Conclusion

by Peter Robertson

  “There’s nothing to suggest he’s still alive?

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you finding that I couldn’t?”

  “Not much.” She was still typing. “His companies are liquidated. His investments aren’t active.”

  “He’s dead,” Colin reminded her, unnecessarily.

  “Elliot Devine’s certainly dead. But I have a theory: He went after TW and your son because he wanted something for his next life. It would have been his first investment.”

  “He was still Devine when he tried to buy from Tony.”

  “He could have transferred ownership before he concluded.”

  Colin considered this carefully.

  “Did I mention there is an Elliot Devine still living?” Angie said suddenly.

  “Really?”

  “Really. He’s in his early twenties. He’s a professional soccer player. He lives in Scotland. He’s very good, apparently.”

  Colin concluded, “I think we can safely assume he’s not our man.”

  Angie nodded. She continued to type furiously.

  “Devine has a homepage.”

  “Is it still active?”

  She shook her head. “It’s still up. There’s been no new content posted since his death. A lot of his outdoor photos are taken from the same geographic area.”

  “Where?” Colin asked.

  She answered, “The Frontier Waters. In northern Minnesota. North of Duluth. Very close to the border. The whole area is national forest.”

  Colin was smiling at her. “Have you ever been there?” he asked.

  Angie shook her head.

  “We have a lake house up north. It’s very near there. I have a lake house,” he amended.

  She said nothing.

  “I think Elliot Devine is still alive.”

  The typing paused. “If you’re right, we have ourselves a fake conclusion.”

  “Is there such a thing?”

  “I don’t see why not. The next question is, why is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know,” Colin answered. “Maybe someone made a mistake.”

  “Or maybe someone didn’t.”

  “And then we have the illegal weld that magically cured your illness.”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Are welds supposed to do that?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. My understanding is that they prevent any illnesses occurring. If you already have an illness you don’t get to have a weld. And even if you did it wouldn’t do any good.”

  “Maybe you’re some kind of freak.”

  She replied curtly, “Why, thank you.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do. I suppose I could be. Or maybe I just got better all by myself.”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “It has.”

  “But I don’t believe you just got better.”

  “Nope,” Angie said, looking up from her phone. “Me neither. But you know something? We don’t know that much about welds. And when I say we, I don’t just mean you and me. Even science doesn’t know much more. About how they work.” She paused. “Supposing you have an illness and you get scanned and you fail and years later your illness goes away. Can you get scanned again? And will you pass? And if you do, can you get a weld, then? And if you can get a weld, does it still last for twenty years? Or only until you reach seventy-five? What happens in these cases? Because you know that has to occur sometimes.”

  “I agree. My understanding is that the scan identifies and predicts illnesses.”

  “Mine too. And I understand that part. But sometimes people must just get better.”

  “Maybe not that often.”

  “No,” she had to agree. “Maybe not often.” She paused for dramatic effect. “But sometimes.”

  “What was your other point?” he asked her.

  “Do you know why people get scanned at fifty-five?”

  He thought about it. “I don’t,” he admitted. “I know that governments all got together and decided on fifty-five. But I don’t know why.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know either.”

  They lapsed into perplexed silence at that point in the conversation.

  The silence ended as Angie began to type again. “I’ve found more records.”

  “Public records?”

  “Well, almost public records. The newspapers don’t specify the exact amount of money Devine is leaving to the foundation in Duluth. But I found it somewhere else. No wonder the Devine women aren’t letting go. It’s an awful lot of money.” She paused.

  “How much—”

  “—Is an awful lot of money? I’m glad you asked. I believe the answer would be three billion dollars.”

  In the middle distance they could both hear the low hum of commuter traffic.

  The forest preserve housed a four-mile circuit of asphalt path that bikes, dogs, and walkers shared uneasily. What was intended to be unattended grass, which would by design revert back into Midwest prairie, was instead being subjected to much greater rainfalls and much denser urbanization and attendant runoff. It would be swamp within two decades. The preserve transitioned organically into a neighborhood of larger four-bedroom homes. For the most part they were endearingly scruffy, beset by tangles of surrounding garden, which, at this time of year, were lush and moss-steeped, punctuated by patches of stagnant lawn that, like the preserve, seldom completely drained, acting as so many mosquito incubators in the summer months.

  “Is there a granola bar in there for me?” Angie asked.

  Without a word, Colin opened the bag and handed her one.

  “I’ve already used my paper towel.” Angie made a sad face at him.

  In silence, he handed her another, which Angie used to swipe quickly at the side of his face. He looked at her curiously.

  She grinned at him. “There was still some apple there.”

  “No, there wasn’t.”

  “It seemed like a motherly thing to do.”

  “You’re not my mother.”

  “True.”

  They drove home later in the afternoon. It transpired, as she had already told him, that she did live nearby. Less than two miles away. When he parked the car outside her house, she thanked him for the ride.

  “You walked to my house today.” It was not a question.

  She shook her head. “I considered it. But I was lazy. So, I took the train.”

  “How did you know I would be home?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in mourning?”

  While she had a point, he was not convinced that some technological manner of surveillance was not also involved.

  She waited for him to ask. He didn’t. So, she had to ask him, “Can I see you again soon?”

  “How soon?” he asked her.

  She replied, “Very soon.”

  “Another date?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “I’m going for a walk tomorrow,” he said carefully.

  “The same place?”

  Colin shook his head. “I was thinking of heading to the beach for my lunch.”

  “It’ll be more crowded.”

  He shook his head again. “I go north, to the edge of the city. And the weather forecast isn’t that good.”

  “Will you be bringing the snacks again?”

  He shrugged to indicate helplessness. “It’s what I do.”

  Angie giggled, leaned in, and kissed him on the cheek. Then she got out of the car and ran to her front door. “Text me tomorrow when you’re ready to go,” she shouted. “You can pick me up.”

  He shouted back, “I don’t know your number.”

  “There’s a text on your phone. It’s from me,” she yelled at him. “You just have to reply.”

  The front door of her tiny bungalow was open, and then she disappeared.

  Colin sat in his car for a moment with the engine running.

  There was a possibility that Angie Rennie was not his ty
pe.

  Her front yard was dry mud and seriously neglected.

  Her front door all but begged for a painting.

  He should be grieving in earnest.

  She was young. He had a little more than a year to live.

  In his heart of hearts, he could not dispel the thought that she was only dating him for the snacks.

  Which was probably just as well, because it crossed Colin’s mind that Angie Rennie might be better off as his research sidekick than a romantic companion.

  He needed a sidekick. He had several mysteries to solve.

  Before he drove away, he looked at his phone. There was indeed a text, short and to the point: Thanx for the snax.

  And there it was. Proof positive that the way to her heart was by way of her stomach.

  Yet, Colin Tugdale couldn’t wait for tomorrow.

  What on earth would Ruby think?

  This was the question Colin pondered in the early hours of the evening, as he sat with a glass of red wine, on a metal chair, at a metal table, on the small concrete patio behind his house. There were eight-foot-high redwood-stained fences draped in purple-blue clematis on two sides. The third side stood open, overlooking a patch of well-trimmed grass.

  The Tugdales’ house in the city was a trim three-bedroom, one-level affair. By contrast, his neighbor’s was a three-flat behemoth standing in the center of a double lot. The top floor boasted a flimsy deck construction that buttressed the back of the building, with a well-used barbeque unit that was brutally overworked during the late summer months of nighttime baseball.

  There was no shortage of grilling and yelling tonight. They were unceasingly loud and boisterous people. Colin liked them well enough most of the time, that is, until he tried to go to bed early. When there was a doubleheader on the television they often transported out onto the deck. Doubleheaders usually necessitated an extended round of screaming and the enthusiastic tapping of a second keg.

  Well, honey, you did tell me to try something new.

  He wasn’t certain that dating this quickly was what she had in mind. Perhaps she imagined him taking up needlepoint or birdwatching. But, as hard as he tried to make himself feel guilty, he found that he couldn’t. Ruby would want him to be happy. She would want him not to grieve. She would want him not to waste away. She wouldn’t want him to linger after her and then die without consequence, a pointlessly squandered year or so after her.

  When one partner was scheduled for conclusion, it was not unheard of for the other to choose death at that same moment. Some of these attendant deaths came with sound rationales; a concluding spouse may have a non-welded partner with health issues, for whom the future might seem too frightening and uncertain. For that spouse, a companionable exit might be deemed the wiser course. And there were couples simply unable to imagine a life apart.

  Colin’s and Ruby’s times of conclusion were relatively close. And for this reason, they had discussed the question of Colin pre-concluding with Ruby.

  It had been a short discussion. Colin had tenderly raised the possibility, and Ruby had bluntly shot the concept down in three short words. They had quickly moved on to other topics of conversation.

  For the record, the words in question were: Don’t be stupid.

  Colin sagely reasoned that he could not be blamed if he chose to spend his final year in a wallow of wanton womanizing.

  But it would hardly be that. He would make the most of his short time. He would not feel guilty, for any number of reasons, including his sneaking suspicion that Ruby Tugdale would have found Angie Rennie at the very least, curious. I only have one year left. He suspected he would remind himself of this often.

  When he turned his laptop on, he was not surprised to discover that he had several emails from the curious Ms. Rennie.

  She had forwarded him a copy of the Devine beneficence document. Colin sipped his wine as a bright red cardinal, the gaudy male of the species, landed on the bird feeder attached to the wall of the garage at the bottom of the yard. Colin smiled to himself. He had recently remembered to load the feeder, and the bird made a welcome change from the usual battalions of fat, pampered, and singularly unwelcome squirrels.

  Angie had also unearthed some general information on the Natural Boundary Foundation. There wasn’t much. The NBF was not a public but a private foundation. As a result, they had no board of freely elected well-wishers, and fewer of the usual philanthropic requirements for financial or ideological transparency. They had a board of directors and a chairman, all elected by donors. They were seemingly not required to list either their donors or their elected officials. Their donations were used to further their objectives. Their assets were not listed. Nor were their objectives stated.

  Angie had been unable to find listings of their founder, their chairman, their current or past board members, or much of anything else.

  Like the pictures on Elliot Devine’s home page, the images on the NBF site were from the Frontier Waters.

  Angie’s next email contained nothing Colin didn’t already know.

  The Frontier began two hours northeast of Duluth, Minnesota, and stretched up to the Canadian border. This was land that, dating from times past, had been extensive swaths of state and national forest, riddled with no-wake lakes, bleak and cold and inaccessible in winter, accessible in summer along dirt roads and hiking trails, but penetrated the more deeply with canoes, to be paddled, and painstakingly portaged.

  The NBF website accepted credit card donations online and directed checks to the address of a post office box in Duluth.

  The foundation did not specify whether or not donations were tax-deductible.

  The website was a masterpiece of evasiveness, with no discussion of what the NBF did, or what they wanted to do. They seemed to be hazily pro-nature and vaguely and indefinably anti pretty much everything else. At the least, they stood opposed to all forms of government intervention.

  Colin looked at a few more pictures of lakes and trees before closing his laptop and finishing his wine. It was still early. The deck next door was at full capacity, and the timbers were heaving under the strain. The home team was winning comfortably.

  He went inside.

  It would be another hour before the visitors staged a late rally.

  For the weld widower Colin Tugdale, that next portion of the night stretched out noisily, and sleeplessly.

  But it ended with a narrow victory for the hometown heroes, and several hours of belated shut-eye for Colin.

  Angie was talking to her phone. “That’s weird.”

  Colin was talking to the wet road through the car windshield. “What’s weird?”

  They were northbound on the main road running along the coastline of the city. The sky was cloudy, and a feather-light drizzle was tormenting the sensors on the windshield wipers.

  Colin waited for an answer that was not immediately forthcoming.

  “I have a windbreaker in the trunk that will fit you,” Colin told her a moment later.

  She smiled. “Of course you do.”

  Angie was wearing the same shorts as yesterday, and a dark green T-shirt. She was cold, if the proliferation of goosebumps on her bare brown arms was any indication.

  “We could close the windows,” he offered.

  “No. Don’t. I’m okay being cold.”

  Colin tried again. “So, what’s so weird?”

  “Just so you know, I’m not a paranoid person.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  She put her phone down and turned to face him. “I get a text alert if someone runs a credit check on me. It doesn’t happen often; maybe twice in the past five years. I own my house. I don’t own a car. I’ve had my credit cards forever, and I don’t use them much. My alert doesn’t tell me who requested the credit check, but it tells me which company ran the check, which isn’t that helpful, since there are only about a half dozen credit outfits. They’re the ones you see on TV ads offering you a free report if you sign up for extra prot
ection you don’t need. I can speak from experience when I say that running a check on someone is pretty easy.”

  He didn’t need to ask, but he blurted it out just the same: “You ran a credit check on me, didn’t you?”

  “You might be a gold digger.”

  “That’s true,” he allowed. “Although you appear to be the one chasing me.”

  “So, some credit company I’ve never heard of just ran a credit check on me.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Are you buying a house?”

  Angie ignored him. He tried again.

  “A car?”

  “I run my own credit checks.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Is there a simple version of the answer?”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “You checked on me.” Did he sound offended?

  “I did. You’re a loan shark’s worst nightmare. Have you ever bought anything on credit?”

  He grew defensive. “Our house. We had a mortgage once.”

  She was dismissive. “It’s been paid off for years. You paid your mortgage off ahead of schedule, which most financial planners would tell you is foolish. I also ran a second check.”

  “On?”

  “The Natural Boundary Foundation. But I failed. The system kicked me out. I learned nothing. And I think I triggered their response. Which was to run a check of their own.”

  “Can you tell if they were more successful?”

  She smiled without warmth. “I can’t tell for sure. But I can make a guess.”

  “And?”

  “I’m assuming they found out more about me than I found out about them.”

  Colin took the last exit toward the lake, before the coast road turned sharply into the first of the suburbs north of the city.

  It was unseasonably chilly, and, with the exception of a few mouthy seagulls, Colin and Angie had the beach to themselves.

  Colin twisted open a small flask of coffee. He sat down on a wooden bench and looked out across the water before he poured half the contents of the flask into the plastic cup, electing to drink his share straight from the container. Angie was wearing the windbreaker he had offered her. Moments later, she pulled her shoes off and ran toward the waves. Her movement momentarily scattered the birds, who quickly and expectantly regrouped at the sight of the sandwiches Colin was pulling from his lunch bag.