I wanted to be neighbourly.”
“You did?”
“Yes, I did. Dolores came over with me and we skimmed all the leaves, but a few were waterlogged, and when Dolores tried to scoop them up, they sank. That’s when we discovered it.”
“Discovered what?”
“The discrepancy.”
“Mrs. de Cuchilleros, what are you talking about?”
“Be patient, Detective. Dolores’s net went down so deep in the water she reached the end of the long handle and could just scrape the bottom.”
“And?”
“And nothing. You see, that’s the point!”
He didn’t see, and nodded a solemn invitation for the comic relief to proceed.
“Well, we went home and had our morning tea. But then I began thinking. I asked Dolores if the pond froze around the edges last winter. Our pond, I’m talking about. It seems to come closer to freezing each year. Didn’t I ask you that, Dolores? And what did you say?”
“It seems to come closer to freezing each year,” the maid said.
“Mrs. de Cuchilleros —”
“Detective, you’re in such a hurry. I told Dolores we had to get a long pole. So we went out into the carriage house and found a long bamboo pole. And just as I suspected, our pond wasn’t as deep! That’s why it’s been freezing up.”
“Mrs. de Cuchilleros, where is this going?”
She smiled.
The old woman had read Agatha Christie, Morgan thought. She knew how these things worked. Pacing was as important as the details being revealed.
“Detective Morgan, the bottom of our pond is lumpy. The bottom of Mr. Griffin’s pond is smooth.”
Morgan was uneasy. He cocked an eye quizzically and waited for an unpleasant denouement.
“So there we are, Detective, prodding away with the pole, but it broke. We couldn’t get hold of anything. Then a few bits of plastic floated up.”
“From the lumpy bottom?”
“That’s how we would describe it, isn’t it, Dolores? Our pond, not Mr. Griffin’s.”
The maid nodded ambiguously. Dolores appeared to be more and more reticent as the story unfolded, as if she might avoid some grotesque revelation through affected indifference.
“Dolores,” Morgan pressed, “what do you think is down there in your pond, in the de Cuchilleros pond?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“I’ll tell you what’s down there,” said Mrs. de Cuchilleros.
“All right. What do you think is down there?”
“Dead bodies.”
Morgan had been afraid she would say that. He looked at the Filipino maid for confirmation and grimaced when she receded into inscrutability. In contrast Mrs. de Cuchilleros seemed to rise more and more with each passing moment to the role fate had cast upon her as central protagonist in a drama of unimaginable proportions. A small facet of Morgan’s mind clung to the serio-comic performance, even as a suffocating fear rose inside him for what lay ahead, a dread that must inevitably connect with Miranda’s disappearance.
Mrs. de Cuchilleros smiled solemnly, the way people did at funerals, and lowered her voice to a whisper as if she feared being overheard by the dead. “I felt down there with a rake — we taped a garden rake onto the handle of a hoe — and I could feel things. They felt slippery and mucky. We stirred up a lot of clay. There are bodies covered in silt and clay and wrapped in plastic. I didn’t want to puncture anything, so I let the rake slide around, but I could feel them. I don’t know whether they’re cut up into pieces or not. It’s hard to tell with a rake.”
Morgan grasped for alternative explanations, but nothing took hold. Details and patterns careened through his brain in slow motion as if he were in a car spinning out of control and a part of his mind was poised off to the side, waiting to see how everything turned out.
Griffin had forced himself on Miranda. Before that, on Molly’s mother, and after, on Molly, his own daughter. This history alone, foreshortened by the intensity of the moment, seemed proof of the man’s rapacious depravity. A whole range of ghastly scenarios radiated out from the probability that Robert Griffin was responsible for multiple murders and that Eleanor Drummond had known about his homicidal proclivities.
Molly Bray had become part of her assailant’s world. She had brought up her daughter with Griffin’s resources and assumed strange authority in his life. Was her control not only through using the sordid particulars of her birth like a weapon, but in knowing he was a serial killer, knowledge that would implicate her in his crimes? If power corrupted, wielding power over evil might corrupt absolutely.
Morgan was intrigued, as his ideas coalesced, that he had immediately accepted the explanation offered by Mrs. de Cuchilleros for the unnatural contours at the bottom of her pond. There was a ghastly inevitability to the revelation of profligate death. The bodies, he was sure, were there.
And Miranda was part of the equation, an inextri-cable and vital link between Molly and her mother, between Molly and her daughter. Among the convoluted relations revealed about daughters and fathers, the release of Miranda’s suppressed memories was strategic. Molly, playing with death like a puppeteer, had died with the conviction that Miranda would fiercely protect Jill’s interests.
Morgan turned directly to face Mrs. de Cuchilleros. “We’ll drain the ponds. We can do yours from over here. I believe they connect.”
“Oh, my goodness!” she gasped. “Really?”
She was stunned, faced with the sudden possibility that what she imagined was real. It was as if she had been anticipating the relief of being scolded and sent home. Morgan’s response had thrown her into giddy confusion. She grasped Dolores by the arm, obviously wanting to withdraw.
“My goodness is right,” said Morgan. “You’ve been a great help.”
Mrs. de Cuchilleros seemed to have suddenly aged, and Dolores glanced furtively around like an anxious tourist yearning for something familiar.
“You should leave now and make sure the door in the tunnel isn’t locked. The police will need to get back and forth. And please unlatch your gate so we have access from the street.”
“I don’t know what we’ve got ourselves into, Dolores. Come along now. It was very nice talking to you, Detective Morgan.”
He grimaced at the woman’s genteel formality as the old woman took her accomplice by the arm to steady herself. Leaning precariously forward, they made their way to the French doors and disappeared into Griffin’s den.
Mrs. de Cuchilleros’s closing words drifted back to him. “I believe we both need a nice cup of Tippi Assam.”
Morgan forced his way through the undergrowth outside
