de Cuchilleros during the night, guessing that it was the neighbour in the attic who had called 911. She was old-world money, her family was a “name” with Lloyd’s; she was an only child from the other Rosedale, by the other ravine, where estates had gatehouses and the help lived in. She had married into impecunious European aristocracy.
As Morgan and Miranda talked by the formal pond, they watched a great shadow emerge from the depths, slowly rise, and take on colour that resolved in the sunlight into muted bronze, like crinkled foil. As the nostrils appeared above the surface and then the sad limpid eyes looked up at him, Morgan knew he had his Chagoi.
“Hand me the net,” he said without breaking eye contact with the sad fish. “The big black one under the trellis. And the plastic tub.”
When he slid the tub into the water beside the Chagoi, before he got the net into position to guide it, the big fish glided with a slight flutter of its pectoral fins into the container. Together Morgan and Miranda lifted the tub onto the low wall of the pool, then Morgan picked it up himself, carried it over to the pea-green pond, and gently lowered it into the water. After a few minutes to adjust while pond water flooded the container, the Chagoi flicked its tail and disappeared into the murky deep.
Morgan and Miranda waited so close that their clothing touched like the rustling of dry grass on a still day or the sound between calm water and the shore of a northern lake. They both knew northern lakes from working as students in the summers. They both loved summer, and the heart of winter. And the suddenness of spring, the slow advent of autumn. They agreed that March and November were the dismal months.
After a while, the big Chagoi surfaced and mouthed the air to express a healthy appetite, then faded back into opacity until Morgan returned with food. The fish rose to feed from his hand, and as it did, softly shifting patterns of red and white slowly came into focus in the water behind it. Heartened by the Chagoi, a myriad fish hovered randomly below the surface. Then, gradually, as the Chagoi swam away and back, taking food and releasing pellets into the surrounding water, they all began to eat.
“Okay,” said Miranda. “We were right. These are fabulous Kohaku. There must be a fortune tied up in this pool. People pay astounding sums for fish like these.”
“Yesterday you thought koi were pond ornaments. Miranda, the woman next door is watching us from her attic. Don’t turn around! I saw her glasses, maybe binoculars. Okay, let’s both look at once.”
Miranda wheeled, and they both gazed at the attic window. There was the briefest flash, then the window emptied of even that much of Mrs. Jorge de Cucherillos.
“Who talked to her?” asked Miranda. “Don’t you love the name? I knew someone called Snot once.”
“You did not.”
“I knew Finks and Risks and Underhills and Over-dales, and I went to school with Juliet Smellie —” She stopped suddenly, her banter overtaken by an observation. “Someone was here last night.”
“How so?”
“There are no leaves on the ponds. There’s a skimmer thing sucking most of them away on the upper pool, but not this one.”
“It wasn’t the pond maintenance people,” said Morgan. “They checked out as water mechanics. They don’t know much about the fish themselves. There was a guy here this morning when I arrived, just after sunrise. He seemed more concerned about lost business than murder.”
“You were here at sunrise?”
“Got a call from a friend in the night, couldn’t sleep for worrying. So, anyway, Griffin must have brought the fish directly from Japan. We can check customs, though maybe they’re smuggled.”
“A fish-smuggling lawyer with a language obsession!”
“Who he could sell to is an open question.”
“Whom,” Miranda corrected. “What about Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros?”
“She’s housebound, apparently. Let’s go and talk to her.”
“My great-grandmother and her friends used to call each other by their last names. ‘Mrs. Nisbell came to tea,’ she’d say. ‘And Mrs. Purvis and Mrs. Frank Pattinson, and so on.’”
“A bygone era when —”
“Women were women.”
“When life was gracious.”
“For the rich,” said Miranda. “We weren’t rich. Maybe village rich — we had indoor plumbing.”
“I want to see inside the house.”
“You weren’t rich, either.”
“I remember.” He touched her on the arm as if to hold her back, though she was standing still. “I don’t recall my father ever being called mister. My mother got Mrs., but only from people above her talking down.”
“My parents were Mom and Dad even to each other.”
“Mine were Darlene and Fred. And we lived in Cabbagetown when it was still Cabbagetown.”
“The largest Anglo-Saxon slum outside England — I’ve heard it before, Morgan. And now there’s no room there for the poor.”
“I grew up on the cusp of transition, one neighbour’s house derelict and the next a designer showpiece.”
“I know — if you had owned and not rented from a slumlord, and if you had waited long enough, you would have made a killing. And your mother had a Scottish accent after eight generations in Canada.”
“Yeah,” he said, pleased and irritated by her familiarity with his life. “Let’s amble over and visit our voyeur.”
“Amble,” she said. “Okay, let’s amble.”
As they walked, she ruminated about what Morgan called “her part of the world.” She still owned her mother’s house in Waterloo County. She thought of it that way, as her mother’s, though her parents had lived there together until the summer she had turned fourteen, when her father died. Her mother passed away four years ago. She and her sister in Vancouver were orphans. You were still an orphan even in your thirties when both parents were dead.
Miranda’s sister had her own life and seldom came east. She had signed her share of the house over to Miranda. She and her husband were professionals, and Miranda’s welfare, according to them, was more precarious. That was a judgment on her marital and not her financial status. Single women of a certain age inspired righteous condescension. Miranda didn’t argue. It was satisfying to have the old house, though she didn’t rent it out and only visited occasionally. She hadn’t slept over since her mother’s funeral. The village of Waldron was changing. When she walked to the general store, she sometimes recognized a familiar face but went unrecognized herself. Mostly, there were strangers now living in the old houses clustered around the crossroads, down the hill, and along the river.
Morgan and Miranda were greeted at the door by a Filipino woman who showed them into a formal receiving room that was dark and excessive, with numerous old photographs in sterling frames propped in strategic formation, a genealogical gallery that seemed to have reached its terminus about the time of the Great War and before the Great Depression.
