that fits. You don’t want to go around showing your titties like they were raspberries on over-whipped cream.”
“I don’t have a little sister and neither does Justine. We’re both orphans.”
“My parents aren’t dead.”
“But they will be, eventually,” said Jill, cheerfully. “Mandy’s an orphan. What about you, Rachel?”
“Not yet! Only halfway. My father’s alive.”
Miranda leaned against a verandah column, enjoying the absurd repartee. Rachel was scolding them as if she had known them for years. The girls were responding with good-humoured cheek. Jill’s morbidity suggested she was coming to terms with the deaths of her erstwhile parents. She envied the girls their friendship, based on mutual admiration, not convenience, as her friendships had been when she was their age. She acknowledged to herself that Rachel was as close to their age as her own. She looked at all three of them with a surge of parental passion — something new to her and awesomely satisfying.
“Have you thought any more about what I proposed?” she asked Jill.
“Yeah, I talked it over with Victoria. Justine says I can’t go.”
“And why not?”
“Because she’s my friend.”
“Then wouldn’t she want her friend to have the advantages — ”
“Of a private school!” exclaimed Jill. “I don’t understand why.”
“Victoria wants to go back to Barbados, Jill. She has kids of her own.”
“I’m her kid; she can’t leave me. She wouldn’t want to.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she’ll stay with me always.”
“And me too,” said Justine. “Victoria and me. We’re her support group.”
“Get lost,” said Jill.
“I don’t want you to go away.”
“Branksome’s in Toronto,” said Miranda.
“Mandy, it’s the wrong side of Yonge Street. And you want me to live there!”
“And enjoy it!”
“It’s called Branksome Hall. That sounds like a jail.”
“Sounds ritzy to me,” said Rachel.
“What did Victoria say?” asked Miranda.
“Ask her yourself. Victoria!” Jill called, leaning back on her elbows and casting her voice through the screen door behind her.
There was silence until Victoria appeared in the doorway. “Was I bein’ summoned, Miss Jill?” She rolled her eyes. “I ain’t birfin’ no baby, Miss Scarlet.” Then she saw Rachel. She opened the door and came out, extending her hand. “I’m Victoria,” she announced, as if it were in doubt. “I am this rude child’s significant other — not her mother and I’m not her guardian, and I’m Miranda’s housekeeper, not the young lady’s housekeeper, in spite of what she thinks, and I’m not her friend since Justine’s enough friend for anybody.”
“‘Significant other’ has sexual implications,” said Jill.
“For heaven’s sake, Jill!” Victoria snapped.
To Rachel’s surprise, the girl looked admonished. “Sorry, Victoria. This is Rachel Naismith. She’s Mandy’s friend.”
“And she’s twelfth-generation Canadian,” Justine chimed in.
“It can happen,” said Victoria. “Even ’mong us black folks.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Rachel, shaking Victoria’s hand.
“How are you? And how are you, Detective Quin? Your girl here is getting quite a handful. Off to boarding school for her — it’s the only way.”
“Victoria! You told me I could live with you always.”
“Or until you got too big to handle, whichever came first.”
Jill looked devastated, then burst into laughter. “You don’t want to go home, do you, Victoria?”
It was Victoria’s turn to look distraught. Miranda interjected. “That’s not really fair, Jill. You can’t make her choose between you and her own children.”
“But she’s always been here — ever since I was born.”
“But child, I do have my own children runnin’ around in Barbados, and they need their mommy. I wanna take you with me, if I could.”
Justine interjected. “Can we come and see you for visits and things, like on holidays? Can I come too?”
“Of course,” Victoria responded, touched by the naivete of their love. “You stand up, the both of you.” They did, and she drew each of them to her bosom, hugging them with a sweet rocking motion. “You’ll both come and stay with me any time you want. That’s okay with Miranda, isn’t it, Miranda?”
“For sure,” said Miranda. She exchanged a knowing glance with Rachel. They had talked about Jill and her need for stability. Boarding school, Rachel agreed, was the answer.
Miranda wasn’t prepared to move to Wychwood Park. Her work demanded a central location (she knew that argument was absurd, since her condo on Isabella was little closer to police headquarters). Her work did demand odd hours and a disruptive domestic life. Jill had only two more years in school after this one.
“I’m not going to leave here. I love this house and I love Justine and I’m not going to leave either one. I’ll stay here without you, Victoria. Justine and I will live here alone. It’s my house.”
“More or less,” said Miranda. “‘Less’ would be the operative word, since I’m in charge of your estate.”
“Then I’ll move in with you.”
“Highly unlikely!”
“Then I’ll move in with Justine.”
“Jill, you can’t,” said Justine. “I’m too poor. You know there’s no room. My dad and my mom, they think you’re my twin sister, but there’s no way. You’re the daughter they had to give up. I sleep on the couch.”
“You do?” exclaimed Rachel.
“Only since my little brother was born.”
“How old is he?”
“Twelve.”
Jill turned to address them all solemnly. “You know about the working poor. Well, Justine’s parents, they work and they’re poor. They don’t live in Wychwood Park. So, we’re at an impasse.”
“No,” said Rachel. “I think we can work it out. Let me have a brief whispering session with the boss lady here.” She took Miranda by the arm and walked her to the corner of the verandah.
“Now, it’s none of my business, but I’m going to tell you all the same. Jill’s expenses are covered by the estate of the old bastard who owned the Jag, right? You take some of the old bastard’s money. You set up a fund. You already administer two other funds from his millions. So you set up an education scholarship in her dead mother’s name. For girls. First recipient, Justine. Is that her real name?”
“She and Jill both read Lawrence Durrell when they were twelve. It’s from there, she’s been Justine ever since, except for a brief period when she was Balthazar.”
“Neat.”
Over dinner, conversation between Miranda and Rachel ran the gamut from boarding schools to Catholic saints, but kept returning to murder. They were in the nondescript Italian restaurant on Yonge Street that had become their special haunt, despite the lacklustre food and indifferent service. Rachel described her year at Alma College near London. That was all her parents could afford. She worked her way through Western, but she had been going through a brief Rastafarian phase and they figured a stint at a school for young ladies would straighten her out. It did, she observed enigmatically, in ways they could never have imagined. Miranda confessed to her own freshman admiration for private-school girls, who seemed, wherever they were, to behave like they had a perfect right to be there. They were worldly — even the ones who had never been to Europe — and they had ways of dressing down with casual authority. She and Rachel agreed: it would be good for Jill to spend her last two years of high school at Branksome Hall.
Sainthood was more problematic. Neither of them came from a tradition where becoming a saint was an option. True, they had both encountered Mormons, with their self-proclaimed status as latter-day saints, but Rachel found them racist and too cheerfully morbid, and Miranda found them absurd. It’s not Jesus coming to North
