Thunder Bay (12 page)

He eyed me, surprised. “You’re not even curious?”

“Of course I’m curious. Hell, I feel responsible. That guy followed me out to Meloux’s. Damn, I should have spotted him.”

“Give yourself a break,” Schanno suggested. “You had a lot on your mind.”

“I’m not about to make matters worse by wading in any deeper. I’ve got a business to run. I’ve got a family to think about. We’re not cops anymore, you and me. Let’s let the people who’re wearing the badges do their jobs, okay?”

A grasshopper banged against the side of the Quonset hut and fell into the gravel at our feet. Trixie tried to attack it and yanked Schanno hard. The grasshopper took an enormous hop. Trixie leaped at it, hit the end of the leash, and fell back with a pained yelp.

“All right, then,” Schanno said curtly. He turned away and walked Trixie back to his truck.

I watched him go, feeling not at all good about how I’d treated him, but wondering, too, resentfully, why it was that everyone else seemed to have such a clear idea of what I ought to do.

Sheriff Marcia Dross drove into the parking lot of Sam’s Place in the brittle blue light well after sunset. In town, the streetlamps and
the shop lights had come on. I don’t have a big lighted sign for the Quonset hut, just a tall pole with a halogen lamp on top that brightens the area in front of the serving windows. Dross got out of her cruiser, came up to the windows, and asked to see me outside. That’s never a good sign.

We walked to the picnic table under the big red pine near the shoreline. We were out of the light there. A warm wind blew across Iron Lake and small waves slapped near our feet. The moon wasn’t up yet, and the other side of the lake was sliding into restless black.

Dross got right to the point.

“Cork, you said Morrissey worked for Henry Wellington.”

“That’s right.”

“According to the Canadian authorities Ed Larson spoke with, Morrissey runs a guide service, takes hunters and fishermen up into the wilderness of northern Ontario.”

“The only place he guided me was out to Manitou Island.”

“Where, according to the Ontario police, Henry Wellington is not currently in residence. They say they’re trying to talk to Rupert Wellington, but he’s been unavailable.”

“Unavailable?”

“Whatever that means.”

“He was in Thunder Bay yesterday and quite available. And Henry Wellington was definitely on Manitou Island. Are you getting good information?”

Even in the dark, I could see the consternation on her face. “It’s all being done by fax and phone. They’re sending an investigator down to talk to us, maybe tomorrow or the next day.”

“Why doesn’t Ed pay them a visit?”

“They haven’t exactly invited us. Ed thinks we’re being stonewalled.”

“What do you think?”

“Why would they stonewall us?” she asked.

“Pressure from powerful people, maybe. The Wellingtons are powerful. Or maybe a little territorial posturing. They’re not always happy with their neighbors to the south. Maybe they’re just busy and doing things as they’re able. The shooting didn’t occur in their jurisdiction.” I stood up and stretched my back. The place where Morrissey
had sucker-punched me was feeling pretty sore. “Did Morrissey have family?”

“Not that we’ve been able to identify so far. The Ontario police are still checking.”

“So maybe in the end he’s the kind of man nobody cared much about alive or dead.”

“And maybe the kind of guy who’d kill an old man over an antique watch? I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. Care to speculate?”

“I don’t know enough.”

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

She stood up and stared out at the lake that was almost fully black now. “Just be patient, I guess. I’ll see what the Ontario investigator has to say and go from there.” She turned to me. “But, Cork, if Morrissey wasn’t acting on his own, the people who sent him still don’t have what they want, whether it’s the watch or Henry Meloux dead.”

“He’s with his nephew, Ernie Champoux, out on the rez. Strangers come looking for him, word’ll get out fast, and nobody’s going to give them directions.”

“All right,” she said. She headed back to her cruiser.

After the sheriff left, I went inside. “Let’s close up early,” I told the girls. “You guys have had a hard day.”

“Like you haven’t,” Anne said.

I called Jo and told her I was going out to the rez to check on Meloux.

“Cork, Jenny’s here. She wants to talk.”

“Can it wait until after I see Meloux?”

“Will you be long?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’ll wait up,” Jo said.

I
t wasn’t hard dark yet as I headed up the eastern shoreline of Iron Lake toward the reservation. In the west, the sky still held a whisper of pale blue daylight. Far across the water, the lights of isolated cabins and resorts had emerged, like the eyes of night animals awakening. The road was empty, but I took it slow anyway. Twilight’s when the deer and moose haunt the edges of highways.

Ernie Champoux had been twice married, both times to smart, pretty women. Neither of the marriages took, but the divorces sure took Ernie. Because he was Iron Lake Ojibwe, he received a nice distribution from the casino profits, but much of that money went right out in alimony. Ernie also liked vehicles. He had snowmobiles, ATVs, a personal watercraft, motorcycles—two dirt bikes and a slick red Suzuki— a couple of pickups, an SUV, a station wagon, and an old yellow VW bug he’d spent a good deal of time restoring. What money didn’t go for supporting the lifestyles of his ex-wives went to maintaining his fleet. As a result, Ernie held down a job. He’d been employed at the Chippewa Grand Casino since it had opened several years earlier. These days he worked swing shift, heading up a maintenance crew.

So I was surprised when I approached his cabin, which was situated in a stand of poplars on the lakeshore just south of Allouette, and the old VW pulled out of his drive and swung wide, directly into the path of my Bronco. I swerved. The VW jerked back toward the proper lane and rolled on down the road. I watched the taillights in my rearview mirror. The brake lights flashed a good deal. Whoever was driving was riding the brake pedal. I was concerned they were drunk, but I wasn’t a cop anymore, and chasing down a DUI wasn’t my responsibility.

Champoux’s vehicles were parked in a neat row next to the garage where he did all his own maintenance and mechanic work. I saw that there were a couple of gaps, like missing teeth, in the row. Gone were one of Ernie’s pickups and the VW. I thought about the Bug I’d narrowly missed and figured a relative of Ernie’s had taken it. On the rez, property was loaned and borrowed freely. Lights were on in the cabin, and I hoped Meloux was still up, though it was late for an old man, especially an old man who lit his own place with a kerosene lamp. I wore my knuckles out on the door. Finally I tried the knob.

“Henry!” I called and poked my head inside. “Ernie! It’s Cork O’Connor.”

Ernie Champoux kept his vehicles in better shape than he did his home. There was clutter everywhere and the sour smell of a dishcloth gone too long without washing. I checked the place briefly. No one was home.

Then I thought about the VW driven by someone who’d been drinking. Not a drunk, I realized, but an old man who never drove.

I caught up with him near the south end of the lake. He’d stopped dead in the road and was standing in front of the VW, staring toward the woods. I pulled up behind the Bug, got out.

“I hit a deer,” he said sadly. “It ran off into the woods, but it is hurt.”

“We can’t follow it in this dark.”

The old man nodded.

“Where were you going, Henry?”

Meloux turned his gaze toward the road ahead, lit for fifty yards by headlights. His own shadow created a long, dark emptiness there. His voice held no trace of apology. “Canada.”

What I’d figured.

“You don’t have a driver’s license, do you, Henry?”

“No.”

“How did you intend to get across the border?”

“I was going to think about that on the way. For a man who knows what he wants, there is always a way.”

“Let’s park the VW and pick it up tomorrow. Then we can go back to your nephew’s place and talk. I’d like to know the whole story, Henry, how you came to have a son you’ve never seen.”

He drew himself up. In the glare of the headlights, his eyes were like fire. “These things I will tell you, but secrets come at a price.”

“What price, Henry?”

“You will take me to Manitou Island. You will take me to my son.”

“I can’t promise.”

“Then, Corcoran O’Connor, we cannot talk.”

“Wait here.”

I slid into the VW, which was still running, and parked it on the gravel shoulder.

“Let’s go back to Ernie’s,” I said, walking to the Bronco. “I’ll think about your offer.”

I drove slowly, watching carefully for deer and rolling around in my mind the deal the old Mide had laid out. It was clear he was determined, one way or another, to see his son. The truth was that I wanted to be there when he did. Based on my own recent experience, I knew he’d need someone to watch his back. Also, the story Meloux had kept to himself for more than seven decades was one I wanted very much to hear.

The old man had me. That was all there was to it.

I parked at the cabin, and we went inside.

“Where’s Ernie?” I asked. “He told me he’d taken a couple of days off.”

“A man is sick. They called. My nephew went.”

Considering the attack on Meloux that morning, the choice Ernie had made didn’t seem a good one. On the other hand, in all this, I’d miscalculated a lot myself, so who was I to criticize?

“All right, Henry. You’ve got a deal,” I said. “Tell me your story, and we’ll go to Thunder Bay together.”

He looked around at the clutter in the cabin. “Not here. We will sit by the lake. We will smoke. Then I will talk, and you will listen.”

I took a pack of Marlboros from a carton Ernie kept on top of his refrigerator, and I found a box of wooden matches in a kitchen drawer. We left the cabin and walked across the backyard, through the poplars to the lake. The moon had just risen, and its reflection cut a path across the black water solid enough to walk on. We sat on a bench Ernie had fashioned from a split log set on a couple of stumps. I
handed Meloux the pack of cigarettes. He took one out, tore the paper, crumbled the tobacco into his hand, and made an offering. Then he tapped out a cigarette for each of us. We smoked a few minutes in silence. For Henry, as for many Shinnobs, tobacco is a sacred element, and smoking has nothing to do with habit.

“You have always thought of me as old, Corcoran O’Connor.”

“You are old, Henry. God only knows how old.”

“When you were born, I was in my forty-third year.”

“That’s pretty old to a kid. Besides, as long as I’ve known you, your hair’s been white as a bleached sheet.”

“It was not always that color. In my nineteenth year, it turned white overnight.”

“What happened?”

“It was something I saw, Corcoran O’Connor. And something I did.”

Meloux studied the moon, and I waited.

H
e didn’t keep track of years by numbers, but it was the same year President Harding died and Calvin Coolidge took his place in the White House. Sometime in the early ’20s, probably. He remembered Coolidge because in a certain way the man was like the Ojibwe. He didn’t speak much, but when he did he was worth listening to.

That day Henry watched the farmer’s son coming across the field of low corn. Under the brim of a straw hat, the kid’s face was dark with shadow. He was taller than Henry and, at seventeen, older by two years. He looked like the farmer, right down to the mean little eyes.

It was late June, hot in South Dakota, and Henry worked in overalls without a shirt. His shoes, supplied by the government boarding school in Flandreau, were falling apart. Although he’d tried to line the shoes with straw to block the holes, dirt and pebbles still found their way inside. Periodically, he stopped his work to remove the shoes and dump them clean. He was sitting at the edge of a dry irrigation ditch with his left shoe off when he spotted the farmer’s son approaching.