Still Waters Read Free Page B

mistress had taken the initiative.
    Together the three of them walked beneath the trellised portico to a set of large French doors, which Eleanor Drummond unlocked. “Did you need permission to enter?”
    They stepped into a room busy with artifacts.
    â€œNo,” said Miranda.
    â€œBut if it was suicide?”
    â€œThis was murder,” said Morgan.
    Eleanor Drummond’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but she said nothing.
    The room was large and cluttered, with massive doors leading away on either side and into the interior depths of the house. It seemed cramped; it was the room of a man who needed to see what he thought, piled on shelves. Morgan felt vaguely embarrassed, the way he did gazing at an open cadaver.
    Windows flanked the French doors along the outer wall. There was a fireplace, there were shelves against the other walls packed with hardcover books, with the occasional oversize volume stored horizontally on top of the rows. Books with pictures of koi lay open on the sofa and floor in cross-referencing piles. There was a smallpile of books beside a wingback chair that faced out with a view of the garden. A slender Waterford vase sat poised on one of the bookshelves with three wilted long-stemmed roses. The walls were adorned with antique guns, animal heads and old maps, aboriginal masks and photographs of blurred shadows, likenesses of nightmares. There was a bar to one side littered with koi paraphernalia, water-testing potions, gauges for testing salinity, ammonia, oxygen quotients.
    â€œOdd that it was locked,” said Morgan.
    â€œMaybe he went out another door and walked around,” suggested Miranda.
    â€œIn his socks?”
    A pair of dress shoes sat neatly on the floor, facing away from the sofa. The shoes had been removed by a man at rest, not parked there on his way outside.
    â€œHe usually used the wingback,” said Eleanor Drummond as if they were piecing together the same puzzle.
    Morgan motioned for her to sit, then took a seat opposite. Miranda drifted away and, despite the forensic specialists coming in through the French doors, the woman focused on Morgan as if there was no one else in the room.
    Miranda usually found books comforting. At first she had thought the room was a sanctuary, but as she wandered around she found it unsettling. What she had initially taken to be evidence of personality was actually its absence.
    The shelved books were arranged by subject matter. She arranged her own books by colour and size. There was a cluster of postcards tacked to a bulletin board. On the obverse side they were blank. Sometimes the most telling story was no story at all. The opulent vulgarityof the Waterford vase attracted her eye. It was Victorian and still had a Birks label affixed to the base. There was no radio, no outlet for music. There were no paintings, only a pair of diplomas, a couple of studio graduation portraits. On a shelf an unlikely sequence of ornamental porcelain ducks was arranged next to some antique etchings in whale ivory.
    â€œScrimshaw,” said Morgan, glancing in the direction of her gaze.
    She nodded. Looking down at the colourful runner beneath her feet, the coarse wool blunt with age, she wondered if it was good. Morgan would know. Must be antique, she thought. Not much resilience. And no underpad.
    Close by the fireplace was a ceramic bin, out of which an array of walking sticks protruded at odd angles. She noticed a flat wooden blade leaning against the bin which, on closer examination, appeared to have hieroglyphs etched into its surface. My God, she thought, gently tracing her fingers along the rows of figures running its length, this was half a million dollars. She held it aslant to the light, trying to capture the inscrutable shadows.
    It saddened Miranda to realize that Easter Islanders couldn’t possibly afford to repatriate their heritage. How could they compete with museums or with a wealthy collector from Rosedale who was too