Thunder Bay Read online

  “Maybe the guy knows the story.” I took off my shirt.

  “What exactly is the whole story? How did Meloux come to father a son he’s never seen?”

  “He’s not saying.”

  Jo stood at the closet door in her white bra and in panties that had little yellow flowers all over them. She’d been through hell in the year since the brutal events in Evanston. But the human spirit—with the help of counseling—is amazingly resilient, and looking at her as she stood ankle deep in a puddle of sunshine, I thought she’d never been more lovely.

  I dropped my shirt on the chair next to our dresser and walked to her. I put my hand gently on her cheek.

  “Part of your question I can answer,” I said.

  “Oh? And which part would that be?”

  “How he fathered a son.”

  I kissed her.

  “You have to open Sam’s Place in half an hour,” she reminded me. “Old pros like us can accomplish a lot in half an hour.”

  She smiled seductively, took my hand, and together we went to the bed.

  EIGHT

  During the day, whenever I had a break from customers, I slipped into the back of Sam’s Place and made telephone calls. I tried the headquarters of Northern Mining and Manufacturing in Thunder Bay. Because it was Sunday, all I got was a recording, pretty much what I’d expected. I’d been unable to find a listing on the Internet for Henry Wellington and had no better luck with directory assistance. Among the information I’d gathered the night before, however, was the name of Wellington’s younger half brother, Rupert Wellington, president and CEO of NMM, and also a resident of Thunder Bay. I tried the number for Rupert I’d pulled off the Internet. The man who answered told me rather crossly that he was not that Rupert Wellington and he was sick and tired of getting the other guy’s calls, thank you very much.

  I’d also learned that Wellington had two children, a son and a daughter. The son worked for a conservation organization in Vancouver, British Columbia. His name was Alan. The daughter, Maria, was a physician in Montreal. I didn’t have a phone number for either of them, but I did have one for the conservation organization, a group called Nature’s Child. I dialed, thinking there was no way on a Sunday. Someone answered on the fourth ring.

  “Nature’s Child. This is Heidi.”

  “Heidi, my name is Corcoran O’Connor. I’m trying to reach Alan Wellington.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Would it be possible to reach him at home?”

  “I suppose you could try.”

  “I would but I don’t have his number.”

  “And I can’t give it out.”

  “It’s a bit of an emergency. It’s about his family.”

  “His father?”

  I wondered why it would occur to her automatically that it would be about Henry Wellington.

  “His grandfather, actually. He’s very sick.”

  “And you would be?”

  “As I said, my name’s Corcoran O’Connor. I’m acting on his grandfather’s behalf.”

  “An attorney?”

  “A friend. Look, I hate to be pressing, but the old man is dying.” There was a brief hesitation on the other end as she considered. Then: “Just a moment.”

  Within a minute, I had the number and was dialing Alan Wellington’s home phone.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice.

  “I’d like to speak with Alan Wellington, please.”

  “May I say who’s calling?”

  I gave her my name.

  A few seconds later, a man came on the line. Firm, deep voice, but not hard. “This is Alan.”

  “Mr. Wellington, my name is Cork O’Connor. I’m calling from Minnesota. I’ve come into possession of a watch that I believe belonged to your grandmother. There’s a rather interesting story attached to it. I’d like to give the watch to your father and tell him the story, but he’s a difficult man to contact.”

  “Not difficult, Mr. O’Connor. Impossible.”

  “That’s why I’m contacting you. I was hoping you might help.”

  “You can certainly send me the watch and the story along with it. I’ll make sure my father gets them.”

  “I’d rather deliver them to him in person.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”

  “Just a telephone number?”

  “Mr. O’Connor, I don’t know the truth of what you’re telling me, though it sounds a little suspect. You have no idea the number of people who’ve tried to get to my father through me. And my sister. My father wants simply to be left alone. As much as I’m able, I intend to help him with that. If you’d like to send me the watch, I’ll see that he gets it. Otherwise, we have nothing further to discuss.”

  “Time is of the essence here, Mr. Wellington. A man who wants very much to contact your father is dying.”

  “A man. Not you?”

  “Someone I represent.”

  “You’re an attorney?”

  “No.”

  “And who is this man?”

  I didn’t know how to explain it. I stumbled on. “He was a very good friend of your grandmother. He has important information about her that your father ought to know.”

  “If you tell me, I’ll see that he gets it.”

  “I can’t really do that.”

  “Then, as I said before—Mr. O’Connor, was it? We have nothing further to discuss.”

  The call ended on that abrupt and chilly note.

  Jo stopped by in the late afternoon. She brought Stevie and Walleye and dropped them off.

  “Mind if they hang out here for a while?” she asked. “I have shopping to do. The dog can’t come into the store, and Stevie won’t go anywhere without him.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  After she left, I watched them chase around outside. Stevie ran; Walleye bounded after him, barking joyously. It was hot and a little humid and Walleye was no spring chicken, so after a while, the dog crept into the shade under the picnic table out front and lay down, panting. Stevie crawled under and sat with him, talking to him quietly and gently stroking his fur.

  I thought about my son. He had friends, kids in the neighborhood he played with, but he didn’t have a best friend. He possessed a fine imagination and often played alone, games he invented or adventures he concocted in his mind’s eye. I didn’t worry about him. He seemed pretty comfortable with who he was. I knew he was lonely sometimes. Who wasn’t? But watching him with Meloux’s old dog, I wondered if maybe there wasn’t an essential connection missing in his life, the kind of affection offered by a best friend. Or a lovable old hound.

  After a while, they came out from under the picnic table. Walleye followed Stevie to the Quonset hut. A few moments later, my son poked his head into the serving area.

  “Can I go fishing?”

  “Don’t think much’ll be biting in this heat, buddy, but be my guest.”

  I kept fishing gear in the back room. Stevie knew where. In a bit, he walked through afternoon sunlight toward the lake with Walleye padding along patiently at his side. They sat at the end of the dock. Stevie took off his shoes, put his feet in the water, and tossed his line. Walleye lay down, his head on his paws, and they hung out together in the comfortable quiet of two good friends.

  At home that night I told Jo, “I’m driving to Thunder Bay in the morning.”

  She was sitting up in bed, propped against the headboard, reading a file in a manila folder, something from work, I was sure. She often read in bed at night, her glasses perched on her nose, making small noises in response to the text.

  “What about Sam’s Place?” She took off her glasses and laid them at her side.

  I slipped into a pair of gym shorts and a clean T-shirt, my usual sleep attire. I turned from the dresser. “Jenny and Annie can handle it. Is Jenny here?”

  “She came in a while ago.”

  “Did she have a good time driving the North Shore with Sean?”

  “She di
dn’t talk much.”

  I sat down on the bed. “Is that good or bad?”

  “It’s neither, I’d say. She’s just thinking, I imagine. Weighing everything.”

  “Weighing an offer of marriage?”

  “I don’t know that there’s been one.”

  “If I were Sean and wanted to pop the question, I’d take her to someplace like the North Shore, sit her down with a gorgeous view of Lake Superior.”

  “I suppose you would. That’s basically how you proposed to me. On Lake Michigan, a beautiful evening, a dinner cruise. That glorious question. Then you threw up.”

  “I hadn’t planned on getting seasick. And you accepted anyway.”

  “Jenny’s in a different place than I was, Cork. I think we should trust her.”

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t nudge her in the direction we’d like her to go.”

  “You think she doesn’t know what we’d prefer?”

  “I’d like her to think of it as what’s best rather than just what we prefer.”

  “I’m sure you would. What do you hope to accomplish in Thunder Bay?”

  “A face-to-face meeting with Henry Wellington.”

  “And how do you intend to go about that?”

  “As nearly as I can tell, his brother—half brother—Rupert runs the company now, so he’s probably accessible. I’m hoping to use him to get to Wellington.”

  “And you’ll get an audience with the brother how?”

  “The watch. I’m banking on it opening the door.”

  “Four-hour drive up, four-hour drive back. Could be all for nothing.”

  “Not for nothing. It’s for Henry. And you have a better idea?”

  She put the manila folder on the nightstand, leaned over, and kissed me. “You’ll be leaving early. Get some sleep.”

  NINE

  I stopped by the hospital on my way out of town. I spoke with Dr. Wrigley, who was pretty familiar by then with my association with Meloux, though he didn’t know anything of what the old man had requested of me. There’d been little change in Meloux’s condition. When I asked what exactly that condition was, Wrigley couldn’t give me an answer.

  “There doesn’t seem to be any occlusion. We’ve run all the tests we can run here. I’m thinking of transferring him down to Saint Luke’s, in Duluth. Their heart people might be able to figure this one out.”

  Meloux was awake. He smiled weakly when I entered his room. “How you doing, Henry?”

  “I don’t sleep so good. I don’t crap so good. Mostly my heart is heavy. Like a bear on my chest.”

  “I’m going up to Thunder Bay today, try to talk to the man who may be your son.”

  “The watch?”

  “I have it.”

  I’d put it in a small white jewelry box Jo had given me. I opened the box, took out the watch, and handed it to Meloux. His fingers were brittle-looking things, thin sticks, but they handled that watch gently. He opened it and studied the photograph inside.

  “She was beautiful,” I said.

  The old Mide looked up. “Her beauty was a knife, Corcoran O’Connor.”

  He handed the watch back.

  “You will bring me my son,” he said.

  * * *

  I followed Highway 1 southeast and reached the North Shore in an hour. I turned left at Ilgen City and took Highway 61 north along Lake Superior.

  It was a beautiful August day. The lake looked hard as blue concrete. Sunlight shattered on its surface into glittering shards. Far to the east, where the pale wall of the sky hit the water, the horizon was a solid line, the meeting of two perfect geometric planes. To the west rose the Sawbill Mountains, covered with second- and third-growth timber. The road often cut along steep cliffs or ran beside a shoreline littered with great slabs of rock broken by the chisel of ice and time and the relentless hammering of waves. I drove through Schroeder, Tofte, Grand Marais, and finally Grand Portage, small towns full of tourists come north for the scenery and to escape the sweltering Midwest heat farther south.

  I crossed the border at the Pigeon River, and less than an hour later, I entered the unimpressive outskirts of Thunder Bay.

  Thunder Bay is really the modern merging of two rival municipalities, Fort William and Port Arthur. As I understand it, the French fur traders started things rolling with a settlement protected by a rustic fort near the mouth of the Kaministiquia River, which emptied into a bay on Lake Superior the French called Baie de Tonnaire. The British, when they took over the fur-trading business, built a more impressive outpost they named Fort William. A few years later, when the new Canadian government wanted to build a road through the wilderness, a site a few miles north of Fort William was chosen. It was christened Port Arthur, and the two towns began trading verbal potshots, something that went on for the next hundred years or so, until they shook hands, erased the borders, and took to calling the new union Thunder Bay. The truth is, it didn’t end the rivalry. Ask anyone who lives in the city where they’re from and no one says Thunder Bay. Either they’re from Port Arthur or Fort William.

  The city’s an old port. Like a lot of towns on the western side of Lake Superior, it’s long past its heyday. But it’s trying.

  The bay is created by a long, southerly sweeping peninsula dominated by an impressive geological formation called Sleeping Giant, so named because that’s what the formation resembles. The Ojibwe story is that it’s Nanabozho, the trickster spirit, turned to stone when white men learned the secret of the peninsula, which was that a rich silver mine was hidden there.

  From what I’d gathered on the Internet, Henry Wellington lived on a remote island called Manitou, which was just off Thunder Cape, the tip of Sleeping Giant. Manitou is an Ojibwe word that means spirit. That’s exactly what Wellington seemed to be. More spirit than flesh, more spoken about than seen.

  I made my way to the Thunder Bay Marina, which was at the eastern edge of the downtown area, just off Water Street. The city’s old railroad station had been remodeled into shops and a little restaurant/bar. There were three main docks. Most of the slips were filled with modest sailboats and large motor launches. I walked to the end of the first dock and stared out across the bay toward Sleeping Giant, dark gray in the distance.

  “Interested in a tour?”

  I glanced back. A woman stood on the deck of a sailboat docked not far away, a can of Labatt Blue in her hand. She wore white shorts, a yellow tank top, a red visor. She looked maybe sixty—a healthy, tanned, fit sixty. The kind of sixty I hoped to be when I got there.

  “Nope. Just one island. Manitou.”

  “Hunting Henry Wellington,” she said and took a drink from her beer. “Where’s your camera?”

  “I don’t want a picture.”

  “Good. Because the chances of getting one are next to nothing.”

  “I just want to talk to the man.”

  She laughed. “Hell, that’s harder than an audience with the pope. Everybody knows that.”

  “Where’s Manitou Island?”

  She pointed toward the enormous landform on the far side of the bay, miles away. “At the base of Sleeping Giant. Too far to see from here.”

  “I understand the only way to get there is by boat.”

  “There’s a helipad.”

  “The man likes his privacy.”

  “The man’s obsessed with it. You’re not a reporter, eh?”

  “Private investigator.” I walked to her boat, reached across the gunwale, and gave her my card. It was the first one I’d given out since I had them printed. I got a thrill from it. “Hired by a family member to deliver a piece of information. You seem to know a lot about Wellington.”

  “Mostly what everyone in Thunder Bay knows. But with my slip right here, I pretty much see who comes and goes to the island.”

  “Could you get me out there?”

  “Wouldn’t do you any good. Wellington’s got dogs, men with guns.”

  “Ever seen him?”

  “Every once
in a while if I’m passing near the island at sundown, I see a wisp of white moving among the trees. More like a ghost than a man, eh. I figure that’s got to be Wellington.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. You decide you want a tour, you know where to find me.”

  “What do you charge?”

  “A six-pack and conversation, sweetheart.” She winked and went back to her beer.

  Northern Mining and Manufacturing headquarters were on a campus just north of the city. There was a tall central structure of modern design—a slanted box of polished girder and smoked glass— surrounded by several smaller buildings of similar but less striking construction. I parked in the visitors’ lot, put on a tie and sport coat, and went inside the grand, central structure. At the reception desk in the lobby, I was directed to the fifteenth floor, the top.

  The waiting area was large enough that if the floor had been ice, I could have played hockey. There was a plush sofa of nice chocolate brown leather and an easy chair of the same color and material. There was a large aquarium with darting fish in psychedelic colors and patterns. And there was a desk with a secretary who turned from her computer and watched me cross the room.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Wellington,” I told her.

  She was young—twenty-seven, maybe thirty—nicely made up and wearing a dark blue suit over a cream-colored blouse. A thin gold chain looped her neck. The nameplate on the desk read MS. HELPRIN.

  She looked up at me, pleasant but professional.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “I don’t. Could I make one?”

  “What’s the nature of your business?”

  “It’s personal and rather urgent.”

  “Mr. Wellington is extremely busy.”

  “Of course,” I said, very understanding. “It concerns a family heirloom that’s recently come into my possession. I believe he’d be interested.”

  “What is the heirloom?”

  I took out the watch, opened it, and handed it to her. “That’s a photograph of his father’s first wife, Maria. My guess would be that there’s significant sentimental value in it.”