Free Grave Doubts by John Moss

incisive but seldom unkind. And she was usually right. He, in contrast, saw neither what people wanted others to see, nor what they wanted to hide. He did not believein the concept of self as a coherent entity. He saw personality as process, something revealed over time.
    Often their conclusions converged, although his were less static than hers, and while they evolved slowly they were more open to revision.
    “Is something bothering you?” he asked.
    “Why?”
    “You don’t seem yourself.”
    “Do I ever?” she grinned. “I was looking forward to lazing in bed,” she said. “Dreaming good dreams, spending a lovely while on my own.” She continued to smile, without looking over at him. She had awakened blissfully distracted, like she had made love through the night, but her phantom lover had departed, and she could not remember his name. “So, what’s going on?” she asked.
    “We missed it. They missed it. The medical examiner missed it. We were royally duped — by a master of the macabre. It’s all very Gothic.”
    “Damn it,” she said. “I knew the clothes fit too well.”
    By the time he explained as much as he knew, they had pulled up in front of the house in Hogg’s Hollow, which looked more dilapidated by daylight, somehow more sad, as if shunned by the neighbouring houses. There was a van parked slightly askew in the driveway. The name “Alexander Pope” in exquisite hand-script on the driver’s door proclaimed the owner a person of profoundly good taste, either too modest to add a line declaring his profession or so confident it was not deemed necessary.
    As they walked by, Morgan peered through the side windows and saw, lying in casual disarray, odds and ends of antique paraphernalia. There was a pair of hand-forged fire irons, were three or four swing arms from the inside of fireplaces, and a couple of iron pots and a kettle. There was acopper cauldron from central Sweden, an old import. There were cardboard boxes brim-filled with ancient nails, a brace of decoys, part of a dry sink, a box of door latches and hinges, and random lengths of painted pine. There were shadows and colours and contours Morgan would have loved to have explored. He was a natural at rummaging through obsolete treasures.
    “The name’s familiar,” said Miranda. “A short poet; rhyming couplets; a gardener.” What else, she wondered? “Didn’t he say ‘brevity is the soul of wit’?”
    “No.”
    “No?”
    “Shakespeare said that. Pope said ‘Wit is the lowest form of humour.’”
    “He must have been having a bad day. This is another Pope, I take it.”
    “This one lives in Port Hope. I asked him to meet us. I didn’t think he’d be here already.”
    They paused at the door. Morgan’s guest had obviously gone in.
    “Do you remember? We talked about this guy in Yorkville.”
    “Last summer, in the coffee house. The architect.”
    “The ultimate expert in colonial house restoration and the simulation of rustic antiquities.”
    “‘The simulation of rustic antiquities’! Sometimes you talk in quotations. Does he write poetry?”
    “If you ask him nicely he might pen you a few short lines.”
    “Perhaps about corpses and crypts.”
    When they opened the door, standing immediately inside with his back to them was a man who in fact was exceptionally tall and quite angular. He was wearing a Fair Isle sweater that had once been a work of art and now threatenedto disintegrate if he moved suddenly — which, by his current posture, seemed unlikely.
    Without turning around, the man said, “She won’t let me in, Mr. Morgan. This woman seems ready to draw her weapon and I’m not properly armed. Do you suppose you could help?”
    Obscured by his lanky frame, Rachel Naismith was revealed by her voice. “Everything is under control, Detectives. He insisted on entering without authorization.”
    She edged around so that Alexander Pope had to step into the living-room rubble to get out of her way.
    “He’s