He chewed his bagel and sipped his coffee, resisting what to him seemed an obvious quip about swimming both ways. “Have I ever met her?”
“No, you don’t know everyone I know, you know.”
“I know.”
They walked over to the lower pond. It was skirted by rocks placed with casual artifice as if by the hand of a thoughtful god. Set off against shrubbery, grasses, moss, and well-placed Japanese maples, close under the towering silver maples, there was a lovely decadence about it, haunting, like a Southern mansion from Faulkner drifting toward ruin.
“Must be a spring down there,” said Miranda. “And enough seepage through the embankment to keep it fresh.”
“Must be,” said Morgan. She was right, of course. There had to be considerable flow if there were no filters or even an aerator.
“It’s lined with bentonite clay.” She settled down on her heels to scoop a handful of muck from below the waterline.
Of course, he thought.
“I’ll bet there are fish in there,” she said. “The diver missed them.”
Of course: still water, the clay, freshness, the opacity.
“Have you ever tried to catch hold of a fish when you’re underwater? You wouldn’t even see it in here. A perfect growing environment for prize koi.” She scraped the clay off her hand, rinsing in the opaque water.
“There’s apparently a grate of some sort along the fence side,” said Morgan. “The diver didn’t think it went anywhere, part of an old drainage system. She said there was no current. Maybe fish were hiding behind the grate.”
They walked back toward the house, agreeing the best fish might be hidden in the lower pond.
Like diamonds in a vault, a mink in cold storage, a stolen painting kept under the bed. Like a bottle of 1967 Chateau D’Yquem buried in the deepest recesses of a wine cellar, too valuable for an honest cop to consider drinking.
“‘Fallen rain on autumn leaves,’” said Miranda as they stopped by the formal pond. “That’s what Ochiba Shigura means. There’s nothing about ‘I am sad.’ I checked it out.”
He repeated the phrase. Then he added, “Nice, what you can do with words when you don’t know their meaning. It’s the most beautiful, the Ochiba Shigura.”
“A little austere for me. You’re very Presbyterian in your fish taste.”
“Lapsed,” he shot back, “and you’re fallen. We lapse, Anglicans fall. It’s all predetermined.”
“The weird thing, the money — we haven’t talked about that.”
“Have you told Legal Affairs?”
“They’ll pull me off the case.”
“So don’t tell.”
“I have to. I’m just stalling.”
“How come?”
“It’s not much of a murder as murders go. A dead guy in a fish pond. And the world goes on.”
“Yeah, except —”
“I’m the guy’s executor.”
“Executrix.”
“Even if I turn him down, I’m compromised.”
“Not so, unless you did it.”
“What?”
“Killed him.”
“I didn’t even know him.”
“And that’s the real mystery.”
“Morgan, I swear to God I don’t remember the guy.”
“He knew you.”
“Or thinks he did.”
“Could he have possibly known you’d be investigating his death?”
“I don’t see how.”
“Neither do I.”
“Clairvoyance? Conspiracy? Coincidence?”
“Concupiscence!” she added to his list. “I’m not sure what that means, but it alliterates.” She didn’t know if alliterate was a verb.
He looked at her and thought about Freud. “Concupiscence means sexual desire.”
“Yuck.”
“Listen, I checked him out on the Web last night. Couldn’t find much on Griffin personally — a rich lawyer, no record of ever pleading a case in court, not listed in the current Who’s Who, no club memberships. I found more about the property than him, and the family. He was called to the bar in 1966, so he was a lawyer before he got into linguistics. He received a Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of Toronto. ‘Language Acquisition and the Descent of Man.’ Two copies of his dissertation are in the Library and Archives Canada, one copy registered with the Library of Congress in Washington, two copies in the Robarts Library at U of T. Published privately in a limited edition of fifty. No ISBN. You’ll be handling a sizable estate. This house is older than you’d think. The family were in the mill business. They owned a feed mill and a carding mill in the Don Valley — paved over now. Woollen mills at one time and even a shingle mill. And farmland. They owned a good chunk of prime nineteenth century Rosedale, and several more grist mills in southwestern Ontario — your part of the world. I checked out the architectural drawings for this place. Do you know there’s even a registered plan for the fish garden? A son and heir, probably Griffin’s grandfather, built the Tudor monstrosity next door, made it bigger than the old man’s, built a stone wall between them, then put in a gate, which looks as if it hasn’t been opened in a century. He even drew up plans for a sheltered passageway, a tunnel affair, to get back and forth in inclement weather.”
“Inclement?”
“Inclement weather.”
“You know,” she paused, looking at the Ochiba, trying to see what he saw, “someday the words that swirl inside your skull are going to explode.”
“Implode.”
“You know what you know, Morgan, and then you die.”
“That’s Presbyterian. Which I am not, by the way, not practising.”
“You don’t need practice to be a Presbyterian. There’s no point. Isn’t that the whole point — there is no point?”
He smiled. John Calvin in a nutshell, and from an Anglican.
“What’s a Kumonryu?” she asked.
“Spell it. Your Japanese is terrible.”
Miranda spelled it. She hadn’t mentioned Griffin’s email about caring for the koi.
“Known also, I think, as the dragon fish,” said Morgan. “The Kumonryu changes colour as it grows, becomes dark and furtive, dissembling behind a progression from silver to platinum to pewter. You can never be sure with a dragon fish that it is what it seems.”
“Sounds like people I’ve known.”
“The dark side eventually takes over. A bland little fish becomes a creature of the shadows — the darkness is offset by radiant flashes of white, reminders of lost innocence.”
“Dragons can be complex,” she said. She couldn’t always tell when he was quoting some esoteric text and when he was constructing his own modest parallel universe.
He didn’t pursue her Kumonryu query. Sometimes the suppression of curiosity was strategy, sometimes carelessness or indifference.
Inside