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1
Morning Light
When Miranda Quin woke up after sleeping alone, her mind often swarmed with languorous images. She would lie very still, hoping they’d gather into coherent memories, which they seldom did. On the rare occasions when she was not by herself, residual images would dissolve into gnawing sensations of dread or confusion, or, more infrequently, into feelings of comfort and warmth. But on this particular morning, there was nothing. It was still dark. She was drenched in sweat and lying close to the edge of the bed, with an arm draped over the side to counter being drawn into the centre. She stretched carefully and tried to differentiate one part of her body from another. She suspected she had had a bad night, but there was no rush of anxiety, there were no symptoms of excess. Just clammy flesh and a void deep inside.
Opening one eye, she tried to see the illuminated clock face. It was obscured. She sensed it must be about five. As she drifted back toward sleep the shape obstructing her view of the clock unexpectedly resolved in her mind. She raised her head, eyes wide open. Her semi-automatic lay poised in the dull luminescence. Settling back on the pillow, she tried to remember why she had put it there. She always kept her scaled-down 9mm Glock in the locked drawer of her desk on the other side of the room.
She remembered yesterday but not how it ended. Philip, beside her, was dead to the world. She reached for him under the thin cotton sheet. When her fingers encountered a slick dampness she quickly withdrew her hand. She slid naked from between the sheets and trudged through the darkness into the bathroom. Rubbing her sticky right hand against her thigh, she smelled the vague odour of almonds and rust. She switched on the overhead heat lamp and fan, which filled the room with a dull red glow and a low rumble.
Beside the shower she flicked another switch and the stall flooded with light. She swung the glass door open and reached in, turning on a full blast of water, then danced her hands into the stream, waiting for the temperature to rise as her eyes adjusted to the glare. Only then, with her disembodied arms in dazzling light while the rest of her, outside the stall, was bathed in red from the heat lamp, did she see that her right hand was smeared with blood.
We must have really been out of it, she thought.
She stepped into the shower and cleaned off the blood, then lathered her hair before reaching with the soap between her legs. She tried to focus. Her gut didn’t feel menstrual; she was never early. She bent forward within the confined space of the stall as streaming lather seared her eyes. She grimaced, shook her head sharply, blinked clear, reached between her legs again, examined her fingers more carefully. There was no blood.
Miranda stood straight, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands.
“Philip?” she called.
The blood wasn’t hers.
She called again. Silence.
And again, this time his name rising to a muffled shriek.
No answer.
Frantically rinsing shampoo from her hair, she stepped out of the shower and grabbed a huge towel, drying herself as she rushed out of the red glow into the bedroom, which had brightened with the first light of dawn. Even before she flicked on the overhead, she knew. She stopped halfway to the bed. She had seen too many corpses at crime scenes not to recognize the unnatural stillness of death.
There was no blood on the covering sheet. Only the top of his head showed on the pillow, his black hair too long for a lawyer.
She walked slowly to his side of the bed.
“Philip?” she whispered, hoping it was a stranger.
Her voice carrying his name reverberated against the walls. In her mind. In the room. Miranda pushed back the semi-sheer drapes as if natural light would help to make sense of what was happening.
Bending over, she carefully pulled the sheet away from the face of the corpse. Some of what she had taken to be Philip’s black hair fanned across the pillow was congealing blood. She had to squat down to see the point of entry, where the bullet had penetrated his temple just above the right eye. She assumed there was an abdominal wound as well, to account for the blood pooled on the mattress between them.
When she leaned out of her shadow, the glazed surface of his eyes caught a flash of the morning. She reeled back. The bath towel fell and for a moment she stood naked in the middle of her bedroom, feeling unspeakably vulnerable.
Retrieving the towel, she wrapped it around her, methodically, urgently, as if it were armour, then stepped over to close Philip’s eyes, hesitated, and withdrew her hand. She had tampered enough with the crime scene.
For a fluttering moment she felt disengaged, as if she were looking down through the ceiling of a film noir set, and the enormity and absurdity of the scenario were an aesthetic display. This was the way people who reluctantly returned from the dead described their own passing.
Then she felt a rushing collapse inside and from the maelstrom’s rim she realized she was slipping into shock.
Clutching the towel, she moved into the living room and warily eyed the telephone, then picked up and pushed the first button on automatic dial.
“Morgan,” she said when the clattering at the other end of the line subsided into a groggy expletive. “Morgan,” she repeated. “There’s a body in my bed.”
Before he had finished speaking he knew he was on the wrong track, but it was too late to stop. “Anyone I know?”
There was a thick hum on the line.
“Miranda?”
“Yes?”
“You awake?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
Silence.
“Dead?”
“Yes.”
David Morgan wanted to make a joke, to make it unreal. He could feel tremulations of fear and confusion in the emptiness between them. He wanted to say something funny, to move back in time to that moment just before he picked up, when he was awake enough to realize it could only be her and still half asleep, so her call seemed a welcome intrusion.
“Is it your friend Carter?” The line filled with the sounds of their breathing. “Are you okay?”
“He’s been shot.”
“You’re sure?”
She said nothing.
“Miranda?”
“Yes?”
“You’re not hurt?
“I don’t know what happened.”
“I’m on my way. I’ll phone it in.”
“I
