Still Waters by John Moss Page B

Presbyterian in your fish taste.”
    â€œLapsed,” he shot back, “and you’re fallen. We lapse, Anglicans fall. It’s all predetermined.”
    â€œThe weird thing, the money — we haven’t talked about that.”
    â€œHave you told Legal Affairs?”
    â€œThey’ll pull me off the case.”
    â€œSo don’t tell.”
    â€œI have to. I’m just stalling.”
    â€œHow come?”
    â€œIt’s not much of a murder as murders go. A dead guy in a fish pond. And the world goes on.”
    â€œYeah, except —”
    â€œI’m the guy’s executor.”
    â€œExecutrix.”
    â€œEven if I turn him down, I’m compromised.”
    â€œNot so, unless you did it.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œKilled him.”
    â€œI didn’t even know him.”
    â€œAnd that’s the real mystery.”
    â€œMorgan, I swear to God I don’t remember the guy.”
    â€œHe knew you.”
    â€œOr thinks he did.”
    â€œCould he have possibly known you’d be investigating his death?”
    â€œI don’t see how.”
    â€œNeither do I.”
    â€œClairvoyance? Conspiracy? Coincidence?”
    â€œConcupiscence!” she added to his list. “I’m not sure what that means, but it alliterates.” She didn’t know if
alliterate
was a verb.
    He looked at her and thought about Freud. “Concupiscence means sexual desire.”
    â€œYuck.”
    â€œListen, I checked him out on the Web last night. Couldn’t find much on Griffin personally — a rich lawyer, no record of ever pleading a case in court, not listed in the current
Who’s Who,
no club memberships. I found more about the property than him, and the family. He was called to the bar in 1966, so he was a lawyer before he got into linguistics. He received a Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of Toronto. ‘Language Acquisition and the Descent of Man.’ Two copies of his dissertation are in the Library and Archives Canada, one copy registered with the Library of Congress in Washington, two copies in the Robarts Library at U of T. Published privately in a limited edition of fifty. No ISBN. You’ll be handling a sizable estate. This house is older than you’d think. The family were in the mill business. They owned a feed mill and a carding mill in the Don Valley — paved over now. Woollen mills at one time and even a shingle mill. And farmland. They owned a good chunk of prime nineteenth century Rosedale, and several more grist mills in southwestern Ontario — your part of the world. I checked out the architectural drawings for this place. Do you know there’s even a registered plan for the fish garden? A son and heir, probably Griffin’s grandfather, built the Tudor monstrosity next door, made it bigger than the old man’s, built a stone wall between them, then put in a gate, whichlooks as if it hasn’t been opened in a century. He even drew up plans for a sheltered passageway, a tunnel affair, to get back and forth in inclement weather.”
    â€œInclement?”
    â€œInclement weather.”
    â€œYou know,” she paused, looking at the Ochiba, trying to see what he saw, “someday the words that swirl inside your skull are going to explode.”
    â€œImplode.”
    â€œYou know what you know, Morgan, and then you die.”
    â€œThat’s Presbyterian. Which I am not, by the way, not practising.”
    â€œYou don’t need practice to be a Presbyterian. There’s no point. Isn’t that the whole point — there is no point?”
    He smiled. John Calvin in a nutshell, and from an Anglican.
    â€œWhat’s a Kumonryu?” she asked.
    â€œSpell it. Your Japanese is terrible.”
    Miranda spelled it. She hadn’t mentioned Griffin’s email about caring for the koi.
    â€œKnown also, I think, as the dragon fish,” said Morgan. “The Kumonryu changes