Balsam Sirens Read online

  Copyright © 2017 Keith Weaver

  Published by Iguana Books

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 303

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M5S 2R4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Publisher: Greg Ioannou

  Editor: Mary Ann Blair

  Front cover image: Courtesy of Unsplash

  Front cover design: Daniella Postavsky

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Weaver, Keith, 1947-, author

  Balsam sirens / Keith Weaver.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77180-204-8 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77180-205-5 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77180-206-2 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8645.E2175B35 2017 C813’.6 C2016-908164-8

  C2016-908165-6

  This is an original print edition of Balsam Sirens.

  A Note on History

  Readers might infer from Balsam Sirens that the author shares some of Mark Whelan’s views on history.

  They would be right.

  The only non-fictional character in this book is George Laidlaw. George Edward Laidlaw, eldest son of entrepreneur and railway promoter George Edward, was a tireless student of local history.

  Balsam Sirens is a work of fiction, but I want to acknowledge some liberties that I have taken in writing the book and to flag one very important piece of background.

  The first gold rush in Canada occurred near Madoc in Ontario in the mid-1860s, but the date has been shifted slightly in the book.

  Rory McCleod is entirely fictional and represents no real person.

  The island in Balsam Lake that was once called Ghost Island is now Hogg Island, but Ghost Island sounds better.

  In the nineteenth century, there was limited steamboat traffic on Balsam Lake. But the timing of this traffic has been shifted about 10-15 years earlier than was the actual case.

  The steamboat Coboconk did exist; however, no steamboats named Jackson, Daniella and Damsel May ever sailed on Balsam Lake.

  The establishment Le Repos de Champlain, placed in Rosedale, does not exist. Too bad.

  The village of Largs (the one on Balsam Lake) also doesn’t exist.

  Finally, and in many ways most importantly, I have tried to express, through the thoughts and speech of Mark Whelan, statements I have come across on the present and past realities of First Nations peoples, the appalling history they have had to endure, and the need not only for this situation, but also the First Nations’ central role in the reality we call Canada to be recognized and acknowledged, and for reconciliation and justice to be sought. Having said that, the character John Longfeather / John Woodhouse is fictional.

  Dedicated to the Memory of Geoff Ogram

  Colleague, Kindred Spirit, Friend

  One

  It promised to be a warm late spring day, the sky bright and sunny, and a light breeze flirting with still virginal leaves.

  Ideal for a trip to the morgue.

  Mark Whelan, Private Investigator. That’s me. And I was here, at the Toronto morgue, at the request of one of my clients who wanted moral support in the task of identifying his brother.

  “Bankers’ hours, eh, Whelan?” The speaker was Detective Sergeant Bent Cromarty. I had interacted with Cromarty a few times. Decent sort. Hard to read. Apparently impossible to get to know. But I would choose Cromarty to work with over many other detectives. His one hot button – well, warm button – brought out a prickly reaction to anyone who didn’t respect his turf.

  Cromarty wasn’t the hard-boiled, chain-smoking, larger-than-life bad-cop stereotype, someone headed for an early seat on the emphysema express. He was lean, had close-cropped auburn hair, and wore suits that looked a bit severe, but that were an attractively snug fit to his athletic form. There were always, it seemed, a few remarks stored behind his deadpan expression, ready for delivery. But he was fully rooted in the police system and did not release projectiles, verbal or otherwise, that could bounce off his superiors and result in self-inflicted wounds.

  I let Cromarty’s dig pass without any response or acknowledgement. Other thoughts were occupying me just then, and there was the problem of time. Waiting seemed to be one of my most frequent occupations – in this case, waiting for my client to turn up. The combination of the prospect of unstructured time lying before me and of stooging around next to Cromarty caused my mind to make its escape and dodge down a frequent byway into one of the many quirky mental spaces that are a necessary part of my life. My own collection of quirks, contradictions, and puzzles populated that space. The puzzles, human nature puzzles, intrigued me most. One such unexplained puzzle was the large percentage of parents who made it to peaceful old age. I had ruminated for years on the apparent low rate of parricide. There seemed to be all kinds of reasons that would nudge people toward that particular crime.

  Cromarty was walking about aimlessly. I pulled out my cellphone and made as though I was checking appointments. What I really wanted was to avoid any attempt by Cromarty to drag me into some meandering discussion that would help him fill his time. Hiding behind my phone, I resumed my own mental wandering.

  Where was I? Oh, yes. Parricide.

  High on the list of these plausible reasons for parricide were the many serious rub points between the generations, and one of the most prominent of these rub points was names. Not for the first time, I wondered what gave rise to the mental fog that engulfed parents as they sat down to name their children. The names that some parents chose! Many of the given names were fine on their own, but a name always has two or more elements. Given names chosen, apparently, in blissful isolation, can team up with surnames to produce aberrations that range from oddly peculiar to unbelievably ghastly. The possibilities were legion. Instances of infelicitous alliteration, asinine assonance, and podunk handles adapted from commercials and sitcoms. There were far too many instances of ill-matched monosyllables that jostle together in hard brutal clunks. One cringed at assaults by meanderings of vocalic jumbles, too rich in vowels and requiring more than one breath to utter. Bentley Cromarty was a good example, his given and family names together offering a hopscotch lilt, a tipsy linguistic ramble in some undocumented musical time signature, like the totterings of a horse that has just sampled the sour mash. And presumably, it explained Cromarty’s preference for “Bent”. But then “Bent” trailed a haze of its own problems …

  I was always grateful for my own given names: Mark Alessandro. But that was just the luck of the draw, having been inspired by a rather unlikely mix of biblical and Botticellian enthusiasms. It could have been otherwise: Winston Whelan, Galen Whelan, Dylan Whelan …

  But this recurring fret over names was just a minor compulsion, chronic but easily resisted, nothing as imperious as the invitation presented by a chipped tooth to a tongue. In due course, my client would turn up, allowing me to terminate this diversion into a world of personal fantasy.

  Cellphone fiddling and musings worked well as bulwarks against intrusions from Cromarty, and eventually, my client George arrived. George was a stressed-out fifty-something bundle of hesitations. I greeted him, offering a gentle smile and a reassuring hand on the shoulder, but this did little to counteract the hidden causes, or the psychological effects, that perhaps were reflected in his ruffled salt-an
d-pepper hair, his red eyes ringed in grey, and the unrelenting Pontius Pilate hand actions.

  “Okay, George?” I asked gently.

  George Barbour was one extreme of a classic office worker, someone appearing to have no past, no future, and no access to happiness. He returned a faint nod that was little more than an automatic response to my question.

  “This won’t take long, George. Then we can go somewhere and have a talk.”

  Nod.

  A body lay before us, covered by a sheet. A mortuary staff member asked, by way of a gesture, if we were ready. I looked at George and raised an eyebrow. There was another nod, much more hesitant and anxious this time.

  Identifying a dead loved one is a shock, but George’s sudden vocalized intake of breath when the dead face was revealed was far more reaction than I had expected. Something prompted me to move closer to George, which I did just in time to grab him round the waist before his knees buckled.

  “Is that your brother, Harold Barbour?” Cromarty asked. George stood immobile. I squeezed his arm gently, he nodded vigorously several times, croaked out a “yes”, and looked around in near panic, as if seeking a corner to which he could run and hide. I led George away, and as soon as we were in a neutral corridor, I pulled out a hip flask, unscrewed the cap, and put it to George’s lips. Not knowing what else to do, George took a sip, coughed delicately, and seemed to regain some colour and strength.

  “Let’s go and get a cup of coffee”, I suggested, and led George away without waiting for a reply. We left the morgue and found a coffee shop a couple of blocks away. I sat George at a corner table and went off to order two cups of coffee, one having a good shot of espresso. Over the coffee, we talked for about fifteen minutes, while I got the whole discussion kick-started through snatches of narrative that had nothing to do with death, during which George graduated from nods, to reluctant “yes” and “no” responses, and eventually to short sentences. Our coffees finished, I announced with some gusto that I was hungry, even though it was by then still only late midmorning, and I invited George to come with me to a good breakfast place nearby. George nodded, rose, and followed passively.

  Forty minutes later, we had both finished whopping plates of omelettes and pancakes. George looked much more human by now. As we left the restaurant, I scanned the street for a cab.

  “I … Will there be some … paperwork?” George asked in trepidation.

  “Yes, but I’ll get it all ready so that all you need to do is sign. We can leave that for a few days. I’ll call you, George.”

  A cab pulled up to the curb, we climbed in, and went to George’s apartment building. On the way, I passed George my card, and fixing him in a direct gaze, said forcefully that he should call me if he had any questions, or even if he just wanted to talk.

  George smiled faintly. “Yes”, he said. “Thanks”, he added, after a short delay.

  “Off you go, George. You need some rest.”

  I had the cabbie wait until George reached the front door of his building. We waved to each other, then I told the cabbie the address of our condo – Andrea’s and mine – in the old part of town. Back in our condo, I immediately changed into shorts and a T-shirt, went out onto the terrace, and flopped into a large cushioned reclining chair. I had some thinking to do.

  George’s case had come to me entirely by chance through one of my bush telegraph connections. I had just finished a tightly bunched group of commissions, was tired, and let it be known to a few of my fellow PIs that I was taking a week for myself. Just staying home, enjoying the weather, doing some reading …

  Then came a call from a colleague, hinting at a favour and mentioning someone’s name. There was something about the way my colleague described the case that grabbed my attention. I agreed to allow my name to be recommended, and a day later I had George as a client. I had contacted Cromarty and got the information that was available. I had then called George, we had a somewhat one-sided telephone discussion, and I assured him that I would take him on, even though I wasn’t sure at all just what it was that he thought I could do for him.

  The event before us was the death of the man George had just identified as his brother. The notes on the case called the event “a boating accident”. There were a few lines of description but little else. However, that wasn’t what caught my eye.

  The accident had occurred in Balsam Lake, on the shore of which slumbered my home village, Largs, the place where I had spent my youth to the age of eighteen.

  More significantly, from even the little information I had been passed by the police, I was all but convinced that the accident had been no accident. It seemed more probable that Harold Barbour had been murdered.

  Two

  We both sat there looking at her, feeling like two students being chided for not working hard enough, and waiting for her pronouncement.

  “I really don’t think you two have a problem”, the marriage counsellor said, leaning back in her chair and setting down a pen that so far had been used just to carve half a page of doodles.

  “Well, we’re here, aren’t we?” I replied, slightly annoyed.

  “Yes, but by your own admission you don’t fight over things. There’s just this haze of mild disagreement. Surely you don’t expect every situation to resolve instantly into crystal clarity. I think”, she said, leaning forward over the desk in a pose that spoke of reaching a conclusion, “I think that you are allowing situations to define who you feel you should be rather than the other way round.”

  The two students looked on dumbly, as though the meeting had suddenly switched to ancient Greek.

  We had been talking with the counsellor about all and sundry. It wasn’t really any sort of crisis management. We weren’t teetering on any brink. It was just that, without actually arguing or fighting, there seemed to be an uncomfortable number of things that Andrea and I didn’t really either agree or disagree on.

  Before the end of our first session with her, I had the frustrating sense that we were getting nowhere, and this wasn’t helped by the relaxed and apparently unconcerned aura that surrounded our counsellor. Our session was now obviously wrapping up, and I’m sure that the summary statement she embarked upon now was meant to reassure us both, but it didn’t do that for me.

  “People tend to be followers”, the counsellor began, “and some of the things that influence people most strongly are social mores. And, by the way, this has little to do with intelligence. Nobody is particularly good at analysing their own situations, so the information we as individuals work with tends not to be of the analytical sort. We usually get it elsewhere. People can form impressions independently, or impressions can be transmitted unconsciously to us, somehow, from others, through expressions, gestures, odd words, and phrases. And we have expectations. Some of these we formulate ourselves, but many of them we pick up, perceive, from what’s around us. We’re all social creatures, and all of us, but some much more than others, are sensitive to cues, hints, and non-verbal suggestions. Usually without realizing it, we detect social expectations, the collective expectations of others, and our responses, too often, are that those expectations have to be met as is, without questions being asked. And this is a dynamic that many people are never aware of.”

  A further short discussion led to the conclusion that Andrea and Mark should go away and think about things. Then we left.

  The ride home was quiet.

  We both knew, I’m sure, that we had things to work through. But first, we had to bring our situation into focus.

  During that trip home, my mind raced through the events that had preceded my first contact with George. It wasn’t that George was in any way a precipitating factor. He was just an arbitrary stake in the sand. Going to see a counsellor inevitably caused a lot of reflection. It was this reflection, welling up into consciousness, that made me shine a bright light inward on myself.

  What that light revealed was that George was just one more of those odd random chunks of reality that
continuously litter what I seem predisposed to consider my linear well-engineered path through life. But I knew that I was just fooling myself, or trying to. Sometimes, I would awaken at 3 am and be appalled, when I looked at it carefully, at what a crash site my working life was. My arrogant departure from the police force, where I did have a future, had led to my current existence, which was … what, exactly?

  It had seemed straightforward back then, and my blithe confidence greased the quick decision to become a private investigator, my police background being ample preparation for such a role, or so I thought. Being honest with myself, or what passes for honesty amid 3 am desperation, my livelihood was indeed lucrative, but at the cost of sifting through the sordid detritus of other people’s disintegrating lives. This had become background music, definitely atonal, to many of my days, when at least daylight, sunlight, managed to dissipate most of my metaphorical grey mental fog. During these periods, I was indeed able to focus on the day’s work, and ignore the question in Peggy Lee’s song line that challenged me regularly. “Focusing” and “doing the work” was rarely much of an effort owing to the fact that most of my cases fell into one of four or five standard formats: divorces, affairs, financial irregularities, dysfunctional families, and virulent personal situations, the development of which were almost always powered by suspicions, feelings of inadequacy, and smouldering hatreds. In any assignment, focusing on the patterns and avoiding being psychologically engulfed by the gruesome details was essential. Once I had found the standard pattern that matched the particular events before me, the past, present, and future of the case became as evident as an unfolding Harlequin romance. I could just concentrate on the pattern, work the problem.

  So I was mystified to discover that, even though George’s case had only begun, it was already throwing curves at me and refusing to fit into the simplest of my patterns. It was occupying my time excessively.