There was a long pause.
“What made you suspect he was her father?” he asked.
“Coroner’s intuition. They were lying there side by side. I don’t know. Him, nondescript. Her, lovely even in death. But there was something … They had similar feet, long fingers, eye teeth the same, you know, an accumulation of details.”
There was another long pause. Morgan didn’t want to break the connection.
“So,” Ellen said at last, “confronted with the fact that he was Molly’s father, as well as being the father of her unborn child, Griffin had no choice but to look after her. It all came down to negotiating the details. And she became his mistress …”
“I doubt it.”
“And the murder-suicide, suicide-murder — all this, Morgan, doesn’t explain that.”
“No, there’s a huge gap between motive and intent. The intention? Well, she was confident we’d discover Jill’s parentage. So, to ensure that Jill was recognized as Griffin’s heir, to protect her daughter’s interests, and at the same time to keep Jill from finding out that her father was also her mother’s father, she counted on us to be just good enough at our jobs to reveal and obscure as directed, from beyond the grave. Motivation? Why start the ball rolling? It’s a mystery.”
“Gap? It’s more like a yawning abyss! The woman killed herself in the most horrendous way, Morgan. To endure such appalling pain, to put herself through that, there had to be something unthinkably worse that she was trying to obscure.”
“Yeah,” said Morgan. “There’s more to the story. Where the hell is Miranda?”
“I gotta go. My clients are getting impatient. You take care now. She’ll turn up one way or another. She always does.”
Morgan sank deeper into the cushions of the wing-back chair, aching from Miranda’s absence, wanting to toss these latest revelations and speculations around with her to see if she could sort them out, take them farther. His anxiety was becoming more focused, and curiously, as he worried about her, he needed her warmth to assuage his fears. Caught up in anxiety, he was hardly aware of where he was, and virtually went limp at the sudden sound of a voice out of nowhere.
“Well, don’t we look cozy.”
It wasn’t the utterance of a fiend or mischievous sprite but merely Mrs. de Cuchilleros speaking from an alarmingly unexpected position behind him.
“Hello, Detective Morgan! I thought you were outside.”
“No,” he said without looking around. “I’m not.” He needed a moment to construct in his mind what was happening. “Please come around where I can see you,” he finally said, remaining seated in the chair.
“Yes, certainly,” she responded cheerfully. “I would be happy to. I knew you were here somewhere. I wanted to speak to you.”
“How did you get in, Mrs. de Cuchilleros?”
“Through the tunnel, dear. Come along, Dolores. Dolores came with me, of course. I wouldn’t come alone.”
Morgan was nearly as disconcerted when the maid came into view and stood beside Mrs. de Cuchilleros, who had made herself comfortable on the sofa. He felt foolish. He hadn’t conceived of the passage between houses as going both ways.
“It’s not the easiest route,” he suggested.
“Oh, but it is, and here we are.”
“Do you often do this?”
“No. Not since my husband died. One time Mr. De Cuchilleros thought there might be burglars. Mr. Griffin was away, of course.”
“You must have been compelled to examine the place thoroughly.”
“Oh, yes, we went through the entire house.”
I’m sure you did, he thought. “Did you have a weapon?”
“Good grief, no. Just a flashlight. The late Mr. de Cuchilleros was a very accomplished boxer.”
“Boxer?”
“When he was a youth.”
“Good thing you didn’t run into a burglar.”
“Oh, yes, it would have been very unpleasant. My husband was a strong man even at seventy. He had an excellent physique. He lifted dumbbells every morning of our married life.”
“Mrs. de Cuchilleros, could you explain why you’re here? This is a crime scene.”
“We’re not going to contaminate anything, dear.”
“That’s not the point.”
“The Chinese boy is walking about like he owns the place.”
“Mr. Nishimura is a man, and he’s Japanese. He’s a Canadian of very long standing, he’s an authority in his field, and he belongs here by invitation of the police and the executor of the deceased.”
“Well, I wanted to speak to you personally.”
“Perhaps we should go outside,” said Morgan as he rose to his feet and shepherded the two women through the French doors.
“It’s chilly out here,” Mrs. de Cuchilleros said.
Dolores looked at her sympathetically but didn’t offer her cardigan, seeming to know the gesture would be wasted. Since Morgan didn’t offer his own jacket, the old woman braced her shoulders and marched over to the pool where her neighbour’s body had been floating when she discovered it from her aerie next door. She waited for her maid and Morgan to catch up, then made a declaration. “Dolores and I cleaned out the leaves.”
“You what!” Morgan was annoyed both at her presumption and at the triviality of her announcement.
“Dolores and I cleaned out the leaves.”
“You came here?”
“Early this morning, and we raked the leaves off the
top of his pond.” She paused for dramatic effect, then pointed at the green pond. “That one.” Ominously, she added, “It looks like mine … on the surface.”
“You’ve done this before?” asked Morgan, irritated by the way she was trying to position herself in a drama with pregnant pauses and curious inflections.
“I’ve only been here … once … since poor Mr. Griffin was found dead in his fish pond.”
“They’re all fish ponds.”
“Oh, no. I would say the two greenish ponds are ponds with fish in them and this one, where he was floating, that’s a fish pond.”
“Fair enough,” Morgan said, appreciating the distinction. “Did you come here through the house?”
“Yes, but we didn’t disturb anything. He had more leaves on his pond than we ever have in ours. It’s the trees, you know, and the wind. So I could see his needed caring for and I wanted to be neighbourly.”
“You did?”
“Yes, I did. Dolores came over with me and we skimmed all the leaves, but a few were waterlogged, and when Dolores tried to scoop them up, they sank. That’s when we discovered it.”
“Discovered what?”
“The discrepancy.”
“Mrs. de Cuchilleros, what are you talking about?”
“Be patient, Detective. Dolores’s net went down so deep in the water she reached the end of the long handle and could just scrape the bottom.”
“And?”
“And nothing. You see,