Her family had been in Waterloo County since it first opened for settlement. Some of her earliest forbears were Mennonites who had trekked up from Pennsylvania by Conestoga wagon after the revolutionary defeat, not for loyalty to the Crown but in fear of closing horizons in the new republic, a nation cobbled from wishes and dreams and given to values of enterprise and self-reliance they admired in themselves and feared in others. She was German, as well, from Bavaria, and English from Northumberland and Kent, and family lore had it that there was Mohawk blood in their veins. But she identified most with her Irish progenitors who had arrived out of famine and were thrust into agricultural wealth beyond their imagining in the lush, fertile landscape of Waterloo County, so strange from Connemara it faded out of their memories in only a few generations, but stayed deep in their hearts, that mixture of cool detachment, wild passion, and an inordinate fondness for language. McGillivery’s subversive burr made her feel oddly at home.
Being Anglican for the last couple of generations was like flying a flag of convenience, tattered as it was at this point in her life.
“What about inside?” she asked. “Did you take Rex into the house?”
“Why?” asked Morgan.
“I don’t know, she said. “Let’s take him in.”
When they opened the French doors, McGillivery released the dog without giving him a particular scent to pursue. Rex walked to the armchair, then looked back at Morgan. He walked over and sniffed Miranda, and she resisted her impulse to pat him. He seemed to be assimilating their scent, sorting them out from a complex pattern of odours. Then he paced back and forth, testing different scents that were unfamiliar but suggested only the purposeful activities of police investigators going about their business. Nothing spiked, nothing caught his attention, until he sniffed by the sofa where Eleanor Drummond had been sitting. Rex followed her scent to the chair and around and about the room, losing it in the din. He walked to the open door leading to the main floor, went back to the sofa as if he were confirming a suspicion, then walked purposefully upstairs, through the foyer, and up the next flight to the study door, which he pushed open with his nose. Standing very still, he blocked entry into the room, awaiting instructions.
Morgan glanced at the stains on the floor and explained to McGillivery that Eleanor Drummond had been found here in a pool of blood.
On a command from McGillivery, Rex moved one step at a time through the room, surveyed the patterns of scent, careful to avoid the space the body had occupied, and returned to sit at the feet of his handler, pensively waiting. McGillivery snapped his fingers, and the dog turned and trotted back down to the den. Miranda, Morgan, and Rex’s handler followed, the detectives expecting a revelation of some sort, but when they caught up to him, the dog was curled on the Kurdish runner, feigning sleep.
“So what’s he telling us?” Morgan asked.
“That he’s hungry,” suggested Miranda. “How did he know where Eleanor Drummond died?”
“He recognizes violence,” said McGillivery. “Even weeks later there’s a residual smell.”
“The lingering presence of evil,” said Morgan, assuming with a name like McGillivery that the handler was a Calvinist.
As if on cue, the dog unfurled, rose to his feet, shook himself, and went to the door that led past the bathroom into the nether regions of the house. McGillivery opened it for him. He stopped at the bathroom, entered, sniffed at the drain, gazed uncertainly at the tile walls, then abruptly went out and along to the next door, which stood ajar, and plunged into the dark, subterranean maze of cellars and passageways.
“He’ll get lost in there,” said Morgan.
Miranda responded by flicking a switch that drowned out the darkness with pools of light. They saw Rex disappear around a corner and caught up with him near the wine cellar, where he seemed for a moment distracted, standing unnaturally still. Then he gathered himself, veered around them, and disappeared back down the long passage leading to the tunnel. Barking, he returned, sniffed Miranda and Morgan, as if sorting out something, then almost slunk back to the wine cellar door. He stared up toward the small window, lowered his head, and began scratching against the stone and dirt floor by the sill.
“He’s got excellent taste,” Morgan observed. “He smells what they call ‘the portion of the gods,’ the infinitesimal seepage of great wine through old cork. I think we’ll have to sample a few before it’s all gone.”
Miranda smiled. The wine fell under her jurisdiction, not his.
Rex moved on, abandoning his digging project. His focus shifted to the pump room, but when he got inside he seemed disinterested, as if it wasn’t what he had expected.
“It’s the noise,” said McGillivery. There was an audible hush of electric motors, the soft rush of water surging through enclosed spaces. “It muffles the scents. My God, is all this necessary to run a fish pond?”
“They’re koi,” said Morgan. “Highly valued. The proof is the expense you see to maintain them.”
“What do you think he thought he’d find?” said Miranda, not sure whether the word thought was appropriate.
“Rex? Hard to say. He’s picking up too much. He can’t process it all. He gets bits and pieces, but no overall pattern. He’d show me if he could —”
“Searching for the master narrative,” interjected Miranda. “The story of the stories. He’s probably getting undisturbed scents down here from generations, a hundred and fifty years or more, everything from trysts between servants to the depravity of children playing games of fear and retribution.”
“Normally called hide-and-seek,” Morgan said. “You’re in a mood.”
“Yeah,” said Miranda, surprised that it showed. She hadn’t had the opportunity to tell him about the previous night’s revelations. She was in no hurry; she had a lot to assimilate. “Let’s get back into the light. I don’t like it down here. It’s all too obsessive.”
As soon as they re-entered the passageways, Rex starting dashing about again. He went down to the tunnel door and back, then to the wine cellar door, where he lingered briefly, then back to the door into the garage, which he scratched at and abruptly abandoned, then back once more, pushing his way out into the den with the others, striding ahead of them outside into the sunlight.
Rex trotted over to the pool, rested his forepaws on the top of the raised wall, and gazed down at the koi swimming below him quite calmly, having recovered from his intrusion. He cocked his head to one side, quizzical, the observer observed, his work in the cellar already forgotten.
Morgan was puzzling over the way Rex had avoided contaminating the crime scene when they went up to the study. The dog carefully stepped around the specific area where the body had been. Did his handler give him a command, or did he just know? He asked McGillivery, and the man explained he had used the word steady, and that was all it took.
“Would it work for me?” asked Morgan.
“What do you mean?”
“If I gave the same command.”
“If it made sense. There would have to be something to avoid.”
“Okay, here’s where Griffin was laid out on the ground. You try it first.”
McGillivery moved so the dog would have to cross over the site where the body had been to reach him when he was summoned. On command, after the handler said “Steady,” Rex came directly to him, stepping through the phantom corpse as if nothing were there. “There must have been a groundsheet under the dead man, something to obscure the scent.”
Morgan insisted they go back to the study, while Miranda stayed by the pool.
When they returned, Morgan explained. “He wouldn’t walk across where the body