Eventually, she would be discovered.
Would her corpse be mouldering in the bed, her desiccated remains inseparable from the bedclothes and mattress, or dried into dust? Images of the grotesque and macabre entertained themselves in her brain, stopping her from slipping into a state of calm that scared her more than the taunting illusions of death.
Suddenly, the window in the door flashed with illumination, her cell reverberated with light. Gasping, she struggled to the door, her eyes searing in the dim glow. She couldn’t see or hear anything through the thick, narrow window. Miranda banged against the dented sheet metal, but could feel the door thud against the flesh of her hands, feel her efforts dissipate into the depths of its thermal layers. She walked around the room, straightening and tidying. The light suddenly flicked off, and she felt relieved as she stepped carefully through the darkness back to her bed.
That would have been Eugene Nishimura. It must be Sunday afternoon. She hadn’t thought to check her watch, which was under the edge of the bed. She leaned over, picked it up, and set it on the table. It was either Sunday or Monday. Surely, she had been here more than twenty-four hours. Her body felt drained and depleted. She had to conserve. She was leaching vital energy and fluids into the air.
The absence of humidity, the warmth, these were conditions that could easily be controlled by a system ostensibly set up for wine. This place was designed as a prison specifically to hold captives. Jill wasn’t the first. Those weren’t Jill’s dents on the back of the door. Miranda hadn’t noticed any bruises or abrasions on the girl.
Her mind raced. Griffin had kept other victims locked in here, warm and dry, had let them take showers and use the toilet, or at least empty the bedpan. He could have kept them on hold indefinitely for his personal use. She shuddered. How many rapes had occurred in this room? How many women had died here? She settled into the bed, feeling it rise to her weight, feeling a strange kinship with the girls and women who had preceded her in this terrible place.
Morgan went out for Sunday dinner to a restaurant on Eglinton Avenue. He walked there and worked up an appetite. After a pasta dinner, savouring the pleasant taste of garlic in his mouth, he ambled back along Yonge Street and into Rosedale.
Eugene Nishimura’s van was parked in front of the Griffin house, and though it was dark, enough light from Mrs. de Cuchilleros’s side windows enabled Morgan to see his way around to the back garden. Nishimura was inside. Morgan saw his head bobbing through the abandoned casement that was all that remained of the outside entry into the pump room.
“You’re working late,” he said when Nishimura emerged from the house.
Nishimura called out, “Is that you, Detective Morgan? Just a sec. I’ll turn on the pond lights.”
Suddenly, the most astonishing tableau flashed before Morgan’s eyes. He had been trying to make out the shapes of separate fish in the indirect garden lighting. Now a spectacular cube of illumination and colour opened in the ground, the depths of water resonating with absolute clarity.
“What an amazing collection!” said Nishimura. “I moved the grand champ up from the lower pond. Look at her! Have you ever seen red so wonderfully intense? Asymmetrical continents floating in absolute stillness, perfectly balanced. Such harmony! There’s a perfect tension between all the parts. She’s beautifully healthy. She’s a living haiku, a perfect living haiku.”
“Speaking of which, what does Ochiba Shigura mean?” Morgan asked. “Isn’t it something about autumn leaves and still water?”
“It just means Ochiba Shigura. That’s what kind of fish it is.”
“Don’t the words mean something? Translate it into English.”
“It means Ochiba Shigura. That’s a beautiful name for a fish.”
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t know. My Japanese isn’t that good.”
“It’s my favourite. Except for the Chagoi. You’ve moved it back up, too.”
The two men stood mesmerized, staring into the pel-lucid depths at the fish weaving patterns of colour and form, lazily ignoring the laws of gravity as they expounded the dimensions of their home in soaring slow motion.
Eventually, Nishimura said, “I’ve got to get going. My wife thinks I’ve got a new mistress.”
“A new one?”
Nishimura looked at him with an embarrassed smile. “I am a family man.”
“Lovely.”
“I fed them earlier. I’ll be back tomorrow to clean the filters.”
“I’ll walk out with you,” said Morgan. “I don’t want to be left in the dark.”
Miranda slept fitfully for an indeterminate period of time. Getting up with excruciating effort, she sat at the table, propped on her elbows, and fiddled with her watch. She had no desire to eat, but a craving for water sent burning cramps through her abdomen. Miranda contemplated opening one of the small wounds in her fingers and sucking on her own blood, but she was afraid the strain in processing the rich fluid might deplete more than nourish. She had no stomach at all for drinking urine, which now smelled sour. She had gone again a couple of times. Nothing much had come except a few drops and a sensation in her urethra as if she were trying to pee needles. She hadn’t been able to have a bowel movement, but a heavy urgency hovered painfully in her lower gut.
She decided she needed to think. Despite the miserable depletion of her physical resources, her mind seemed clear. Thinking would make the time pass, keep her focused. Images of the sun-glowing youth in the Speedo drifted through her mind. The last thing she felt was sexy. Her lips seared with pain, and she knew she had to be smiling. He had been a lovely temptation. Like seeing something sinful on a menu — too many calories, too much money. What if she had splurged? Why not? When she got out of this room, she was going to hop on a plane, fly to Grand Cayman, and find that luxuriously endowed young man. She was going to go scuba diving with him and dance beyond gravity in an erotic undersea ballet. Then she would take him back to her hotel room and do it and do it and do it.
“My goodness!” she said aloud, and this time she was strangely reassured by the resonance of her voice, despite its distortion.
Her throat was so dry that the utterance had nearly strangled her, and the deep fissures opening on her lips had caught at the words as they had emerged from her body. Her voice sounded familiar, but not like herself. She whispered, refusing the silence. “When I get out … I want …”
She couldn’t think of what she wanted. Miranda tried to redirect her thoughts. She knew she had to exercise her mind or she would lose control. She didn’t know what that meant, but it frightened her.
If Griffin had died the way she thought he had, and Eleanor Drummond had only killed him after he was dead, he couldn’t have known he was going to die. Miranda’s mind seemed separate from her body and was clearly a better place to be.
Two things. Why had Eleanor come to Griffin’s house if she wasn’t expecting her daughter to be there? Where had she thought Jill was? If Jill had run away before, say, downtown, and hung out with street kids, then her mother must have known she would come back. Eleanor had recognized how headstrong Jill was: bull-headed, determined, and smart the way she had been herself — a survivor. She had expected Jill to return home in due course after sorting out the revelation of her mother’s double life. Eleanor Drummond, or Molly Bray, hadn’t known that the issue for Jill was her father’s identity, not her mother’s deceit.
So