Thunder Bay co-7

by William Kent Krueger

  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.

  What I said was, “Will you talk to us before you make a decision?”

  “Yes, all right?” she snapped.

  She turned away without saying good night and started upstairs, but she stopped. “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d like to go with Sean for a drive along the North Shore tomorrow. I asked Jodi to fill in for me. She said she would. Is it okay?”

  “Go,” I said.

  I listened to her feet hammer up the stairs.

  I turned out the kitchen light and trudged up to bed.

  SEVEN

  Early the next morning I went to the hospital to see Meloux. He was still in the ICU, still looking like he had a toehold in the next world. His eyes were closed. I thought he was sleeping and I turned to go.

  “You have news?”

  His eyelids lifted wearily. Behind them, his almond eyes were dull.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  One of the monitors bleeped incessantly. A cart with a squeaky wheel warbled past his door. In another room someone moaned. This had to be hard on Henry. He was used to the song of birds in the morning all around his cabin. If he were to pass from this life, it shouldn’t have been there in that sterile place but in the woods that had been his home for God knows how long.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  I walked to his bedside.

  “I found a woman, Henry. Maria Lima. Her father was a man named Carlos Lima.”

  Meloux’s eyes were no longer dull.

  “Carlos Lima,” he said. The name meant something to him, and not in a good way.

  “She passed away many years ago.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. A man as old as Henry probably expected everyone from his youth to be dead by now.

  “She was married, Henry. To a man named Wellington.”

  From the way his face went rigid, I might as well have hit him with my fist.

  “Wellington,” he repeated.

  “Maria Lima Wellington had a son,” I went on. “She named him Henry.”

  His eyes changed again, a spark there.

  “And he was born seventy-two years ago.”

  “What month?”

  “June.”

  He seemed to do the calculation in his head and was satisfied with the result.

  “Is he…?”

  “Alive? Yeah, Henry, he is. He lives in Thunder Bay, Canada. Just across the border.”

  Meloux nodded, thinking it over.

  “I want to see him,” he said.

  “Henry, you’re not getting out of here until you’re better.”

  “Bring him to me.”

  “It was a miracle just finding him. Bringing him here? I don’t know, Henry.”

  “You did not believe you would find him.”

  This was true, though I hadn’t said anything like that to Meloux. Somehow he’d known my thoughts. Typical of the old Mide.

  “You will find a way,” he said.

  “Look, I might be able to talk to him, but I can’t promise anything. Honestly, I’m not sure how I can make any of this sound believable.”

  “The watch, you found it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show him the watch.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Meloux seemed comforted. He smiled, satisfied.

  “I will see my son,” he said. His eyes drifted closed.

  I started out.

  “Walleye?” the old man said.

  I turned back. “We’re taking good care of him, Henry.”

  He nodded and once again closed his eyes.

  I spoke with Ernie Champoux, Meloux’s great-nephew, who was in the waiting room. He told me the doctors were puzzled by the symptoms the old man was presenting and were still running tests. Things didn’t look good, though.

  I’d dressed for church, suit and tie, and when I was finished at the hospital I met Jo and the kids at St. Agnes for Mass. I didn’t pay much attention to the service. I was thinking about Thunder Bay and how to go about keeping my second promise to Meloux. I thought about some guy approaching me with the kind of story I was going to toss at Wellington. It would sound exactly like a con. On the other hand, maybe the man was already aware of some of this. Who knew? The watch might have some effect on Henry Wellington. But how to get an audience with the notorious recluse in order to show him the item?

  It would have been better to know the whole story: how a Shinnob had come to father-apparently illegitimately-the man who’d headed a major Canadian corporation. That had to be some tale. If the old Mide had been stronger, I might have pressed him.

  “You seemed distracted,” Jo said at home. “How did it go with Meloux?”

  “The news did him good, I think. He asked me to bring his son to him.”

  We were in our bedroom, changing. Jo stepped out of her slip and threw me a questioning look.

  “You promised?”

  I pulled off my tie. “It felt that way.”

  “Good luck, cowboy. If I were Meloux’s son and you told me this story, I’d have you locked up.” She unbuttoned her cream-colored blouse and went to the closet to hang it up.

  “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.

&nb
sp; “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?”