“What an astonishing irony,” said Morgan. “Like King Henry sanctioning Becket’s sainthood after commanding his execution.”
His allusion seemed of no interest. He shrugged as they got up and moved closer to the fire. He had grave doubts about this strange woman, which she seemed to cultivate, and her project sounded far-fetched. Research proposals were peer reviewed, of course, although perhaps her peers were equally delusional.
“So, how do you get permission to dig up a sacred aboriginal site and/or the grave of a saint?”
“You have the good fortune of being able to trace the bones to unsanctified ground on the edge of a farmer’s field.”
“You’ve done that?” he asked, a little incredulous.
“No,” she said, as she tilted a decanter of port and poured them each a good portion. “Not exactly. I have been shown a place where there is a stone cairn and what might be a burial mound, on land that may once have been a Huron settlement. The native residents have long since disappeared, pushed out by successive waves of Iroquois, French, and then settler invaders, none of whom were interested in a hallowed sight of the vanquished. I’m playing on more than a hunch, though. By reading Jesuit texts, reading the lay of the land — it would have been a perfect setting for one of the Huron people’s moveable villages, a pocket of good earth for agriculture, the stonework appears to be Huron — everything led me to think the farmer who owned it, who called me out of the blue, was on to something. He knew about the mound all his life but waited until he got old before risking anything that might interfere with working the land. Unfortunately for him, he waited too long. He died. But the new absentee owners from Toronto don’t mind me prowling about. In fact, they’re quite pleased, and they don’t even know what I suspect is interred in the mound, only that they are, as we say, stewards of our archaeological heritage.”
Shelagh Hubbard was an odd anomaly. As she leaned toward him over the table, gesticulating with her wine glass, the candle flames caught in her eyes and flickered. Morgan was drawn to her and repelled, and she seemed amused by his ambivalence.
“This is my sanctuary, Morgan. My sanctum sanctorum, where anything seems possible and all is forgiven.”
Planes of firelight gleamed on the walls, the fire burned bright and clean, the air shimmered with a timeless warmth. It had never before occurred to him how different light must have been as a medium before electricity. The air had dimension, the eyes were not passive receptacles but reached out to connect. He felt comfortably removed from the familiar world.
“It’s hard not to like it here,” she observed. “I’m glad you came, whatever your reasons.”
He glanced at her and away, looking into the heart of the fire.
“It’s always interesting,” she said. “The Georgian Bay is filled with enticements. And secrets, as well.”
She was taunting him.
“Why do you call it ‘The’?”
“Playful pretension. The nouveau riche who buy up those rambling old cottages in Muskoka say ‘The Muskokas.’ It’s parody — just a bit of fun.”
Either this was a profound revelation of character or as trivial an affectation as the one she was mocking.
“Tell me about your wife,” she asked, reaching across to replenish the blood-red port in his glass.
He could hear Miranda warning him. When they start offering consolation for your love life, Morgan, you know you’re in trouble. He gazed into the flickering fire in her eyes and sat back in his chair.
“You’ve been wounded, David. Invisible wounds leave invisible scars, but they’re there to the touch.”
She tilted her head slightly. She was so obvious, and yet emotional need overrode sense and he felt himself opening to her. Perhaps because he suspected her guilty of unspeakable crimes, he was drawn to self-revelation. Embraced by the profound amorality of a psychopath — the perfect conditions to exorcise demons. An absolute absence of judgment seemed dangerously seductive.
“We were deeply in love,” he said, “but not with each other. We loved an idea of what the other could be. It didn’t last long.”
Shelagh Hubbard swirled her port and raised it high to observe his image distorted through the crimson depths of her glass.
“Six weeks after we were married…,” he paused. This was something he had talked about to no one. “Six weeks, and she went back to her former boyfriend. Just for a weekend. She came home, told me where she had been, said she loved me, said she had to be sure. The absurd thing is, I knew all weekend where she was, what she was doing. We were supposed to meet for dinner on Friday at the corner of Yonge and Queen. Six o’clock. I waited for her in the drenching rain. I waited until ten o’clock. I was twenty-four years old. I knew where she was. I went home.
“She thought I could be a better version of him; he was a bit stupid and psychologically abusive and struck me as sleazy, the one time we met. But he understood her in ways I couldn’t. He played on her weaknesses and I played to her strengths. Inevitably the game went to him.”
“Was it a game?”
“Yeah, for her it was. Not a party game, more like medieval jousting. Tears of anguish, histrionic emotions, malevolent acts, and melodramatic confessions. And of course I wasn’t him. It sunk in, eventually. I wasn’t even a very good version of myself.”
“And what about her? What did you want her to be?”
She got up and put a hand on his arm, giving it a lingering squeeze, then stirred the embers and added a couple of split maple logs, returned to her chair, and leaned forward into the candlelight.
She was drawing him out, like a succubus ingesting his soul. There was something sexually charged about her silence that made him afraid not of her but himself.
“At that point in my life, I wasn’t after a mirror opposite, but the mirror itself. No matter how I held it, I wanted to see me. I hadn’t learned yet to be alone.”
“And have you now?”
“Yes, I have.”
“You and Detective Quin are very close.”
“Yes.”
“But she’s not like you at all.”
“No.”
“And you like that — you both do.”
“We’re good to each other. My marriage, brief as it was, was brutal and bitter. I learned that being alone is a primal condition of being. I’m okay with that.”
“How sad.”
“Not really.”
“You retreat into esoteric allusions and arcane pursuits, with a friend too close to be a lover.”
“Hardly makes me a figure of pathos.”
“But rather restricting. A good relationship can change your life without changing who you are.” She paused, as if trying to determine the truth of her own statement. “Do we have a good relationship, David?”
He did not answer. A woman quite possibly guilty of the most grisly of murders, of being a psychopath, was giving him advice. And he was listening.
“Let’s have that sauna,” she said. “You’ll find towels in your room, top of the stairs to the right. It’s the only room upstairs that’s finished.”
He wondered if it had a lock on the door. It did not.
When he came down, she was already in the kitchen cleaning up, wrapped in a large towel. He remembered when women wore slips, when Lucy used to walk around with a half-slip pulled up over her breasts, like a micro-mini just skimming her bottom. He felt a familiar surge and tugged at the towel draped over his shoulders and adjusted the other one wrapped tightly around his waist.
The room was warm from the fire and they did the dishes together without talking, except to get the job done.