this had happened and nothing had changed. A man was mysteriously dead and it made no difference. Usually by now Morgan’s mind was teeming with intimations, possibilities, connections. But here was a death for which no crowd gathered.
The medical examiner came around through the walkway, led by Yosserian, the body’s self-appointed keeper. “Is that you, Morgan?” she asked, trying to penetrate the gloom.
“You ran out of gas?” said Morgan. He moved close enough so that Ellen Ravenscroft could see it was him, then shrugged agreeably and turned away.
She squatted by the body. “All right then, love, I’ve got work to do.”
Morgan gazed into the closest pool, the fish now indistinct wraiths deep below the surface. The low green pond down by the ravine appeared brackish in the dying light. He walked over to it. It smelled fresh. Why no water flowers, no grasses around the shoreline?
He tried to block out the banal chatter between Yosserian and the ME. They were arguing about the body bag. He listened to the water and thought he could hear the hush of its limpid surface as it settled against the earth. His mind seemed both empty and filled until in the distance he heard a siren and returned to himself in the garden.
When a diver appeared by the lower pond, Morgan watched for a while. Her light, as she submerged, transformed from a shimmering cone to a glowing green cor-sage, then a vague flicker, until it extinguished in the opaque depths, only to reappear again here and there as she groped her way to the edges. It made him queasy, watching her hand reach up through the murk to signal her assistant the direction of her quest.
“She won’t see anything in there,” said the assistant, standing tall as if the higher perspective would let him see deeper. “This kind of thing is by touch alone.”
Morgan felt claustrophobic. He nodded and retreated to the upper pool. The diver had already checked this one thoroughly, moving gently among the fish, and come up with nothing.
By the time Miranda joined him, Ellen Ravenscroft had left with the body, the diver was gone, and the night sky was flushed with the lights of the city. The water in front of them was black, like anthracite sheared from its motherlode. Morgan remained motionless, staring into the impenetrable depths. Miranda moved close enough that they could feel the body heat between them, but they didn’t touch. They were comfortable with silence.
Eventually, she said, “It’s strange, that huge house, it’s creepy. Except for the den the place could have been decorated by committee.”
“Or successive generations of Rosedale matrons.”
“A committee of ghosts.” She reflected on the secrets implied by the water’s dark surface, then returned to her previous theme. “There’s no evidence anywhere of his so-called mistress, no lingerie under the bed, no scented shampoo in the shower.”
“Has she gone?”
“Yeah. We’ll connect in the morning.” She paused. “Why mistress, not girlfriend?” She paused again. “You know, he wouldn’t walk across the yard in socks.”
“No. He wasn’t wearing a tie.”
“So?”
“Well, his top button was done up. So he’s the kind of guy who prepares for death by taking off his shoes and tie but forgets to unbutton his shirt?”
“Do you own a tie?”
“One, utilitarian black.”
Morgan looked at her in the evening light. She had seen him wear his tie at funerals. Her hazel eyes gleamed silver and bronze from the surface reflection of light from the city. He pushed his hair back from his forehead, a habit from twenty years earlier, when it was longer and obstructed his view.
“Eleanor Drummond figured that Griffin wanted us to think it was murder,” Morgan said. “He locked himself out, then drowned himself, expiring among friends. She wants it to be suicide. Strange, most people would rather a loved one was murdered. Then they can grieve guilt-free.”
“She was trying to smoke in there! She seems an unlikely smoker.”
“Yeah, she tried with me, too.”
“I was out of the room for a minute and she lit up,” Miranda said. “Someone told her to put it out. She made quite a production of going down the hall to the bathroom.”
“She flushed the toilet?”
“I know, but they said they’d finished with it.”
“Mistress is a way of distancing herself, making sure we don’t think they were friends.”
“Or of convincing herself of the same.”
“Funny,” Morgan said. “The door being locked.” He paused. “There’s no Chagoi.”
“No what?”
“No Chagoi. I’ve read that every koi pond should have a Chagoi. It’s big and affable, wrinkled like gold foil.”
“Maybe it’s lying low.”
“A furtive Chagoi. No, it’s a personality fish. It mediates between species. It’s got the mind of a mammal. Extravagantly subtle. Billy Crystal wearing Armani.” He seemed pleased with the allusion.
Miranda glanced at his rumpled clothes and smiled. He would look good in Armani. She hadn’t noticed before, but he had a day’s growth of beard. Was it stylish, or had he forgotten to shave? Probably the latter.
“She didn’t know there were no ashtrays. She doesn’t look like a smoker,” he repeated.
“She doesn’t smell like a smoker. You ever kiss a smoker, Morgan? Like sucking garbage through a straw.”
“You used to smoke.”
“That’s how I know.”
“I never did.”
She wanted to kiss him right then and there. It wasn’t a sexual impulse, at least not directly, not rising out of the hollow inside. It was the need to connect, by touching someone intimately who actually gave a damn about her after the lights were out. Maybe a little sexual, she thought, and thinking so made it sexual.
“Hey, Morgan.” Maybe she should reveal her anxiety, the horror and panic and strange sense of relief.
“Yeah?”
“Did you notice the books?”
“The koi books? Or the others?”
“Not many people these days buy hardcover books except lawyers and scholars with grants,” said Miranda. “Did you see the degree?”
“Linguistics.”
“Semiotics.”
“Same thing.”
“Not.”
Miranda had been holding an envelope in her
