Read Online Still Waters by John Moss - Free Book Online

colour as it grows, becomes dark and furtive, dissembling behind a progression from silver to platinum to pewter. You can never be sure with a dragon fish that it is what it seems.”
    â€œSounds like people I’ve known.”
    â€œThe dark side eventually takes over. A bland little fish becomes a creature of the shadows — the darkness is offset by radiant flashes of white, reminders of lost innocence.”
    â€œDragons can be complex,” she said. She couldn’t always tell when he was quoting some esoteric textand when he was constructing his own modest parallel universe.
    He didn’t pursue her Kumonryu query. Sometimes the suppression of curiosity was strategy, sometimes carelessness or indifference.
    Inside the house, in the den, they examined bins of chemicals behind the bar — sodium thiosulphate, salt, a canister of potassium permanganate. It had all been catalogued by the forensic squad.
    â€œIt’s like a medieval alchemist’s place,” Morgan observed.
    â€œMore like a drug lab.”
    â€œI don’t think so. This is how lawyers with fish fetishes live.”
    She reached down to open the door of a refrigerator under the bar. It was stocked with diet ginger ale and plastic bottles of something which, as Miranda read aloud from the label, turned out to be an aquaculture management product containing non-hazardous and non-pathogenic naturally occurring microbes, enzymes, and micro-nutrients. “If they’re naturally occurring, why are they in plastic bottles?” There was a side-by-side freezer. She opened it. “Shrimp, and space for more shrimp. Ice cubes.”
    â€œShrimp?”
    â€œTreats for the fish.” She looked down at the carpet. “Morgan, you knew this was antique and Kurdish from Iran. Persia. And I knew that you wouldn’t keep a rug like this on a slate floor without an underpad. The other carpets in the house — he has a beautiful collection — are on wood floors, all of them on pads. Or displayed on the walls. So, what’s happening here?”
    â€œDamned if I know.”
    â€œAnd damned if you don’t.”
    â€œNow that’s Presbyterian,” he said. “Let’s go find the Chagoi.”
    â€œFirst, let’s talk carpets.”
    After a tour of the house to show him the carpet collection, which was even better, according to Morgan, than she had imagined, they wandered back out to the garden, chatting about carpets and fish and dead lawyers. Here was a dead lawyer who worked on his own, who lived on his own, the last heir apparently of an old family fortune, truly to the manor born, in spite of his elderly neighbour’s reported intimations to the contrary. Morgan had also checked out Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros during the night, guessing that it was the neighbour in the attic who had called 911. She was old-world money, her family was a “name” with Lloyd’s; she was an only child from the other Rosedale, by the other ravine, where estates had gatehouses and the help lived in. She had married into impecunious European aristocracy.
    As Morgan and Miranda talked by the formal pond, they watched a great shadow emerge from the depths, slowly rise, and take on colour that resolved in the sunlight into muted bronze, like crinkled foil. As the nostrils appeared above the surface and then the sad limpid eyes looked up at him, Morgan knew he had his Chagoi.
    â€œHand me the net,” he said without breaking eye contact with the sad fish. “The big black one under the trellis. And the plastic tub.”
    When he slid the tub into the water beside the Chagoi, before he got the net into position to guide it, the big fish glided with a slight flutter of its pectoral fins into the container. Together Morgan and Miranda lifted the tub onto the low wall of the pool, then Morgan picked it up himself, carried it over to the pea-green pond, and gently lowered it into the water. After