Morgan walked through the corridor and into the labyrinthine crypt under the oldest part of the house, heading directly to the pump room where the door opened easily. He surveyed the elaborate convolutions of pipes and tanks, went over and picked up the rag draped across the tap. He knew what a gusset was and tossed the rag aside.
Striding out to the main passageway again, he turned and stopped at the wine cellar door without noticing there was a key in the lock. He leaned forward to peer through the glass but could see nothing, not even his shadowed reflection. Returning to the main passage, he made his way to the door of the tunnel connected to the de Cuchilleros estate, pushed it open, and stared into the darkness. Another dead end. He returned to his chair.
Morgan was too restless to settle for very long, and after a while he rose, put on his rumpled jacket, though it wasn’t cool in the cellars, and picked up a pewter candle holder. Taking the Zippo from his pocket, he lit the candle and went back to the tunnel entrance. There was an imperceptible breeze that made the flame flicker as he entered the darkness. The tunnel took several abrupt turns, and Morgan felt increasingly claustrophobic. Then a turgid movement of air snuffed out the candle, and for a moment he froze. The floor was suddenly a dark abyss, as if he might step off the earth into a terrible void.
The lighter dropped when he took it from his pocket and clattered against the cobbles. As he squatted slowly toward the sound where it had landed, warm wax dripped onto his wrist. In surprise he released his grip on the candle holder and was startled by the resonant thud of pewter on stone as it fell to the floor. Shifting to his knees, he made a sweep through the darkness with his hand and almost immediately brushed against the holder, but the candle was gone. He was amused and annoyed at his fear. His fingers closed around the lighter, and he rose to his feet. His mind, even before a flame leaped into the darkness, summoned an image of Jill at the morgue.
Locating the candle, he relit it, carefully shielded the flame with his cupped hand, and moved forward inside the flickering aura of light until he was confronted by two heavy oak doors, one of which opened with considerable effort onto a stone stairway. At the top of the steps he discovered he was in the de Cuchilleros carriage house, which was attached to the main house and was used as a garage. Descending, he tried the other door, which swung freely as if the hinges had been oiled, and found himself staring out into the widow’s back garden.
Morgan was strangely unnerved by his feelings of violation as a trespasser, and he returned through the tunnel. He had been enthralled by the cellars and passageways, but now it all seemed more sinister, perhaps because for a moment the darkness had closed around him like the walls of a grave.
Before going home he went down to police headquarters, did a search of hospital admissions with no result, and finally decided Miranda had gone off on a fling. When he got home, he sat in front of the television, angry at her and worried. If she was touring the Muskoka colours, it was a dumb way to do it, not telling him first. No one at headquarters had showed any concern. Alex Rufalo had pointed out that she was on compassionate leave, so she could do what she wanted.
Morgan fell asleep sprawled across his sofa. When he woke up, the television was flickering grey. He shivered while he stood beside the toilet to pee. Weighed down with the excessive gravity of early morning, he struggled to get up the stairs. After he crawled into bed, he dreamed of autumn leaves falling on still water.
Miranda awakened in bone-wracking pain. She tried to raise herself, but her body was a dead weight. Her mind seemed uncannily lucid, her mental world separate from its violated container, reaching to float free. Her body was holding her back, urging her that it was time perhaps to leave it behind.
I remember the victims, she thought. I try to remember the victims.
Miranda had known the names of all fourteen young women who were shot to death at École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1989. But then they began to slip away, and she jumbled first names with last, distorting their identities, and was ashamed. And she was angry that she couldn’t forget their killer’s name.
She recalled reading about Kitty Genovese who had died in New York in the 1960s while witnesses had looked out their windows and watched her being stabbed, then watched again when her assailant returned a half-hour later and stabbed her some more until she was dead. She remembered Mary Jo Kopechne at Chap-paquiddick, Massachusetts, who may have been implicated in her own demise, or maybe not.
She remembered she had never been to Europe.
Envisioning her subterranean prison of stone and plastered brick and old timbers, she summoned images of European timelessness, the walls of medieval towns weaving through cities, and these pictures gave way to visions of utter depravity, the mounds of human corpses she had witnessed with fascinated horror in old newsreels, trying to pick out among the twisted limbs and torsos and gaping misshapen heads whole figures, somehow as if she could restore dignity to a few of them if only she could recognize individuals, not a jumble of parts.
She thought of Safiya Husaini, the woman in Nigeria condemned to be buried to the waist and stoned to death with rocks of a prescribed size because she had submitted to forced sex with an elderly relative. This was her fate under the jurisdiction of sharia, proclaimed by some as the fundamental laws of God. Sometimes Miranda felt sorry for God. To her horror she couldn’t recall whether or not the execution had been carried out. She didn’t know whether Safiya Husaini was alive or dead.
In Ontario sharia was accepted as law. Was it? Her eyes burned without tears to wash away pain.
If she walked through a slave market, should she stifle her outrage because it was custom, or tear off the manacles, even of slaves who found comfort in slavery?
Fadime — that was the name of the young Kurdish woman in Sweden who was killed by her father for loving a Swede. Honour killings in Canada. Surely dishonour.
A poem by Margaret Atwood came to her in precise, cruel images; there was no beauty in them. The poem was called “Women’s Issue,” or it should have been, but that was close enough. Nameless women give birth to the men who arrange to have stakes driven between other women’s legs and their vaginas sewn up, and to the men who line up for a turn at the same used prostitute, adding their semen to the spilled waste of the world. She couldn’t sort out the poem’s grisly imagery from her own memories of brutalized women, nameless, blood-drenched, in ditches and bedrooms and cars, and splayed out on stainless-steel trays at the morgue.
When did political correctness become moral compromise? That was her last, pellucid thought, which she associated with burkas, with cultural brutality, with the infinite pain of bearing and not bearing children, with tolerance for death.
Miranda’s whole system was shutting down. She could feel her guts shrivel, could identify each organ by its unique tremulations of pain as she did a ghoulish inventory. Her heart beat like a fist clenched over nothing, expanding and contracting in exhaustion; her breath grated against her throat, her lungs were in flames.
Thinking was suddenly unbearable. One minute she was filled with ideas, the next almost vacant. Except she knew something. She knew she had been the victim of a crime, of rape, and of consequences fast approaching closure. Not through her death. Through the revelation of suffering.
She groped with her hands until they found each other over her stomach. Then she let her elbows drop and her forearms settle against the bed by her thighs. She gave a mighty heave and swung herself forward through a muffled scream so that her legs draped over the side, pulling her upright, and a dry sob emerged from deep