“Seriously, how did you find it?”
“Morgan, I’m a good detective. I phoned CAA.” She couldn’t remember which one was Scully and which was Mulder in The X-Files, but she could see the actors who played the FBI agents clearly on a television screen in her mind. “What did you think of Miss Clarke? She was flirting with you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Morgan, she was.”
“I take that as a compliment — from both of you. It was curious, insisting that Molly wasn’t difficult, then telling stories that would make your hair curl.”
“And with pride.”
“Yeah. I’d say she loved her foundling daughter.”
“Granddaughter. To be age appropriate she designates herself a grandmother.”
“But I’m not really sure she understood her. Must have been like nurturing a wild animal until it springs free of affection. The loss leaves you grateful and grasping, resigned and triumphant.”
“That’s poetic.”
“She was a lovely woman.”
“Morgan, do you know what I like about you?”
“I’m poetic?”
“You wear baby powder–scented deodorant.”
“I do?”
“You smell nice.”
“You smell earthy,” he said.
“I do not.”
“You smell like winter. You always smell like winter.”
“That’s nice, Morgan. Thank you.”
They came to the 401, but instead of crossing over to the Toronto ramp, Miranda veered west toward Waterloo County. Not anticipating the turn, Morgan lurched to the side, recovered, and slouched into the comfortable leather depths of the bucket seat. He looked for an explanation, but she was completely focused on the road ahead.
What difference would it make if he didn’t go into headquarters? Alex Rufalo, their superintendent, knew Miranda was off the case. He also knew they were working together as usual. That meant they were relatively autonomous or, at the least, hard to pin down.
Neither said a word during the short ride to Waldron. Being on a monster highway that swayed across the landscape under the burden of eighteen-wheelers spewing fumes as they passed wasn’t enough to erase his pleasure in the pastoral experience. The low-slung car rolled solidly along, indifferent to the contours of scenery. Miranda drove with casual confidence, but not fast.
Morgan had never been this far west except in the air. Taking the Waldron exit, Miranda drove down past her mother’s house without slowing and didn’t indicate to her partner that that was where she had grown up. She drove directly over the hill and parked the green Jaguar at the end of the loading dock under the lee of the corrugated steel walls of the mill. High above, in faded orange, a rampant gryphon lorded over all he surveyed, even though the mill had long since passed into local ownership. This was exactly where she had last seen the same car, parked right here, twenty years earlier.
Miranda got out of the Jaguar, strode up onto the embankment, and plunged into the cloistered canopy over the millrace. Brooding cedars tinged with autumn russet and perforated with a filigree of light cast dappled patterns between them as Morgan raced to catch up with her. When he reached her, he took her arm and she immediately slowed to a walk, almost a stroll, as if they were lovers. They hadn’t spoken for almost an hour, but driving into the rolling hills of Waterloo County, Morgan had felt perfectly attuned to her needs, if not privy to her thoughts.
When they broke into the open space of the meadow, they saw the pond water divide in the gentle breeze: one branch flowed over the dam, sliding smoothly, carving down into the spillway, where it broke and re-gathered in the trout pool and cut randomly toward the bridge in the valley beyond; and the other branch flowed to the race, where it took on dimensions of shadow and darkness as it moved between parallels under the cedars on its way to the turbines of the mill.
They both stood astonished. Morgan had never seen such beauty. He had never imagined, in all his reading and limited travels, that there could be such a place. He knew other people were moved by mountains or wilderness, the Sistine Chapel or Stonehenge, Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon, the Acropolis, High Arctic archipelagos, or the gardens at Kew. But his mind raced and found no comparisons. For him this was the right combination of nature and the gentle intrusion of human design. For Miranda there was shock, a chilling bewilderment that nothing had changed.
Stepping into the light, she walked to an imagined depression in the grass, knelt, placed her hand on the ground, and ran it slowly over where she would have been spread out so long ago, so recently that it hurt. Morgan came up and stood beside her, resting his hand on her shoulder. He looked over at the dilapidated structure of the old mill, the roof still precariously balanced in sheet metal shards on its tumbledown tower.
Crossing the dam to the mill, Morgan shifted his weight carefully over the thick walk-board. When he got to the mill, he pushed open the door and stepped into a dank maze of shadows and light, crenellations of the sun shining between separated boards of the ancient walls. He pushed against myriad cobwebs, some wheeling in small riots of intricate strategic design, some invisible in the shadows, and choked when they clasped at his face.
Morgan climbed gingerly up the suspended ladder steps into the tower loft and stepped onto the precarious floor, bracing against rafters that swooped ominously over his head. He looked down through the splayed floor-boards into a watery shimmer two storeys below beneath gaps in the ground-level floor — still-water seepage, closed off long ago by the earthen embankment when the pond was diverted to the race. Morgan crouched where the wallboard opened and peered toward the dam and down at Miranda, who was lying spread-eagled on top of her coat on the grass, fully clothed but pathetically vulnerable. She was staring up into the sky, not at the tower but into the layers of cloud and open blue.
Morgan’s eyes adjusted to the chiaroscuro lattice of shadows and light that surrounded him. Tracing in his imagination where the man must have spent all those hours, he lowered his weight to the floor and found it difficult to breathe.
A hand-forged nail lying on top of an exposed joist caught his eye. He picked it up and toyed with it, imagining other hands holding it, other eyes examining the flanged head where it had been drawn and snipped from redhot iron two centuries earlier. Morgan had read about nails. He knew the different shapes of pioneer nails, each peculiar to one region or another, declaring its vintage as clearly as if it were labelled. He didn’t own antiques, but he loved reading about Canadiana, especially early Ontario furniture with its original paint. He watched the Antiques Road Show, both the British and American versions, on late-night reruns.
As he replaced the nail, exactly where he found it, he noticed deliberate marks etched into a wallboard. He brushed the dust away with the side of his hand, blew across what seemed to be letters.
The inscription was brief and enigmatic, like the flourish of a signature that concealed yet expressed identity. The first letter was a capital M, like a skull with the top carved away. The next was a B, crudely done with the eyes of the letter gouged out. Then there were a linked pair of letters, what seemed like a gaping mouth with a slash to one side, followed by the crooked jaw of a G. Leaning to the side, he spied in the shadow of an upright beam other marks scratched into the wood. When his eyes adjusted, the marks became very distinct: M period. Q period.
Griffin knew her name!
Morgan could taste bile in his throat. How many hours and years did he hide here, watching? Morgan spat into the dust.
“Mary Bingham Carter-Griffin,”