“Oh,” said Miranda.
When they said goodbye and were outside, Miranda took Morgan by the arm and led him around through the walkway into the lawyer’s garden, talking all the way. “My first husband. How quaint. De, and my dear. Her little jokes. She’s a caricature. What she said to the maid, besides asking about the smell, was ‘Do not serve tea.’ Did you notice she called her Dolores, almost the same as your mother’s name?”
“Darlene.”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
“Sorry. I thought it was Delores. Did you find anything when you went to the bathroom? She gave me the creeps. We should have asked to see the attic. Reminds me of Psycho, Anthony Perkins rocking in the window. I wonder if she had children.”
Morgan said nothing.
“She killed him!” Miranda blurted.
“Anthony Perkins?”
“She killed Robert Griffin.”
Morgan smiled. He liked when she held his arm. He knew he wasn’t supposed to, but he could feel the curve of her breast as they strolled through the garden.
“I’d better check in with Legal Affairs,” she said, pulling away from him. “See you about five.”
He watched as she walked away. She should always wear skirts. How did a woman decide if it was a skirt or pant day? He never understood the subliminal conspiracy in the way women dressed, how one day it was décolletage and another short skirts. One short skirt in the morning, and he knew it would be legs and short skirts for the day. He thought of a joke: would a community of nuns aspiring to sainthood all experience stigmata at the same time of the month? It was a woman’s joke. To him it was more of a mystery.
4
Kumonryu
Miranda left with the keys. Morgan could still feel the weight of her hand on the inside of his arm. Walking around to the front of the house, he descended the ramp from street level to the garage where the door was still open from the night before. He ducked under the yellow tape marking it a crime scene and entered a large vault with enough space for three or four cars. Only a classic Jaguar two-seater was parked there at the moment. He didn’t know the model; he had never developed an interest in cars. Growing up where buses, the subway, and trolleys were the alternatives to pedestrian transit, he had never known anyone who actually owned a car until university. Even then he wasn’t much interested in students who insinuated cars into the sanctuary of a campus with gardens and manicured lawns in the heart of the city. He didn’t learn to drive until after his degree, teaching himself on a rental automatic, using fake ID, graduating to standard shift a few weeks later.
Morgan had never worked traffic. His university specialization in the sociology of deviance got him into investigations from the start, so he didn’t work his way up from the streets. He liked to present himself as an academic bumbler, but as Miranda surmised, he had been a stellar student and might have pursued an academic career except he had an undisciplined imagination and too many enthusiasms. Though he majored in the human sciences, he preferred philosophy. Morgan was a Heideggerian, as he recalled, no longer sure what that meant.
He would have to learn about cars. There was a certain perversity in his sustained ignorance, however, that gave him the same kind of pleasure as not knowing about hockey. Only a fact junky can appreciate the pleasures of purposely not knowing. He could name complete rosters from the old National Hockey League before 1967 when there were only six teams and every player was a star. He had no idea what teams out of Tampa and Pittsburgh were called. He could name every player on the women’s Olympic team that won in Nagano. He was the only person in Canada who had never played hockey, according to Miranda, who used to play shinny on the Ice Pond outside Waldron — called that because ice had been harvested there long before she was born.
There were two doors from the heated garage into the house. Both were locked. The one he tried opened easily enough with a little persuasion. From an efficiently rectilinear space that smelled of machine oil, he stepped into a musty confusion of brick work and stone, muffled odours of other times, shadows converging, the air ominously still.
As he made his way among the convoluted inner foundations, he had the sense of walking outside the boundaries of history. The original structure of the house was virtually intact, though on the exterior it had been tarted up with Victorian turrets and verandahs and gingerbread trim. He knew he must be on the same level as the garden out back and the den, but this was a world apart.
Morgan stopped beside a great oak door with huge hand-forged hinges. He sat on a makeshift bench in the bleak light of bulbs strung sparingly between hand-hewn beams, their illumination barely extending through the darkness from one pool of light to the next. Here were remnants of a Toronto beyond his experience.
This city was his place of origin, his genetic source, not Ireland or Wales, as his name would suggest, or Scotland, where his mother’s people originated. He came from nowhere else. In the motley assemblage of clay brick, rough plaster, and stonework over a cobbled floor, in the adze marks gouged into the squared oak beams, the hammered ironwork on the door, he saw the residue of a past that was strangely familiar. Like discovering a fingerprint embedded in the surface of an ancient relic; it wasn’t someone else’s history he sensed, but his own.
His ancestors had built these walls, or maybe they had owned them. Class and money had a way of sideslipping in Canada every few generations. He was at home here, connected to cobwebs and dust, though there were surprisingly little of either. The echoes of dead artisans’ dreams resounded around him, and he rose to go about his silent business, moving by stealth, it would seem to a ghostly observer, to take in the emanations that might be clues to the mystery of their lives.
He returned to the oak door. Beside it was a control panel with a thermostat and humidistat, the keyboard to an alarm system, and a light switch. There was a small window in the door. When he peered through the glass, which was two layers thick with a space between, he realized the oak, despite its mighty appearance, was a facade for a thermal door. He flicked the switch, but the room remained dark. He could make out rows of bottle ends in a rack opposite the door, which was securely locked, though the alarm, oddly enough, was disarmed. This was what a real wine cellar was like.
Wandering through the subterranean maze, Morgan was surprised at the images that popped into his mind, some of them curiously macabre, some strangely erotic. He thought of his first encounter with sex, with Francine Cardarelli in the janitor’s closet near the end of grade eleven at Jarvis Collegiate. He thought of a severed head in a garbage container under a sink. Frankie married Vittorio Ciccone. They sent him a wedding present, but he was working homicide by then and returned it despite Lucy’s objection. Nothing was proven; the Ciccone family might not have been involved.
A strange underground concatenation of opposites, he thought — it was warm but cool on the skin, bone dry and musty, darkness striated with light, sounds reverberating in the hushed air, closed in and endless … endless. It was like walking through the inside of somebody’s brain, maybe Griffin’s, maybe his own, or the collective mind where disparates converged.
Approaching what he estimated to be the back corner of the house closest to the garden wall, he came to another oak door. It, too, appeared to be elaborately bolted and locked. Backtracking to the near side of the labyrinth, he discovered two more massive doors. One had to lead into the den, perhaps through the hall where the bathroom was. It seemed to be bolted from the inside. The other was at the bottom of a further descent into the depths of the earth and, to his surprise, it swung open with a tentative touch.
Walking through he found himself in what looked like the inner workings of a submarine. There were pumps and pipes and tanks in profusion. A symphony of small motors and the muffled gurgle of water moving against smooth surfaces filled the room with the aura of inspired efficiency, like listening to Rimsky-Korsakov at low volume.
Morgan