Balsam Sirens

by Keith Weaver

  “Don’t have the foggiest.”

  “Probably not his real name anyhow.”

  I was fully awake now, and Mike explained to me the few other shreds his man had passed on to him.

  “What’s your guy going to do now? He can’t just walk away and leave Dickson’s stooge on his own. The stooge will warn Dickson and then our surprise will be lost.”

  “What surprise?” Mike growled. “We might know Dickson’s name, but we have no idea just where he is, even though I suspect he’s somewhere very near. Besides, when he tries to contact his stooge again, which he’s bound to do, he’ll become suspicious right away when the stooge doesn’t answer.”

  “Why wouldn’t the stooge answer?”

  “Because my guy convinced him to take a few sleeping pills. Don’t worry, they won’t kill him. But he won’t wake up for about eighteen hours.”

  So we had a few hours in hand. We smiled at each other. It was just before three o’clock in the morning and we decided that there was time for two hours’ sleep.

  Twenty-seven

  At ten past six, I awoke gritty-eyed and grumpy. Sometimes just a little sleep is worse than none at all. The face that looked back at me from the mirror was ghastly. I tried to cheer myself up by feeling sorry for it. It had eye bags that hadn’t been there the day before. Its skin was a grey-green-yellow blend, a colour that I imagined, if the world had any fairness to it, would be reserved exclusively for a slurry of mustard, tapenade, and elephant dung. Even though I felt sorry for it, I looked at it impassively. “Tough break, Dorian”, I muttered to it cruelly. “You’re the image. I’m the reality”, and I walked out, leaving it to despair alone.

  The image’s electroshocked mop had caused me to run my hands through my own hair, and I could only hope that its gritty eyes were worse than mine. Mike, in contrast, when I met him in the kitchen, looked brushed and combed, as cheery and happy as a six-year-old after fifteen hours’ sleep. Sometimes I hate Mike. Sometimes I hate the world.

  “So!” Mike said, rubbing his hands together in enthusiasm. “Some elixir of life, and then we plan the day. Lots to do.”

  I grumbled miserably that I didn’t want any coffee.

  “Who said anything about coffee”, Mike exclaimed in surprise, while brandishing a flask of Talisker. Without delay or awaiting a reply from me, he immediately poured us each a two-ounce measure.

  I downed my Talisker in two glugs and almost right away it began giving the Sandman a good duffing up. Mike and I reached our views on the day’s chores at almost the same time, and we both looked up and opened our mouths to speak.

  “Go ahead”, I said.

  “I want to go into Coboconk and float some inquiries about our Carl Dickson. I’m going to call the three dive shops and drop his name there as well. And while I’m at that, I’m going to call my man in Toronto and ask him to do more rooting around on Dickson. We need to know more, as much as we can find.”

  “And I’m going to stay here”, I said. “I’ll keep a close eye on Andrea and go through my notes once more.”

  “You think you’ve missed something?”

  “Don’t know. But a lot of new information has come into play in the past twenty-four hours, and new information can sometimes make you see something in old information that you missed on the previous round.”

  Mike nodded. “Let’s keep in contact. You call me every half-hour, or whenever something important comes up. If I’m on a call, leave a message.” And without waiting for me to reply, Mike went out the back door to his car.

  It was now quarter to seven and Andrea would be stirring soon. I went into the den, picked up a notepad, pen, and my notes, which now were distributed across four folders, and the laptop, and brought it all out to the breakfast table.

  Over the past two days, my listing of significant data items and happenings had expanded and their time sequence had needed multiple reorderings. Looking at the notes I had jotted down based on my discussion with John last night, I went through the current time sequence again. There were also notes on background material and these were even more extensive than the listing of time sequence events. I was in the middle of this when someone bit my earlobe. I hadn’t heard Andrea enter the room because of the noise of a motorboat going past outside.

  “Oh! Hello there, ma petite!”

  “Hello, handsome! Where’s Mike?”

  “Off to Coboconk to troll some gutters again. You going to be able to finish at Number 3 today?”

  “Easily”, Andrea said. “Then, I think, there’s only one more to assess and make a list of things to be done.”

  She had gone over to the fridge and picked a yogurt, then brought it back to the table and began spooning it into her mouth in that deliberate way that I enjoyed watching surreptitiously.

  “What are you doing today?”

  “I’m slogging away at my notes and files, and I need to think about what I learned from John last night.”

  “John?” she asked, and I realized that she was unaware I had met John last night, that she knew nothing about the personal history he had related to me in The Repose, and that almost certainly she wouldn’t relate any current individual ‘John’ to the schoolboy friend I had mentioned to her several times in passing. So I explained it all to her at length now. After five minutes, during which time Andrea seemed to have been frozen in attention, spoon partway to her mouth, she began asking questions.

  “You’re not making this up, are you?”

  “Not at all. But it really does sound like a first-rate yarn, doesn’t it.”

  “It’s absolutely stunning. When can I meet him?”

  “Whenever you’d like. I’ll find out when he has time free.”

  Andrea’s spoon of yogurt finished its journey at long last, but it was clear that she was pondering what she had just heard.

  “How does John feel about it all?”

  “Hard to imagine”, I said. “But I doubt that he’s really got his own head around it yet.”

  “Indeed!”

  Andrea finished her yogurt and went off to find her work boots. In ten minutes she had everything she needed for the day, and waved as she left for Number 3 Ash Grove. I gave it a few minutes, then took my notes and papers back to the den, grabbed my laptop, and headed off toward Number 2 Ash Grove. I had no intention of letting Andrea out of my sight.

  The morning seemed to pass very slowly. At about eleven o’clock, I heard Andrea leave Number 3, and watched as she crossed the street at an angle and let herself in to Number 6 Ash Grove, the last of the unusables. From Number 2, I had a good view of Number 6 as well, and the day carried on.

  As we had arranged, I had called Mike every half-hour. He sounded increasingly hot and frustrated as the day wore on, and I suspected that his inquiries were leading nowhere useful. At four o’clock I called him again and asked if he could wrap it up and come back to Largs and meet me at Number 2 Ash Grove, since I had to go off and buy what we needed for dinner.

  “What feast are you planning for tonight?” he asked.

  “I thought we’d have coronation chicken.”

  “What? Never heard of it.”

  “Well, you don’t need to have it, if you’d prefer Kraft Dinner instead.”

  His reply used the word “smartass” with emphasis.

  “Don’t worry, Mike. It’s a quite simple dish, and it really is delicious. You’ll like it. In fact, I’m prepared to wager that you’ll love it.”

  I told him that I was in Number 2, and twenty minutes later he tapped on the door. I told him where Andrea was, said how long I’d be gone, and left. Wally Harris’ food counter was unlikely to include a good mango, so a brief shopping expedition to Coboconk netted me the ingredients I wanted. Half an hour later, it was me who tapped on the door of Number 2. I told Mike I was going to the house to start putting the grub together, and that I’d call both him and Andrea when their attendance was required. It took little time to get the dish prepared, and I stuck it
in the fridge to cool for twenty minutes. As I waited, I leafed through what I had accomplished during the day, and had to conclude that it was essentially nothing.

  Putting my notes away, I called Andrea and Mike. Andrea arrived first and Mike about five minutes later. They went off to clean up and came back to large glasses of an excellent dry riesling. At the first taste of the coronation chicken, Mike looked up in astonishment.

  “Good God, Mark! This stuff is too good to be real!”

  Mike went back for “a bit more” several times, we talked in relaxed disconnection about the unusables, about John, about books, about the weather, forgetting, for the time being, a situation worthy of the most serious unease. We chatted and laughed, and three smiling faces glided down the slope of an evening, gently lubricated by glasses of a very good Pear Williams, into a happy space that could not have been beaten by The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.

  Twenty-eight

  It was Wednesday morning. I had slept more deeply during the night than any time within the past week, and felt good for it, physically. Mentally, well, that was another story. Today Mike would be picking up George from the bus station in Lindsay at about noon, Andrea would be trying to finish off at Number 6, and apart from being eager to throw myself at the paperwork, I had no real idea what I would be trying to do. It was that unsettled and directionless feeling that bothered me. A vague but oddly nagging sense of the calm before the storm seemed to hover somewhere, and try as I might I couldn’t see why that feeling persisted or where it was coming from.

  The three of us had a leisurely breakfast, Mike disappeared to do his inevitable “paperwork”, Andrea headed off to Number 6 at about eight thirty, and a few minutes later I walked to Number 2 with my files, notebook, and laptop. It was another sunny day, refreshingly cool, and in no time I was installed at the table in Number 2. The walk seemed miraculously to drive away the cloud that was hanging over me, leaving just a fresh outlook, and my life force felt restored by a good night’s sleep. Energy bubbled up from somewhere within, and I tackled my paperwork once again (once more with feeling), this time starting at Aldred’s files. Bringing a tight and penetrating focus to the material, something that had been a difficult chore on previous occasions, now became natural and relatively effortless. The documented landscape was familiar, and looking back and forth from Aldred’s notes to my own point-form summary showed that there was no irregularity, no deviation between them. This in itself was satisfying.

  Aldred’s file, and my own notes, recorded what was really a compressed story of old McCleod’s business career. In connection with significant changes in McCleod’s approach on how he directed his business, Aldred had noted several times that the old man was exceedingly secretive, that he went sometimes to extraordinary measures to make sure that his decisions, and his reasons behind them, remained opaque to the outside world. Aldred recorded significant instances of such business ventures: the three expansions of McCleod’s fleet of lake ships, his measures to redirect his business focus in adjusting to the new reality of an expanding railway network, his success in convincing Gooderham that he could provide a reliable means for shipping grain to Gooderham’s distillery in Toronto, his expansion into land ownership in Hastings County, and his decision to wind down that investment over what was really a short period, just a few months. It seemed evident that Aldred had done a great deal of digging to be able to paint such a detailed picture. He was able to do this specifically because he had access to all the files by virtue of his work at Clarence and Donaldson, one aspect of which was looking after The McCleod Foundation. He had been completely dedicated to McCleod, and he carried on working on the McCleod Foundation files out of personal interest and on his own time during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

  Aldred also had documented how McCleod wound down his business interests in the years before his death. McCleod had divided his operations into packages which he sold off separately. The lake ships were sold as a separate going concern. His warehousing operations in Toronto were handled similarly. His contracting business for managing the collection, storage, and delivery of goods by rail to inland centres north of Lake Ontario was also sold off as a unit. I had recorded all this, but was now able to add details that I had missed on earlier passes through Aldred’s notes.

  McCleod’s two steamboats on Balsam Lake and Cameron Lake, the Jackson and the Damsel May, were sold as a pair and as a going-concern business. I stopped here for a moment, pondering. Somewhere else in his notes, Aldred had mentioned these two steamboats, and I began leafing back through the pages to locate that spot, mostly out of curiosity. It took only a few minutes to find Aldred’s note that the two boats were the Jackson and the Daniella. Hmmm. Returning to Aldred’s later note, I could see that he was definitely referring to the Damsel May and not the Daniella. I shrugged and moved on.

  About five pages later, Aldred appeared to be making a point of documenting how McCleod had undertaken moving on from a life in business to the leisure of a retired man. He travelled less and less frequently to Largs as he grew older, and this seemed to be a situation he accepted very reluctantly. Apparently, during his prime business years McCleod had taken to going on cruises on Balsam Lake whenever he was there, especially in the Daniella, which appeared to be by far his favourite boat. And then there was a particular note made by Aldred: “McCleod was especially aggrieved at the loss of the Daniella, which developed a serious steam leak the day before she was scheduled to make an important trip, and then foundered on rocks and sank as the crew was taking her to Fenelon Falls for repairs. These events seemed to have particular and oddly unexplained weight for McCleod.”

  Odd indeed. I spent some time thinking about this. There was no way of knowing, at this remove, why McCleod might have recorded these things, or if indeed this was just Aldred’s conclusion from what was evidently his own close and careful examination of the events of McCleod’s life. If this had been Aldred’s reading of things, there was still no way of knowing why the records of these events in the files had made such an impression on Aldred that he felt the need to document them here in his own notes. They were details that seemed strangely out of place in an otherwise broad-brush overview of my great-great-grandfather’s extraordinary life. And once again I couldn’t shake the feeling that Aldred’s account had been written very specifically with me, or someone like me, in mind as the only reader.

  Aldred’s account had some information on the order in which McCleod had terminated his businesses, liquidated their value, and assigned almost all of the proceeds to The McCleod Foundation. He retained some capital separately and this supplied him a generous stream of what would now be called retirement income. Aldred also noted that McCleod had weeded his companies’ files down to a manageable size and had them transferred to a storage space in a smallish building McCleod had owned and which was given over for use by The McCleod Foundation. At McCleod’s direction, the Foundation took on a philanthropic role, and some of the Foundation’s capital was distributed in this way. Then, in a three-line note that was easy to miss, since it was half on one page and half on the next, Aldred wrote: “In 1957, seventy years after McCleod’s death, The McCleod Foundation donated Mr. McCleod’s weeded files to the City of Toronto Archives, for their potential historical value.”

  How had I missed this until now?

  In no time, I found the City of Toronto Archives website. The amount of information stored there is huge, as would be expected. After about a half-hour of digging, I managed to find references to the McCleod files and I gave a sigh of relief to find that they had all been digitized.

  Searching the electronic files was not hard, and I soon found what I wanted. There was a lot of detail, more than I expected, and I skimmed it impatiently. I was stopped by three entries: “Valuable shipment carried by Jackson on August 15, 1860, to Fenelon Falls, eventually delivered safely to Toronto.” “Daniella partially crippled by boiler-steam leak on August 14, 1860. Attempted trip to Fenelon F
alls for repairs under ad hoc fix and reduced steam pressure.” And then: “My dear old Daniella was lost, August 17, 1860, after striking a reef off Largs.”

  There it was.

  But there was something not quite right here and I couldn’t pinpoint it. I was pretty sure that I had noted the “something” somewhere, but the volume of my notes had mounted continuously, and finding that reference would likely take up to an hour. Despite all this, I had a feeling that I had made real progress during the morning.

  There was a knock on the door. Opening it, I was met by Mike’s smiling puss and the hunted face of George, who relaxed immediately on seeing me. I could just imagine how intimidating Mike must have seemed to him during the trip from Lindsay to Largs. Mike delivered George to my charge, saying that he was going off to the dive shop in Fenelon Falls, something he hadn’t got round to earlier, and then he headed back to his car. I walked with George from Number 2 Ash Grove to our house, told him he would be in the same room as before, made sure he had everything he needed, then left and went back to Number 2. Andrea had taken some lunch with her to Number 6, but I imagined that she was hard at it making sure she could finish before the end of the day. I settled down once more to my notes. I had worked for about twenty minutes when my cellphone buzzed. Andrea, I thought right away, but then noticed that the display said Unknown Caller.

  “Hello.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Whelan.” A man’s voice. One I didn’t recognize.

  “Your wife has decided to keep me company for a little while.”

  All the blood drained from my body and my veins were suddenly full of dry ice.

  Andrea. They had Andrea.

  “I know that you might be momentarily in shock, Mr. Whelan, so let me just say a few things. First, don’t bother asking to speak to your wife. That’s not going to happen. Second, please don’t call the police. Your wife is very lovely and I’m sure you want her to stay that way. Third, some friends of mine will be visiting you very shortly. You are going to help them get what I want. I want to have it before the end of the day today. When I have it, you can have your wife back and we can all go our separate ways. I’m pleased that you haven’t objected to any of this. I appreciate your cooperation very much. Goodbye for now.”