warmth. It had never before occurred to him how different light must have been as a medium before electricity. The air had dimension, the eyes were not passive receptacles but reached out to connect. He felt comfortably removed from the familiar world.
“It’s hard not to like it here,” she observed. “I’m glad you came, whatever your reasons.”
He glanced at her and away, looking into the heart of the fire.
“It’s always interesting,” she said. “The Georgian Bay is filled with enticements. And secrets, as well.”
She was taunting him.
“Why do you call it ‘The’?”
“Playful pretension. The nouveau riche who buy up those rambling old cottages in Muskoka say ‘The Muskokas.’ It’s parody — just a bit of fun.”
Either this was a profound revelation of character or as trivial an affectation as the one she was mocking.
“Tell me about your wife,” she asked, reaching across to replenish the blood-red port in his glass.
He could hear Miranda warning him. When they start offering consolation for your love life, Morgan, you know you’re in trouble. He gazed into the flickering fire in her eyes and sat back in his chair.
“You’ve been wounded, David. Invisible wounds leave invisible scars, but they’re there to the touch.”
She tilted her head slightly. She was so obvious, and yet emotional need overrode sense and he felt himself opening to her. Perhaps because he suspected her guilty of unspeakable crimes, he was drawn to self-revelation. Embraced by the profound amorality of a psychopath — the perfect conditions to exorcise demons. An absolute absence of judgment seemed dangerously seductive.
“We were deeply in love,” he said, “but not with each other. We loved an idea of what the other could be. It didn’t last long.”
Shelagh Hubbard swirled her port and raised it high to observe his image distorted through the crimson depths of her glass.
“Six weeks after we were married…,” he paused. This was something he had talked about to no one. “Six weeks, and she went back to her former boyfriend. Just for a weekend. She came home, told me where she had been, said she loved me, said she had to be sure. The absurd thing is, I knew all weekend where she was, what she was doing. We were supposed to meet for dinner on Friday at the corner of Yonge and Queen. Six o’clock. I waited for her in the drenching rain. I waited until ten o’clock. I was twenty-four years old. I knew where she was. I went home.
“She thought I could be a better version of him; he was a bit stupid and psychologically abusive and struck me as sleazy, the one time we met. But he understood her in ways I couldn’t. He played on her weaknesses and I played to her strengths. Inevitably the game went to him.”
“Was it a game?”
“Yeah, for her it was. Not a party game, more like medieval jousting. Tears of anguish, histrionic emotions, malevolent acts, and melodramatic confessions. And of course I wasn’t him. It sunk in, eventually. I wasn’t even a very good version of myself.”
“And what about her? What did you want her to be?”
She got up and put a hand on his arm, giving it a lingering squeeze, then stirred the embers and added a couple of split maple logs, returned to her chair, and leaned forward into the candlelight.
She was drawing him out, like a succubus ingesting his soul. There was something sexually charged about her silence that made him afraid not of her but himself.
“At that point in my life, I wasn’t after a mirror opposite, but the mirror itself. No matter how I held it, I wanted to see me. I hadn’t learned yet to be alone.”
“And have you now?”
“Yes, I have.”
“You and Detective Quin are very close.”
“Yes.”
“But she’s not like you at all.”
“No.”
“And you like that — you both do.”
“We’re good to each other. My marriage, brief as it was, was brutal and bitter. I learned that being alone is a primal condition of being. I’m okay with that.”
“How sad.”
“Not really.”
“You retreat into esoteric allusions and arcane pursuits, with a friend too close to be a lover.”
“Hardly makes me a figure of pathos.”
“But rather restricting. A good relationship can change your life without changing who you are.” She paused, as if trying to determine the truth of her own statement. “Do we have a good relationship, David?”
He did not answer. A woman quite possibly guilty of the most grisly of murders, of being a psychopath, was giving him advice. And he was listening.
“Let’s have that sauna,” she said. “You’ll find towels in your room, top of the stairs to the right. It’s the only room upstairs that’s finished.”
He wondered if it had a lock on the door. It did not.
When he came down, she was already in the kitchen cleaning up, wrapped in a large towel. He remembered when women wore slips, when Lucy used to walk around with a half-slip pulled up over her breasts, like a micro- mini just skimming her bottom. He felt a familiar surge and tugged at the towel draped over his shoulders and adjusted the other one wrapped tightly around his waist.
The room was warm from the fire and they did the dishes together without talking, except to get the job done.
When they went out into the damp chill of the summer kitchen, Shelagh excused herself for a moment and disappeared in the darkness to stoke up the fire, which must have been started in the afternoon, then returned and unbolted the sauna door. It was a larger room than Morgan had expected, with two benches banked along one side long enough to stretch out on and a single bench along the back wall holding a wooden bucket, half-filled with water, and a bundle of birch switches. There was an iron grate in the floor where water could be thrown directly onto the stove-top below. The sweet meaty smell of smoke-dried cedar was intense. As they entered, it was like passing through a wall of heat into another dimension.
Shelagh scooped water out of the bucket and drizzled it through the grate. Clouds of steam surged upward and transformed into waves of dry heat. She climbed onto the upper bench and Morgan joined her. She undid her towel and let it fall away, being careful to keep it under her to avoid scalding against the wood. He dropped the towel around his shoulders onto the bench and loosened the one around his waist. For a short time, his skin felt radiant and dry, then his pores opened and quite suddenly he was covered with beads of sweat that gathered and descended in random streamlets, tickling as they chose the courses of least resistance down his sides and over his stomach, some of them pooling in the depression between his thighs, which were clenched in an autonomic gesture of modesty, his penis tucked between in shy denial of the tumescence that threatened when he had first seen Shelagh towel-wrapped in the kitchen.
Following what he assumed was sauna protocol, Morgan avoided looking sideways in Shelagh’s direction, but as perspiration began to gather between her legs she relaxed her own posture, her towel settled to the side, and he could not avoid observing the shadowy promise as she spread her legs comfortably apart, the soft voluptuous contours of her vulva enhanced by a thin tangle of damp curly hair. He glanced down at himself; shrivelled in the heat to a mushroom, embedded in a wiry cluster of wet moss.
Unused to the extremes of a sauna, Morgan was disconcerted by the contradictory responses of his body. He felt intensely aroused, almost to the point of climax, and yet the instrument by which he normally measured such things had been rendered inoperative. For an instant, the memory flashed through his mind of his first and most troubling orgasm, when he was about seven years old and had had to pee desperately, but lay back under the covers because the sensation of holding back sent exquisite shivers coursing through his entire body, until finally he squeezed his penis between his fingers to restrain from wetting the bed, and suddenly his body and mind convulsed, and almost immediately he had to run to the bathroom, still pinching the end of his penis to stop the pee from flooding out. He had been so frightened by the experience, for the next year he would stand beside the toilet and
