Balsam Sirens

by Keith Weaver

  I got us four beers, flipped the caps off all of them, and Mike drained three-quarters of his first one at a single glug.

  “So. You go first, Mike. What did you find?”

  “Made some headway. First, I cleaned up your pictures, and we’ve now got reasonable shots of two of our guys, and a blurry one of a third. What do you know about the diver?” Mike placed three prints on the table.

  “I would guess about five feet, nine inches, but that’s just a guess, stocky build, medium-length brown hair, that’s it.”

  “They might not have been thinking straight when they headed north after you stuck the diver in the leg. They can’t take a boat any further up the Gull River than Coboconk. So I checked all the rental cabins looking for the boat and as many of the regular cottages as I could. Nothing. But they had to put in somewhere between here and the dam in Coboconk.”

  I was already on my phone. There was no answer, so I left a message for Kate.

  “What was that?” Mike demanded, in his usual rough way.

  “Float plane. We’ll scan for the boat.”

  Mike nodded, then resumed his report.

  “They wouldn’t have taken their guy to a hospital, and there are only five doctors in the area. I doubt they would take him to any of those either. They all have their offices in towns or villages. Pretty hard to disguise a guy who limps from a knife wound to the leg. And all the doctors are well known. Not easy for any of them to make a house call without the risk of somebody seeing when and where. So, I think they’ve taken Diver Dan to some isolated spot and got a tame quack to come in. Anyway, he’ll be patched up and invalided out. Probably done by now. But he won’t be doing any more diving for a few weeks.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  Mike was waving his hand impatiently.

  “Beer break, man! Back off!”

  I waited until Mike had drained half another bottle, but then looked at my watch pointedly.

  Mike’s bottle hit the table with a thud. “Ahhh! Man, that’s good!”

  Looking up at me, he went back into business mode.

  “I’ve asked a few contacts if they can identify the two clear-image clowns. I also tacked up a few posters in Coboconk.”

  “Posters? What kind of posters?”

  “Panic posters. Pictures of these two charlies and a message saying that they have been reported missing and are believed to be vacationing in the Coboconk area and if anyone sees them they should contact the police.”

  “Shit, Mike! That’s illegal!”

  “Yeah! Nice, isn’t it”, Mike chirped and beamed like a cherub. “If those guys or any of their watchers see that, they’ll become scarce very quickly.”

  My cellphone buzzed, I pulled it out, and answered.

  “Kate! Yes! Can you do a half-hour of contract flying for us? Right now. No, not me and Andrea, a friend of mine called Mike. Yes, standard conditions. Yes, payment at the end of the flight. Twenty minutes in front of the Largs church? Excellent! Thanks, Kate. See you shortly.”

  I looked at Mike. “You’re going for a plane ride, Mike.”

  “Looking for a boat, right?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Oh, I thought I’d trim my toenails, have a nap –”

  “I know it’s hard for you, Mark, but try not to be an asshole.”

  “Okay. I’m going to make dinner for the three of us, maybe four, if Kate wants to stay.”

  I turned back to the relatively clear pictures of two of the guys in the boat.

  “When do you think you might hear from your contact on who these guys might be?” I asked.

  “Probably late this afternoon, or early evening.”

  “What will we do if we get names for them?”

  “Well, that depends”, Mike said. “If I know them, then we’ll know right away whether they’re big fish or little fish and what they’ve done with their lives up to now. If I don’t know them, then I’ll take steps to find out all that information. If they really are bad asses, then maybe we’ll need some support.”

  “Anything more on whoever was following me earlier today on the way to Toronto?”

  “Nothing yet”, Mike said. “Patience. Things comes to them buggers as waits.”

  We sat looking at the photos a bit longer. And I thought again about George, and how he had been caught up in all this mess, in something that was foreign to his life. My ongoing concern for George was that he would discover unpleasant things about his brother Harold, the only person who appeared to matter in his life, and I wondered how he would handle that. I resolved pretty much on the spot to invite George to Largs again for the coming weekend.

  I turned my head, listened, then stood.

  “Time to get ready, Mike. Your flight is about to leave”, and I saw that he then recognized the distant buzz that signalled Kate’s approach. Walking to the desk in our family room, I retrieved a small set of powerful binoculars.

  “These might come in handy, Mike.” He took them and just as we both went outside and headed toward the lake, we heard the whoosh as the floats touched the water. Kate pulled up next to the small dock, floats squeaking against the tire bumpers, nose pointed out toward the lake. Mike opened the passenger side door, I introduced them, and he climbed in.

  “Usual hourly rate, Kate?” I asked, practically shouting to be heard over the rough engine idle.

  She nodded.

  I pulled $300 from my wallet and handed it to Mike.

  “Too much”, Kate shouted back, frowning and shaking her head.

  “Okay. Go now”, I responded. “No time to waste. This young fellow has to be back in time for dinner and early to bed.”

  Mike shut the door, the plane chugged out into the lake, turned, and then roared off to the south.

  It took me half an hour to get everything I needed for a dinner of pad thai, and at five thirty, as I began getting things ready in the kitchen, I heard the plane returning. Having forgotten to ask Kate if she wanted to stay for dinner, I hoped that Mike remembered to do so. The sound of the plane’s engine being shut down after the approach to the dock and after a few moments of idling indicated that he had and that both Kate and Mike would be coming in through the back door any second.

  Bringing up Andrea’s number on my cellphone, I called.

  “Hi, what’s up?” she answered.

  “We’re having pad thai for dinner. I hope that’s okay. Kate’s here and she’ll be eating with us.”

  “Kate! Really? Good! I’ll finish up here and be home in fifteen minutes.”

  Mike and Kate blew in through the back door, Kate carried on to the loo to clean up for dinner, and I took Mike aside.

  “There’s a good chance that sometime during the evening we’ll be talking about what you and I have been doing today to identify the guys we think were involved with Harold, but keep it general, and say nothing about the attack on me. Okay?”

  “Got it, kid. I’ll take my lead from you.”

  “Good. Andrea will be back soon, and when Kate rejoins us, I’ll be taking orders for drinks.”

  “I think we found the boat.” As he was saying this, Mike unfolded a large-scale map. “It’s sitting just here”, Mike said, as he jabbed a stubby finger at the map unforgivingly.

  I looked at the spot he indicated. “Those are Stinson’s cottages.”

  “You know the guy?”

  “Yeah. He looks and sounds pleasant enough on the outside, but he’d sell his mother’s glass eye for a buck. We can have a rough word with him tomorrow. But in his world, it’s a matter of “ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies”. There’s probably a good chance that the only thing he knows about those guys is the colour of their money.”

  Mike smiled grimly, and I almost felt sorry for old Rick Stinson. Almost.

  Kate rejoined us, Mike went off for his pre-prandial ablutions, and I invited Kate into the kitchen to watch me cook.

  I always
look forward to dinner with Andrea, and having Kate along made it just that much better. But looking beyond dinner, I knew that it would be a long night.

  Twenty

  Dinner was a surprise combination of urbanity, entertainment, and hilarity.

  Kate and Mike had evidently hit it off from the get-go, Kate talking about flying, Mike talking about detecting.

  “What do you do to relax, Mike?” Kate asked, after fifteen minutes of their accounts of derring-do. “Do you read?”

  “Nah. Not much.”

  “What then?”

  “I like music. That’s relaxing.”

  Kate kept digging, asking for details. Eventually, we got there.

  “Opera!” Kate cried, surprised and delighted.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know”, Mike rumbled, looking a bit ruffled, uncertain. “Gumshoe, Grade 8 education. Spends his days in life’s sewers. Beats people senseless for diversion. Likes Verdi and Puccini. Doesn’t fit, does it?”

  Nobody bought Mike’s low-grade description of himself, least of all me since I was aware of his degree in criminology. But the operatic interest was something that not even I knew about, and Mike had our full attention now, as our voices rose in rebuke at his rough and one-dimensional self-characterization.

  “I don’t know”, Mike said, in response to more questions. “Favourites? Very hard to choose. So much good stuff.”

  But we didn’t let up, and eventually Mike stood. His fine, rich tenor delivered an excellent version of “Nessun Dorma”. Mike held the last high “Vincero” perfectly, and there was complete silence from his audience of three. But then enthusiastic applause erupted immediately, followed by another round of questions.

  The evening broke up when Kate excused herself, saying that she wanted to arrive home before official sunset. We all went out with her to her plane and said our warm goodbyes, then watched as she fired up the bird, moved slowly out into the lake, turned the plane to face north, then roared off into the evening.

  “How long will it take her to get home?” Mike asked.

  “About ten minutes”, Andrea said.

  We stood looking out over the lake, listening to the wavelets lap the shore, hearing the occasional night bird, and following the sound of the plane as it faded away.

  “Okay”, I said suddenly as I was attacked by a mosquito, “everybody inside for digestifs while I clean up”, holding up my hands to decline the offers of assistance in the kitchen.

  Everyone flopped in the sitting room, and after glasses of sambuca were distributed I repaired to the kitchen to do the last bits of cleanup. When I rejoined Andrea and Mike, Andrea had sipped about half her sambuca, but the drooping eyelids and nodding head demonstrated clearly enough that she had run out of steam. Mike’s glass was empty and he was at work on his cellphone.

  “I have some antisocial work to do, if you’ll excuse me”, he said, and without waiting for a response he rose and headed for his room, uttering a “sleep tight” over his shoulder as he rounded the corner. I sat down next to Andrea and draped an arm over her sagging shoulders.

  “Time for beddy-byes.” She nodded and mumbled something, I helped her to her feet, and led her off to our bedroom.

  Back in our family room, I retrieved the cloth carrier bag and the banker’s box from the filing cabinet, unpacked the contents of Harold’s safety deposit box from the carrier bag and the files from the banker’s box, and laid them all out on the large coffee table. Placing a pile of cushions on the floor, and retrieving a fresh note pad, I set to work.

  The small leather change purse had my attention first, simply because it seemed so out of the ordinary. Opening it, I found four memory sticks. Thinking back, I tried to reconstruct the details of Harold’s apartment in my mind. I had seen it for less than thirty seconds, although my gaze had swept around the main room systematically, following my police training, which I find resurfaces regularly and usefully. What I recalled was what one might expect. There had been a dreary grey sofa awaiting its own post-mortem, a threadbare armchair from which some of the stuffing was making good its escape, a scarred coffee table, a cheap kitchen table and three chrome and plastic chairs, a tottery four-shelf bookcase, and a desk and swivel chair. The floor had been covered in scattered papers, the few books had been riffled and were in disarray on the floor, what looked like it had once been a decent rose-coloured vase was in pieces, all three drawers of the desk had been pulled out roughly, one of them destructively, and lay empty to one side, their contents evidently strewn about.

  There was a power bar on the desk, but no computer.

  I recalled being able to see partway through the doorway into the kitchen. There was no evidence that I could see of anyone having searched for something hidden in flour bags, cereal boxes, or sugar bowls.

  Someone accused of computer fraud would have had a computer. So it was a safe bet that whoever had been there trashing the place had taken a computer, probably a laptop. What they might have found among Harold’s paperwork was impossible to guess.

  It took me the best part of an hour and a half to look through and list the contents of Harold’s four memory sticks. The first one I chose appeared to be records of his personal financial affairs, which indicated that he had smallish savings accounts in four separate banks. The total in all these accounts came to a bit more than $26,000, and based on the files in this memory stick there had been very little activity in these accounts over a period of months, either as deposits or withdrawals.

  I moved quickly through the remaining memory sticks, which contained a lot of personal correspondence, and some snippets of history that Harold had evidently collected. Voltaire’s dismissive description of “our home and native land” as “quelques arpents de neige” – a few acres of snow – had caught Harold’s attention because he had included two papers just on that comment. I flipped quickly through a surprisingly voluminous collection of papers and copied bits of reports on the period 1759 to 1763. But I spent a good amount of time on one of Harold’s memory sticks, which included more than a hundred files of local history for villages and areas centred on the Balsam Lake area. The name George Laidlaw was associated with many of these files.

  So, Harold was an amateur historian! Interesting …

  One file that did catch my eye described the long withdrawal after the French defeat at the Plains of Abraham. There were French settled thinly in what later became Upper Canada. Some decided to depart, others were determined to remain, and some of them would become part of a founding stream of the Métis. There were isolated groups of Jesuits who had set about trying to convert the native people to Christianity. Some met the essential precondition for this task – they survived. But after 1763, some of them stayed since the church’s work went on. Those who left made the long trek from spots on the upper Great Lakes, through the traditional routes down to Lake Ontario, and thence to Montreal, either to remain in Quebec or to find passage back to France. At the same time, there was an influx of soldiers and settlers from England. Not huge, but very much noticeable. Despite the fact that the English wanted peaceful accommodation with their conquered French population, inevitably there were some clashes between the departing French and the arriving English, since the Seven Years’ War had only sharpened the mutual antagonisms between ancestral enemies.

  As it happened, it was the fourth and last memory stick that held the real pay dirt, although I didn’t realize this right away. The files on this stick were identified by date only, the dates going back almost fifteen years, and the most recent dates being just a year ago. It looked as though this was a record of at least some of Harold’s research.

  Seven of the files on this stick, copies of reports and newspaper items, all bore dates from between six to ten years earlier. I dipped into some of them. There were dry compilations of waterborne traffic on Balsam Lake, Cameron Lake, and Sturgeon Lake in the mid-nineteenth century. A long newspaper article excerpted at length from the memoir of a late-nineteenth-century log driv
er, recounting stories of booms, jams, sluices, and being caught in rapids. The facts behind it might have been few and doubtful, but it certainly wasn’t boring. There were several pictures of steamboats, grainy images of people in their finery waving at the camera. It was the story of a world now gone.

  Then I found an article written by Harold himself, seemingly just to document things. He had tabulated boats, lakes, years, cargoes, and numbers of passengers. But the article just ended in mid-air.

  I was ready to conclude that it was all just hurriedly thrown together, having little internal logic, when I found a two-page note. The note gave details on nine boats that had been lost due to boiler explosions, fire, or being holed by water hazards.

  Opening six of Harold’s files, I began taking notes. Some of the timings were inconsistent. But where there were firm dates, they seemed all to be in the ten years between the mid-1850s and mid-1860s. This was up to fifteen years before the railway came to Coboconk and transport by water was really the only way to go. Two of the reports in Harold’s files emphasized that there were no real roads, just tracks, and even those were rough and scarcely passable at the best of times, becoming totally unusable, due to deep, thick mud in spring or any time after heavy rains.

  Lawlessness.

  It was mentioned a couple of times in two of the articles. And that tweaked a thought.

  What about highwaymen?

  Looking back through Harold’s articles, I found no mention of this. A few internet searches revealed a cache of likely sources, and I soon learned that there wasn’t much trouble from highwaymen in Upper Canada at that time, although they were around. There were scattered accounts, the basis for which wasn’t evident, of highwaymen operating between larger centres, such as Lindsay and Peterborough, probably in the wake of the extending network of railways. But this was likely just some initiative by local young bucks, hardly the stuff of Butch Cassidy and Jesse James mythology.

  At eleven thirty, needing a break, I walked outside, and was bathed in the glory of the firmament: thousands of visible stars, and untold millions of invisible ones, in a silent, constant holding pattern above me, these stars speaking a language of collective turmoil and violence beyond the conceivable. This was a deeply burnt image of my childhood and early youth – the night sky at Balsam Lake, the great stardust sash of the Milky Way.