and figured I must be here, since she thought that was what our fight was about. You know, about smoking.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“No.”
“Did she know how much you saw in her files?”
“She knew I discovered who she was. She didn’t know I had discovered who I was! She didn’t know I knew about him.”
“Did you and your mother have lots of fights?”
“I think it was because we’re the same. It’s easier when you’re different.”
“You know that from your research?” asked Miranda, smiling.
“No, just from life. It’s something I’ve learned. It’s harder to be the same than different.”
“I’ll have to think about that.”
“Okay.”
“Wasn’t your mother worried if you were away for three days?”
“Yes, she was. And no.”
“Explain.”
“I’d run away before. I lived at a Sally Ann hostel one time for a week.”
“What did she think of that?”
“It terrified her, me being on the street. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t walking the streets, or streetwalking. I was living with the Salvation Army, for God’s sake.”
“So to speak. She must have been worried sick.”
“I guess that was the point. But when I realized how much, I felt bad.”
“Bad, as in wicked? Or badly?”
“Both. You like words, just like me and my father. I promised her I’d never do it again. She should have known I wouldn’t.”
“Jill, your mother might not have killed Robert Griffin.”
“I didn’t do it. I was locked up in here.”
“No, no. It’s just that he might have, well, let himself die.”
“She said he didn’t struggle.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“She didn’t want anyone to know she did it except me. She said the police would find him. They’d think it was suicide, especially if they didn’t know we’d been here. She left me with his dead body. I sat beside him on the floor. He didn’t seem like my father and yet he did. She came back with the long carpet from the hall upstairs. She said we’d have to hurry. It was almost time for the old woman next door to switch from spying out front to spying from her attic at the back. Before we rolled him up she turned on an air bubbler thing that was on the bar. It’s for fish. And she really gently put the tube in his mouth and blew air in until he burped. My mother said she didn’t want him sinking out there — polluting and killing the fish.
“So we rolled him sideways in the underpad. My mom said it was top quality, or it wouldn’t take his weight, but we didn’t need the rug like she’d thought. So we carried him out through the big doors, sort of lifting him over the sill, and then we hauled him over to the pond in broad daylight, holding his weight off the ground so we wouldn’t leave marks. Then we slipped him in. One big fish, all brassy and crinkly, came up too close just to watch, and Mr. Griffin, my dad, landed right on top of him. Mom said it would be okay. It would just go to the bottom for a while.”
Miranda listened as the gruesome account fell open before her in the strange, dispassionate voice of a young girl talking about her family reunion.
“So then we went home.”
“That was it?”
“Well, my mom spread out the carpet from upstairs on the floor, and we took that other one. It’s called a Gabbeh. She placed books, big ones with pictures of koi, open on the sofa. She took the Gabbeh and its underpad to the car —”
“And the pillow?”
“The one she killed him with. We took it. She rolled it up in the underpad, which wasn’t that smudged from the grass and flagstones, and we threw them into a dumpster on the way home. Oh, yeah, before we left she sent me back in here to clean up this room. That’s when I made the bed. And I took the book back out to the den and put it in the bookshelf where it belongs.”
“The short-story book? He let you read?”
“Yeah, I told you. Mostly, the lights were on full blast. But I slept a lot, anyway. She was outside already, so I locked the door. Then we went home.”
“And you forgot your cigarettes?” Eleanor Drummond must have created the inept smoking business as an excuse to tuck the pack into her purse. She didn’t want anybody to know Jill had been there.
“Yeah, I guess I did. And I lost my lighter. Maybe at the morgue. It wasn’t for smoking, just a souvenir.”
“Of what?”
“Of whatever happened while it was mine.”
“Jill, how did your mother know you were in this cell? I don’t think a package of cigarettes would be enough. You could have been and gone. They could have belonged to somebody else.”
“Well, she did.”
“But she didn’t come in right away?”
“No, I guess not. It was just some place she checked when she was here.”
“Was she surprised?”
“To find me? Shocked, but not surprised. By the time she opened the door, she already knew. I could tell.” The girl seemed almost wistful. “Do you think he did that to my mother like he said?”
“I think he did bad things to many people.”
“I didn’t really have a father, you know. Not if he raped her.”
“No, you didn’t, not a real father.”
“How come you’re looking after my interests?”
Miranda smiled at the arcane description of their relationship.
“You didn’t know my mother until after my father was dead. If he hurt you, why would you care?”
“Because.” Miranda gazed into the girl’s troubled eyes, acknowledging the truth of their common experience. She rose and reached out. “Come on, Jill. Let’s get you out of here.”
“Okay,” said the girl, allowing Miranda to take her hand and rising from the edge of the bed. They stood side by side and surveyed the chamber, Miranda with an overwhelming feeling of horror, Jill with unreachable memories and surface indifference.
“Do you think my mother really murdered my father?” she asked as if
