a corpse on display at a wake, except she was turned to one side and breathing.
Miranda touched her again on the forehead then let her fingers drift over her cheek, finding reassurance in the warmth of her flesh. Miranda stared at the woman’s blue eyes, waiting for a person to appear in their depths, someone who could explain what was happening to both of them.
The web was a last resort. Morgan preferred books for such an inquiry; he wanted to turn the pages of wine books and revel in the graphic design of grapes and landscape among blocks of text in a pleasing variety of fonts. But nothing he owned showed a listing for Baudrillard et fils in Avignon or anywhere else. Nothing for a Châteauneuf-du-Pape called simply that, ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape. He realized in a satisfying small revelation that this might be its name, the Ninth Château; there was no break between Château and Neuf and there was a cap on the N. Or perhaps Neuf simply meant New and was nothing more than an aberrant spelling.
There was nothing on the Net.
This was a quandary not unrelated to the strange death of Philip Carter. It was Carter’s bottle — he had to have bought it somewhere. It must have an origin, however obscure. He thought about Carter’s Lebanese friend and felt a wave of revulsion sweep through his gut, but he could not conjure a connection between the hint of Lebanon in the wine and the man who assaulted Miranda.
Rising from the sofa, Morgan smacked his shin against a painted wood chest he used as an end table. It was precariously stacked with books and magazines so that its dimensions were illusory, and when he hit it a number of them clattered to the floor. While on his hands and knees to retrieve them, the faded black- stencilled lettering caught his eye. S. Sutter, 1789. This was on a field of thick green paint, worn and cracked by time into a lustrous patina.
Morgan paused and ran his fingers over the letters. After his parents died, when he had retrieved the chest from the shed that his mother called the summer kitchen in the home they rented all their lives in old Cabbagetown, he used it to pack the few possessions they had worth keeping, and then only for sentimental value. This was when Cabbagetown was still a slum, before it became urban chic. These were the sole remnants of his childhood among the working poor.
This was also the beginning of his interest in country antiques. When he got the painted pine box home and cleaned it up, he discovered the stencilling. After a bit of research he found it was a woman’s dower chest built in the Niagara Peninsula, probably Welland County, Bertie Township, and that it had belonged to Sarah Sutter, who married Jacob Haun in 1794. The Sutters were Loyalists during the American Revolution. Sarah’s father, having served fourteen months imprisonment in New Jersey for his British sympathies before coming to the Niagara area in the summer of 1785, was refused compensation; it was judged that “he had not come within the British lines” during hostilities, but only afterwards in hope of recompense.
Morgan sat back on the floor, staring at the box. Why was he thinking about this? Why was he rehearsing in his mind the facts he had dug up about an antique hope chest?
He trusted his own discursiveness; it sometimes led to intuitive leaps where unlikely connections, once made, would suddenly seem inevitable.
Was it the chest itself, with the traditional bracket base, the rural Pennsylvania Chippendale coping, the austere slab face with its tiny lock opening, the thick, worn paint, or was it Sarah Sutter, whose father established Sutter’s Mill in early Toronto before the American invasion? No, it was Niagara. Something about Niagara.
Morgan got up from the floor and wandered distractedly into his kitchen, where the ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape stood open on the counter. He poured himself two fingers in a brandy snifter and swirled it vigorously, then held it to his nose and inhaled a deep draught of the pungent aroma, redolent with sunbaked soil and ripe fruit.
As he closed his eyes to savour the smell of the wine, wheels clicked into place like a slot machine coming up with a winning set. Lebanon and Niagara, unexpected locales for the origin of fine wines, and a mysterious wine labelled as ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape but not from the Avignon region — these connected.
He had heard of the millions to be made in counterfeit wines but he had never taken the rumours seriously. Not because he did not think such things happened but because it seemed a frivolous crime, relatively harmless to all except those willing to pay exorbitant prices for exquisite small pleasures.
Suddenly, he envisioned Miranda’s assailants as operatives in an international conspiracy of epic malevolence, concerned with illicit wine trade on a major scale.
He knew of a twenty-four hour wine merchant in Rochester who had the best fine wine offerings in the northeast. He called and got an assistant manager who assured him, yes, they did carry ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape, some very good vintages, and could give a reasonable discount by the case, along with a lower invoice, if required, to offset excessive Canadian tariffs.
Miranda heard the telephone ring. She was still sitting on the bathroom floor. She had been there for four or five hours. She could remember time expanding as if she were an observer watching two women, neither of whom seemed familiar.
Post-traumatic stress disorder; the observing Miranda knew about such things and even thought it might be an appropriate term, perhaps for both women. It didn’t mean anything — it was not a diagnosis, it was a description.
She could envision Morgan on the other end of the line giving his Clint Eastwood scowl, which would shift too quickly into a sly Kevin Spacey grin and then, because no one was answering, his face would collapse into a Jack Nicholson sneer or a Mel Gibson smirk, or, if he could muster it, a blue-eyed Paul Newman smile, even though his eyes were deep brown.
No, that sequence would be if he thought she was in bed with her lover. He would have another set of faces for this, whatever was happening now.
He doesn’t know how he looks, she thought. Maybe nobody does. For the most part he was stone-faced, displaying only the subtlest nuances of character, like all the great screen actors. Some people thought he was cold. Others thought he was cool.
He was only forty-two, but she never thought of him in terms of young actors like Ewan McGregor or Brad Pitt. They had not yet done enough in their lives to transcend the roles they played. And never like Al Pacino, De Niro, or Hoffman, who were inseparable from their roles.
The phone kept ringing in a monotonous jangle, like a giant insect blindly searching its prey.
Morgan was childish, sometimes, but only with her. He would recite bits of nursery rhymes or schoolyard jingles, sometimes delightfully, absurdly obscene, always inappropriate, although he almost never swore. You can take the boy out of the schoolyard, she thought, but …
Time passed, and she could hear voices and a key rattling in her door.
Then Morgan was beside her. The building caretaker who let him in had gone back to bed. Morgan touched her, and she touched the blond woman’s cheek.
“Hello, Morgan,” she said.
“My goodness, it stinks in here,” said Morgan.
“I’m okay,” she said. “You were going to ask if I’m okay. I’m okay. This is my friend, she’s okay.”
“You’re not,” said Morgan. “I’m going to call an ambulance.”
Suddenly, as if she had been slapped in the face or jarred with defibrillators, Miranda returned to herself.
“Morgan! No ambulance, no cops.” She placed her hand
