“Come on …”
“She’s earthy. I like her. What did you think about Eleanor Drummond?”
“Definitely not earthy. I can’t imagine that woman in ‘snuggle’ mode even on a rental basis.”
“She’s stunningly beautiful.”
“Yeah, like a magazine layout — she looks airbrushed. Seriously, you found her attractive?”
“Yes and no. More yes than no.”
“It’s time to go home,” she said, shifting in her chair.
As he rose to his feet, Morgan reached over and gave her shoulder a companionable squeeze. She flinched. He didn’t seem to notice, but she was surprised. It wasn’t him; it had something to do with the dead man in the pond. She couldn’t see the connection. She settled back.
“Think I’ll stay for a bit. No, really. Good night, Morgan.” She watched him walk away. “You can stay, too, if you want,” she added softly as he wandered away through the tables.
He waved backward with a small hand gesture, then she heard, trailing off in the ambient din as he approached the exit, “There’s got to be a Chagoi.”
And he was gone.
2
Parrotfish and Barracuda
Miranda’s condo on Isabella Street was Gothic by neglect, not design. The fountain in the courtyard hadn’t seen water since the Great Flood. The fascia drooped behind gingerbread swirls; acid-worn gargoyles leered over down-spouts that leaned precariously away from the eaves.
In the lobby she paused to pick up her mail and press her own buzzer before letting herself in. Years ago whimsy had turned into ritual; she felt reassured, knowing the sound was filling her empty apartment. She carried a scaled-down 9 mm Glock semi-automatic in a shoulder holster or holstered against the small of her back, or in her bag when it was too hot to wear a jacket, but she had no desire to use it. The buzzing would scare away burglars; and sometimes she could sense the reverberations still lingering to welcome her home.
Miranda was fond of the old place. The stair treads were worn marble, the wood trim was walnut, darkened by age, the fixtures were bronze. There was an air of decadent longevity rare in the centre of the city. She had lived here as a student when the building was still apartments. It was seedy enough to seem subversive but structurally sound and aggressively urban.
When she returned to Toronto after three years away, she had raised a down payment, retrieved her furniture from storage, and moved back in. It was as if she had never been away. She felt toward her apartment the kind of myopic affection usually reserved for an appallingly inappropriate lover — of whom there had been several, she thought as she paused at the foot of the stairs to jettison flyers into the trash bin.
The bin was overflowing. It, and having the walkway shovelled in the winter, were the only perceptible services for the condo fee. There was no lawn to speak of, no gardening to be done beyond the annual trimming of a few stunted spirea bushes in the courtyard and a couple of grotesque forsythia against the sidewalk out front. The lobby was cleaned just enough to maintain an aura of genteel dinginess.
Almost lost among duplicate Victoria’s Secret catalogues and an alumni magazine from the University of Toronto was a manila envelope with no return address. Miranda might have thrown it out but for the spidery handwriting. Grasping her mail, she started up the stairs, then stopped and pulled away the cellotape holding down the manila flap. There was a one-page letter, a fragile newspaper cutting, and a legal document of some sort, folded in the middle. The letter was dated yesterday. She looked at the postmark on the envelope. It was obscure but genuine. Yesterday, as well. The letter, which began rather quaintly, “My Dear Miranda,” was signed by a dead man.
Miranda shuddered, and with her mail held tentatively in hand like a urine specimen, she hurried upward to the relative security of her third-floor home.
Once inside, with the lights on and everything familiar, she set the mail down, deliberately unread, and went into her bedroom, which doubled as a study, where she methodically eased out of her clothes. In the shower she let the pulsing flow of hot water work away the tension of the day that as usual had settled into her neck and shoulders. She put on cotton pajamas imprinted with grazing moose. She flipped on her computer and walked out into the cramped kitchen, where she was momentarily surprised to see the mysterious contents of the manila envelope still on the counter.
“Why don’t you get a decent apartment,” Morgan had asked after their one brief tryst.
“Was that your problem?”
“We were good,” he had said, neither amused nor taking offence. “I thought we were very good. Did you have a problem?”
“Screw you.”
“Miranda...”
Sometimes he used her last name. Usually, the first. Tone could make it mean anything. Then it had conveyed good-natured wariness.
She always called him Morgan; she liked the sound. Soft and abrupt, a controlled expletive, like swearing at someone you loved. Yet she had found herself repeating his first name during sex. David, David. She almost never called him David to his face.
Ellen Ravenscroft had once challenged her about “the name thing.”
“His last and your first — what’s with that?”
“It’s not about power,” Miranda had responded.
“Of course it is, love. It’s always about power.”
Not always, she now thought. Sometimes words were just words.
When Morgan and she undressed that time and had faced each other, she had felt uncomfortably disconnected. She was thinking about Ellen, about how much Ellen would like to be in her place. But the moment to stop things had passed. It had seemed more intimate to resist or explain. And then she had abandoned herself, and it was as good as Morgan had suggested.
During their prolonged coital embrace — that was the term, inept as it was, that had come to her mind — she had luxuriated in the indulgent pace. Morgan was physically uninhibited — strange for a man — and yet emotionally shy. He was a lovely lover and that had frightened her. She had never been married, never lived with a man, not because she didn’t have needs, but because she needed too much.
“I like this apartment,” she had told him. “I’ve been here from day one. Second year university, after first year in residence. I shared it with a roommate. She had this room, the boudoir, and I had a fold-out in the living room. I lost the toss of a coin. Then she started having layovers — guys laid her and stayed over. Alphabetically, she was working through the student directory. I don’t think she even liked it much. I lived in her vestibule. My love life, of course, was zero. She tried buying me off, but I didn’t want leftovers. We tossed another coin and I won. She left, she became a lawyer. I practised celibacy. Turned out it didn’t take practice.”
“You must have saved a fortune by now. And no car.”
“Nor you.”
“Bad driver.”
“Bad driver, poor lover, no sense of humour. Most men won’t acknowledge their failings.”
“Miranda, I —” he had begun, stifling his protest, then touching her gently.
“It’s a clean well-lighted place.”
“Yeah, and it smells good. There’s nothing, nothing, as erotic as the smell of a single woman’s apartment.”
“Go home, Morgan.”
And he had gone.
Miranda wasn’t prepared yet to read the letter. She picked up the newspaper cutting and smoothed it on the counter. It was actually an entire tabloid page, torn along one edge and tattered