“It’s pronounced ‘Bo-slee,’” Miranda explained over dinner in a Collingwood steak-house. “It’s spelled ‘Beausoleil,’ but it’s pronounced ‘Bo-slee,’ like the nerdy factotum in Charlie’s Angels.”
“He was Bawz-lee. There was a street where I lived in London called ‘Beechum’ Place, spelled ‘Beauchamp.’ But of course, Londoners declared the spelling aberrant, not the pronunciation.”
She sat back and sighed. “It’s been quite a day,” she said. “Thank God we’re not driving back tonight. Rufalo said the budget’s good for a couple of rooms and dinner.”
“No breakfast?”
“And breakfast.”
“We could find a motel with breakfast included.”
“A doughnut and coffee. They call it ‘Continental.’ Anyway, Beausoleil is a crossroads hamlet near Penetang. Alexander Pope has a restoration project there. Artwork of some sort in an old church.”
“The only thing I know about Penetanguishene is there’s a prison for the criminally insane.”
“That’s where your new best friend will go, if we ever find her,” said Miranda.
“Well, if we can get your own new best friend on the case, we’ll find her in no time.”
“She’s following the case from afar.”
“Who?”
“My new best friend.”
“I meant Officer Singh of Owen Sound Police Services.”
“I thought you meant Rachel.”
“You’re very fickle. What about me?”
“Why don’t we compromise? Officer Singh is our new best friend, together.”
“He’s a nice kid,” said Morgan. “He’ll make a good cop some day.”
“Oh, go on. He’s a good cop now. You all right?”
“Yeah. A little shaken, a little humbled, a lot embarrassed, and very relieved. I wonder why she didn’t do me in when she had the chance.”
“I think she was pretty confident she could get to you later. And she knew that I knew where you were. Her notes make it clear your little episode in the sauna was just a dry run, so to speak. Maybe that’s why she didn’t climb into your bed — assuming she didn’t. Extended foreplay. Prolonging the game. If you and the lady had been intimate, Morgan, I’m sure you would have been graded.”
“How did you convince the OPP to let us have the binders? All we’re dealing with at this point is unlawful disposal of human remains.”
“Until there’s proof the murders happened on the farm, it’s our case. That’s what Rufalo says. Anyway, the binders just happened to be in the back of our car when the Provincials arrived.” She smiled. “I told them about them, of course. I might have implied they were already on the way to Toronto.”
“And meanwhile, where was I?”
“You were a bit discombobulated. You went for a walk.”
“I just went out to the barn. I was looking for her car. It wasn’t in the drive shed. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been in a barn before — not one that hasn’t been converted into an antiques emporium. There’s something comforting about a four-storey haymow with light beams poking through, aslant from the sun — ”
“Is that a quotation?”
“I think so, I’m not sure. Anyway, when I came out, the place was swarming with cops.”
“They’re a committed bunch, the Provincials. They pulled out all the stops. If there’s DNA anywhere, in the freezer, the sauna, wherever, they’ll find it. They’ll find yours, of course.”
“Oh, for goodness sake!”
“Are you on file?”
“Yeah, I imagine.”
“I’d say you’re an indelible part of the story, sauna or not. You were being set up as her next victim. Maybe you should recuse yourself from the plot.”
“ Au contraire. It makes me an invaluable asset to the investigation. Fifth business, at least.”
“Fifth business, yes. You’d have to be dead to be the villain or the hero in this story. That’s how her stories work.”
“They’re brilliant, actually, narratives frozen in time, like eighteenth-century court tableaux; everything is posed. The absolute stillness excuses all excess — there is no obscenity, nothing is admitted as vile, even death is held in suspension.”
“Well, it’s better your death is held in suspension, for the time being, at least.”
They skipped dessert and lingered over coffee. Morgan added double-double and Miranda pretended not to notice.
“What’s in the third binder?”
“I don’t know yet. It appears to be set in England.”
“You think it was a similar crime?”
“Comparable, not similar. The Hogg’s Hollow case and the project she was developing for you are entirely different — ”
“But equally depraved. Equally ingenious.”
“You can’t help yourself, can you? You admire her.”
“She was intending to kill me.”
“I’ve had relationships like that.”
“Something about her — my response to her — reminded me of Lucy.”
“Oh, Morgan, how sad.”
Although he had been divorced before he teamed up with Miranda over a decade ago, and despite the fact that he seldom talked about his marriage, he occasionally mentioned his former wife on a first-name basis, as if Lucy and Miranda had once been friends. Miranda had very ambivalent feelings about Lucy. She knew Morgan had been through an abusive relationship and that his former wife was a manipulative bully, and yet Miranda felt empathetic, knowing Morgan could be intellectually overbearing and emotionally elusive.
“So, what about Alexander Pope?” said Morgan. “He’s your new friend, too.”
“He’s interesting. Maybe we should drop in and see him tomorrow. Beausoleil isn’t far from here, really.”
“Would he be working on Saturday?”
“Oh, for sure. I’d think when he’s on a project he must work through weekends and holidays. He’s a man driven by God knows what.”
“Possibly. He’s working in a church.”
“An abandoned Roman Catholic church.”
“I didn’t think Catholics did that.”
“It’s been deconsecrated, or whatever they do. It’s decommissioned. Secular territory. It’s just a building, now.”
“There’s gotta be a story in that.”
“So, let’s check him out on our way home.”
“It’s north of here. Home’s south.”
“Not very far north.”
“Sounds good. Where do you think Shelagh Hubbard has got to?”
“The abductor abducted! I don’t have a clue,” said Miranda. “Maybe there was someone else involved in her godawful plots.”
“I don’t think so. That’s not the impression I got from her notes. A monomaniacal psychopath couldn’t abide sharing credit.”
“Monomaniacal?”
“To do the crimes is psychopathic; to plan them, mono-maniacal. To conceive of their elaborate contexts, to play author with other people’s mortality… there’s only one reality for such a mind.”
“Her own.”
“No one else matters, except to flesh out the context of her own existence.”
“So, whodunit? Who took her away? She didn’t drive off, leaving things the way we found them.”
“Maybe it’s coincidence. Her disappearance might have nothing to do with the case.”
“Morgan, what if she’s setting us up again? What if she wanted us to find her notebooks? She is a woman with powerful needs; maybe she couldn’t wait any longer.”
“Go on.”
“So everything was arranged. By missing the tenure committee summons, she knew she could count on Birbalsingh to get excited, and she could count on us to get involved. She left the heat on in the house, did everything just so, to fake her abduction. It was a set-up, Morgan.”
“Could be.”
“Maybe it was time to move on. She connected with you. Maybe that threw a wrench in the works. Psychopaths aren’t supposed to feel — there’s no room for empathy.”
“Miranda, we didn’t really connect all that much. It would seem from her notes even less than I thought.”
“Maybe more than you know. She is a woman of infinite complexity. Maybe you touched something human.”
“We’ve agreed: interring my bones in the Huron burial mound was only in the planning stage — written up as if she were preparing an application for a scholarly grant.”
“Let’s say she lost her confidence in the project, whatever the reason. It was time to move on. We were meant to be her witnesses. Megalomaniacs need affirmation even if psychopaths don’t. Who better to witness a criminal achievement than professionals in the business of crime? We’re the equivalent of critics in the audience on opening night. Maybe the third volume is actually the first in a series. From another, earlier version of her life. Maybe she was successful with whatever diabolical tableau it records, but she felt it didn’t get the attention it deserved. Maybe it was never discovered. So she moved on. I’m betting it’s set in England — she studied over there. And not a hint of an English accent, did you notice that?”
“There is, actually. A bit of an Oxford lisp. I’d guess she grew up in Victoria.”
“Almost right. Vancouver. Shall we go? I paid the bill when I went to the washroom.”
“I’m ready.”
“There’s a good motel on the edge of town,” she said. She leaned back in her chair, stretched sinuously, and declared in a throaty voice, “It’s past my bedtime, darling!”
Morgan looked around. Diners at the tables on either side of them had overheard in that selective way people have of filtering anything salacious from the general hubbub of public conversation. The man to his right gazed openly at Miranda, assessing her attributes. Morgan shifted in his chair. The man looked away. The woman with him, however, caught Morgan’s eye and almost winked. On the other side, an older couple stared glassily at each other, chewing voraciously, ostentatiously pretending they had not heard Miranda’s proposition.
“Yes,” he said. “Enough foreplay. Let’s go!”
Arm in arm they sauntered to the door.
When they pulled up at the motel, Miranda turned to him and said, “Morgan, can I sleep with you tonight?”
“Miranda!”
“In the same room, darling. We’ll get separate receipts.”
They were inside the room with their coats off before Miranda noticed the bed. “I thought you asked for twins?”
“I did.”
“Well, that looks like a double to me.”
“King size, Miranda. We’ll put pillows down the middle like a bundling board.”
“At least you won’t get slivers.”
“Nor you.”
“Maybe I should get another room,” she offered.
“No, stay here. I need the company. Why don’t you relax and watch TV? I’m going back to the variety store to pick up some toothpaste and a razor. You want anything?”
“Toothbrushes. Baby-powder-scented deodorant. Condoms. Pantyhose. Tampons.”
“I don’t do tampons. Pantyhose, maybe.”
“Just testing, Morgan. Actually, I’d like some pantyhose if they have any. And some antacid pills. Hurry back.”
“Do you really want tampons? I don’t mind.”
“No, Morgan. Hurry back.”
“Condoms?”
“Forget it.”
Miranda showered and washed out her underclothes, wringing them almost dry inside a rolled bath towel. She climbed into bed naked, pulling the covers up to her chin, then folded them modestly down so that her arms were free to hold the third blue binder, which she propped up on the blanket over her breasts and proceeded to read. The text was so horrifically absorbing, when Morgan returned she hardly looked up.
He set down their bag of supplies and took off his coat. She looked radiant in bed, with the reading light casting a warm aura around her head and bare shoulders. He opened a closet and retrieved from the top shelf two extra pillows and a thick blanket. The blanket he rolled into a cylindrical shape and placed down the middle of the bed. Without speaking he walked around to her side of the bed, and she leaned forward while he tucked another pillow under her head.
He took the variety-store bag into the bathroom. Before closing the door, he tossed a new T-shirt out across the bed. “Present for you,” he said. “Hope it fits.” She held the T-shirt up in front of her. It was extra-large, white, with a generic Group of Seven windswept-pine-on-rocky-coast design, underneath which were emblazoned in neon colours, “Owen Sound: A Nice Place to Visit.” She chuckled, completing the familiar aphorism in her mind. She assumed the “wouldn’t want to live there” part was beyond the Taiwanese manufacturer’s cultural grasp, and wondered if the merchandiser, probably Toronto-based, was being intentionally subversive.
She shook the newness out of it and put it on. It was big enough to be a nightgown. “Thanks, Morgan,” she shouted, but he obviously couldn’t hear her over the sound of water beating like a monsoon against the shower curtain.
After the shower stopped running, he poked his head through the door. “Did you yell?” he asked.
“I said ‘thank you.’ Thank you for the wearing apparel.”
“You’re welcome,” he responded, waving his right arm in a discreet salute.
“Morgan!”
“Yes!”
“What’s that on your shoulder?”
“ Tangata manu.”
“Who?”
“He’s the bird-man. He’s everywhere on Rapa Nui. The moai — or giant statues — the bird-man, and komari. Everywhere you turn, there are images — and Maki Maki, he’s the main god. Komari are vulva. There are hundreds and hundreds carved into the lava rock.”
“You do know how to deflect questions, don’t you! Hundreds of vulva?”
“Hundreds and hundreds.”
“Morgan, you have a tattoo.”
“A little one.”
“Don’t you feel guilty?”
“For cultural appropriation?”
“Bad taste.”
He snarled fake anger and retreated behind the closed bathroom door.
She listened to him moving about, mumbling to himself, but when he emerged in his boxer shorts with a towel draped modestly over his shoulders, she didn’t look up. In a quiet voice, she asked, “Can I touch it?”
“Sure! What?”
“You know.”
“What?”
“Your tattoo.”
“No.”
He walked to his side of the bed and carefully lifted the covers to slip the bundling blanket between them as he climbed in. In the ruffling shadows he caught a momentary glimpse of her naked legs and he lay back, deciding not to read. He was almost asleep when she turned off the reading light, slipped out of the bed, and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Inside the bag of toiletries were a package of super absorbency tampons and a packet of grotesque cherry-flavoured condoms. She looked at herself in the wall mirror over the sinks. She was grinning and shaking her head, and seeing herself grinning, she chuckled audibly and blew herself a kiss. Then she turned and, dowsing the light, edged her way through the darkness to the bedside where she slid quietly under the covers and lay on her back, staring thoughtfully into the darkness.
After a while, she said, “You asleep?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good,” she said, “Sleep well, Morgan. Thanks for letting me stay.”
“G’night.”
Miranda had been reading Shelagh Hubbard’s sordid narrative and she knew Morgan might easily have been the next victim, but she felt strangely at peace with the world as she listened to the sounds of her partner sleeping beside her, felt the almost imperceptible surge of the bed in the rhythm of his breathing, and inhaled the fresh scents of their bodies, enfolding them both.
Suddenly, she opened her eyes and realized it was morning. Morgan was up and dressed, sitting in a chair, reading a blue binder. She had slept beautifully.
Morgan seemed absorbed.
“Good morning,” Miranda said.
“Mmmnnn,” he responded.
“You’re sitting on my clothes.”
“They’re on the bed.”
He glanced up. “She writes like Graham Greene,” he said. “All moral complexity and no resolution. So completely matter-of-fact you forget how squalid and corrupt her vision of life really is.” He was already back into the text before he had finished speaking.
Miranda gathered her clothes with a sweep of her arm that was impeded by the bulge of the bundling blanket still in place beneath the covers. She rose awkwardly, holding clothes and a pillow in front of her as she backed toward the bathroom. Morgan wasn’t even looking. She wheeled around — scorning his indifference — stepped through the door, and shut it behind her. At the same time, attracted by her pirouette, he glanced up, smiled appreciatively at the flash of her nakedness, and returned to his reading.
Her panties were dry but she had to apply the hair drier to her bra before putting it on. It felt warm to the touch as she leaned over and adjusted her shape to its contour. I’m too sexy for my bra, she hummed, too sexy for my bra. As she stood upright, drawing each breast into place with a peremptory tug, she caught an image in the mirror of a woman of no particular age. She loved that. That’s how it should be, she thought. And I hope to goodness when I’m seventy, God willing, I’ll sometimes look in the mirror and see a woman like me, of no particular age.
When she emerged from the bathroom, Morgan stood up and looked her over. “Good,” he said, in a burlesque of the dutiful spouse. “You look lovely today.”
“It’s a new outfit. An exact replica of the one I wore yesterday. Once you find your style, you stick with it.”
“Really,” he said. “You look fine.”
“I like you better sarcastic. What do you think of your friend’s English exploits?”
“We’ll talk on the road. Let’s grab our coffee and doughnut and get out of here.”
He drove, following the signs to Penetanguishene. She explained he needed the practice. They discussed the third binder, which was first in the deadly trilogy.
“Maybe it’s just fantasy,” he said. “A prelude to murder. If you read it as fiction, it’s brilliantly conceived. I know Madam Renaud’s in London. The Chamber of Horrors. I actually have bittersweet memories of being there, twenty years ago. It was a girlfriend thing. A sad parting. I’ve never told you about Susan.”
“There’s lot you haven’t told me, Morgan. I don’t need all the details. Was she nice? If it was sad, she must have been nice.”
“Too nice. The problem was she was too nice.”
“I can relate to that.” She paused, not sure if she could. “Why the Chamber of Horrors?”
“Just a place we knew,” he responded, trying to remember which of them had proposed meeting there. He had been on the Continent for months; they had already broken up after sharing a pair of adjoining bedsitters in Knightsbridge for the better part of a year. She had a child before she got married. She had flown over from London to Toronto for dinner, just before Morgan’s own wedding. Was that her idea or his? Was she married then or not?
Miranda’s voice penetrated his gnawing reverie.
“For Shelagh Hubbard, Madame Renaud’s was almost inevitable. I ran across a reference when I was checking her out. She actually worked there after she finished a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of London — it was an offshoot from studies in forensic reconstruction, working with wax to recreate faces. It didn’t seem relevant. It certainly does now. But it sounds like a B movie — Vincent Price on the late show.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it? Turning cliche into reality.” Morgan stared at the landscape ahead as the highway rolled under them, periodically reminding himself he was at the wheel. He felt distracted but amused. “Wax figures look dead, even when they’re not meant to. If she really did use cadavers waxed-over to create realistic corpses, and then systematically insinuated her macabre creations into the displays in an actual Chamber of Horrors, like she claims, well, it’s diabolical, isn’t it? Using the dead to simulate death!”
“She’d have to be very good. Not morally speaking, of course.”
“If she really did it, and if no one noticed, she must have been very, very good. She would have treated the bodies to resist decomposition, then sealed and moulded them to the precise shape of the murder victims they were meant to displace on display. It’s all like a gruesome parody of something. Of death itself?”
“Murder victims disguised as murder victims — it’s unspeakably grotesque.” In spite of herself, Miranda could see the black humour. “Can you imagine her hanging out at The Nag’s Head or The Bunch of Grapes? She’d be eyeballing the clientele for who would make the best corpse.”
“Picking up Shelagh would have been a deadly affair.”
“She picked up women, too, you know. By my count she did five, altogether: two men and three women.”
“If you can trust her notes,” said Morgan, who would have preferred not to. “She even enjoyed the existential implications of dealing with the discards. Stripped of their bloodied costumes and rouged to make them appear less dead, they became anonymous in the storage rooms among fallen rock stars, disgraced royalty, and yesterday’s politicians.”
“Surely disgraced royals were kept on view.”
“The hard part was getting the bodies there, I would think.”
“You were reading too quickly, Morgan. Her victims came of their own accord, after hours. She did a Ph. D. at Oxford, postdoc at London; she knew how to turn on the charm, English-wise. She would lead them on an esoteric adventure, their visits shrouded in secrecy. Who could resist the chance for a clandestine tour of the Chamber of Horrors? That was her lure: not sex — morbid curiosity. Death on display.”
“That seems familiar! What I find upsetting is how easily I entered into the story.”
After a contemplative period of silence, Miranda spoke. “Did you ever think about how the way death is experienced was changed by twentieth-century technology?”
“I’ll assume you’re not talking about embalming and the art of the mortuary.”
“No. Being dead.”
“So, we’re not talking about the collapse of religion and the downgrading of heaven and hell to moral analogies?”
“No. From the point of view of the living, death has lost its absolute edge.”
“You are about to launch into a discourse on war as entertainment, the ultimate opiate of the masses?”
“Yeah, partly. World War I, grainy black-and-white photographs. World War II, photo essays by Frank Capra and Margaret Bourke-White. Vietnam, television. A generation later, we watch the wretchedness of Afghanistan as virtual reality. Buffy the Vampire Slayer elicits a more visceral response. No, that’s not what I mean. I was thinking about how different death is since we’ve been able to record our live presence electrically and electronically. The dead aren’t dead in the same way. Death is no longer an absolute.”
“It is for the dead,” said Morgan.
“But not for the living. I have tapes of my mother’s voice, photographs of my father. I can turn on television and see Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. I can watch old Bette Davis in a horror flick, and then watch young Bette Davis devouring long-gone leading men with her inimitable eyes, and so on, flipping back and forth through her life by the press of a button on my remote control.”
“Not through her actual life, Miranda. Don’t confuse the person with the roles she plays.”
“Yes! Her life. I know she was an actress — but it’s the actress who ages, rejuvenates, plays many parts. Of course, my mother’s voice on tape is not my mother, my father’s pictures are not my father. But they connect me to them — the ways she sounded, the ways he looked.”
“It’s still the living who provide narrative context for the dead to endure. I would see and hear the same images very differently. Technology doesn’t change death, it only allows for different illusions than the ones offered by the past.”
“It always comes down to the story, doesn’t it?” said Miranda.
“Renaud’s Chamber of Horrors re-enacts crimes. Stories. The display of mutilated bodies and faces distended with horror wouldn’t mean much without a narrative context. It would be gratuitous, and in very bad taste.”
“That’s why her waxworks project was a failure, not because she had no witnesses to celebrate her prowess. That may have been part of it, but, really, it’s because the stories were already determined. Jack the Ripper, Dr. Crippen… They weren’t hers. She had to animate her own story. Or stories; the ghoulish complexity of her Hogg’s Hollow project was only a prelude to what she had in store for you, Morgan. Or, at least, for your charred remains. I wonder if she’d have been clever enough to leave a few bones missing. For authenticity. I wonder what she’d leave out.”
They drove without talking for a while, enjoying the quiet, which was broken only by the hum of the tires and the low rumble of the engine. Trees and fields swept by, hills carried them high and dropped away. Occasionally one would speak, and the other would nod.
Before they reached Penetanguishene, Miranda directed Morgan to turn off onto a sideroad. After several more turns and a sharp descent into a valley that broke the grid pattern of the concession roads, they rose high onto a limestone plateau where they could see in the distance a stone church and rectory rising imperiously above the landscape. There was not a barn or a farmhouse in sight. They pulled up between the two buildings, beside a midnight blue van with the name Alexander Pope in cursive script on the driver’s door. Morgan leaned forward to peer up at the steeple.
“This is eerie,” he said as he got out of the car. “A deserted church, an empty manse, in the middle of nowhere. So much for a hamlet called ‘Beausoleil.’ No cross on the steeple, no sign of a cross or crucifix except in the graveyard.” He nodded in the direction of the derelict cemetery on the far side of the church, surrounded by a tumbledown stone wall. “Do Catholics call it a manse?”
Morgan walked over to the low wall. It struck him as strange, when the church building itself appeared to be in good repair, that graves should be left unattended, with brambles and weeds running riot among toppled monuments, the occasional spire still thrusting toward heaven, although most were on precarious angles. The rectory, on the other side of the church, was a standing ruin.
“I don’t get it,” he said as he returned to where Miranda was standing in front of the church.
“What don’t you get?”
He did not respond. The parts didn’t fit; it was like they had entered a world gone slightly askew.
“Alexander told me it was deconsecrated in the late 1800s,” Miranda explained. “Maybe the graves were emptied, the bodies dug up and reburied.”
“Looks to me more like selective neglect. The church itself is okay.”
Miranda spread her arms wide to take in the empty horizon. “Not much call for bingo or euchre in Beausoleil.”
“The windows are intact. There’s no sign of vandalism. The grass is cut, the shrubs are trimmed.” He gazed up and down the concession road. “There’s no reason for a church to be here. It’s not an intersection, there’s no river for a village to grow on. No railway. There’re just miles and miles of miles and miles.” From close to the building he looked upwards, his eyes following the rough stone to the sky. “It’s imposing. I guess that was the idea, but who in God’s name would want to restore it?”
“I don’t think God had much to do with it,” Miranda quipped.
“Well, let’s take a look inside.”