Miranda reached into her purse and retrieved the envelope with the photograph. She examined the picture, then held it out to the girl.
“That was me when I was nine.”
“I think you’d better come with me, Jill.” Miranda preceded the girl into the autopsy area of the crypt and asked Ellen to cover the body of Eleanor Drummond, except for the head.
Miranda held the girl by the arm and drew her close to the table. Gazing at the composed features of the dead woman’s face, the haunting pallor giving her skin the translucent quality of a Lalique sculpture, Jill seemed mesmerized. No one said anything. Jill reached out tentatively and touched the back of her hand to the woman’s cheek. She didn’t flinch when contact was made with the cool flesh, as Miranda had expected. Jill related to the brutality of death in ways Miranda did not at the same age, or even now.
The girl turned and walked out of the room, and Miranda followed her, with Morgan close behind. Jill sat by the soft drink machine, staring at the floor, uncertain what to do next. Miranda wanted to comfort her, but the girl apparently needed distance.
Morgan tried for clarification, speaking in a quiet voice to Miranda. “It seems out of character. She wouldn’t just leave a message saying, ‘Pick up my body at the morgue.’”
“Jill, do you have your mother’s note?” Miranda asked. “Could we see it?”
The girl handed her a folded sheet of pale blue vellum. On it were clear instructions to meet her at this address. Miranda expected a spidery script, but the writing was slanted all to one side.
“Your mother didn’t write this, did she?” Miranda asked.
“No.”
“Did you write it?”
“Yes.”
“Why? I don’t understand how you knew to come here.”
She gazed into Miranda’s eyes with the bewildered look of a bird plucked from the air.
Miranda resisted taking the girl in her arms. They had to sort this out. “How did you know to come here, Jill?”
The girl seemed to be searching inside for an answer.
“When did you last see your mother?” asked Morgan, sitting beside her. Miranda was sitting on the other side; between the two of them they were shoring her up without touching her.
“This morning … when she drove me to school. She said not to worry and I wasn’t worried until she said that. Like, of course, I worried. She sometimes does strange things. She told me Victoria, our housekeeper, would look after me. She said you, the woman cop, would look after me. I asked her why would I need anyone to look after me. I asked her what cop. She said you’d find me. So I went into school, worried sick. When I got home, she wasn’t there and she didn’t come home for supper. Victoria had no idea what was going on, so I phoned all the hospitals. When I phoned here, they said there was a woman here, a murder victim, who fit my mom’s description. So I came over. I was waiting for you.”
She looked into Miranda’s eyes, her own eyes pleading for release from the emotional confusion. Miranda recognized the familiar fear of a brutalized child. She had been the same age when her father died.
Almost immediately Jill rallied and spoke in an even tone. “You know it when someone says goodbye to you and what they mean is forever. I knew this morning that I’d never see her again. But it was like being inside a movie. The more scary it was the more unreal it all seemed. Now it seems real. That’s my mom in there on the table. Isn’t she beautiful?”
“Yes,” said Miranda, “she’s very beautiful. Why the note, Jill?”
“I’m a kid. Kids can’t hang around places like this without permission.”
“Permission?”
“Like school, a note from my mom.” Miranda winced, and Jill smiled at her sweetly. “That’s irony, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Jill, that’s irony. Come on now. Let’s get you home. Is anyone there?”
“Victoria.”
“Your father?”
“My father is deceased,” the girl said with incongruous formality.
“I’m sorry, Jill.”
“It’s okay.” She gazed plaintively at Miranda and then away. “I don’t want my mom to be dead.”
“I know. Come on. Let’s go home.”
“Call me first thing in the morning, Miranda,” said Morgan. “Good night, Jill.” He remained seated while Miranda and Jill walked out through the front entrance, Miranda’s arm draped lightly across the girl’s shoulder, the girl leaning slightly into Miranda’s body, almost as if they were comforting each other.
When they were gone, Morgan picked up a chrome-plated Zippo lighter from the bench and fiddled with the unfamiliar mechanism until it flared into an orange-blue flame that burnt his finger. With a rapid flick of his hand he let the lighter drop to the floor. Then he leaned over, retrieved it, and slipped it into his pocket, where he could feel its residual warmth.
After the time it would have taken him to have a cigarette, Morgan went back into the autopsy room. “The big question is why?” he mumbled as he moved close to Ellen to follow her progress. He was thinking about smokers, not the corpse on the table.
“I can’t tell you that, Morgan. I never know why. No matter how much I cut and probe, I can’t get there. I can slice and dice the brain, but the mind is something else. I know that’s trite, but it’s true. I’ve never seen a soul, either.”
“Maybe you’ll surprise yourself someday and find a cavity the size of a walnut near the hypothalamus, but it’s empty and the occupant has fled. There’s a whole galaxy of souls out there, billions of walnuts rattling along the corridors of heaven. And I don’t even know what you mean by the mind.”
“The potential inherent in the functioning brain for awareness…” She paused and leaned low with a bright light to peer into the depths of the body. “I don’t know, Morgan. You tell me. What is the mind?”
“Maybe it’s like a grasp, something shaped in the air with your hands, the way your fingers move to catch water. It’s not the hand or the water but what they can do. More like the content in a computer, not the hard drive or a memory stick, but the content itself. And it can be erased. Look at her, just like that, and all you’re left with is machinery.”
“Late night at the morgue — the chatter never stops! Can you pour us some coffee? I don’t know how much more I’m going to get out of her tonight.”
Morgan got two cups of coffee and came back. “What about him?” He nodded in the direction of the stainless-steel drawers. “Robert Griffin. What’s the last word?”
“Died from asphyxiation. No trauma to speak of apart from death. His lungs were rosy and plump. Seems to have died without protesting.” She walked to a drawer, pulled it open, and peeled back a white cloth so that Griffin’s face gleamed in the phosphorescent light. “There was a fair dose of Valium in his system. Maybe that explains it. Apart from a little water damage he looks quite passable. Death becomes him, I think.”
“More so than life. He seems to have had an impoverished existence despite his wealth. No family, no friends, an indifferent lover, an obsession with fish. There was no water in his lungs, right?”
“Right.”
“No sign of a struggle?”
“Right. A small cut on his left temple, nothing much.”
“Would there have been blood?”
“I doubt it. It happened, as far as I can tell, virtually at the point of death. There would hardly be any to speak of.”