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.”
“Not in Australia.”
She extended an open hand toward the corpse. As he moved slowly around the pool, the dead man seemed to rotate on an unseen axis.
“He’s turning the wrong way,” said Morgan.
“Exactly. And he’s floating.”
“Yes he is. Very postmodern — he’s part of the garden design.”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead’s easy, dying is hard.”
She couldn’t tell from the sun glinting in his eyes whether he was being thoughtful or quoting Oscar Wilde. Or Dashiell Hammett.
“Not that hard,” she said. “He was probably unconscious when he entered the water. Otherwise he’d be on the bottom.”
“I knew a kid in grade one. He used to scare hell out of Miss Moore by holding his breath till he fainted.”
“You remember your teacher’s name?”
“And the kid’s — Billy DeBrusk. He died in Kingston.”
“Maximum Security or Collins Bay?”
“He was an accountant. Secondary drowning in a triathlon. His lungs flooded a day after the race, filled with bodily fluids in his sleep. He got kicked in the swim.”
“I didn’t know you could drown in bed.” She paused. “Did he win?”
Morgan loved the way her mind worked, convinced it was in complementary opposition to his own, which needed channels to contain the discursive energy. He thought a lot about his own mind. It was a place to visit and explore. It wasn’t where he lived.
“Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones before she walked into the Thames,” said Miranda. “That way, it was out of her hands. Like diving from the Bloor Street Viaduct. You commit, then you wait. Death happens. It’s not your fault.”
“She drowned in the River Ouse in Sussex, not the Thames. She left a note to her husband, saying, ‘You have given me the greatest possible happiness.’ Do you think you could drown yourself?”
This bleak sense of dread inside her, was that what it felt like? But there was also the unsettling sensation of release. Release tinged oddly with guilt. No, I could not.
“Whoever called it in —” Morgan began.
“Left him floating. Must have known he was already dead.”
“How?”
“Perhaps patience.”
There was something bothering her, he thought. Macabre humour was either a mask or a masquerade. His own humour ran more to wordplay and irony.
“You sure you don’t know him,” he said. Stolid silence. “It could have been called in by the person who killed him.”
“That’s an idea,” she said, indicating by her tone she didn’t consider it likely.
They contemplated the pool; the sun was low in the sky, so there was little reflection. It was difficult to separate the surface from the depths, except close to