STILL WATERS
STILL WATERS
A Quin and Morgan Mystery
John Moss
A Castle Street Mystery
Copyright © John Moss, 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Editor: Michael Carroll
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Webcom
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Moss, John, 1940-
Still waters / John Moss.
ISBN 978-1-55002-790-7
I. TITLE.
PS8576.O7863S84 2008 C813’.6 C2008-900691-7
1 2 3 4 5 12 11 10 09 08
We acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
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For Bev, as always,
For Tobi Kozakewich,
For Bea and Julie and Laura,
For Margaret Atwood, whose wicked candour was taken to heart,
And for Morgan and Miranda, who are real, as only fiction can be.
1
Water Weavers
The dead man with comb-over hair fanning away from his skull was floating face down in the fish pond. Although still unidentified, he was appropriately dressed for a Rosedale garden. Another pond, closer to the ravine, settled into the landscape as if a ground depression had been filled with primordial sludge. Windows in the large house looming over the scene were empty, the curtains half-drawn. Aside from the police, there was no one around, not a gardener, no family, no maid. Most houses in this part of Toronto’s Rosedale had domestic help. At 7:15 each weekday morning women of colour spread out from the subway station, through the tree-lined streets, along the red brick sidewalks, and into the private worlds of the gentry by blood and by money. An hour later pickups arrived with Dutch names on the sides, carrying men wielding rakes and mowers, and in winter, shovels and buckets of sand and salt. By now the workers had gone home, the owners had returned, children had changed out of school uniforms and were doing homework, and prepared dinners had been taken from refrigerators. It was quiet in Rosedale in the early evening in Indian summer. But it was preternaturally quiet in this garden, even with all the police activity. In the unseasonable heat, among dappled shadows, it was like being underwater.
Miranda Quin knelt against the limestone parapet. As the body swung by, she reached out to draw it closer.
“Don’t touch him!” David Morgan, Miranda’s partner, said.
“I wasn’t. I can’t see his face.”
She prodded the dead man’s shoulder until his profile lolled into view, washed pale and streaked with light. There was nothing about his bland features to connect with, but death made his face seem familiar. As he drifted across her reflection, Miranda flinched. It wasn’t the intimation of her own mortality — she had a working relationship with death — but something inexplicable, like vertigo, seemed to rise inside her. A mixture of horror and panic, strangely tempered by a flutter of relief, all held in check by the need to sort out her feelings before revealing them.
Morgan stared into the depths of the pool. He was captivated by the fish weaving the water with eerie striations of light. The body on the surface was a minor distraction — not to the fish playing in the dead man’s shadow — but to Morgan, whose current enthusiasm was imported koi. “Japanese,” he murmured. “From Niigata.”
“Caucasian,” Miranda responded. “From Rosedale.”
“Ochiba Shigura,” said Morgan. “The big one near his ear.”
Perhaps it was, she thought.
“Ochiba Shigura,” he repeated. He had never before said these words out loud. “It means ‘Autumn leaves falling on still water, I am sad.’” He paused. “They know this guy. That one’s a Utsuri. What about you?”
“What? Know him? Why would I?” She surprised them both that she found his question invasive.
Morgan shrugged. “It’s a folly.” He took in the entire garden with a sweeping glance. “This guy spared no expense to make it look natural.”
“There’s nothing natural about gardens,” Miranda declared. Were she not preoccupied by the gnawing within, they might have wandered into a discussion about the vanities of landscape architecture. Instead, she forced herself to focus on the corpse. She bent closer and felt a surge of revulsion.
There were no visible wounds.
She looked back at Morgan through a veil of shoulder-length hair. “You’ve been studying fish?”
“Koi,” he clarified. “I’ve been reading.”
“Good timing.”
His personality and looks coincided, she thought. Unkempt, tousled. Features bold enough to cast shadows. Dark eyes, highlights when he smiled, sometimes exposing, more often concealing. Good body, tall, lean but not lanky. Good hair, all there. Fiercely intelligent.
They had made love once but preferred to be friends.
“Look at them,” he said. “They’re disturbingly beautiful …”
“To us or each other? They’re carp. Genetically manipulated scavengers.” She rocked back onto her feet, grasping his arm to pull herself upright.
“Expensive carp.”
She envied his esoteric diversions. Persian tribal carpets, Ontario country furniture, vintage Bordeaux, now Japanese fish. She suspected he could evade himself endlessly. After more than a decade working murders together, she wasn’t sure why.
He hadn’t noticed her suppressed anxiety. That pleased her. It also annoyed her. She tried to imagine her bathtub. She usually had showers. “Morgan,” she announced as if it were a point of contention, “water moves counter-clockwise.”