magician at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. She had revelled in the illusion of an elephant disappearing from the stage. Morgan had wanted to know where it had gone, how it had been done.
“That’s not the point,” she had said. “It’s magic.”
But he had talked about the machinery behind the illusion for the rest of the evening over drinks and on the walk home. He was always fascinated by his own understanding. It wasn’t the system but how he worked it out that excited him.
“What’s this?” she said now, unravelling the fragment of lingerie from around the base of a brass spigot over the sink.
“Yeah, I noticed that. What do you think?”
“Well, it’s not his. I’d say it’s a gusset.” She had said that just to annoy him. He wouldn’t know what a gusset was. “A crotch panel, Morgan. From an old pair of nylon panties. Maybe a rag from the cleaning service — not something Eleanor Drummond would wear.”
“It could be Darlene’s. She had stuff like that.”
“Your mother’s?” Miranda always found it disconcerting when he referred to his mother by her first name. His father was Pop, or Fred, and his mother was Darlene. Her own mother had always been Mom, not Mummy or Mum, and certainly not Margaret. Her father had died before graduating to “Dad.” She would think of him until her own end as Daddy. Her mother called him Daddy, too, in the old-fashioned way. His first name was Herbert, though. She knew that.
“You seem distracted,” Morgan said. “What are you thinking about?”
“My mom. Underwear. Dying. You know, the usual.”
“C’mon, I want to show you the wine cellar. Have you got a flashlight?”
Of course, she did — a small penlight. She would be Sigourney Weaver. Not as tall, but intelligent, beautiful. Younger, of course. When the movie was over, her name wouldn’t be in the credits, either. She would still be inside the story with him.
Miranda shone her light through the double glass panes in the door, which the glare turned nearly opaque, then she laughed. “I thought you said it was filled with wine. That’s a curtain — a plastic shower curtain with a wine bottle motif!”
“Let’s see. My gosh! Isn’t that bizarre?”
“That I’m right?”
“The guy had a sense of humour.”
“Do you think there’s actually wine in there?”
“I hope you’re not part of the joke.”
“That’s a sinister thought.”
“We’re in a sinister business,” he said. “We’ve got two bodies on our hands — one who slipped effortlessly away and the other impaled. And you’re in the middle of it all, connections unknown.”
“Some joke. Let’s pray it stays out of the press. Did you see the death notice in the Globe?”
“This morning? The guy’s barely dried out at the morgue.”
“It said, ‘died suddenly, at home.’ That’s obituary code for suicide. I’d say Eleanor Drummond put it in.”
“Her death is more likely to draw attention.”
“She didn’t die naked.”
“No, but this has all the tabloid ingredients — big house, dead lawyer, mystery mistress, handsome detective, attractive detectives. And a really weird arrangement in estate management.”
“Give it a rest,” she said.
“Yeah, there must be wine in there,” he said as if they had been talking about nothing else.
“The door looks formidable.”
“Under the facade it’s a thermal vault. The wood in the frame is so dry that the bolts would pull out by hand, but it’s virtually impregnable. There has to be great wine in there, or why bother? You need to do an inventory, right? Let’s check it out.” He started feeling around along the overhead beams. “There must be a key…”
“If there’s wine, it’ll wait. Delayed gratification, Morgan.”
Mildly irritated by her chirpy forbearance, he went back to the pump room to get a hammer to whack open the padlock on the farthest door leading to the adjoining property.
Miranda peered through the mottled light as she walked along on her own, imagining the orientation of the world outside. She felt the chill she had anticipated. It was being afraid that bothered her, not anything she feared. She couldn’t hear Morgan; she could see nothing to be alarmed about. The walls closed ambiguously around her like the setting of an ancient memory or a dream on the edge of nightmare.
She heard Morgan shuffling along, catching up from behind. His wavering shadow crept by her as she slowed, then loomed over her, rendered headless in the niche of illumination surrounding the light bulb in front. She was unnerved for a moment by what wasn’t there.
Something wasn’t right, evaded perception. In this Faustian maze of rough-cut stone reinforced with brick patchwork and horsehair plaster that had crumbled away from its lath, of supporting beams that were solid after generations entombed in the darkness, with great gaps where the grain had split open, there were innumerable habitations for spiders. But there were no spiderwebs. She doubted that anyone had actually cleaned here in a hundred years, but clearly there had been traffic through these passageways.
Morgan was determined to see what lay beyond the remaining unexplained door. He was curious about the wine cellar, but he displayed the ingenuous enthusiasm of a small boy bent on great tasks, insofar as the possibility of a tunnel was concerned. Miranda didn’t buy much of what Freud had to say, but certainly it was amazing how grown men revealed such a childish predilection for exploring secret corridors.
He seemed genuinely excited, poking away in the musty nether regions. She couldn’t think of a female alternative that would command a comparable response. She would rather be upstairs where natural materials were transformed by artifice into furniture and fireplaces, but these weren’t phallic — well, possibly the candlesticks and the bedposts, she thought, mocking the essentializing contructs of the sad little doctor from Vienna. She had never been to Austria’s capital, or anywhere in Europe for that matter.
When Morgan drew alongside, she turned on him and blurted, “It’s all about sex.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Freud. What are you talking about? Do you know I’ve never been to Europe?”
Morgan tried to get a focus on her in the mottled light. He was a little confused, and he shrugged. “I think you have to explore the foundation before you can understand the edifice.” He thought that was suitably ambiguous — applicable to psychoanalysis, travel abroad, or their present location.
“There’s Freud again — you with your edifice complex.” She smiled as if she knew things beyond his grasp.
“This is a good place to think,” he observed. “Not necessarily out loud.”
