Read Online Still Waters by John Moss - Free Book Online Page B

now there’s no room there for the poor.”
    â€œI grew up on the cusp of transition, one neighbour’s house derelict and the next a designer showpiece.”
    â€œI know — if you had owned and not rented from a slumlord, and if you had waited long enough, you would have made a killing. And your mother had a Scottish accent after eight generations in Canada.”
    â€œYeah,” he said, pleased and irritated by her familiarity with his life. “Let’s amble over and visit our voyeur.”
    â€œAmble,”
she said. “Okay, let’s amble.”
    As they walked, she ruminated about what Morgan called “her part of the world.” She still owned her mother’s house in Waterloo County. She thought of it that way, as her mother’s, though her parents had lived there together until the summer she had turned fourteen, when her father died. Her mother passed away four years ago. She and her sister in Vancouver were orphans. You were still an orphan even in your thirties when both parents were dead.
    Miranda’s sister had her own life and seldom came east. She had signed her share of the house over to Miranda. She and her husband were professionals, and Miranda’s welfare, according to them, was more precarious. That was a judgment on her marital and not her financial status. Singlewomen of a certain age inspired righteous condescension. Miranda didn’t argue. It was satisfying to have the old house, though she didn’t rent it out and only visited occasionally. She hadn’t slept over since her mother’s funeral. The village of Waldron was changing. When she walked to the general store, she sometimes recognized a familiar face but went unrecognized herself. Mostly, there were strangers now living in the old houses clustered around the crossroads, down the hill, and along the river.
    Morgan and Miranda were greeted at the door by a Filipino woman who showed them into a formal receiving room that was dark and excessive, with numerous old photographs in sterling frames propped in strategic formation, a genealogical gallery that seemed to have reached its terminus about the time of the Great War and before the Great Depression. Everything was “Great” back then until the age of irony set in. There were heavy velvet drapes pulled back and ferns in the window, a perfect camouflage for someone observing the street without being seen.
    When Mrs. Jorge de Cuchilleros entered the room, it was with a sense of occasion, as if her presence gave the encounter significance in excess of what a dead lawyer might conjure, especially one found in a fish pond. Yet she was herself neither stately nor ancient, and while she may have preferred to avoid crowds since Toronto had become so cosmopolitan — as she would describe it, her tolerance for ethnic diversity implicit — she wasn’t bound to stay in by virtue of any crippling condition. She simply enjoyed the role of reclusive widow, which she did with relish for Mormons, meter readers, and homicide detectives, even for policemen in uniform. Since the Georgian Room at Eaton’s had closed a generation ago, she hadn’t been south of Bloor Street.
    On the floor was a magnificent carpet. Morgan recognized the stylized peacocks of an antique Akstafa from the southern Caucasus. In spite of that the room made him uncomfortable. While the women talked, he assessed the furnishings. Apart from the carpet, it all seemed in opulent bad taste, a sad relic of Victorian imperialism. He asked for the bathroom and was surprised when the Filipino maid answered the ring of a small crystal bell to show him the way.
    There was a convenience on the same floor at the back, he was told. He was led through a panelled dining room and caught a glimpse of the garden. When the maid seemed about to wait for him outside the lavatory door, he motioned her away a bit awkwardly, trying in the gesture of his hand for casual