Thunder Bay (Cork O'Connor Mysteries) Read online

  Stevie came up beside me. “He didn’t close his door.”

  “I’m sure he thought he’d be back soon and left it open so Walleye could come and go as he pleased.”

  “He never locks his door. Isn’t he afraid someone’s going to steal from him?”

  “I think Henry believes that what’s in here wouldn’t interest anyone but him.”

  “I think it’s cool stuff.”

  “So do I, Stevie.”

  Meloux had told me to look under the bunk for the watch. I crossed the floorboards, knelt, and peered into the dark beneath the bed frame. Shoved into a far corner against the wall was a wooden box. I lay down on my belly, stretched out my arm, snagged the box, and pulled it into the light. It was cedar, ten inches long, six inches wide and deep. Carved into the top was an image of animikii, the Thunderbird. Under the bed, undisturbed, it should have had some dust on it, a few cobwebs attached, but the box was clean. Meloux had handled it recently. I opened the lid. Inside, on top of a stack of folded papers, lay a gold pocket watch.

  I picked up the watch and snapped it open. Opposite the watch face was a tiny photograph of a handsome young woman with long black hair.

  Stevie looked over my shoulder. “What’s that?”

  “Not what, Stevie. Who. Her name is Maria Lima.”

  “That picture looks old.”

  “It is. More than seventy years old.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Keep it, for now. I might need it.”

  “Why?”

  “Henry asked me to do something for him. Two things actually. And one of them was to take care of Walleye.”

  I put the watch in my shirt pocket, closed the box, and slid it back into the corner where I’d found it.

  “If Henry is in the hospital, maybe we should stay out here,” Stevie suggested. “So Walleye won’t get lonely.”

  “I have a better idea,” I said. “Why don’t we take him home?”

  “Really?” A huge, eager smile bloomed on his face.

  “Just until Henry’s better.” Though I didn’t know if that was going to happen.

  Walleye had padded into the cabin behind us and sat on his haunches, watching. Stevie turned to him and scratched the fur at the dog’s neck.

  “You want to come home with us, boy? I’ll take good care of you.”

  Walleye’s tail swept back and forth across the floor.

  “Come on, boy. Come on, Walleye.” Stevie slapped the side of his leg and headed out with the dog at his heels.

  I closed the door behind us. There was no lock.

  Walleye paused beside me, looked back at the closed door, then followed my son, who danced ahead of us down the trail as if he were the Pied Piper.

  SIX

  That night when I walked in from closing up Sam’s Place, Jo was sitting on the living room sofa, reading a book. She looked up and smiled. “Good night at Sam’s?”

  “We made a buck or two.” I kissed the top of her head and sat down beside her. “Where’s Walleye?”

  “Sleeping with Stevie.”

  I was surprised. That afternoon when she saw the dog follow Stevie through the front door, she hadn’t been happy. I’d explained my dilemma, and she reluctantly relented. She wouldn’t allow the dog in the house, however. Not only because Walleye had come from the woods and might have ticks or fleas but, more important, because Jenny was allergic to dogs. And cats, too. Our pets had always been turtles and fish, and once we had a canary that wouldn’t shut up. Jenny named it The Artist Formerly Known As Tweety. We called it Art.

  “We put up a tent in the backyard,” Jo said. “They’re both out there. Is Jenny with Sean?”

  “Yeah. She promised to be home by midnight. So now do I finally get to hear what the big secret is?”

  Jo closed her book and set it on the end table. She composed herself. I’d seen her do this sometimes before difficult summations in court. It didn’t do a lot to reassure me.

  “Sean’s not going back to Macalester this fall,” she began calmly. “He’s taking the money in his bank account and using it to go to Paris to live for a year.”

  “Do his folks know that?”

  “As I understand it, not yet.”

  “Can’t imagine that’s going to please Lane. He’s been counting on Sean to finish his degree and take over the pharmacy. What’s this got to do with Jenny?”

  “Sean wants her to go with him.”

  “That’s it?” I laughed with relief. “Hell, Jenny’s too sensible for that.”

  Jo didn’t laugh.

  “Isn’t she?”

  “She’s thinking about it, Cork.”

  “Running off to Europe instead of college? And what? She and Sean’ll live together?”

  “She thinks Sean’s going to ask her to marry him first.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  I couldn’t sit still. I got up and began pacing.

  Jenny’s the academic in the family, takes after her mother. That June, she’d graduated from high school, valedictorian. For a long time, she’d had her sights set on Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. It was her mother’s alma mater and had an excellent writing program. When she’d gone with Jo to look at the school, horrible things had happened—not to her but to Jo—and the result was that the idea of attending Northwestern had turned bitter. She’d chosen the University of Iowa instead, hoping eventually to be accepted into the writing workshop, which she said had a terrific reputation. Robert Frost had taught there, and Robert Penn Warren. We did the financial calculations, Jo and I, and told Jenny that we could foot the bill for out-of-state tuition for the first couple of years without help. Or she could do her best to get a scholarship and we might be able to give her a hand all four years. Like her mother, whenever she puts her mind to something, she makes it happen. She got a good scholarship. And a couple of grants, and a hefty student loan, and the promise of a job on campus. Jo and I still needed to kick in a lot. I was hoping the PI license might help toward that. All the pieces of the crazy jigsaw puzzle of her educational financing had fallen into place, and she was prepared to go.

  Or was she?

  She’s gone through phases. Hasn’t every kid? Her hair’s been every color of the rainbow. For several months at the beginning of her junior year, she was into Goth. Thank God the only things she’d pierced were her earlobes. A week after she turned eighteen and no longer needed our consent, she got a tattoo. A small yellow butterfly on her shoulder. When I found out, I nearly went ballistic, but Jo pointed out that there were worse things than a small butterfly.

  She was back to the color of hair God had given her—ice blond, like her mother’s. Like Jo, too, she was willowy and had smart blue eyes. The truth is that it never mattered to me what she chose to look like on the outside. I saw her with a father’s eyes, and she was lovely. And intelligent. I always knew she would leave Aurora, go out into the world to make her mark. I’d steeled myself for that separation long ago.

  It had never occurred to me that she might decide to marry at eighteen.

  “How long have you known?” I asked.

  “A couple of weeks.”

  “Great. I just love being on the outside of things.”

  “She asked me not to say anything because she was afraid you’d get upset and overreact.”

  “Me? Why would I overreact? Just because they’re kids and Jenny’s got her whole future ahead of her and Sean can’t see beyond some crazy dream of being Hemingway.”

  “He’s a poet.”

  “What?”

  “Sean writes poetry.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You see?”

  “I have a right to be concerned. Hell, we have a right to be concerned. Why are you taking all this so calmly?”

  “Because Sean hasn’t proposed, and if he does, she’ll talk to us before she decides anything. We need to give her room, Cork, and trust her. Jenny’s nothing if not levelheaded.”

>   I stopped pacing for a moment. “What if he doesn’t propose, just asks her to go off and live with him in Paris?” That brought another thought to mind. “Jo, are they already sleeping together?”

  “She’s eighteen.”

  I stared at her. “What does that mean?”

  “What she chooses to do with her body is her own right.”

  “Meaning she’s sleeping with Sean.”

  “I don’t know, Cork.”

  “So she could be pregnant.”

  “We’ve had multiple discussions about safe sex. Jenny isn’t stupid or impulsive.” She stood up and kissed my cheek. “We just have to be patient, Cork, and trust her, okay? She’ll talk to us before she decides anything.”

  I rubbed my temples. “God, I don’t know if I’m ready for this. It was so much easier when the question was whether or not she should have braces.”

  “Any word on Meloux?” Jo said, obviously changing the subject. “No. I called George LeDuc from Sam’s Place, but he couldn’t tell me anything.”

  “What are you going to do about your promise to find his son?”

  “What every self-respecting detective does these days. Get on the Internet. Mind if I use your computer?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I left her to her reading and went into her office, which was down the hallway beyond the stairs.

  It took me an hour of Googling before I had what I believed was a decent lead.

  I found Maria Lima referenced on a site named Ontario Past. When I clicked on the site, I discovered there was a school in the town of Flame Lake called the Wellington School, which had been built in 1932 with funds donated by Maria Lima Wellington. The town had been constructed by Northern Mining and Manufacturing, a large company founded by Leonard Wellington, in order to house workers from the nearby gold mine he owned. Using Google again, I found that Maria Lima Wellington was the daughter of Carlos Lima and the first wife of Leonard Wellington. She’d died young, leaving a son. The son’s name was Henry.

  According to the Internet information, Henry Wellington was the man responsible for making Northern Mining and Manufacturing (NMM) a major corporation. He had an interesting history. After receiving his engineering degree from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, he joined the Canadian Air Force. Although no Canadian fighter squadrons were involved in the Korean War, as part of an exchange program, Wellington served with a U.S. squadron of Sabre-equipped fighter interceptors. He was the only Canadian to achieve the coveted rating of Ace. After the war, he became a test pilot. When his father died, he took over NMM. As a result of what one of his contemporaries characterized as his “brilliant, restless, and iconoclastic” mind, he developed innovative techniques for refining minerals, and held a number of lucrative patents. Under his direction, NMM had expanded its mining operations across Canada, and into other parts of the world. He invested in diverse enterprises, among them the fledgling Canadian film industry. He became a popular escort (some reports said consort) of several stunningly beautiful starlets, one of whom he finally married. He was often referred to as the Howard Hughes of Canada. I searched until I found a date of birth, and after a calculation, realized Henry Wellington was seventy-two years old. Seventy-three winters, Meloux had said, dating his relationship with Maria Lima. Given the normal gestation period of nine months, Henry Wellington would be right on the money.

  He was still alive, according to the Internet, and living in Thunder Bay, Canada, where NMM was headquartered. He was a widower with two grown children. And that, according to the Web information, was part of the problem. His wife had died six years earlier, and in the time since, Wellington had become a notorious recluse. Again, the comparisons with Howard Hughes. Speculation was that the industrialist had gone into a deep depression following his wife’s death. Although he was still on the board of NMM, he no longer ran the company, nor did he appear in public. I couldn’t find any recent photographs of him, but I did find several taken earlier in his life. His hair was black, his face angular and high cheeked, his eyes dark and penetrating. Did he look like Meloux? Or like the photograph in Meloux’s gold watch? I honestly couldn’t say.

  Near the end, I found one odd, but compelling, piece of information that, as much as anything else, pointed toward a connection between Wellington and Meloux. As a child, one of Henry Wellington’s favorite possessions had been a stuffed cormorant given to him by his mother. The cormorant is one of the clans of the Ojibwe. Henry Meloux was cormorant clan.

  By the time I clicked off the computer, Annie had come home and both she and Jo had gone to bed. It was after midnight. Jenny was still out with Sean.

  I went to the kitchen and fished a couple of chocolate chip cookies out of the cookie jar on the counter. The jar was shaped like Ernie from Sesame Street. We’d had it since the kids were small. I poured some milk and sat down at the table.

  Moths crawled the screen on the window over the kitchen sink, seeking the light. Occasionally, I heard small thumps. The grasshoppers, who seemed never to sleep. Jenny hadn’t left for Iowa City yet, but the house felt different already, emptier.

  I could have gone to bed but didn’t feel like sleeping. I was thinking about Meloux, who had a son out there—an old man himself now— who’d been even less than a stranger to his father. And I was thinking about my own children, Jenny especially. I thought I knew them pretty well, but Jenny’s hesitation, if that’s what it was, to step forward into the future she’d worked so hard to open for herself worried me. It wasn’t like her. Sean was pressuring her, I figured. He was basically a good kid. I’d never been unhappy that he and Jenny had decided to date only each other. In my day, we’d called it going steady. Now it was “exclusive.” Whatever. Sean came from a good family. His mother was a math teacher, his father a pharmacist. They were Methodist, not Catholic; no big deal. Good kid and good family notwithstanding, I wasn’t going to stand by and let them make a mistake they’d both regret somewhere down the line. When you live in a town your whole life, you see the arc of those marriages that began with a high school romance. More often than not, when the teenage passion fades, and it always does, they’re left with the realization of all they wouldn’t know about themselves and others—lovers especially—and sooner or later one of them wonders and wanders and the marriage becomes history. Pathetically predictable.

  The front door opened. A half minute later Jenny stood in the kitchen doorway.

  “Still up, Dad?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. Have a good time with Sean?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re still on target for Iowa, right?”

  She looked at me warily. “Mom said something, didn’t she?”

  “We talked.”

  I hadn’t touched one of the cookies. I offered it to her. She accepted and took a bite.

  “Did he pop the question?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Would you go with him to Paris anyway?”

  “Dad, I don’t know.” A strong note of irritation.

  “And if he does pop the question?”

  Her blue eyes bounced around the room, as if looking for a way to escape. “See, this is why I didn’t want you to know. I knew you’d interrogate me.”

  “Interrogate? I just asked a question.”

  “It’s the way you asked. And it’s only the beginning.”

  “Jenny, I’m your father. I ought to be allowed to question your thinking and your actions. It’s what I’ve done for eighteen years. And if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s served us both pretty well.”

  “It has.” Her face was intense. Beautiful and serious. “It’s helped make me who I am, a woman capable of making her own decisions.” Each word had the feel of cold steel.

  “I never suggested you weren’t.”

  “I love him, Dad. He loves me.”

  Love? I wanted to say. What do you know about love, Jenny? Do you know what it’s like to hold on by your fingernails through doubt and deception and
betrayal and despair? To go on hoping when you’re so exhausted by the struggle of love that giving up would be easy? To believe in the face of all contradiction? To walk alone in the dark—because in all love there are times of heartbreaking darkness—until you find that small flame still burning somewhere? Oh, Jenny, I wanted to say,there’s so much you don’t know.