Grave Doubts by John Moss Page A

especially in stories as wildly exploited for gruesome perversity, despite all that went unrevealed. But Rachel’s casual reference forced a vital connection between the trivialized account in the papers and her private and painful memories.
    Rachel seemed to understand.
    “It’s so easy to lose track of the real people involved,” she was saying. “Like the fifty-some prostitutes murdered in Vancouver. Maybe their bodies were ground up as pig food. People food? It wasn’t until I saw somebody’s brother weeping on television, suddenly the numbers, the macabre speculation broke down, those women, they were individual lives, each with her own terrible agony, dying her own special death. It’s the Anne Frank syndrome. I understand more about the Holocaust, reading the account of a girl that ends just before her arrest, than from seeing the pictures of bulldozed bodies and reading statistics. I didn’t even know Anne had died at Bergen-Belsen when I read her diary. The illusions of objectivity in historical texts or in tabloids destroy empathy. You know what I mean?”
    Miranda stared at her, wide-eyed. Another person mighthave just apologized.
    “You talk to me,” said Rachel. “You need to talk.”
    She reached across and put her hand on the other woman’s knee. Miranda started to pull away, then placed her own hand over Rachel’s and gave it an affirming squeeze that curiously translated through Rachel’s grasp to her own knee, as if she were reassuring herself.
    Miranda placed Jill at the centre of the narrative, merging public knowledge with confidential revelations; unsure, herself, about the lines between news and gossip and confession. She explained her connection to a wealthy recluse with a vintage Jag, and she explained Jill’s connection to them both. She explained how she had been transformed by ghastly circumstances from investigating detective to Jill’s guardian and the man’s executor. She described horrors inflicted and horrors endured.
    “But you cannot suppress evil for wanting,” she said. “You can hide terrible things but you can’t erase them. You can’t forget just because you want to forget. You know what I mean?”
    “Miranda, I do. I know exactly what you mean.”
    Miranda meant to ask Rachel to go on, but instead she pursued the dead woman in the closet. That seemed more real, for the moment, paradoxically, because Rachel was willing to listen.
    “She died from dehydration,” Miranda explained. “She felt her skin parch and shrivel, felt her insides decrepitate, felt her lips crack and her eyes bleed. This young woman, she was of no interest to her killer. Do you realize how rare that must be? Murder, not to end a life but to create death. It’s beyond pathological. Almost satanic.”
    “Death as an act of creation! In that case, there will likely be more. Do you think so?”
    They talked late into the night, then went to bed.
    Miranda rolled on her side, staring at the indentation in the pillow where Rachel’s head had been. She reached over and gently rested the back of her hand in the hollow. She could smell the fresh scent that lingered in the sheets, like the smell of leaves unfurling in the morning sun. She drifted into sleep, and an hour later awakened. She would call Jill at noon, when she was home from school, and see if she wanted to go out for pizza, maybe an early movie if the homework wasn’t too heavy. They both liked movies.

chapter six
Rapa Nui
    “G’morning,” said Morgan. “I’m back.”
    “I didn’t know you’d been away.”
    Miranda mumbled, struggling to assimilate his voice into her scattering dream. She rolled over on her back and stretched. At least it was morning.
    “I’ve been up all night. It’s time you got out of bed,” he said, as if there were a logical point. “I’m still at the airport; thought I’d check in.”
    “Thanks, Morgan. Where have you been?”
    “Just got in from Sao Paulo.”
    “That’s