a ghost.
“It’s not your fault, Alexander.”
“But it is. I created the context. I revealed the frescoes, I set up the scene.”
“Alexander, this is not about you,” said Morgan, not unsympathetically. He found the man more likable now, when he was standing on unknown ground and his project seemed to be slipping from his grasp. “How could you know this would happen?”
“I’ve been here most of the time, or sleeping in my van. Sometimes I drive into Midland or Penetanguishene for supplies. Otherwise, I’ve been here.”
“One thing is certain,” said Miranda. “Good though she was at her craft, she didn’t put herself in there without help.”
“She has never looked better,” said Morgan, staring over the forensic team clustered at the opening of the small crypt.
“Blue suits her, although I must say the cut of her dress isn’t quite au courant,” Miranda observed. “It’s obviously meant to look like the outfit Saint Marie is wearing for her ascension.” She stepped down from the chancel and walked along the nave until opposite the fifth panel, in which Mary the Mother and Marie Celeste seemed to merge as one. The other three followed. “Look at that,” said Miranda. “Funny, though, I didn’t see it before. I thought she looked familiar but I didn’t make the connection. That could be an inspired portrait of Shelagh Hubbard!”
“And then there were four,” said Morgan. “Saint Marie Celeste and the Virgin Mary and Sister Mary Joseph and Saint Shelagh herself. It’s not a coincidence she’s laid out in a pale-blue habit.”
“Robe.”
“Habit. Anyway, the resemblance is uncanny, and it’s not a coincidence that Shelagh Hubbard and Lorraine Eliott are dead ringers.”
“What an unfortunate choice of words.”
“So, where are the bones of Lorraine Eliott?” said Miranda aloud, but more to herself than the others. Then, addressing Morgan, she said, “We’d better caution forensics to check the crypt carefully for residual traces of a much older body.” She stepped up onto the chancel to confer with the OPP.
“Where do you think they got to?” Morgan asked Alexander Pope.
“The bones? I have no idea. What would a person do with old bones?”
“Discard them, I suppose, or set up a morbid tableau. But there would have been more than a skeleton in the tomb. It’s a stone crypt, cool in summer and frozen in winter, and we saw how well it was sealed. I would imagine there was a mouldering corpse in there, swathed in the remains of a pale-blue robe.”
“Unless, of course, she was truly a saint,” Alexander observed. “Then she would have been perfectly preserved and smelling of violets. Perhaps the violets we smell are a lingering reminder of her inviolate flesh. How very eerie.”
When the county coroner’s people lifted Shelagh Hubbard’s body out of its tomb, Morgan moved closer. He watched them set her gently on the gurney. He stood beside her, looking down at her face. He felt a strange mixture of emotions. There was no doubt she was a pathological killer. His own fate had rested precariously in her power, and she had clearly articulated plans in her journal for extinguishing his life and using his bones to fabricate the charred remnants of a Jesuit saint. It seemed almost silly now, a quixotic subterfuge doomed to exposure. And he could not help but feel the pathetic irony of her present predicament, having herself been used after death to supplant another saint’s earthly remains. And as he scanned her face, her deep-set eyes pressing with suppressed vitality against the membrane of their lids, full lips poised as if about to utter a benediction, cheekbones pushing at their thin veneer of covering flesh, he found her hauntingly beautiful and it made him sad, and he felt sympathy for her powerless state as an exemplar of death.
“Morgan, you all right?” Miranda pressed to his side, holding his arm against her breast in a subtle gesture of affection no one else could see.
“Yeah,” he said. “Better than her.”
“Come on, let’s look around. It’s still our case; the abductor abducted is now the murderer murdered.”
“Okay.”
He kept staring at the dead woman’s face. Miranda spoke in a low voice — not a whisper, but a private communication. “Morgan, it’s okay, it wasn’t evil you were attracted to but the disguise she gave it. And look at her — it was an enticing disguise. Forgive yourself for being her victim, Morgan.”
He turned to her; they were standing so close, in other circumstances it might have been an embrace. He spoke in a firm voice. “Think about that.”
“No,” she said. She was not about to collapse her life story with his.
The two of them looked down at Shelagh Hubbard, who seemed to be listening.
“She’s had better days,” said Miranda.
“I wonder.”
“Death becomes the lady, Morgan. Pallor suits her.”
The implied intimacy of how close they were standing suddenly made both of them uncomfortable. Morgan stepped back and nearly trampled Officer Singh, who had just approached from behind. Miranda moved to the side and pushed against the gurney. A coroner’s assistant, taking that to be a signal, drew a white cloth over Shelagh Hubbard’s face and signalled for another assistant to help wheel her out of the building.
“Does this mean our case is resolved?” said Peter Singh.
“Well, in some sense it does,” Morgan answered, swinging around to respond and finding himself awkwardly close, but still able to appreciate the young officer’s odd gesture of closure, swiping his hand across his throat in a guillotine motion. Morgan held his own hand up, patting the air. “And in some sense it doesn’t.”
Miranda chimed in. “Scotland Yard will be pleased she’s dead. Our superintendent will be pleased she’s way out here and she’s dead. Morgan’s eventual heirs will be pleased she’s dead. But there’s a lot to find out before the story is over.”
“The important thing, apparently, is that she’s dead,” said Alexander Pope, who had meandered through the tangle of investigators to join them.
There was an awkward silence.
“This one’s definitely out of our jurisdiction,” said Morgan.
“Unless,” said Miranda, with a devilish gleam in her eye, “she was killed in Toronto and brought back here for burial. Then it’s the same deal as with the Provincials, in reverse.”
“Could that be possible?” said Officer Singh.
“Anything’s possible,” Morgan responded.
“We’re on this,” said Miranda, “until, can I say in oral quotation marks, ‘the circumstances of her death have been resolved.’ We’d like to understand what led her to do what she did, why she kept such meticulous records, where the predilection for grisly scenarios came from. That’s part of our mandate, unofficially, if not on the books.”
“Well, I must say,” said Alexander, “I will be relieved when this latest development in her story is over. I really would like to get back to my work.”
“Of course,” said Morgan. “It’s good to keep things in perspective.”
More sympathetically, Miranda said, “I think the believers have already begun to disperse. Let’s check them out.” She led the others toward the front of the building and pushed one of the double doors open. The OPP officer outside made way and they stepped into a garish glow. Miranda was startled to realize the night had fled to the west and the grey sky was streaked with pink and orange as the sun pushed upwards against the eastern horizon. The crowd had thinned to a few clusters of diehards who seemed as thrilled to be associated with murder as with the holy apparition that it had displaced.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she said, taking a deep breath of the crisp morning air. “The paintings on the wall haven’t changed, but now they’re just paintings. For these people out here, Shelagh Hubbard’s appearance in the grave of their saint seems to have taken the magic away, if not the mystery.”
“Not their saint,” said Morgan. “She’s the saint of the housekeeping pilgrims. What these other people saw was an image of the Virgin Mary, and it undermines her manifestation to be associated with a criminal investigation. Logic kicks in. Maybe it’s only a picture of the folk saint after all, and suddenly the apparition is reduced to cult status, an awkward archaic curiosity. So, home they go, to wait for another sign, next time on a pizza crust or a
