“It wasn’t the pond maintenance people,” said Morgan. “They checked out as water mechanics. They don’t know much about the fish themselves. There was a guy here this morning when I arrived, just after sunrise. He seemed more concerned about lost business than murder.”
“You were here at sunrise?”
“Got a call from a friend in the night, couldn’t sleep for worrying. So, anyway, Griffin must have brought the fish directly from Japan. We can check customs, though maybe they’re smuggled.”
“A fish-smuggling lawyer with a language obsession!”
“Who he could sell to is an open question.”
“Whom,” Miranda corrected. “What about Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros?”
“She’s housebound, apparently. Let’s go and talk to her.”
“My great-grandmother and her friends used to call each other by their last names. ‘Mrs. Nisbell came to tea,’ she’d say. ‘And Mrs. Purvis and Mrs. Frank Pattinson, and so on.’”
“A bygone era when —”
“Women were women.”
“When life was gracious.”
“For the rich,” said Miranda. “We weren’t rich. Maybe village rich — we had indoor plumbing.”
“I want to see inside the house.”
“You weren’t rich, either.”
“I remember.” He touched her on the arm as if to hold her back, though she was standing still. “I don’t recall my father ever being called mister. My mother got Mrs., but only from people above her talking down.”
“My parents were Mom and Dad even to each other.”
“Mine were Darlene and Fred. And we lived in Cabbagetown when it was still Cabbagetown.”
“The largest Anglo-Saxon slum outside England — I’ve heard it before, Morgan. And now there’s no room there for the poor.”
“I grew up on the cusp of transition, one neighbour’s house derelict and the next a designer showpiece.”
“I know — if you had owned and not rented from a slumlord, and if you had waited long enough, you would have made a killing. And your mother had a Scottish accent after eight generations in Canada.”
“Yeah,” he said, pleased and irritated by her familiarity with his life. “Let’s amble over and visit our voyeur.”
“Amble,” she said. “Okay, let’s amble.”
As they walked, she ruminated about what Morgan called “her part of the world.” She still owned her mother’s house in Waterloo County. She thought of it that way, as her mother’s, though her parents had lived there together until the summer she had turned fourteen, when her father died. Her mother passed away four years ago. She and her sister in Vancouver were orphans. You were still an orphan even in your thirties when both parents were dead.
Miranda’s sister had her own life and seldom came east. She had signed her share of the house over to Miranda. She and her husband were professionals, and Miranda’s welfare, according to them, was more precarious. That was a judgment on her marital and not her financial status. Single women of a certain age inspired righteous condescension. Miranda didn’t argue. It was satisfying to have the old house, though she didn’t rent it out and only visited occasionally. She hadn’t slept over since her mother’s funeral. The village of Waldron was changing. When she walked to the general store, she sometimes recognized a familiar face but went unrecognized herself. Mostly, there were strangers now living in the old houses clustered around the crossroads, down the hill, and along the river.
Morgan and Miranda were greeted at the door by a Filipino woman who showed them into a formal receiving room that was dark and excessive, with numerous old photographs in sterling frames propped in strategic formation, a genealogical gallery that seemed to have reached its terminus about the time of the Great War and before the Great Depression. Everything was “Great” back then until the age of irony set in. There were heavy velvet drapes pulled back and ferns in the window, a perfect camouflage for someone observing the street without being seen.
When Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros entered the room, it was with a sense of occasion, as if her presence gave the encounter significance in excess of what a dead lawyer might conjure, especially one found in a fish pond. Yet she was herself neither stately nor ancient, and while she may have preferred to avoid crowds since Toronto had become so cosmopolitan — as she would describe it, her tolerance for ethnic diversity implicit — she wasn’t bound to stay in by virtue of any crippling condition. She simply enjoyed the role of reclusive widow, which she did with relish for Mormons, meter readers, and homicide detectives, even for policemen in uniform. Since the Georgian Room at Eaton’s had closed a generation ago, she hadn’t been south of Bloor Street.
On the floor was a magnificent carpet. Morgan recognized the stylized peacocks of an antique Akstafa from the southern Caucasus. In spite of that the room made him uncomfortable. While the women talked, he assessed the furnishings. Apart from the carpet, it all seemed in opulent bad taste, a sad relic of Victorian imperialism. He asked for the bathroom and was surprised when the Filipino maid answered the ring of a small crystal bell to show him the way.
There was a convenience on the same floor at the back, he was told. He was led through a panelled dining room and caught a glimpse of the garden. When the maid seemed about to wait for him outside the lavatory door, he motioned her away a bit awkwardly, trying in the gesture of his hand for casual civility, neither excessively familiar nor imperious. It was the first time in his life that he had encountered someone in the role of servant who answered to a bell. Instinctively, he wanted to call after her that he was from Cabbagetown, at least as alien from all this as Manila.
Back in the dining room, he examined the huge Heriz carpet spread almost wall to wall, then gazed outside. The garden was rather dismal, compared to its neighbour, but to his surprise there was a large green pond.
When he returned to the receiving room, he asked Mrs. de Cuchilleros if she kept koi. No, she explained. Not really. A few, nothing to speak of. She wasn’t sure. Thirty years ago, when they bought the property, Robert Griffin had asked if he could keep a few fish in her pond, and on several occasions, she didn’t know how often, she had looked out very early in the morning and seen him by the pond as if standing vigil. He would stare into the water like an Inuk hunter — which meant Eskimo, she explained — and then without coming to the door he would leave. There was no upkeep; it was a natural system. Sometimes in the autumn he came over and skimmed leaves off the surface. It never froze over completely in winter. She had seen movement in the murky water but couldn’t say if it was fish, flesh, or foul. She spelled out the last word for the sake of the pun.
“Does it smell?” asked Miranda. “The pond next door is fresh.”
“No,” said Mrs. de Cuchilleros, annoyed that her jest had provoked a literal response. “Not at all. It is as fresh as his.” She summoned her maid and said something to her in apparently fluent Spanish. A colonial habit, Miranda thought. Spanish is the old language of the Philippines, supplanted by English and Tagalog, but both women would regard it as the appropriate language of servitude — the maid speaking it out of deference and Mrs. de Cuchilleros, because she could.
The maid responded with a brief expletive and left. “No,” Mrs. de Cuchilleros repeated. “I asked Dolores if she ever noticed a smell — I hardly ever go out there — and she said no. So there you are, my freshwater oasis. If there are fish in it now, I expect they’ll stay for the duration. No one feeds them, they get enough wild insects, as opposed to the tame ones, and they live longer than people. I have a gardener come in most days, but he just mows to the edge of the pond. It’s clay, you know, brought in by the Griffins generations ago, the one who built this place. It’s a nice old pond. My first husband loved it.”
“Mrs. Cuchilleros, were you