For the next two weeks, Miranda and Morgan scanned missing-persons files, tracked down false leads, and despite an absence of DNA records, eventually established probable identities. They found that neither of the deceased had any connection with the derelict house, and no relationship with each other. The cause of their deaths had not been precisely determined, nor, due to their mummified condition, could the exact time of their demise be established, especially since both were missing for some time before anyone noticed. The man was a traveller from the States, and no one at his home office even knew he was in Toronto. He had an ex-wife who wasn’t aware of his absence until a postdated cheque failed to be honoured, and who was the beneficiary of his modest insurance policy. He was Jewish and had never been associated with the Masonic Order. The woman was a fourth-year student at York University, ominously majoring in anthropology. She was from Liverpool, estranged from her family, had recently emerged from a dishevelled relationship with another woman, and was a Mormon, not Catholic as the crucifix implied. Her former girlfriend, an agnostic, was shocked by her death.
The papers ran with the Hogg’s Hollow murders for a couple of days. Television coverage lasted only a few hours. When it turned out the dead were not actually lovers, the news media, following their prime directive to entertain, shifted attention to more accessible crimes and misdemeanours, where the blood was still warm and death was a thrill. The public appetite for horror was fickle. Without romance to keep the blood flowing, the story had the lasting power of a horror film, forgotten half way home from the theatre. It was as if the grisly events had actually occurred in the colonial past. They might have sustained interest for history buffs and the occasional misdirected forensic anthropologist, but otherwise seemed of likely concern only to police assigned to the case.
Miranda and Rachel Naismith became friends. One day when they were off duty they drove out to Port Hope in Miranda’s Jaguar. Lunching in a family restaurant on Walton Street that had booth-side jukeboxes and grey-flecked tables and served real raisin pie, they felt the time-warped atmosphere bode well for their intended visit to Alexander Pope. They were both fascinated by the man’s capacity to represent himself as being from an era that never quite was. Port Hope was the perfect setting for an adventure through time, straddling as it did so many periods in its diverse architecture and casual gentility.
The downtown area was Ontario vernacular, shorn of the garish paraphernalia of twentieth-century merchandising. Three- to five-storey red-brick buildings hovered close to the street, interspersed with the occasional civic edifice of quarried stone. Victorian cornices and casements, pediments and paint — all were revealed in parochial splendour, celebrating the town’s pride in its historical past and aesthetic present.
Driving a circuitous route to Pope’s place on the outskirts, Miranda and Rachel shared their admiration for old houses, from modest mansions topped with widow’s walks to painted-brick cottages tucked behind white picket fences. Most of the older homes bespoke a lovely merging of civic responsibility, architectural self-consciousness, and horticultural vanity. It occurred to Miranda as they drove past a well-kempt cemetery that even the dead in Port Hope maintained decorum.
As curiosity began to seem an exercise in delayed gratification, they veered away from the town and after ten minutes of exhilarating lakeshore landscape they turned into a long driveway and drove up a hill to Alexander Pope’s fine old house, which was set in brooding isolation behind a shrouding of foliage. The building itself was a marvel of austere congeniality on the outside, and conveyed the promise of esoteric pleasures within.
Waiting at the door on the side porch, which was partially enclosed as a shed, Miranda stared into the shadows beside them. There was what appeared to be the entrance to a wood-fired sauna. A stack of dry maple firewood. Various tools for gardening and building. A chainsaw. She felt the thrill of connection on seeing a couple of compressed-air tanks leaning against the wall.
He’s a diver, she thought.
Alexander Pope was a man of wide-ranging pursuits, as well as of arcane skills, esoteric knowledge, eccentric apparel, awkward charm, and stellar lineage.
She was going to mention the scuba gear to Rachel but something in the other woman’s muted excitement made her keep silent. The two of them were like teenagers calling on the mysterious boy in the big house who had just moved into the neighbourhood. When the inner door opened, they breathed deeply in unison, as if something magnificent were about to occur.
Alexander greeted them through the storm door like old friends. He recognized them instantly and invited them in. After brief chatter he gave them a tour of the house. He identified old locks, small cabinets, hinges, and latches, and with unexpected candour he showed them how to distinguish original sideboards and dressers and tables from reconstructions. He showed them replicas he had himself contrived, with meticulous attention to detail. Even hidden joints, places, and materials never meant to be seen, bore the artisan’s signature devotion to successful dissembling.
Since the surrounding grounds were too soggy from the spring thaw to be negotiated, he explained the exterior of the house while they sat in front of the kitchen fire. He described how the Georgian lines were so well-served by painted wood siding made to represent ashlar blocks, which came to light when the layers of clapboard and aluminum had been peeled away.
On the outside, restoration had been scrupulously governed by Pope’s desire for authenticity. Inside, he had taken liberties, moving or eliminating walls to achieve an airy yet intricate effect that allowed him copious wall space against which to display his country furniture.
All in all, Alexander Pope seemed to have eliminated the Victorian era. Everything around him had been made by, or honoured, the settlers from the Old World and up from the States who displaced native inhabitants in the area, or was unabashedly contemporary. The lighting was modern, not tacky reproductions of old lanterns and lamps, the plumbing and appliances were not coyly disguised. The panes in his twelve-over-twelve windows were rippled with age, although the glass had been set into newly built versions of old frames.
They sat on ladder-back chairs — brought up during the Revolution by United Empire Loyalists — at a harvest table from Ile d’Orleans before the fall of New France, with the robust patina of a dozen generations etched deeply into its broad, blackened boards, and drank instant coffee. It was better than Rachel’s, Miranda thought, but not much. How can you ruin instant coffee? Perhaps it was never meant to be endlessly boiled.
Alexander Pope asked Miranda for a progress report on the Hogg’s Hollow investigation, affecting a gravitas that Miranda found curiously winsome. Rachel laughed at him. He seemed not to notice. After eliciting particulars that from his perspective were extraneous, such as the identity of the victims and the finer points of their execution, he let the matter drop, cracked open a bottle of cooking sherry, and they spent the rest of the afternoon talking antiques.
Several times the possibility of murder as an art form arose, invariably embedded in a historical context, and drifted away amid talk of aesthetics and artifice, antiquities and architecture. They might have been in another time, or out of time entirely. It was a most pleasant occasion, thought Miranda as they drove back to Toronto, each woman silently savouring what they had shared.
The Port Hope foray occurred on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. Morgan had mysteriously taken his leave a couple of days earlier. He would only admit to a return date, later the following week. Miranda guessed he was heading south. The Cayman Islands, perhaps. That’s where she had gone scuba diving several years back, living aboard a dive boat and earning Open Water and Advanced PADI certification. He had subsequently promised he would dive with her some day, although she wouldn’t have held him to it. Knowing Morgan, she suspected he had snuck off to learn on his own so that he could keep up with her.
The visit to Alexander Pope was in some way related to her partner’s absence, she suspected, although it had arisen in conversation with Rachel as simply a fun thing to do. She could not remember which of them first brought it up, but they had both taken it on as a pilgrimage — not to the man, but for the sake of the lovely odd values and grace he embodied.
Back at her desk the next week, Miranda was still annoyed with Morgan. The autopsy reports finally came in: they suggested both victims had died from a profound breakdown of the autonomic system, in all probability by protracted exposure to heat without adequate hydration — symptoms, according to the medical examiner’s report, consistent with a slow death in the central Sahara.
Miranda shuddered. She phoned the medical examiner’s office and asked for Ellen Ravenscroft.
“I enjoyed the report,” she said. “Nice prose style; a touch ornate.”
“Which report would that be, love?”
“The Sahara Desert. That was good.”
“It was a particularly trying job. Onerous, very onerous. Have you ever been to Guanahuato?”
“Where?”
“Guanahuato. It’s in Mexico. No, I don’t suppose you have.”
Miranda wondered why she had called.
“They put bodies on display in the Museo de los Mommias. There’s a natural mummifying effect from the sand where the townspeople bury their dead. If no one pays the cemetery fees, after ten years the bodies are disinterred. The interesting ones go into the museum, the others are tossed out. It’s electrifying, walking among them.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Curiosity, love — about the poor sods who maintain the exhibit. Can you imagine working there? Like being a coroner’s apprentice without the autopsies. I’m not much interested in a replenishing stock of dried-out corpses scavenged from reusable graves, despite my choice of professions, but when I was prying through the insides of your closeted lovers I couldn’t help thinking about the state-employed ghouls of Guanahuato. You should visit sometime. They have an annual Cervantes festival.”
“They weren’t lovers.”
“No, I expect they weren’t. We found traces of mould on the male’s skin. He’d been processed and placed on hold for a while before she came along. The poor thing had none on her at all, so they were probably encrypted as soon as she was prepared. Anyway, love, as I was working I recalled Guanahuato, bodies arranged for morbid amusement. It’s a form of play, Miranda. Playing with the dead. Your killer is a fatalist with a warped appreciation for the absurdity of the human condition. Let’s make death perform — it performs. You’re looking for someone utterly lacking in empathy, someone who has an impoverished emotional life, inflexible religious beliefs, or none at all, and a fecund imagination.”
“Thank you, Detective Inspector Ravenscroft. And the Sahara?”
“That was for colour. Guanahuato wouldn’t have worked. You know why? I’ll tell you why. Neither of your lovers was dead before the process of mummification began!”
“Oh, Christ!”
“A killer with a mind like the mind of God. You know the fall from Eden is all about making us live out our lives, knowing we’re dying from the moment of conception. Not that I believe all that. Not the religious part. I’d say your murders are virtually incomprehensible from a mortal perspective. But so is life.” She paused. “Medical examiners carry on conversations with the dead, you know. We’re filled with deep thoughts. Let’s get together. I hear Morgan’s deserted you.”
“He’ll be back next week. I’ll call.”
“Do.”
“Bye.”
Miranda had no intention of calling, and Ellen Ravenscroft had no expectation that she would. Somehow, Morgan as an issue of playful contention between them had opened a minor rift. It was not so much that Miranda wanted Morgan as her lover — she was pretty sure she did not. But she did not want the medical examiner to have him, either. Miranda at her desk was an uncommon sight. Superintendent Alex Rufalo noted her presence, looked at his watch, and chortled to himself. With Morgan away, she was spending more visible time in the office. Usually the two of them were off by themselves — freelancing, he called it; working the field. You never knew when they might turn up, day or night.
Aware of being watched, Miranda caught Rufalo’s eye and smiled with what she imagined was non-invasive congeniality. She didn’t want to pry but she wanted him to know she was there, if he needed her. Nurturing be damned, she thought, and went back to work. She was reading Morgan’s inspired version of the Hogg’s Hollow murders.
Rachel Naismith leaned against Miranda’s desk, waiting to be noticed. She was in street clothes and carried a small pack or knapsack, as well as a purse. Miranda was intent on Morgan’s account, which he had written up for her benefit as if it were a piece for The New Yorker. Without taking her eyes from the page, she said, “He writes more like Truman Capote than Dashiell Hammett.”
“Are you talking to me?” Rachel responded. “Are you talking to me?”
“Yeah,” said Miranda, sitting back in her chair. “He’d hate that. He’d much rather be Dashiell Hammett. How long have you been standing there?”
“Awhile. How long did you know I was watching?”
“Awhile. It’s Morgan’s report. He writes really well, but it’s not exactly police-appropriate.”
“You gonna change it? Do you want to go for a drink?”
“Yeah. This’ll wait. The superintendent has other things on his mind.”
“A messed-up marriage.”
“Do you know him?” she said, glancing through Rufalo’s door. “How do you know that?”
“He smiled at me,” said Rachel. “He never smiles at uniformed officers. Not at the women.”
“You’re kidding.”
“So, what I figure, he’s got woman problems, he’s in the wrong, he’s compensating, trying to prove to himself he’s not a chauvinist double-pig.”
“Double?”
“He’s a cop.”
“How sixties. You’re not in uniform now — ”
“So he doesn’t recognize me, which proves my point!”
“It does?”
“He’s a man.”
“He’s a good man. A bit of a prick, but a good man,” she said in a whisper. “His wife’s a lawyer.”
“I heard.”
“So, let’s go for a drink. This case is giving me the creeps.”
“Weird, eh?”
“I feel like I’m in the middle of a play by Samuel Beckett, trying to make out what’s going on in the audience.” She liked that — the turn of phrase, a Morgan-like inversion. She wondered if he was diving.
“I played Estragon in a school production of Waiting for Godot.”
“Some school,” said Miranda.
“Some play. We had a great teacher. She insisted that if you know what the play means, you’ve ruined the play. She’d say things like that. To understand is to misunderstand. She was a superannuated hippy on the verge of retirement. It was funny and sad, and I never knew what the play was about, not even now.”
“The fine line between madness and genius…”
“There’s no line at all. Let’s get outta here.”
When Miranda woke up, Rachel was naked in bed beside her. Without lifting her head, and with only one eye open, Miranda surveyed the situation. They were lying on top of the covers. Rachel was facing her, her head on the other pillow; she opened her eyes and smiled.
“G’morning, Detective.”
Without saying anything, Miranda got up and went into the bathroom. She sat on the toilet with her arms propped on her knees and cradled her head between her hands. She was mildly hungover.
Rachel stood in the doorway, legs akimbo, arms folded beneath her breasts. Miranda looked up, smiled sheepishly. She had never been with a woman.
With calming deliberation, her eyes traced Rachel’s body, starting at the long toes and slowly rising, exploring the deep colour of the woman’s skin, sliding up past her trim ankles, knees, hard thighs, delving into the folds between her legs accentuated by the soft curly fringe of glistening hair, rising over her taunt stomach, her gently articulated ribcage and diaphragm, lingering on the sullen precocity of her small breasts, rising past her collarbone, which gleamed ebony through her skin, up the long neck to her chin, the full lips, the fine broad nose, the deep-set gleaming eyes, her face surrounded by a thick fringe of sleek, black hair. Is this woman my lover, she wondered?
Neither demure nor provocative, Rachel let Miranda survey her body. She said nothing. After a few moments she rose to her toes, lifting her entire form into an alluring and yet innocent pose, and slowly, softly, began to laugh. Miranda glanced away in embarrassment, then looked back, catching the vulnerability and strength in her eyes, and began to laugh herself. Two naked women, one sitting on a toilet, the other holding a statuesque pose. Miranda did not know where to go from there so she began to pee. This took them both to the edge of hysteria.
“Hurry up,” said Rachel. “Now I’ve gotta go, too.”
“Use the shower,” said Miranda. “Don’t be shy, girl.”
Their laughter died out as Rachel stepped into the shower and closed the door, turned on the water, squealed until the hot water came through, and began to sing in such a low voice, the words and melody were inaudible.
Miranda brushed her teeth, handed a spare toothbrush over the shower door to Rachel, and after a few minutes Rachel opened the door and drew her in beside her. They began to soap each other with gentle exploratory gestures. Miranda wondered if perhaps the night before had been a prelude: she could summon only a vague recollection of sensuous well-being.
Rachel turned Miranda away and worked a lather on her back, then reached around with soapy hands to cup her breasts against her palms. Miranda relaxed against her and gazing down admired how fingers against flesh gleamed ebony and alabaster in the streaming water. One of Rachel’s hands slid lower and her fingers splayed across the curls of Miranda’s pubic hair, squeezing rivulets of foamy subs, but did not descend further between her legs, making no proprietorial assumptions. Miranda turned and surprised herself by arching away to hold Rachel’s breasts one at a time, gently caressing them with suds.
Fascinated by her own lack of inhibition, she let her arms drop to rest against Rachel’s hips and leaned forward, their bodies gently touching. Rachel’s breasts pressed softly against Miranda’s, which were a little heavier and, despite their similar heights, a little lower, and pressed into Rachel’s diaphragm; they stood like that with the water streaming over them, passively rinsing. Their lips brushed against each other, foreheads touched, they tilted their heads to the side as if to kiss. Each cocked a leg slightly, pudenda pressed warmly against the upper thigh of the other. They did not move, feeling the intimate warmth of the pressure. They did not kiss. Somewhere in the mind of each there was the ambiguous image of Rodin’s sculpture, and the remnants of last evening’s discussion about undecidability in the works of Samuel Beckett.
Suddenly, the water went cold. They leapt from the shower, giggling, jostling each other through the narrow stall door. They did not dry each other off. Both realized their moment of intimacy had passed.
After Rachel left for work, wearing borrowed panties under yesterday’s clothes, Miranda went back to bed. Gradually, she remembered sitting around in the living room drinking Bloody Marys after leaving the pub. She recalled how natural it had seemed, with Rachel staying over, the two of them walking into the bedroom, stripping to the buff like girls at camp, and climbing side by side into bed. Some time during the night they must have kicked off the covers.
Her hangover didn’t amount to much but she was tired. She might have slept fitfully, being naked in bed with another woman. She was not in the least upset about compromised sexuality. She had no idea whether Rachel Naismith was a lesbian, or whether she herself was unexpectedly bisexual. Time would reveal all that. She was curious more than anything else. Miranda was comfortable with her own sexuality, if not with sex itself. If only she could get them together — sex and sexuality. She wondered if it were possible.
She remembered sunbathing beside the mill race near Waldron, the village where she grew up. She remembered the shadow of a man looming over her. The rest she forgot until he reappeared in her life, twenty years later, driving a Jaguar. The girl in the closet had a story of her own. But she died. Miranda could refuse to remain a victim; she could not.
They had talked late into the night, Miranda and Rachel. After meandering up Yonge Street, past shop after shop catering to bizarre sexual, psychic, and spiritual proclivities and the occasional outlet for mundane necessities like toilet paper and party balloons, they had found an anonymous trattoria and settled in for a surprisingly bad dinner with a nondescript bottle of wine. Afterward they each had a shot of grappa, courtesy of the owner.
Halfway back to Miranda’s place, Rachel realized she had left her pack behind. When they returned to the restaurant, the proprietor was waiting inside the door with the pack in hand. He had not tried to call after her — maybe he had discovered it too late — but he was visibly pleased to find her in his debt.
“Officer,” he proclaimed. “This is yours.”
“I know it’s mine, paisano. Did you find anything in it of interest?”
“Your uniform. That’s how I knew it was yours.”
“Or how you knew I was a cop.”
“Yes, one of those two. Ciao, ladies. Good night.”
As they walked along Isabella Street, Rachel argued persuasively that the man was a former Mafia boss in an RCMP witness-protection program. Miranda, having once been a Mountie, thought it more likely he was the illegitimate offspring of Prince Rainier.
Whatever the case, they agreed he was not a born restaurateur.
“I’ve only got V-8 juice. And some gin. Does that make a Bloody Mary?” Miranda called to Rachel from the kitchen.
Rachel answered through the open door of the bathroom. “It sounds wretched. Let’s give it a try.”
They settled onto the living-room sofa.
On the coffee table in front of them sat a large bottle of V-8, a bottle of gin, a salt shaker, and a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Each mixed her own drink, Rachel licking the rim of her glass and dragging it through salt in the palm of her hand before mixing the gin and juice, Miranda shaking in enough Worcestershire to turn the liquid a muddy brown.
“I think,” said Miranda, raising her glass in a mock toast, “this drink is a Bloody Mess.”
“What do you suppose was going through the killer’s mind?” said Rachel.
The two women were relaxed with each other. Conversation no longer needed to proceed through a logical sequence with appropriate segues. Each could say what was on her mind and connections were made through personality, not content.
“I mean, was it all for a diabolical show? Were the murders collateral damage? It was a thrilling display of pathological depravity — horror with an edge.”
“An edge?”
“Of irony, I guess. It’s very contemporary, isn’t it? To make death a joke and a puzzle.”
“Horror films are funny,” said Miranda.
“They used to be scary. Think of Nosferatu, compared to Interview with the Vampire or the Scream movies, or Freddie the 13th. ”
“You’ve made a study of horror?” said Miranda. “Have you ever actually seen Nosferatu?”
“Only in clips, but whatever, the old films evoked our deepest fears. The new ones play to our vanity.”
“Vanity? Like, you’re frightened, but you understand why. We’re back to irony.”
“Death is the ultimate irony.” Rachel said this as if she were quoting someone. “There was a directness in old-fashioned horror; it was the real thing. Dracula. Edgar Allan Poe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, even Jane Eyre.”
“The real thing!”
“Where horror and terror converge.” She paused. “When we are terrified to be alive.”
“Wow, Rachel. That’s scary. I’ll take irony — with an edge.”
Rachel seemed preternaturally composed as she discussed the Hogg’s Hollow crime scene and related it to films and novels, showing an affinity for the ominous that Miranda found mystifying and strangely exciting.
“You’re lucky, Miranda. You get to think on the job.”
“All cops think. A traffic cop thinks. When I worked on Parliament Hill, striking in scarlet, I had to think.”
“About what?”
“About security, about whether my hat was on straight, about why I ever wanted to be a Mountie.”
“Why?”
“Dunno. I wanted to be a cop. Morgan says it was for empowerment. He figures I was reacting to a subconscious sense of violation.”
“Is he right?”
“Maybe.”
Rachel sank back against the sofa cushions, waiting.
“There was a man; he was in one of my senior courses at university, much older than me. He may have…” Miranda sat forward, took in a deep breath. “I was raped when I was eighteen. I never saw his face. I didn’t know his name… Maybe I did, I don’t know. I made myself forget.
“I didn’t connect the guy in my class with my assailant. Not consciously, not until last summer.
“At the end of the academic year, when friends were taking off for Europe or Thailand or preparing for graduate school — I had a scholarship to go on in semiotics, believe it or not — to everyone’s surprise, including my own, I joined the Mounties.”
“Morgan thinks you were trying to get away from this guy who was haunting your life?”
“Shadowing, not haunting. I didn’t know he was there. Morgan thinks subconsciously I did. He thinks I was trying to take charge of my life. I don’t even know if I believe in the subconscious. It’s just a bunch of neurons in there and an infinite maze of electrical impulses.”
“Tell me about your daughter.”
“Who?”
“You’ve mentioned a girl. I thought maybe it was a custody thing.”
“Jill? She’s my ward. I’ve never had kids. You?”
“Not even an abortion.”
Miranda was thrown for a moment, but saw nothing in Rachel’s expression either to indicate morbid wit or incipient confession.
“Jill’s fifteen, going on forty. And sometimes she’s four. She’s sweet and tough and smart. She’s gone through a lot.”
“And you?”
“I’m the administrator of her father’s charitable bequests. I was his executor.”
“Not the girl from the fish-pond murders?”
Miranda glared.
“I’m sorry,” said Rachel. “That was thoughtless.”
Miranda shrugged. Usually, she did not connect with versions of herself in the media, especially in stories as wildly exploited for gruesome perversity, despite all that went unrevealed. But Rachel’s casual reference forced a vital connection between the trivialized account in the papers and her private and painful memories.
Rachel seemed to understand.
“It’s so easy to lose track of the real people involved,” she was saying. “Like the fifty-some prostitutes murdered in Vancouver. Maybe their bodies were ground up as pig food. People food? It wasn’t until I saw somebody’s brother weeping on television, suddenly the numbers, the macabre speculation broke down, those women, they were individual lives, each with her own terrible agony, dying her own special death. It’s the Anne Frank syndrome. I understand more about the Holocaust, reading the account of a girl that ends just before her arrest, than from seeing the pictures of bulldozed bodies and reading statistics. I didn’t even know Anne had died at Bergen-Belsen when I read her diary. The illusions of objectivity in historical texts or in tabloids destroy empathy. You know what I mean?”
Miranda stared at her, wide-eyed. Another person might have just apologized.
“You talk to me,” said Rachel. “You need to talk.”
She reached across and put her hand on the other woman’s knee. Miranda started to pull away, then placed her own hand over Rachel’s and gave it an affirming squeeze that curiously translated through Rachel’s grasp to her own knee, as if she were reassuring herself.
Miranda placed Jill at the centre of the narrative, merging public knowledge with confidential revelations; unsure, herself, about the lines between news and gossip and confession. She explained her connection to a wealthy recluse with a vintage Jag, and she explained Jill’s connection to them both. She explained how she had been transformed by ghastly circumstances from investigating detective to Jill’s guardian and the man’s executor. She described horrors inflicted and horrors endured.
“But you cannot suppress evil for wanting,” she said. “You can hide terrible things but you can’t erase them. You can’t forget just because you want to forget. You know what I mean?”
“Miranda, I do. I know exactly what you mean.”
Miranda meant to ask Rachel to go on, but instead she pursued the dead woman in the closet. That seemed more real, for the moment, paradoxically, because Rachel was willing to listen.
“She died from dehydration,” Miranda explained. “She felt her skin parch and shrivel, felt her insides decrepitate, felt her lips crack and her eyes bleed. This young woman, she was of no interest to her killer. Do you realize how rare that must be? Murder, not to end a life but to create death. It’s beyond pathological. Almost satanic.”
“Death as an act of creation! In that case, there will likely be more. Do you think so?”
They talked late into the night, then went to bed.
Miranda rolled on her side, staring at the indentation in the pillow where Rachel’s head had been. She reached over and gently rested the back of her hand in the hollow. She could smell the fresh scent that lingered in the sheets, like the smell of leaves unfurling in the morning sun. She drifted into sleep, and an hour later awakened. She would call Jill at noon, when she was home from school, and see if she wanted to go out for pizza, maybe an early movie if the homework wasn’t too heavy. They both liked movies.