Michelle Gellar, she plays the slayer.”
“You watch that, too?” Miranda exclaimed over her shoulder.
“And you can remember who plays which, in relation to what, but you don’t know your own name?” said Morgan.
“I seem to have been traumatized in a highly selective way, Detective.”
The Bonnydoon Winery turned out to be mostly warehouses, storage sheds, and a private airstrip running between rows of vines. Set back against the escarpment, looming over the modest vineyard, was a rambling house of extravagant proportions designed for a mountainside on Vancouver Island or the California coastline. Lots of glass, cement columns, cedar beams.
There was no one around when they pulled up in front of a shed marked THE OFFICE. For a few minutes they sat in the car.
“Just what is it we’re looking for?” asked Miranda.
Morgan released his seatbelt and turned to the woman in the back seat.
“Does this look familiar?”
She seemed subdued but not frightened. “Maybe,” she said. “I remember an airplane.”
“Were you on it?”
She closed her eyes. “I can hear it, I can’t see anything.”
“Come on, let’s look around.”
The three of them got out and stood together near the front of the car, waiting for someone to come out of the office or down from the house.
Michelle leaned against Miranda, but Miranda edged away so she had to stand on her own. The young woman closed her eyes and her nostrils twitched. She opened her eyes.
“I’ve been here. I recognize the smells. Turned earth, gasoline, sulphur, sun-heat on cedar, stewed fruit, gravel, gunpowder, damp cement.”
“My goodness,” said Morgan. “You’re a wine taster by trade.”
“You think so?” said Michelle.
Miranda cocked her nose, trying to differentiate the smells. She had no doubt Morgan was right. For Miranda the various odours ran together in a blur. For Michelle it seemed like a DNA code of the place.
“I’ve been here,” she repeated. “I remember a small plane. I remember feeling my stomach pitch, I was on board. I must have been blindfolded. I can hear the engine, I can feel the vibration. I can hear shouting over the engine noise.”
She sat down unceremoniously on the gravel drive with an inelegant and childlike lurch. She was dressed in new clothes that Miranda had bought for her at a funky shop on Yonge Street just over from the hospital. She had insisted on wearing a skirt, although Miranda had provided her with slacks as well. She wore a T-shirt that proclaimed the beauties of Toronto and displayed the CN Tower like a soaring phallic icon rising hard by the clam-shaped SkyDome. Miranda had not shaken it out to see the design when she bought it. She bought three the same, in different colours. The clothes were Miranda’s size. The skirt fit perfectly. The T-shirt was tight.
“What?” said Miranda, leaning down. “Michelle?”
“I’m trying to remember. My name is Elke.”
“Elke?”
“I am from Stockholm. I have been speaking English since I was a small child. I studied wine in London and New York. I was here last night.”
Morgan was surprised, not that she had been here before but that she was Swedish. He prided himself on a good ear for dialects and accents. Once she had explained, he could detect a slight Scandinavian lilt, but so vague it might be generational, something picked up from an immigrant parent or even a grandparent.
“What else do you remember?” said Morgan.
She did not respond. Morgan and Miranda helped her to her feet. They walked over to the office and Morgan tried the door. It was locked. He gave it a loud thump but there was no response.
“Let’s walk,” he said. The three of them would have appeared from a distance to be strolling arm in arm. In fact, Miranda and Morgan were supporting the young woman, whose body seemed to be reacting to memory fragments at a visceral level that her mind could not deal with, aroused apparently by the smells and perhaps ambient sounds of her surroundings. Sometimes she would shut her eyes and nearly swoon, so they had to brace her upright, and then she would try to stride out as if they were holding her back.
By the end of the runway, near the open-sided aerodrome, they wheeled and then walked back to the first of the warehouses. The sliding door was ajar. They slipped into the gloom inside and stood still for a moment, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the muted light.
There were a series of vast cement cisterns down the centre and large fibreglass tanks or casks stacked high along both side walls.
“Not here,” said the young woman suddenly and marched out the open door, with Morgan and Miranda trailing behind.
“What’s not there?” asked Miranda.
“That’s where they mix their wines. I wasn’t in there.”
“Mix?” Morgan asked, struck by what seemed an odd term.
“Yes. The casks were filled with a Cabernet blend from Lebanon, I imagine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. And the cement vats, that’s where they’re mixing the Lebanese import with local wines.”
“Is that legal?” asked Miranda.
“I don’t know, I’m not from around here. I’ve never been to Niagara-on-the-Lake. Maybe I saw it on television.”
They entered another wine shed, much like the first. The blond woman’s nose twitched. She walked around like a cat sidestepping unseen obstacles, catching odours hovering in layers and channels as she slowly passed through them. Miranda and Morgan watched.
She returned to their side. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” she said.
“What?” said Morgan.
“Rhône. They’re simulating a Rhône valley blend, the southern Rhône around Avignon. I’d say they’ve created a Frankenstein monster, an Ontario-Lebanese fake Châteauneuf-du-Pape with the seams and scar tissues disguised.”
“Disguised by what?” Morgan was intrigued. If this is what he had been drinking, Carter’s ChâteauNeuf-du-Pape, it had seemed superbly blended.”
“Chemicals. And a master blender. It’s like having perfect pitch, there’s not a formula, it’s instinct.”
“So, if it fools the experts,” said Miranda, “then what’s the difference?”
“But it doesn’t, that’s just it. When is a Rembrandt not a Rembrandt? Simple, when it’s recognized to be by someone else.”
“Well,
