RELUCTANT
DEAD
A Quin and Morgan Mystery
John Moss
1
Crimes of the Early Morning
Miranda Quin wondered how many of her fellow passengers on the Boeing 747 were contemplating murder. Before the shuddering rush of takeoff had fully subsided, she noticed that people around her had cracked open mystery novels that would mostly begin with gushing blood or gruesome dismemberment. A few sat with eyes closed, strained at the corners, perhaps thinking of adversaries they might prefer dead. One or two, possibly, thought about victims they had safely interred in secret places.
* * *
David Morgan, outside the parking garage at Pearson International, scanned the overcast sky, wondering which sound reverberating through the fog signified his partner’s escape. He was sympathetic to her need to get away, but he was puzzled, amused, and a little concerned that she was going off to the South Pacific to try her hand at writing a mystery. At least she was travelling business class. She had been saving Aeroplan points for years, waiting for the appropriate occasion. As he wheeled out onto the throughway, Morgan took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. After more than a decade working homicide together, having faced death in so many ways, they were closer than lovers. He would miss her.
He swerved to avoid a truck. When Miranda was around, she did the driving. Either an unmarked police car or her 1959 Jaguar XK 150. Morgan was a bad driver, too easily distracted. A sixteen-wheeler pressed him to speed up. He accelerated, moved into the slower lane, and slowed to a comfortable speed. She had taken a night course on crafting the mystery novel at Sir Adam Beck College. Mostly, she skipped classes because they were immersed in actual murders. He tried to focus. She had trusted that he would get her car back to the parking garage and avoid it until her return.
* * *
As the plane slipped above the fog into dazzling blue, the cabin flooded with evening light. Miranda loosened her seat belt, leaned forward, and gazed out the window for a while at the illusion of a receding horizon, then drew down her shade, and, closing her eyes, drifted into an uneasy sleep.
She woke up with a start when the hush was shattered by a voice instructing passengers on how to conduct themselves should the plane crash on water. In three languages. She imagined that by now Morgan had tucked her away in the back of his mind and was intent on other things. She felt a moment of panic. He was always there, for ten years he had been the defining witness to her life.
A year ago Morgan had gone to Easter Island for a holiday and he had come back filled with unbridled enthusiasm. His rambling narrative about the authenticity of his own experiences in the most isolated and exoticized destination in the world translated in her mind into a haven of dreams, where the tropical sun warmed ragged grasslands and towering palms, where the salt-water breeze cooled the dreamer in the verandah’s shade while local people lived ordinary lives amidst the thronging of their ancestral past. Shadows of the giant moai loomed over everything on her imagined island, making her daydreams tantalizing and dangerous.
She planned to stay for three months. The isolation would give her perspective and she would write mysteries with a Toronto setting because that was the locale she knew best. She had never been anywhere so remote from the centre of her world, thousands of kilometres from its nearest neighbours. She would be able to look back and envision Canada as a whole; she would be able to see around the edges, she would understand for the first time where she came from. And, of course, she would write about murder.
After she had started talking about her plans to colleagues and friends, by a curious form of cultural osmosis the news of her adventure reached a publisher who offered an advance payment for her novel large enough to cover a good part of her expenses. Taggart and Foulds were based in New York with a branch in Toronto. Morgan had thought it was unusual to invest so much in a new writer, a Canadian at that, but she took their offer in stride. It wasn’t that much, really, relative to her investment of time. A few thousand dollars and an upgrade to business class. A little embarrassed by her good fortune, she had told Morgan she had upgraded with Aeroplan points.
Miranda raised her window shade and was staring down into the darkness that seemed to be rising from below when a steward leaned over and said something to her that seemed exotic, but was unintelligible. She was flattered. The first leg of her journey was to São Paulo and she had obviously been taken for a cosmopolitan Brazilian returning home. That pleased her. She did not want to appear as if she were from Toronto. She knew this was a trait shared with many of her countrymen, who were vaguely embarrassed to be recognized as Canadians abroad, although if pressed they were righteously proud.
She smiled and nodded in the affirmative.
“You just agreed to exchange your window seat for an aisle seat with that unhappy fellow several rows back,” said the man beside her in perfect English.
“Did I?” she said. “Of course I did.”
“I hope it wasn’t on my account,” he said and smiled with an insouciant Errol Flynn/Johnny Depp radiance.
“No. My Spanish is a little rusty, I thought she was asking me if I wanted a blanket.”
“She was speaking Portuguese.”
“My Portuguese is also rusty,” said Miranda, rising to her feet and gathering her travelling paraphernalia, which consisted of a horseshoe-shaped inflatable pillow, a large handbag, a notebook, a P.D. James mystery novel, a book called Inventing Easter Island by Beverley Haun, a book by Thor Heyerdahl, and a small sheaf of vintage comics that Morgan had presented to her at the airport, the top one featuring Scrooge McDuck on Easter Island.
“Excuse me,” she said. “It’s not personal. I prefer the aisle. The negative ions are highest if you’re close to the window.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t offer to trade places.”
She disliked him immensely. He was far too comfortable being outrageously handsome, too casual with his wit, too indifferent as to whether she liked him or not.
Edging around the elderly gentleman who was displacing her, she leaned down and whispered to her erstwhile seatmate with all the condescension she could muster: “You speak very good English.”
“Thank you.” He smiled and his teeth glistened. “Sloane Square, Jesus College Oxford, Washington, my life in six words, five if you don’t count Square. English comes rather naturally.”
“Final disposition?”
“Of my mortal remains? At present, unknown. Have a safe flight.”
“You, too,” she said, puzzled, since they were on the same plane.
Later, when Miranda walked forward to the washroom, she noticed he was the only one awake in the entire business-class section, reading by the focused light beaming down from overhead. She slipped past in the gloom, apparently unnoticed. For some reason the notion that he would know where she had been made her feel exposed and vaguely improper.
He, of course, looked up upon her return and smiled directly at her as she tried to pass by in the semi-darkness.
“Couldn’t
