“Or how you knew I was a cop.”
“Yes, one of those two. Ciao, ladies. Good night.”
As they walked along Isabella Street, Rachel argued persuasively that the man was a former Mafia boss in an RCMP witness-protection program. Miranda, having once been a Mountie, thought it more likely he was the illegitimate offspring of Prince Rainier.
Whatever the case, they agreed he was not a born restaurateur.
“I’ve only got V-8 juice. And some gin. Does that make a Bloody Mary?” Miranda called to Rachel from the kitchen.
Rachel answered through the open door of the bathroom. “It sounds wretched. Let’s give it a try.”
They settled onto the living-room sofa.
On the coffee table in front of them sat a large bottle of V-8, a bottle of gin, a salt shaker, and a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Each mixed her own drink, Rachel licking the rim of her glass and dragging it through salt in the palm of her hand before mixing the gin and juice, Miranda shaking in enough Worcestershire to turn the liquid a muddy brown.
“I think,” said Miranda, raising her glass in a mock toast, “this drink is a Bloody Mess.”
“What do you suppose was going through the killer’s mind?” said Rachel.
The two women were relaxed with each other. Conversation no longer needed to proceed through a logical sequence with appropriate segues. Each could say what was on her mind and connections were made through personality, not content.
“I mean, was it all for a diabolical show? Were the murders collateral damage? It was a thrilling display of pathological depravity — horror with an edge.”
“An edge?”
“Of irony, I guess. It’s very contemporary, isn’t it? To make death a joke and a puzzle.”
“Horror films are funny,” said Miranda.
“They used to be scary. Think of Nosferatu, compared to Interview with the Vampire or the Scream movies, or Freddie the 13th. ”
“You’ve made a study of horror?” said Miranda. “Have you ever actually seen Nosferatu?”
“Only in clips, but whatever, the old films evoked our deepest fears. The new ones play to our vanity.”
“Vanity? Like, you’re frightened, but you understand why. We’re back to irony.”
“Death is the ultimate irony.” Rachel said this as if she were quoting someone. “There was a directness in old-fashioned horror; it was the real thing. Dracula. Edgar Allan Poe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, even Jane Eyre.”
“The real thing!”
“Where horror and terror converge.” She paused. “When we are terrified to be alive.”
“Wow, Rachel. That’s scary. I’ll take irony — with an edge.”
Rachel seemed preternaturally composed as she discussed the Hogg’s Hollow crime scene and related it to films and novels, showing an affinity for the ominous that Miranda found mystifying and strangely exciting.
“You’re lucky, Miranda. You get to think on the job.”
“All cops think. A traffic cop thinks. When I worked on Parliament Hill, striking in scarlet, I had to think.”
“About what?”
“About security, about whether my hat was on straight, about why I ever wanted to be a Mountie.”
“Why?”
“Dunno. I wanted to be a cop. Morgan says it was for empowerment. He figures I was reacting to a subconscious sense of violation.”
“Is he right?”
“Maybe.”
Rachel sank back against the sofa cushions, waiting.
“There was a man; he was in one of my senior courses at university, much older than me. He may have…” Miranda sat forward, took in a deep breath. “I was raped when I was eighteen. I never saw his face. I didn’t know his name… Maybe I did, I don’t know. I made myself forget.
“I didn’t connect the guy in my class with my assailant. Not consciously, not until last summer.
“At the end of the academic year, when friends were taking off for Europe or Thailand or preparing for graduate school — I had a scholarship to go on in semiotics, believe it or not — to everyone’s surprise, including my own, I joined the Mounties.”
“Morgan thinks you were trying to get away from this guy who was haunting your life?”
“Shadowing, not haunting. I didn’t know he was there. Morgan thinks subconsciously I did. He thinks I was trying to take charge of my life. I don’t even know if I believe in the subconscious. It’s just a bunch of neurons in there and an infinite maze of electrical impulses.”
“Tell me about your daughter.”
“Who?”
“You’ve mentioned a girl. I thought maybe it was a custody thing.”
“Jill? She’s my ward. I’ve never had kids. You?”
“Not even an abortion.”
Miranda was thrown for a moment, but saw nothing in Rachel’s expression either to indicate morbid wit or incipient confession.
“Jill’s fifteen, going on forty. And sometimes she’s four. She’s sweet and tough and smart. She’s gone through a lot.”
“And you?”
“I’m the administrator of her father’s charitable bequests. I was his executor.”
“Not the girl from the fish-pond murders?”
Miranda glared.
“I’m sorry,” said Rachel. “That was thoughtless.”
Miranda shrugged. Usually, she did not connect with versions of herself in the media, especially in stories as wildly exploited for gruesome perversity, despite all that went unrevealed. But Rachel’s casual reference forced a vital connection between the trivialized account in the papers and her private and painful memories.
Rachel seemed to understand.
“It’s so easy to lose track of the real people involved,” she was saying. “Like the fifty-some prostitutes murdered in Vancouver. Maybe their bodies were ground up as pig food. People food? It wasn’t until I saw somebody’s brother weeping on television, suddenly the numbers, the macabre speculation broke down, those women, they were individual lives, each with her own terrible agony, dying her own special death. It’s the Anne Frank syndrome. I understand more about the Holocaust, reading the account of a girl that ends just before her arrest, than from seeing the pictures of bulldozed bodies and reading statistics. I didn’t even know Anne had died at Bergen-Belsen when I read her diary. The illusions of objectivity in historical texts or in tabloids destroy empathy. You know what I mean?”
Miranda stared at her, wide-eyed. Another person might have just apologized.
“You talk to me,” said Rachel. “You need to talk.”
She reached across and put her hand on the other woman’s knee. Miranda started to pull away, then placed her own hand over Rachel’s and gave it an affirming squeeze that curiously translated through Rachel’s grasp to her own knee, as if she were reassuring herself.
Miranda placed Jill at the centre of the narrative, merging public knowledge with confidential revelations; unsure, herself, about the lines between news and gossip and confession. She explained her connection to a wealthy recluse with a vintage Jag, and she explained Jill’s connection to them both. She explained how she had been transformed by ghastly circumstances from investigating detective to Jill’s guardian and the man’s executor. She described horrors inflicted and horrors endured.
“But you cannot suppress evil for wanting,” she said. “You can hide terrible things but you can’t erase them. You can’t forget just because you want to forget. You know what I mean?”
“Miranda, I do. I know exactly what you mean.”
Miranda meant to ask Rachel to go on, but instead she pursued the dead woman in the closet. That seemed more real, for the moment, paradoxically, because Rachel was willing to listen.
