughtfully spit in and rinsed, as he understood from the movies was required. He then began tugging at the BCD fasteners with meticulous care.
“Damn it, Peter, stop fussing. Look around. There should be bubbles breaking the surface.”
“I don’t see anything, Morgan. The water’s like glass, there’s nothing.”
“Damn it,” Morgan repeated. “Sit tight, I’ll be back.”
“I hope so,” said Peter as Morgan clasped mask to face, regulator to his mouth, and sprawled backward head over heels, disappearing under the surface, leaving his own trail of bubbles behind him.
Morgan dropped uncomfortably fast; he was wearing too much weight. He struggled to get his fins underneath him so that he could slow his descent. Once he had a chance to pop his ears, he looked around, descending through layers of pain, repeatedly blowing into his pinched nose to equalize the pressure in his head. Below him was the wreck, standing clear on its side in the cold pristine water. When he settled heavily to the bottom beside the hull, he unclasped his weight belt and slid one of the lead weights off, dropping it among the rocks, at the same time remembering that his BCD was a flotation vest attached to his air tank, which he could have inflated with a few bursts of air to slow his freefall descent. He gave a brief squeeze to the inflator button and levitated, hovering uneasily just off the bottom. His training was recent; this gear was unfamiliar but the procedures were the same. He deflated a brief burst and sank, then inflated again until he achieved neutral buoyancy.
Even while feeling a certain satisfaction at attaining weightlessness, horror mounted as he realized he had seen no air columns rising while on his way down. The water was freezing against his hands and the exposed flesh of his face, but there was an almost tropical clarity. As he turned a slow pirouette, gazing out in all directions, he saw no sign of their bubbles. Fluttering gently up and over the ship, he looked for bubble traces indicating the divers were inside. Or, if they were, would their exhalations be trapped? He swam the length of the upper side, passing along a series of portholes midship, and down over a gaping hole at the ship’s waterline mark, just off the front quarter.
He decided to make another methodical sweep along the uppermost side of the hull. He had turned icily calm after breathing far too heavily, consuming valuable air at a reckless rate. Maybe they had decided wreck-diving was too dangerous. Maybe they were having a recreational tour close by, with no nefarious intent. He would stay close, assuming they would come back to the mooring line before surfacing. Their air must be running low. How strange it will seem, as Miranda swims by, to see me.
Morgan drifted around the stern and back over the upper deck that slanted at a precarious angle against the lucent horizon, gazing in all directions into the distant opacity, searching for movement.
He glanced down as he passed over a row of portholes and caught in one what he took to be a spear of sunlight cast by the prism of a wave overhead. With a slight acceleration he coasted back down over the portholes before passing on to examine the breach in the hull gaping ahead. He directed the beam of his light into the dark cavity in the ship’s side.
They must have surfaced — their air supply would be depleted by now. Suddenly, he heard a sharp metallic clanking reverberate from the darkness inside the hull. It was impossible to determine the direction of its source. He remembered the flash against glass like a shaft of sunlight. There were no waves overhead. He withdrew from the cavernous shadow where he had been hovering, bewildered by the sound, and swam back along the side of the ship.
Miranda flashed her light against the glass of the middle porthole and it glared back in a mirror image of their watery crypt. Alarmed by the image, she dowsed the light. And yet several times she repeated the sequence, mesmerized by how the luminescent world outside the ship was extinguished and then reappeared, as if she had transformative powers. Once, she thought a shadow passed by, but when she flashed her light it had vanished.
She inhaled in slow, shallow breaths and slowly exhaled, tilting her head and watching the bubbles rise in front of her mask and gather against the bulkhead above. She switched on her flashlight with the beam directed downwards to soften the glare, and turned her head to see if Rachel was alive. Rachel stared out at her with what Miranda perceived as serenity. Miranda’s eyelids dropped interrogatively.
What had Alexander done to deserve such a miserable death? How had Miranda so completely misunderstood their relationship? What terrible things swarmed through a mind driven to murders so contrived and cruel and seemingly arbitrary — without even the satisfaction of knowing her victims understood? Perhaps that is the point, Miranda thought: love as a prelude to death, a prologue to absolute power. Some things are beyond understanding.
Or perhaps Alexander understood his own death. Surely Rachel understood hers. And understanding for Miranda was not important — it would neither console nor redeem, and it would not compensate. Dead is dead. She felt life surge inside her and for the briefest moment she was angry, but anger made her colder. She tried to think of sunlight and fires. But when warmth began to creep through her body, she knew hypothermia was setting in as she shivered in spasms.
Rachel twisted their manacled wrists, and grasped Miranda’s hand. She gave it a slow and gentle squeeze — what might have been intended as a meaningful gesture. Miranda turned her light directly on Rachel. Rachel gave an almost imperceptible shrug, then took her mouthpiece from her mouth and held it up over her head.
There was a sudden rush of bubbles, then nothing. Her air was gone. She shrugged again, but instead of inhaling water she seemed to be holding her breath, as if she were determined to be in control to the end, to die by asphyxiation rather than drowning.
Miranda’s mask was filling with water, rising above her nostrils and splashing into her eyes. She felt panic tighten inside her. She took a slow breath and, tilting her head upward, exhaled through her nose, feeling the precious air stream out the top of her mask, driving the invasive water with it. Her mask cleared and the panic subsided.
She drew Rachel close. Reaching down to her side she freed up her octopus, which was tangled with her primary regulator hose, and pressed the auxiliary mouthpiece against Rachel’s pursed lips. After a moment of resistance, Rachel opened her mouth and grasped it between her teeth, but seemed not to breathe. Calmly, Miranda reached over and pressed the diaphragm on the front of the reg, forcing a burst of air into Rachel’s mouth. Rachel took a deep involuntary breath and began to hyperventilate. Miranda pressed against Rachel’s chest with her hand, urging her to slow down. They would share her air to the end. Miranda did not want to die alone. But she would prolong the process as long as possible. She would savour every last moment of consciousness.
Morgan swooped down on three portholes that had deliberately been scraped clean of algae from the inside. He tried to peer in but could see nothing. Grasping a steel flange with his fingertips, he pressed his flashlight against the glass to eliminate the reflection. He was sure there were human-shaped forms in the shadowy darkness. He banged on the window but there was no response. He turned and swam back to the breach in the hull, plunged into the depths of the ship, and was swallowed whole, with only the thread of his light beam to draw him through the bizarre angles of darkness.
Miranda drew in her last full breath and held it until her lungs burst and the residual air spewed out in a violent shudder. Her flashlight was on. She looked into Rachel’s mask, surprised to see fear in her final moment. She shone the light around their murky prison, calmly conscious of inscribing in her mind her final perceptions. Overhead, there was a pearly sheen where their exhaled air had gathered against the steel. She reached up and discovered she could break the surface and her fingers disappeared into a shallow pocket of air. She leaned down and drew Rachel toward her, then stretched upwards, kicking against the cuff around her ankle, forcing it to slide along the iron rail to gain a few inches of height.
Arching her neck, her face was less than a hand’s width away from the air. When she grasped to cup air with her hand, it slipped through her fingers. She needed to press into the pocket with her lips. Her mask hit steel, she tore it off and stretched again, until she could feel the flesh of her ankle break open against the restraining shackle. Still beyond reach. She dipped her fingertips into the eerily beautiful opalescence and pulled back to watch as it broke like shattered mercury. Her mind wavered; carbon dioxide tore into the walls of her lungs and trachea and larynx with innumerable edges; her chest and windpipe collapsed in a paroxysm of agony.
As her mask drifted away, Miranda felt the snorkel attached to its band brush against her leg. She grabbed down at it, but it slipped from her reach. Dropping her flashlight, she tore Rachel’s mask from her face and, after releasing the snorkel, let her mask drop as well. With a jarring heave she tried to twist the stiff plastic into a straight shaft. Briefly asphyxia took hold and her vision flashed black. She stopped, she clasped the snorkel with her manacled hand, reached out, groping, found Rachel’s knife, grasped the release, squeezed, turned the razor-sharp edge against the plastic, incised around the shaft a continuous line. The knife slipped from her fingers. Struggling to remain conscious, she twisted the snorkel with all her remaining strength. It refused, shivered, gave way, the valve end detached and slipped into the murk beneath them.
Miranda pressed the mouthpiece into her mouth and guided the sheared upper end into the pocket of air. She blew out, sucking residual air from cavities of pain to clear the shaft, and took in a slow, deep breath to replenish her screaming lungs.
She took another breath and another, then drew Rachel close, and bending away from her air supply, she pressed her lips over Rachel’s lips, forcing them open with her tongue, and blew air into Rachel’s mouth. Rachel coughed, regurgitating water into Miranda’s mouth. Miranda pulled back, and reached for another breath, then returned and blew more air into Rachel’s mouth. Her flashlight beamed from below in wavering swards above Alexander’s tethered corpse.
Morgan saw light flashing in fragments against the obscene tilt of the corridor walls. His heart racing, he surged ahead to the open door and swung into a stateroom, clattering his tank against the steel bulkhead, smashing his leg against the door frame. He doubled up in pain and lost equilibrium; he shone his light around, trying to orient himself to the bizarre angles of the room. Immediately ahead was the grotesquely contorted body of Alexander Pope. Above him, the beam shone through the swirling sediment and revealed a strange apparition of shadows and limbs.
As he rose up, he reached out and touched a leg. He recoiled as Miranda screamed into the water. He touched her again, this time not tentatively. He cast his light beam across his own face and then across hers. She had let the snorkel drop from her lips, which were open as she desperately mouthed the water. He released his mouthpiece from his own lips and thrust it between hers. She breathed deeply.
Oh, my goodness, my goodness, he thought. He reached around for his octopus regulator and exchanged it with hers. She took another deep breath and then thrust the mouthpiece out toward Rachel. Morgan grabbed it and forced it between Rachel’s lips. There was an interminable pause, then Rachel breathed on her own.
Morgan twisted slowly about and surveyed the situation. His air supply would not sustain all three for very long. Miranda was shaking from the cold but reached for his arm and gave it a tight squeeze through the wetsuit, then made the gesture of pushing him away, but without letting go. He shone his light in the water between them so that they could make eye contact. She rolled her eyes, motioning him to go up. She took the mouthpiece and handed it to Rachel, then, turning back to Morgan, she smiled and blew him an absurd underwater kiss, and gave an abrupt gesture with a jerk of her head. There was no doubt: she wanted him to leave them and save himself. Since he had found her, he understood what was happening. He must — he was here. He was her witness. She felt a great surge of warmth. She was ready.
Morgan wasn’t. He released his grip from their convoluted embrace and, handing off his mouthpiece to Miranda, he sank down to examine the handcuffs around the women’s ankles. He made a futile attempt to break them free and felt in the darkness where blood from torn flesh seeped through Miranda’s wetsuit, warming his hand as he touched her, making him suddenly realize how achingly numb his fingers were, how close to being useless.
He drifted up, took back his reg, and handing Miranda his flashlight he squirmed around to release her gear. She and Rachel were jammed so closely together, and his icy fingers were so clumsy, he could only manage to remove her tank from the back of her BCD, which, when he released it, tumbled with an echoing clang against the steel walls and floor. He struggled to keep her from drifting upward and grasped one of her hands — the other was clutching his flashlight — and pushed it violently against his own chest straps. His fingers flashed white.
She understood, and while Rachel took her turn breathing, Miranda thrust her own fingers between her teeth and, pulling to and fro, peeled off her glove, then reached down and released Morgan’s straps. She grasped at his closest hand to warm it. He pulled away, but briefly pumped it against her breast in affirmation. When he dropped his mouthpiece and pulled the octopus mouthpiece away from her, leaving them all without air while he squirmed out of his gear, she was startled, confused, but trusting. Once freed, he handed her the primary mouthpiece and, taking a deep breath from the octopus, he gave it to her for Rachel, then holding on to Miranda with one hand and clasping his gear awkwardly between his knees, he detached his tank and regulator, took another breath from the mouthpiece she held to his lips, then swung around and secured his tank against the back of her BCD. He adjusted her gear and swung around to face her. She seemed overweighted from his heavier tank but when she moved to release her weight belt, he signalled negative and gave her BCD inflator a couple of bursts to increase her buoyancy. He took another long, deep breath from the proffered reg, while clasping her bared hand for a moment in his icy grasp. The gnawing pain reassured him; the pressure of his touch made her feel like a woman blessed.
Morgan let go, intending on searching for the discarded masks in the murk swirling beneath them, and plummeted into the bulkhead below, careening against planes of steel coated with algae, thickly studded with zebra mussels, until he tumbled into Alexander Pope’s hovering corpse.
They needed masks and light. If somehow he could free them, it would be difficult to get out if they could see clearly, impossible if they couldn’t. He pulled the mask off the corpse and, reaching around blindly, he discovered one of the other masks tangled in the dead man’s floating limbs. Sliding sideways he grabbed at Miranda’s errant flashlight and looped the lanyard around his wrist. He pushed away with oxygen deprivation tearing at his lungs, and kicked upwards but was pinioned against the steel. His weights! His fingers refused to close around his weight-belt release. Grasping at Miranda and Rachel, he hauled himself upward hand over hand until he reached the air that Miranda held out for him. He drew in a deep breath and could taste her blood, or his own, in the mouthpiece. With a single tug she released his weights. The reverberations as they crashed against steel sent shivers of loneliness through both of them.
Once the masks were secure, Miranda blew hers clear of water. Rachel left hers flooded but continued regular breathing, holding the octopus mouthpiece between clenched teeth. Morgan secured Miranda’s flashlight around her wrist, took two deep breaths from the principal reg, then pressed the mouthpiece firmly between her lips, and with a quick parting squeeze on her arm he swam down and over to the door, swimming fiercely but without thrashing. If he could get outside through the hole in the hull, he was certain that he would be able to reach the surface without air.
Miranda succumbed briefly to panic when she realized what Morgan was doing. She stiffened, then slowly relaxed, and breathed deeply, calmly, for his sake as much as her own. Her one hand was still gloveless and it ached; she tried to tuck it between her legs. She tried to pee into the wetsuit and succeeded a little, but not enough to warm her hand. Morgan, one way or another, he would be back. Breathing as shallowly as she could, she struggled to comprehend what was happening. Being captive in a watery grave seemed the inevitable consequence of preceding events, yet it made no sense. Morgan finding her seemed inevitable, as well. She felt a surge of warmth.
Morgan’s lungs knotted with pain as he emerged through the breach in the hull into the pellucid water surrounding the ship. He began to exhale a steady stream of bubbles as he kicked slowly to the light, struggling desperately to control his rate of ascent, knowing instinctively that expanding air in his lungs had to be released. He was no use to Miranda if he lost consciousness or succumbed to an embolism or the bends.
As he struggled through the long ascent toward the boats overhead, his mind swarmed with imagery: fragments of banal conversation with Miranda over a thousand coffees, the headless embrace, the radiant serenity of the face when they opened the tomb, the pilgrims like wraiths in the night, the revealed frescoes on the walls of the church. The surface shimmered far overhead. Images turned into walls of black. He kicked with a great surge and in an explosion he breached, heaving for air, and thrashed in the water until Peter Singh’s arm appeared within reach, then he collapsed into himself, too exhausted to negotiate the ladder. There was no OPP boat, no Coast Guard rescue vessel, only tourist boats in the far, distant offing.
Peter Singh was distraught as he struggled to haul Morgan up onto the dive deck of the trawler. “Where is your tank? Where is Miranda? What is happening down there?”
“Where’s our backup? We need air!” Morgan doubled over to force his diaphragm against his lungs, then straightened abruptly, gasping, twisting his guts into raw knots of pain. “We need air,” he repeated. “How long was I down?”
“There are no air cylinders on the other boat. They did not bring extra. Thirty-five or forty minutes, perhaps.”
“Which?”
“I don’t know. Forty.”
“Can you see anyone coming?”
“Maybe over there. They made the same mistake we did and went the wrong way. Who is down there? Is Miranda okay?”
“No, she’s bloody not. Find the tool kit — there must be a tool box.” As he tried to suppress nausea, Morgan began to straighten and hunch over with slow deliberation, forcing his wracked body into a crude sort of bellows, pumping air into his system. Peter clambered awkwardly about the trawler, tearing open hatches and lockers, and came up with nothing. He climbed into the commandeered fishing boat and found a red tool box.
“Open it. Are there snips, shears, something to cut steel?”
Morgan windmilled his arms, trying to force blood back into his fingers. The excruciating pain was a good sign.
Peter sorted frantically through the box and came up with a rusted pair of cable cutters.
“Good man!” Morgan yelled. “Bring them here.”
As he rushed back, Peter stumbled. The cutters skittered across the deck. Morgan lunged for them from the dive platform, tried to wrap his unbending fingers around the blades as they clattered against the gunnel, spontaneously releasing his grasp as they cut open his palm, and watched them slip through the scuppers into the water.
He scrambled to his feet, heaving to take in as much air as he could, and dove after them, sliding his mask into place in mid-air. He kicked savagely to keep the cutters in sight and watched them clank against the hull directly below and slide down past the hole in the wreck’s side to the rocky bottom. He could feel his ears throb like bolts of hot steel hammering into his head, he continued his descent, his eyes fixed on the small twist of shadow where the cutters had come to rest. His ears popped explosively, and his vision blurred from the pain, then his eyes came back into focus. He was past the dark opening in the hull. He reached down and managed to clutch the cutters between his frozen hands.
He rose to the gaping hole in the ship’s side, unclipped his flashlight, and let its beam lead the way. Within the first chamber he was momentarily disoriented, then found his way through. Careening in slow motion off the angled planes of the corridor, he surged along its length toward the open doorway.
Miranda could see flashes of light and, by their erratic pattern, knew Morgan was on his own. She had recovered her composure, despite shivering bitterly, cold to the bone. She was breathing carefully, ensuring that Rachel was breathing as well. The light beam faltered, stayed ominously still. Dread overwhelmed her. She wrenched violently against the handcuffs on her wrist and ankle, shifting to bang the tank on her back against a bulkhead, sending a thunderous metallic clang resonating through the ship’s interior.
The light began to move again. Morgan flailed with his fins against the wall of water behind him and soared ahead, curving through the door and up beside Miranda in a single, violent motion, grabbing at the mouthpiece from her outstretched hand, jamming it between his teeth, wavering into unconsciousness. Miranda shone her light at him. His eyes were glazed, he wasn’t breathing. She reached out and pressed the diaphragm on the reg, forcing precious air into his mouth. He didn’t respond, and she punched him hard on the chest. He gave a sharp intake of water and air, spat the mouthpiece out, sputtered, and when she replaced it between his lips he drew sweet air deeply into his lungs.
Miranda took a few breaths from Rachel’s reg, then returned it. Rachel was compliant but disinterested. Morgan offered Miranda the cutters — she had to pry open his fingers to get them. She took them and grasped the steel links between the blades. With a seesaw motion of her free hand, she worked away, stopping periodically to breathe from the octopus, feeling the blades etch into the steel of the cuffs. Morgan tried to take over but could not get a grasp. Miranda resumed cutting. Suddenly, the steel snapped. Miranda withdrew her wrist in a sudden motion.
Morgan took the cutter, took a shallow breath, and dropped down to work away at Miranda’s ankle cuff. He reached twice for air from the mouthpiece she held down to him, and in his third attempt, he gave a mighty heave and the steel broke, setting Miranda free.
Checking to be sure Rachel had a good grasp on her mouthpiece, Miranda handed off her own mouthpiece to Morgan. Prying the cutters from his frozen fingers she began working through Rachel’s ankle cuff, taking occasional shallow breaths from Morgan, knowing her exertion was increasing consumption of their last few minutes or seconds of air. Morgan tried to help but she pushed him away. He was barely conscious, his body still depleted and wracked with pain. She would get him out of here, even if they had to leave Rachel behind.
Everything was upside down. Her heartbeat pounded in her temples; vertigo threatened with nausea, bile, blurring vision. She tried to focus on steel against steel, rocking the blades in a severing motion until suddenly there was an abrupt snap — the cutters fell apart in her hands.
Miranda swung upright and tugged the octopus mouthpiece from Rachel’s mouth. She needed the air. She needed to manoeuvre. With Morgan shining the light on Rachel’s ankle, Miranda braced against the steel wall with one leg and with the other jammed against Rachel’s leg she grasped the cuff in both hands and concentrated all her diminished strength on the cleft in the steel. There was a long moment of unspeakable pain as the steel cut into the flesh of her hands and the water clouded red with her blood. The steel snapped and Miranda careened into Alexander’s tangled embrace.
Breaking free from the hoses and limbs, she grasped upward, found her dangling regulator, drew a single breath as she ascended, and put the mouthpiece back into Rachel’s mouth. Morgan handed her his. She drew in deeply; there was a rattle and smack as her cheeks collapsed into themselves. Their air supply had expired.
Morgan slid down against the wall as if he were going to take a rest. Miranda pushed against him then swam through the door and drew him abruptly behind her. In the corridor, she turned and, grasping him by the hair, she shook his head violently. He rocked briefly askew, then, righting himself, motioned her to go first. Miranda pushed him past her and reached back for Rachel, drawing her forward. Morgan had dropped his flashlight and she lost hers in the tumble after Rachel’s manacle gave way. Rachel had retrieved hers from where she had dropped it — her first wilful act in the last quarter hour — and while its beam flashed erratically as she swam it gave them enough light until they entered the dim aura emanating from the hole through the hull. Prodding Morgan from behind and hauling Rachel after her, Miranda engineered their slow progress through the last of the darkness out into the open.
Morgan drifted free from the hull. Miranda grasped the rough steel edge and tried to pull Rachel through. Rachel twisted to the side and Miranda lost her. Miranda could feel her lungs imploding, her heart thudding frantically. She turned to retrieve her grip on Rachel, but Rachel kicked away and slowly receded into the darkness. For an instant Miranda thought of going after. Morgan was drifting in a stupor toward the rocky bottom, gazing back at her with a vacant stare through his mask, which was filled almost to eye level with water. She turned again and peered into the ship’s gaping interior. She saw Rachel move against a shimmer of light and then disappear.
Miranda swooped down to Morgan with a single kick. She still had a tiny reserve of oxygen in her system. She placed her lips over his, prodded between them with her tongue as she had done for Rachel, and expelled a few precious gulps of air into his mouth. He took in the air but did not respond, and settled like a dead weight to the bottom. Miranda shook him and released. If she did not start now, she would never make it to the surface. Instinctively, she kicked away, but then arced around on herself and grasped Morgan under the arms, trying to pull him away from the bottom. As she hauled Morgan roughly against her breast, she could feel the abrasive material of her BCD scraping the back of the hand that was still bare. She squeezed the BCD against her body, responding to its thickness. She had taken in a few extra bursts of air to compensate for the increased weight when Morgan had given her his tank. Reaching along the inflator hose, she grasped the valve with aching fingers and thrust it awkwardly between distended lips, pressing the deflate button. A rush of air surged into her mouth. She took a deep breath. It tasted foul but sent brilliant lights dazzling in front of her eyes as freshened blood coursed through her body.
She thrust the valve between Morgan’s bruised lips and pressed the deflator button again. Nothing. She squeezed the BCD material against her body and watched air stream from his gaping mouth, then his lips closed and she could see him struggle to breathe. She shifted within the constraints of her vest to free up her weight belt and let it drop among the rocks, giving herself a little more air. She took the deflator valve, drew a trickle of air deep into her lungs, then passed it back, and pressed the button. A brief burst trickled from the sides of his mouth, then nothing was left.
Without weights, they were beginning to drift across the bottom. She drew Morgan to her breast and emptied her lungs into his mouth. Turning him to face away from her, she grasped him under one armpit, pushed with a surge against the rocks, and began to swim toward the two boats overhead, kicking with all her strength and pulling against the frigid water with her free arm while Morgan, when he remembered where they were, fluttered his fins, trying to help as he passed in and out of consciousness.
As she concentrated on keeping Morgan in her grip, focused on their upward ascent, Miranda felt lethal waves of euphoria sweep through her. She forced herself to think. Rachel was dead. She knew they would find her body with Alexander, their bodies entwined in a miserable reprise of the eternal embrace — one final dramatic tableau of inspired depravity. It would be the fulfillment of Rachel’s desire, although with the wrong partner. Rachel wanted to share death with Miranda and be free at last of her demon lovers. Miranda was sure of that. Nothing was certain. Nothing was sometimes enough.
I hope we live, she thought. He’ll owe me,
The shimmering surface spread above them like an enveloping shroud. Blood pounded inside Miranda’s head with deafening urgency — suddenly drowned out by an unmistakable roaring. Instinctively, she cringed downward as the hull of another boat slid to an abrupt halt immediately overhead. With a last surge of energy, she pulled Morgan off to the side, then reached desperately upward toward the dive platform. A hand grasped her wrist.
Peter Singh and two OPP officers in full scuba gear dragged both of them onto the trawler deck.
“Miranda,” Peter exclaimed in a tremulous voice. “You are rescued. You can release Morgan now.” He tried to pull her hand away but she would not relinquish her grip. When he pried her fingers free so the OPP medic could look after him, she rolled on her side and grasped a handful of his hair.
“Miranda,” said Peter Singh. “It is all right now, you are rescued. Please release Detective Morgan.” He made an incomprehensible gesture of flinging his open palms into the air.
She tightened her grip.
“Damn it, Miranda,” Morgan gasped in a faraway voice. “That hurts like hell.”
She rolled closer so their faces almost touched. Their noses were running with mucus and blood, their eyes were raw, their lips bruised. Her hands were weeping blood from where the steel had cut into her palms; Morgan’s hands bled from being sliced when he grabbed at the cutters. She smiled. Stigmata. Morgan understood; he struggled to keep her in focus, his ears throbbed. He smiled back.
“Hi,” she whispered.
“Told you we’d dive together.” He couldn’t hear his own words over the roar of his blood beating against the inside of his skull.
“Yeah.”
“Thanks, buddy.” His smile broadened into an awkward grin.
“You too. Buddy.”
He closed his eyes.
Miranda watched as he drifted into pain-free unconsciousness. His smile faded and his face relaxed as he seemed to turn into a little boy.
She opened her own eyes wide, brown and green and golden in the slanting sunlight, which seemed to wash the rawness and the red away, then shut them and held them closed as she picked out the familiar sounds of her partner’s breathing against the din of rescue activities all around them.