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published in 1847.”
    “You know that why?”
    “You’re not the only one who stores away bits of esoteric information.” She paused. “I looked it up.”
    “Never give away your sources.”
    “Okay, we have two people. We assume they were lovers —”
    “Assume?”
    “Maybe it was a macabre joke and they were famous for hating each other. Anyway, there they are, posed like Heathcliff and Catherine, post-mortem. Only Wuthering Heights hadn’t come out yet.”
    “And?”
    “And nothing. It just means no one was emulating Emily Brontë.”
    “Same with Auguste Rodin. ‘The Kiss’ was a century later. But what about Dante? The Divine Comedy was written five centuries before the murders took place.”
    “That’s stretching it, Morgan. Our culture-conscious killer would never count on someone getting the connection, and certainly not cops.” Miranda found the notion that police don’t read, listen to music, enjoy art, attend theatre, or cook like gourmands extremely irksome. It did not bother Morgan. “Maybe the way they’re posed is not an allusion to anything, just inspired depravity.”
    “Inspired depravity!”
    “I sort of feel guilty they’ve been disturbed,” she said. “Don’t you?”
    “Not really. They’ve been locked out of time; now they’re back in.”
    “That’s very profound, and sad.”
    “Let’s say the former and call it a night.”
    “G’night, Morgan.”
    “Phone if you work it all out. If you see Jill, give her my love. And thanks for the ride.”
    She waited until he unlocked his front door, which years ago he had lovingly painted with fourteen coats of midnight blue. It gleamed a putrescent brown in the reflected light of the city at dawn. Miranda shuddered and drove off, giving a reckless beep on the horn. She was suddenly so exhausted she could hardly guide the car through the ruts, and she concentrated on the promise of a warm bed with fresh flannel sheets.
    Morgan closed the door. He was thinking about Rodin’s sculpture. While he got ready for bed he pondered the problem, if it could be considered a problem. How can there be such discrepancy between an artist’s intent and the accepted response to his art?
    As he lingered in front of the bathroom mirror, he envisioned “The Kiss” in its various manifestations: plaster and terra cotta and marble and bronze. An image of the desiccated corpses in Hogg’s Hollow intruded but was displaced by the full-size plaster maquette he had seen with Miranda while they were playing hooky from work at the ROM. It was a ghostly white apparition in a room full of chalky anatomical figures on their way to more permanent representation in metal and stone. A ghost among ghosts.
    Catching sight of himself reflected amid the images shunting through his mind, he relaxed and briefly attended to the mundane necessities of brushing his teeth and washing. He lifted his pyjamas, black moose strolling on a red background, from a hook on the back of the bathroom door and walked stark naked up to his bedroom where he stood, shivering, lost again in contemplation.
    He was so tired, nothing made sense, and after becoming thoroughly chilled he put on his pyjamas and climbed into bed. He curled around himself and breathed deeply, lifting the covers for a moment to let a defining burst of cold air penetrate his cocoon, then he sealed them snugly around his shoulders and almost immediately drifted into a deep slumber.
    Morgan awakened to the insistent ring of the telephone. He picked up the receiver on the night table but there was only a dial tone. Maybe he had dreamed it was ringing. Light rising from the window downstairs indicated it was mid-morning, but he was not interested in getting up.
    He rolled over on his back without looking at his watch or the alarm clock on the dresser and drew the covers close. He had tried an eider-down duvet someone once gave him, but preferred the weight of thick wool blankets, which seemed to modulate their