Balsam Sirens Read online

  The night sky has always inspired and relaxed me, and it didn’t fail to do so now.

  Returning to the den, I popped in a CD, pulled on headphones, and my night was suddenly full of the wonderful haunting tones of BWV 974. For a few therapeutic minutes, I was afloat with Bach, the music eventually slowed to its conclusion, and the sound faded to that restless silent potential of an empty CD track, the Biblical Void prior to the First Day.

  Returning to my pile of cushions, I savoured what was now a clear and refreshed mind, a mental reboot. Into the clarity, a name arose.

  Harold.

  Harold had been a very pragmatic man and evidently not heavily burdened by ethics or morals. He wasn’t here at Balsam Lake looking at nature, gazing at the stars, or snorkelling just for pleasure. Nor was he engaged in some sort of Jim Hawkins adventure. Harold did things for reasons. Pragmatic reasons. Very self-interested reasons. Reasons that held out the promise of immediate payback.

  What had he been looking for?

  Whatever it was, it would be valuable in the monetary sense. My recently contemplated treasure of learning had led me to the notion of physical treasure.

  Was Harold looking for natural mineral wealth, treasure of an antique nature somewhere at the bottom of Balsam Lake, artefacts that would be of value to collectors? Was he looking for treasure that had more of a historical character? Or was he looking for something that he, Harold Barbour, could immediately take to the bank, so to speak?

  One could pretty well rule out mineral wealth, I thought. It wasn’t a quick fix. So it very likely wasn’t Harold.

  I knew of possible treasure of an antique nature, but this derived from a persistent myth that reappeared regularly. The lost treasure of Ghost Island.

  What about the other two possibilities? Treasure having mostly or only historical value. Treasure that was antique in nature, or that otherwise could be turned immediately into cash.

  Blank.

  Thinking about it a bit longer, I realized that the treasure categories of most interest to me were linked to people, to individuals. Things of value that people had lost very recently, say during the past twenty or so years, could be ruled out. Those people would have some idea where they had lost their valuables, and given the search methods and equipment available now, anything of any real value would be recovered to high probability. In the middle of the nineteenth century, which was where the documents on Harold’s memory sticks were pointing, there were few Europeans in the Balsam Lake area, and none of them was wealthy. As a group, they would gradually accrue some wealth, through their labour and the properties they built, and there would be some physical exchanges of money as part of everyday life. Money would need to be transferred, if only in small quantities, and the only practical means to travel had been by water. So, one might expect that some of the old steamboats, on occasion, would be carrying people who in turn would be carrying some money. The only way this could translate into “treasure” was if and when some of these boats capsized or sank for other reasons.

  This line of reasoning led me back to Harold’s files, and I spent another forty-five minutes reading them more closely. Boats lost on the lake were a clue, and Harold’s notes did spend some time on boats that had gone down. But it seemed to be just an indiscriminate listing of sunken boats with no attempt to connect any of these to something valuable being lost. Had Harold been making some assumptions about this, assumptions that he hadn’t bothered to write down? Or had he documented them and they were now lost? Or was this something I had missed? I had to fall back on the old reality check that nothing is that easy. It wasn’t going to be just handed to me on a plate.

  I looked through the list of steamboats again. There were surprisingly many of them, forty-three. Some were evidently just rinky-dink operations and didn’t last long. They all consumed firewood voraciously, so would have been expensive to keep going, and therefore would have needed a regular and high-volume supply of cargo or passenger traffic to justify their continued operation. One of the boats in this list caught my attention, not because of its name, the Coboconk, but because of its relatively short service life. It had caught fire and sunk somewhere off Rosedale.

  Niggle, niggle.

  Why was this sounding familiar somehow?

  I pulled out a large-scale roadmap of the Victoria County area, focused on Balsam Lake, and located Rosedale easily.

  Could it be? Could it really be?

  I found the list of locations that Kate had flown me over in her plane two days ago, the list that the lawyer, Hawley, had passed to George under Harold’s instructions. Turning to my laptop, I brought up Google Earth, and moved the cursor over the four points in Harold’s list. The easternmost point of the four was in the lake just west of Rosedale.

  I sat back in near disbelief.

  Could this have been the trail that Harold was following? Nineteenth-century steamboat wrecks?

  Twenty-one

  Despite the late night, I was up by seven thirty the next morning and found Mike settled in the kitchen, enjoying coffee, eggs, and toast.

  “Ah! Good morning, Rip!” he said past a mouthful of egg. “Pull up a pew. Let me fry you a couple of eggs”, and before I could say anything, Mike was on his feet, had the gas lit, and had broken two eggs into the pan.

  “Coffee?” he asked, redundantly, as he handed me a mug of very black liquid. I just had time to take in the partly overcast morning and the lake already well in ripple before the sound of the toast popping up announced the full scope of my breakfast. No better idea on what to do or say having occurred to me, I sat down.

  “Sleep well, Mike?”

  “Like a baby, my boy, especially after reading the information I received about our argonauts.”

  I looked at Mike questioningly.

  “We now know who the two lads are you took clear pictures of. Both fairly low-level villains from Toronto. So they might be working for someone higher up, but I suspect not.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because it’s all just too messy, too sloppy, even for a semi-professional bunch. I think we’re seeing a bit of private initiative.”

  “But the bigger piece of information”, Mike continued after taking a slug of coffee, “is that I think we now know where Diver Dan is lying low.”

  “Oh? Really!” My increased interest must have been evident.

  “Yes. A guy I hired for the day intercepted your tail when you were taking George back to Toronto. Your tail followed you to that lookout point and parked six or seven cars along. My man Chuck pulled in tight behind him, then got out and set about having a piss. He said a couple of women looked away in disgust and a couple looked on in interest. Odd ploy, but he said he couldn’t think of anything better and had to piss anyhow. Well, Tommy the Tail got a tad anxious because he could see you were leaving, and began to berate Chuck because he couldn’t move his car any more than a couple of inches. ‘In a minute man, in a minute’, Chuck said to him. ‘You can see I’m busy.’ Wish I’d been there”, Mike said through a smile, then gave a good belly laugh. “I can just hear Chuck saying something like that. Anyway, it took a while for Chuck to empty the piss barrel and Tommy the Tail was dancing about like it was him whose back teeth were floating. Chuck got his car out of the way, Tommy jumped in and drove back to the highway, but he couldn’t see you anywhere by then.”

  Mike took another swig of coffee and scratched his groin contentedly.

  “And then?” I prodded.

  “Oh, yeah. And then Chuck followed Tommy, but it looked as though Tommy was so anxious that he forgot to check on whether he was being tailed. I’ve seen it before. Tails don’t seem to think that anybody would ever tail them. Anyroad, Tommy decided to go right at the exit from the lookout point, which is the way you actually had gone, but because of the way the lookout parking lot slopes away from the road, he had no sightline, so he was just guessing, even though the shortest way back to the main road was to the left. I’m sure he expected th
at you were heading for Toronto. But I think he thought that you might have been concerned about being followed, so would take the least obvious route from the lookout point. But he was screwed in any case. Chuck said that Tommy drove like a madman, probably hoping to catch sight of you somewhere. He stopped at one point and talked on a cellphone while he seemed to be looking at a map. Then he set out again and eventually stopped at a seedy motel just south of Lindsay. My guy got some pictures of Tommy talking to another guy just before they went into one of the units.”

  After a few seconds of Mike’s smug silence, I prodded him again impatiently.

  “Yeah. I have copies of the pictures here. But the good news is that the guy Tommy met was limping, favouring his left leg.”

  “The diver!” I exclaimed.

  “Very likely”, Mike said through a happy smile.

  “So”, I said, thinking my way through this. “Our diver is something of a sitting duck, at least for now, since he probably can’t drive himself. So I expect you’ll be paying him a visit at his hotel today.”

  “Bingo! That’s my boy! Right on the money. In fact, now that I’ve finished my coffee, that’s what I’m about to do.”

  I laid down my knife and fork, and Mike took our plates and coffee mugs to the sink, then turned to look at me.

  “And what about you?”

  “I’m going to do some more paper chasing. You remember me telling you about the four coordinates that Harold’s lawyer passed on to George?”

  A nod.

  “Well, I think they’re the sites of old steamboat wrecks.”

  “No! Surely not! We’re not after a bunch of treasure hunters, are we?”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple. But I really don’t know just what they’re up to. I’d like to find out just how long they’ve been looking. Old Rick will know.”

  “Okay. I’ll do that first, make a call on Stinson, then pay a visit to Diver Dan.”

  The day’s agenda having been settled, I moved to the sink and began to clean up. Mike and I agreed to be in fairly regular phone contact during the day. Then he grabbed his notebook and laptop, checked that he had his phone, clapped me on the shoulder, and went out to his car.

  Andrea rose just before nine o’clock, stiff and sore, but clear-eyed, rested, and eager to get back at it again. She had a minimal breakfast, and I kept her company with a second cup of coffee, then I walked with her back to the last of the unusables. She had done a stunning amount of work, and now had a table of project elements, listed by cottage, that we could cost out and put in a sensible order for completion, one that would lead to most units being brought to prime condition in the shortest time. We talked for a few minutes about her day’s work, then she showed me the door, diplomatically.

  Back in the den, I carried on reading from where I had left off in the wee hours of that morning. An hour’s work was enough to identify steamboat names that could conceivably be associated with three of the four points in Harold’s list of coordinates. The one point I could find no matching name for was the most interesting: the one opposite Largs and just offshore from Indian Point, the place where the diver had tried to drown me.

  I puzzled over this, then pouted for a while at my lack of success for that location before I completed detailed notes on what I had done yesterday and today, and then turned to the material in the Clarence and Donaldson banker’s box. I had barely begun to get into this when my cellphone buzzed. It was Mike.

  “What’s up, Mike?”

  “What’s up? Well, if I could lick my own ass, I’m sure the taste in my mouth would be ambrosia compared to what’s there now. Rick Stinson. Gangrene soup could hardly be less appealing.”

  “I did warn you. What did you get?”

  “Well, nothing contagious, I hope. But our boatmen have been there in his ramshackle cabin only three days. And he tells me that they’ve been out in their boat only twice.”

  “Do you know where they got the boat?”

  “Rancid Rick tells me they brought it with them. I got the registration number, and I’ve traced it to a rental shop in Lindsay, so I’ll check that when I’ve finished with Diver Dan.”

  “I take it that our boatmen weren’t there.”

  “No”, Mike replied. “Stinson said they left this morning about half an hour before I arrived. Didn’t know where they were going.”

  “Did you get a look in their cabin?”

  “Just a peek through the windows. Nothing there. Looks almost as though they might have left.”

  “And just abandoned the boat?”

  “Why not? It’s not their boat.”

  “Did you get their car licence number?”

  “No. But I might be able to get that from the boat-rental place in Lindsay.”

  We talked a bit more about Mike’s exchanges with Stinson.

  “I’m surprised you got that much out of him. How can you be sure he isn’t stringing you along for some reason?”

  “Tsk! Tsk! Oh ye of little faith! You’ve forgotten, evidently, that old Mike has great powers of persuasion. And when you hint to most people the personal consequences of aiding and abetting in a murder, they tend suddenly to see the happy side of cooperation. I think what I got is bankable.”

  “So you’re off to see the diver now?”

  “On my way as we speak. I’ll call you when he and I have had our little chat.”

  I went back to my files. Having made some notes from my conversation with Mike, I returned to the Clarence and Donaldson banker’s box. I had previously added to its contents the file I had obtained from my former trustee, Mr. Aldred, on the occasion of our last meeting. I took everything out of the box now.

  Aldred’s file contained his own handwritten notes, and there were more than seventy pages of them. I flicked through a little more than half of them quickly, but nothing that I didn’t already know caught my eye, so I set the file aside.

  The remaining contents of the box consisted of four relatively thick files.

  One of these files contained mostly very old documents, browned from age and looking decidedly brittle along the edges. Somebody, probably Aldred himself, had placed each of the individual sheets of these old documents into high-quality onion-skin paper, folded so that each of the sheets was completely covered. I presumed that this was done to preserve the old paper. Most of the text was legible through the onion skin. A quick perusal indicated that these sheets documented how old McCleod had tried to prevent his legacy and his fortune from being dissipated by his no-good offspring. I would need to have this document copied carefully in order to read it closely without damaging the original.

  The second file contained a detailed set of financial accounts for Largs, by year, documenting separately the capital put into the initial construction of the place, the rents charged to tenants who took up residence in the cottages, and, starting some years later, the commercial income McCleod realized once his lake boats began operating.

  The remaining files contained McCleod’s own projections, indicating which potential lines of business might bring in how much income over the years.

  I was about to return to Aldred’s file when my cellphone buzzed again. It was Mike.

  “So, what did you find, Mike”, I began somewhat enthusiastically.

  “I’m on my way back, Mark”, Mike said in a very strange, flat, and oddly expressionless voice. “We’ll talk when I arrive.”

  “Sure, Mike, but what did you …”

  I realized then that I was speaking to a dead line.

  About twenty minutes later, I heard Mike’s car pull in, and then he tumbled through the door and sat heavily in an easy chair. I had made some coffee and moved to get a cup.

  “Cup of coff –” I began.

  “Is Andrea here?” Same flat voice that I heard over the phone.

  “No, she’s … what’s wrong, Mike?”

  “Triple scotch first”, and without waiting for me to get it for him, Mike moved to the liquor cabinet
, poured what was at least a triple, and downed a third of it.

  “Got to the motel, knew the unit number from the photo Chuck had sent me, knocked on the door, no answer, nobody around, picked the lock, found Diver Dan.”

  Mike drained half of what remained in his glass.

  “Somebody had shot him once through the head.”

  Twenty-two

  For a few seconds I just sat there, getting my head around what Mike had said.

  “We need to do a couple of things right away, Mike.”

  Mike was nodding.

  “I’ve already done the first of them. I called Chuck and asked him to send in a tip from a public pay phone, and that he needed to use wiped coins and gloves, and make sure nobody saw him. By now, the police probably have already found the diver’s body.”

  Now I was nodding.

  “And the second thing”, I began, but was interrupted as Mike held up one hand and pulled out his cellphone.

  “Jefferson.”

  Long silence as Mike listened.

  “Okay. Thanks, Chuck.”

  “Developments?” I asked.

  “You could say that. The police have found something. In a stand of poplars about a quarter-mile from Diver Dan’s motel. In the corner of a field. Three bodies. The men from Diver Dan’s boat. All executed.”

  We just looked at each other for a moment.

  “You were saying something?” Mike asked.

  “Yes. I was about to say that it’s time for us to rethink this whole business. But that seems a little redundant now. This thing really has gone lethal. There are professionals out there, and we’re right in the middle of it, whatever it is.”

  Mike was nodding again.

  I got up, went to the liquor cabinet, poured myself a generous scotch, and took a good swig. Then Mike and I sat down and went through everything we knew about this operation.