LITMIR.BIZ

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the image as he admired Dr. Hubbard.

      Miranda coughed throatily, seemed to listen for something elusive, then coughed again. Then she announced, "I'm going to scream."

      Morgan looked puzzled, tolerant.

      She shrieked wickedly in variable pitch.

      A racket from downstairs was followed by thumping footsteps, and Officer Naismith sprang through the doorway, her semi-automatic clasped in both hands. Everyone froze.

      For a moment even the bodies seemed part of an allegorical danse macabre, with Rachel cast in the role of Death.

      Then the tableau collapsed in laughter, much to the officer's annoyance.

      "Sorry," Miranda said. "I should have warned you."

      Rachel looked down at her Glock semi-automatic, summoned an indignant smile, and tucked it back in its holster.

      "Bang bang," she said.

      Good recovery, Morgan thought. He regarded Miranda with bewildered affection, and waited.

      "Listen," Miranda said. "You can hear the emptiness."

      Nice, thought Morgan, imagining the music of the spheres.

      "I noticed when we were in the kitchen — I've never figured out why people say the word echo to hear an echo. I wonder what they say in Chinese."

      She had their attention.

      "Okay," she said. "Listen."

      She called, "Echo-echo-echo."

      They could hear a faint reverberation in the walls.

      "There's a laundry chute," she said.

      Yes, Morgan thought. You can hear emptiness if you know what to listen for.

      "I remember the laundry chute in my grandmother's house," Miranda explained. "We'd holler up and down, and when they covered it over because they were afraid we'd climb in you could still hear where it was through the walls."

      Morgan picked up a crowbar from the floor next to the hanging cupboard. He walked along the main supporting wall, tapping. They could hear chunks of plaster skitter behind thick layers of paper and sift between the lath down into the hidden depths.

      He stopped and looked out in the hallway. There was a brace at eye level supporting a brick chimney that rose into the attic — all that remained of an abandoned heating system when stovepipes had snaked through the different rooms during the winter. Beneath the brace a thickening in the wall. Morgan rapped on the protrusion. There was a hollow thud.

      He went back into the bedroom, aligned himself precisely, and smashed the back of the crowbar against the wall. Shards of layered paper scattered, plaster flew, and lath shattered. Professor Birbalsingh muttered unhappily.

      Once a hole appeared at laundry-chute height, Miranda stepped forward and tried to peer into the cavity. Choking on the dust, she pulled lath and plaster away with her bare hands. Morgan interceded with the crowbar. Rachel Naismith helped, and soon they had an opening big enough a person could reach in up to the shoulder.

      Morgan set the crowbar down, preparing to explore, but Miranda shunted him aside.

      "This one is mine," she said. "What'll you bet there's a board jammed across to stop things falling through to the cellar."

      She extended her arm fully down into the hole, grimaced as she made contact with something, and carefully lifted her arm out of the chute. Her hand was entwined with long tendrils of human hair. Suspended from the hair was the mummified head of a young woman, skin taut against the skull, lips drawn in a haunting grimace, membranes in her eye sockets catching fragments of light.

      "Morgan," she said. "Could you get the other one?"

      Morgan tried to look in but his own head cast a shadow. He reached down, blindly, careful not to rip his flesh on splintered lath, and suddenly flinched. Steeling himself, he grasped the short-cropped hair of the remaining skull. He pulled it upwards and through, into the room.

      Miranda was still holding the woman's head cradled in the crook of her arm. Without exchanging words, both of them carried their grim loads over to the bodies.

      Professor Birbalsingh and Dr. Hubbard stood aside while Morgan and Miranda kneeled and propped the heads against the necks from which they had been severed.

      When they rose to their feet, the floorboards shivered and the heads lolled to the side. The detectives smiled shyly at each other. They had at least made a gesture to acknowledge the victims had once been alive.

      Taking his cue from Miranda, who seemed quite pleased with herself but ready to leave, Morgan announced, "Well, folks, our work's done here. It's time for us to call it a night." He felt strangely uplifted, as if the pieces of a lingering murder investigation were finally coming together, and at the same time he felt cheated, knowing it wasn't theirs.

      Birbalsingh grunted as he manoeuvred his soft body to get a better perspective on the male. Hubbard was opposite, hovering over the woman. It was as if they had divided the victims according to gender.

      She looked up at Morgan, then at Miranda, then back at Morgan.

      "Goodnight, Detectives," she said.

      Miranda sensed strain in the woman's smile. Possibly the police had overstepped their bounds in retrieving the heads. Perhaps in placing the heads they had undermined procedural objectivity by performing their small ritual of empathy and defiance.

      Miranda didn't much care. She was ready to go home.

      Rachel Naismith saw them to the door.

      "Thanks for dropping in," she said.

      "We'll do it again, sometime," said Miranda.

      The two women exchanged a quick embrace, while Morgan walked by himself toward the car.

      Miranda caught up and, slipping on the sidewalk, grabbed his arm to recover. He walked her to the driver's side. Morgan stood back and waited until she pulled away from the curb, but he still got an icy soaker as he climbed in beside her. It had been an adventure; they both felt somehow winter was over. They drove into the darkness, at its bleakest just before dawn.

      chapter three Cabbagetown

      The heavy wet snow that accumulated during the night made Yonge Street treacherous. Morgan sat back, white-knuckled, fatalistic but hopeful as Miranda negotiated her way through ruts of turgid slush and gave wide berth to a blue-beaconed truck spewing sand that bore down on them from the other direction near Eglinton. It was the only vehicle they encountered on the desolate streets all the way to the Annex. She was a good driver, relatively speaking, and fervently protective about her car. She would deliver him safely to the door for the sake of her vintage Jaguar.

      Weird and wonderful, he thought. Her devotion to the car, like her commitment to her teenage ward, Jill Bray, was a perverse response to heinous crimes. It was astonishing the satisfaction both had brought to her life. She would never have purchased such a car on her own; nor would she by choice have begun parenting with a feisty and resilient survivor of horrific abuse, a child-woman whose story strangely mirrored her own. The car was an act of defiance; Jill was an affirmation of love.

      When she pulled up in front of Morgan's condo, he echoed his invitation of the previous evening. "Do you want to come in?" As if to make it more enticing, he added, "Until the streets are cleared? For an early breakfast?"

      She looked as if she might be considering it.

      "If you want to sleep, I'll take the sofa," he said.

      "That clinches it," she responded. "I'm off. I want to sleep through the day in my own bed. You know what I was thinking?"

      When she turned to address him, the indigo instrument lights cast her features in an eerie pallor. She looks sculptural, he thought. Her face is like alabaster in moonlight.

      "I was thinking about Heathcliff and Catherine."

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