“Dunno. I wanted to be a cop. Morgan says it was for empowerment. He figures I was reacting to a subconscious sense of violation.”
“Is he right?”
“Maybe.”
Rachel sank back against the sofa cushions, waiting.
“There was a man; he was in one of my senior courses at university, much older than me. He may have…” Miranda sat forward, took in a deep breath. “I was raped when I was eighteen. I never saw his face. I didn’t know his name… Maybe I did, I don’t know. I made myself forget.
“I didn’t connect the guy in my class with my assailant. Not consciously, not until last summer.
“At the end of the academic year, when friends were taking off for Europe or Thailand or preparing for graduate school — I had a scholarship to go on in semiotics, believe it or not — to everyone’s surprise, including my own, I joined the Mounties.”
“Morgan thinks you were trying to get away from this guy who was haunting your life?”
“Shadowing, not haunting. I didn’t know he was there. Morgan thinks subconsciously I did. He thinks I was trying to take charge of my life. I don’t even know if I believe in the subconscious. It’s just a bunch of neurons in there and an infinite maze of electrical impulses.”
“Tell me about your daughter.”
“Who?”
“You’ve mentioned a girl. I thought maybe it was a custody thing.”
“Jill? She’s my ward. I’ve never had kids. You?”
“Not even an abortion.”
Miranda was thrown for a moment, but saw nothing in Rachel’s expression either to indicate morbid wit or incipient confession.
“Jill’s fifteen, going on forty. And sometimes she’s four. She’s sweet and tough and smart. She’s gone through a lot.”
“And you?”
“I’m the administrator of her father’s charitable bequests. I was his executor.”
“Not the girl from the fish-pond murders?”
Miranda glared.
“I’m sorry,” said Rachel. “That was thoughtless.”
Miranda shrugged. Usually, she did not connect with versions of herself in the media, especially in stories as wildly exploited for gruesome perversity, despite all that went unrevealed. But Rachel’s casual reference forced a vital connection between the trivialized account in the papers and her private and painful memories.
Rachel seemed to understand.
“It’s so easy to lose track of the real people involved,” she was saying. “Like the fifty-some prostitutes murdered in Vancouver. Maybe their bodies were ground up as pig food. People food? It wasn’t until I saw somebody’s brother weeping on television, suddenly the numbers, the macabre speculation broke down, those women, they were individual lives, each with her own terrible agony, dying her own special death. It’s the Anne Frank syndrome. I understand more about the Holocaust, reading the account of a girl that ends just before her arrest, than from seeing the pictures of bulldozed bodies and reading statistics. I didn’t even know Anne had died at Bergen-Belsen when I read her diary. The illusions of objectivity in historical texts or in tabloids destroy empathy. You know what I mean?”
Miranda stared at her, wide-eyed. Another person might have just apologized.
“You talk to me,” said Rachel. “You need to talk.”
She reached across and put her hand on the other woman’s knee. Miranda started to pull away, then placed her own hand over Rachel’s and gave it an affirming squeeze that curiously translated through Rachel’s grasp to her own knee, as if she were reassuring herself.
Miranda placed Jill at the centre of the narrative, merging public knowledge with confidential revelations; unsure, herself, about the lines between news and gossip and confession. She explained her connection to a wealthy recluse with a vintage Jag, and she explained Jill’s connection to them both. She explained how she had been transformed by ghastly circumstances from investigating detective to Jill’s guardian and the man’s executor. She described horrors inflicted and horrors endured.
“But you cannot suppress evil for wanting,” she said. “You can hide terrible things but you can’t erase them. You can’t forget just because you want to forget. You know what I mean?”
“Miranda, I do. I know exactly what you mean.”
Miranda meant to ask Rachel to go on, but instead she pursued the dead woman in the closet. That seemed more real, for the moment, paradoxically, because Rachel was willing to listen.
“She died from dehydration,” Miranda explained. “She felt her skin parch and shrivel, felt her insides decrepitate, felt her lips crack and her eyes bleed. This young woman, she was of no interest to her killer. Do you realize how rare that must be? Murder, not to end a life but to create death. It’s beyond pathological. Almost satanic.”
“Death as an act of creation! In that case, there will likely be more. Do you think so?”
They talked late into the night, then went to bed.
Miranda rolled on her side, staring at the indentation in the pillow where Rachel’s head had been. She reached over and gently rested the back of her hand in the hollow. She could smell the fresh scent that lingered in the sheets, like the smell of leaves unfurling in the morning sun. She drifted into sleep, and an hour later awakened. She would call Jill at noon, when she was home from school, and see if she wanted to go out for pizza, maybe an early movie if the homework wasn’t too heavy. They both liked movies.
CHAPTER SIX
“G’morning,” said Morgan. “I’m back.”
“I didn’t know you’d been away.”
Miranda mumbled, struggling to assimilate his voice into her scattering dream. She rolled over on her back and stretched. At least it was morning.
“I’ve been up all night. It’s time you got out of bed,” he said, as if there were a logical point. “I’m still at the airport; thought I’d check in.”
“Thanks, Morgan. Where have you been?”
“Just got in from Sao Paulo.”
“That’s Brazil!”
“That’s right.”
“What were you doing there, for goodness sake?”
“Stopping over from Santiago.”
“Chile!”
“Well done.”
“What was in Chile? You are very strange.”
“Easter Island. Santiago is the jumping off point for Easter Island.”
“You’re serious. You were at Easter Island.”
“‘On,’ not ‘at.’ It’s very small.”
“Morgan, it’s too early. Meet me on, or at, Fran’s for breakfast.”
“I’ll meet you at Starbucks in an hour.”
They both knew which Starbucks — the one over from police headquarters on the corner of College and Yonge.
“So, you’ve been away?” she said when she saw him.
He rose, kissed her on both cheeks, and slumped back into his chair. He had a large cappuccino waiting for her, with the saucer on top to keep it warm. His eyes were bloodshot and his hands swollen, but he looked content, like the cat, having swallowed the canary, who endured indigestion as a reasonable price for the pleasure.
“Tell me.”
“Well,” he said, “I got on an Air Canada flight at Pearson, heading for Easter Island. When I transferred to Varig Air in Brazil, I was travelling to Isla de Pascua. In Santiago, I boarded Lan Chile for Rapa Nui. And I landed on Te pito o te henua. All the same place. It was a magical journey. Did you ever read Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, where he gets on a modern train in the Metropolis, and transfers to an older train on his way to Mariposa as he travels back into another world defined by nostalgia and wit? I have just emerged from another dimension, defined by enchantment and mystery.”
“You sound slightly demented. What on earth took you… there?” Miranda gazed across the table at her partner, who was dishevelled, buoyant with enthusiasm. He was precious in her life, she wanted to tell him. She wanted to hug him and keep him invulnerable. “You are an idiot, Morgan. No one knew where you were.”
“On Rapa Nui. That’s what they call themselves, and their language, and the island. Te pito o te henua means navel of the world. It’s not really a name; for a thousand years they didn’t know there was anyone else on the planet. It’s a geographical declaration.”