Balsam Sirens Read online

  At the end of an hour, we had a new perspective on what we were facing. There was something valuable out there that somebody wanted very badly. It looked as though the diver had become a liability, possibly had said that he wanted out, and very quickly demonstrated that he might be by far the weakest link in their operation, risking them all. But it was more likely that the professionals had just eliminated the amateurs. Well, Diver Dan was a risk no longer, nor were his colleagues, but there would now be another much higher profile police investigation taking place that might hinder the work of whoever was after the prize, whatever it was.

  “I don’t think any of us is at immediate risk”, Mike said, “at least not while we aren’t in their way. But let’s think through our actions here. I want to go over our physical security and what exactly we should be trying to protect ourselves from. You need to find out what these goons are after. Chances are that we won’t be caught in any police dragnet, but there’s at least one loose end I can think of – Rancid Rick. I need a story for why I was talking to him.”

  “There’s one other link”, I said, “and I expect it to connect any time now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bent Cromarty.”

  “But it’s out of his jurisdiction. This has nothing to do with Toronto. This will be picked up by the OPP.”

  “He won’t come at us, or at least at me, officially. He’ll just make an inquiry. The Harold Barbour case was snatched away from him by higher-ups who could see no path forward and wanted to reduce the number of open cases on the books. For some reason, Bent has got his teeth into this one, and I’m sure he thinks I know more about it than the police but that I’ve been holding back.”

  “Tough!” Mike barked. “Unless he can show interference in an investigation, fuck ’im!”

  “Fuck ’im indeed. He can’t show interference, because there’s no investigation to interfere in. But he won’t let go easily. My approach to him is easier. I’ll plead ignorance. I’m just a PI taking a couple of weeks’ well-deserved vacation in the company of my old friend Mike. But I agree with you that you need a story, and maybe you can work this holiday angle into it.”

  “Let’s get to it, then”, Mike said, rising in new resolve and heading for his room. But he turned back almost immediately.

  “Where’s Andrea?”

  I felt a jolt of concern, until I realized he wasn’t sounding an alarm but just wanted to have everything covered. Andrea wasn’t at risk, but now that Mike had raised the subject I had to make extra sure that our security net covered all of us all the time.

  “That’s a good call. She’s at Number 3 Cedar Grove today. I’ll take her some water and spend the rest of the day working there with her.”

  “No, Mark. You need to stay here and do our paper sleuthing. I’ll take the water. Where’s the best place to keep an eye on Number 3?”

  “From Number 2, where she was working yesterday. But it really should be me –”

  “Goddammit Mark! We need to find out what the fuck’s going on here! You’re the only one who can do that! So hop to it! Nothing’s going to happen to Andrea!” He pulled six bottles of water from the fridge and stuffed them into a plastic bag.

  I could see Mike’s point, but not taking direct steps myself to look after my own family made me feel totally inadequate and irresponsible.

  “Well, okay. But you call me if there’s even a suggestion that you might need help.”

  Mike gave me a severe dose of the bent eye.

  “The only way I’m likely to need help is in carrying the plates with the heads of whoever the buggers are behind all this.”

  He turned to leave, signalling the end of the discussion.

  “Wait!” I said. “Here’s the key to Number 2”, and I tossed it to him.

  Once Mike had left, I dived into the paperwork. Almost all the material in the banker’s box had to do with commercial matters in one way or another. I identified and set aside all the arrangements old McCleod had with other businesses in Toronto. Likewise, I ignored all his commercial accounts and banking details. Without having a clear idea why, I homed in on his shipping accounts. These covered warehousing details in Toronto, transfers between businesses within Toronto, and shipment of goods to and from Toronto by ship and railways. I soon located the details of shipments to, from, and within the hinterland areas. Fortunately, McCleod’s records were broken down by area.

  My eye gravitated naturally toward old McCleod’s two steamboats that had operated on Balsam and Cameron Lakes. There were statements summarizing hundreds of bills of lading for the cargoes carried by these boats. There were also records showing that McCleod shipped goods from Toronto to Fenelon Falls in stages, first via lake ship from Toronto to Port Hope, by rail from there to Lindsay, and then by boat to Fenelon Falls. The two Balsam and Cameron Lake boats, the Jackson and the Daniella, were busy almost all the time from spring thaw to winter freeze up, and over a period of ten years it looked as though McCleod made a tidy profit from these operations, at least from the Jackson. Records of the Daniella disappeared about 1860 and another boat, the Damsel May, began appearing in the records a year or so later. The Jackson and Daniella were built and launched at Fenelon Falls in 1857; the Damsel May was also built at Fenelon Falls, but no date was given. They were all steamboats, each capable of carrying about sixty passengers or about seven tons of freight.

  McCleod owned land. Lots of it. He owned properties in Toronto, Port Hope, and Cobourg, and he bought and sold land over the years in Coboconk, Fenelon Falls, Lindsay, and of course he owned Largs. There were also records of land he owned in Hastings County, quite a bit of land, land he had bought during a one-year period, held for a short time, then sold within about four months. Most of these records simply named the properties, or in some cases just the lot numbers. The financial transactions, I guessed, were all consolidated in his corporate accounts, and the records of all this had all been moved into the files of The McCleod Foundation a few years before he died. He died of natural causes, and it seems he spent his last years reading, socializing in Toronto, and looking after a few investments. I recalled from a conversation with Mr. Aldred many years earlier that McCleod had an elaborate management scheme for The McCleod Foundation, that he had placed it all in the hands of a few trusted bankers, and that his plan for maintaining it over the years was very conservative. When everybody else was speculating like idiots, McCleod’s foundation would go ultra-conservative, in some cases converting all his assets to gold until it was clear that the financial turbulence had passed. So he or his operations came out of almost every downturn and recession better off or at least as well off as when they went into it.

  The business about The McCleod Foundation fluttered around in my mind but refused to be netted. There was way too much material here to start thinking about very specific items, and I recognized that I was assuming that something about The McCleod Foundation, some specific insight, would leap out at me. There was something here I couldn’t put my finger on. I made a note in the small notebook where I kept a record of stray thoughts and possibly good ideas, rather than in the pages and pages of jottings I was making on the material I had brought back from Toronto, where I’d never find it again. Despite all this, something said to me that I should take some time right now to get a better handle on what it was that was niggling.

  But there was no time.

  I went through Aldred’s onion-skin file, but this time I carefully perused all of it. It was pretty uninspiring financial detail. As well as the goods destined for Lindsay and beyond, McCleod shipped an even greater quantity of stuff to Peterborough, and the areas surrounding it, goods that were needed by farmers, by merchants who served the communities, and even some goods required by the few fledgling industries that were springing up. One of these industries was mining. An item in this file that I hadn’t seen on my previous skim, because I had stopped before I reached it, was one of the very few interviews McCleod had ever given and which
was printed in an issue of the Toronto Leader. In the article, the reporter quoted McCleod as saying that it was hard enough getting goods out to outlying centres, but it was just as hard or harder to bring the receipts from the sale of these goods back to Toronto. “Whenever I could”, McCleod was quoted, “I relied on my own boats to carry these receipts under armed guard. On only one occasion, that dreadful August 17, was I struck by disaster in the course of one of these shipments.”

  By three thirty that afternoon, I had made almost forty pages of notes, and I began entering them into a spreadsheet so that I could move blocks of my notes and data around, rearrange them, and look for any patterns. But the only pattern that appeared to emerge was the fact that the information relating to McCleod’s activities showed that most of these activities were far from Balsam Lake, and I could find nothing to explain the interest of whoever we were up against. The one persistent idea that resurfaced again and again, sometimes in correspondence, sometimes in news articles, involved the Ghost Island treasure. But the idea of anyone seriously looking for the Ghost Island treasure was ridiculous. People had been hunting for it for more than two hundred years, with never the merest hint of success. Any rational person, wanting to invest resources and expecting a return, would not turn to the Ghost Island treasure even as a last resort.

  So these people, the boatmen or whoever was behind them, what had they been after, who had killed them, and why?

  An idea occurred to me suddenly. I went through it all again quickly, looking more closely at the rather anomalous collection of McCleod’s properties in Hastings County. They were all just lot numbers. When he sold them, a few had been sold to individuals whose occupations were given as “farmer”, some were designated as “businessman”, but for many of them, the buyer was just a name with no occupation. But the key point here, it seemed to me, was that McLeod had bought and sold more than a hundred and fifty properties over the space of less than two years. It seemed to me that this was not typical of McCleod and I suspected that I was onto something.

  It was now after four o’clock, and I had to think about the evening meal. I decided on something simple, beef souvlaki. Wally had closed for a family wedding, but I could find what I needed for our meal easily enough. I called Mike on his cell to say that I was off to get the wherewithal for dinner and that I would be back in half an hour. He asked me how it was going, and I mumbled something noncommittal.

  “Take heart, my boy”, he said encouragingly. “I know you. You don’t give up easily, and we both know that gold is where you find it.”

  I drove into Coboconk, got what I needed, said hello to five or six people, and headed back toward Largs. I was about halfway home when the notion of treasure suddenly flashed a different face at my mind’s eye, and I literally jumped at the surge of excitement it delivered.

  Twenty-three

  Luckily there were no radar traps on the highway that day because I raced along at well above the speed limit all the way back to Largs. Navigating the village impatiently, I parked and galloped into the house. Instead of giving in to the huge temptation to go straight to the den, I hurriedly put together the souvlaki skewers, peeled some potatoes, roughly shredded lettuce for a salad, then made a beeline for my notes.

  It took me an hour to go through all the paperwork again looking for those items that might confirm the hunch that had occurred to me back there on the highway.

  And I found them.

  McCleod was not unidimensional. He had interests outside his businesses. He had hobbies. He collected things. Specifically, he collected indigenous artefacts. I recalled that Aldred had mentioned that in passing somewhere in his notes.

  For the next twenty minutes, I sat there flipping through and reading documents, thinking, and noting points on my writing pad.

  Was it conceivable? Yes.

  Did it make sense from McCleod’s point of view? Very much so.

  Was it credible today? Yes.

  Did it explain the activity and the intent we had seen thus far? Yes.

  Did it provide me the basis for a counter-strategy? Yes.

  I went through my points again, checked them against what I had found in the banker’s box files, and did another reality check. It all held together. I couldn’t see any assumptions that might have converted something meaningless or ridiculous into what I believed now lay before me. McCleod had built up a substantial collection of indigenous artefacts at Largs. He had planned to move it all to Toronto where it would be more secure. McCleod never did anything by halves, so although without an inventory I had no way of knowing his collection’s value, it would now be more than 150 years old.

  So, valuable.

  Most likely very valuable, both then and now.

  It was now almost six o’clock. I called Andrea.

  “Ciao, Bellissima! How’s it going?

  “Oh! What time is it? It’s going fine.”

  “It’s six o’clock. I’m making beef souvlaki for dinner, with Greek potatoes and a Greek salad. I’ve got the beef ready for the barbecue.”

  “Well, I’ve got at least another two hours here, so I’ll start wrapping it up for today. Be back in twenty minutes.”

  “Okay. Ciao!”

  Then I called Mike.

  “Mike, Andrea’s packing up now and says she’ll be back here in about twenty minutes.”

  “Great! I’m getting peckish. How’s the sleuthing going?”

  “I think I’ve got it, Mike. If you can get back here in five minutes, I’ll brief you quickly before Andrea returns.”

  “I’m leaving now. Open me a cold beer.”

  “Oh! And Mike. I’m going to let Andrea in on things tonight. I don’t want to keep her in the dark any longer.”

  “Roger”, Mike said, and by the sound of his voice he was already pounding the streets at a fast walk back to our house.

  As usual, Mike’s first beer enjoyed a gleeful freefall into a black hole. He listened intently while I gave him a two-minute summary of my findings.

  “You think that’s what’s out there in the lake?”

  “Everything fits.”

  “So, old McCleod was a collector. And he kept a collection of something here at Largs.”

  “It looks that way”, I said.

  “And you think that maybe he was moving his collection to Toronto and somehow it was lost here in the lake? But what could he collect here?” Mike continued. “What was there of value?”

  “He had several collections. He had a collection of musical instruments in Toronto, but in his will he bequeathed that collection to the museum. You’re right that at that time there wasn’t much to collect here, and he probably just collected stuff that interested him.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Well, Aldred mentioned somewhere that McCleod had a collection of arrowheads. I would bet that he also had a collection of other aboriginal artefacts.”

  “But”, Mike began.

  “Yes, I know. They would have had no value then, except to McCleod for whatever was the reason he collected them. But think about today. Depending on what might have been in the collection, there are people who would love to have what might now be a unique assortment of Ojibway artefacts.”

  “What kind of artefacts?”

  “Well, there could have been bows, lances, ceremonial pipes, all sorts of personal decorations.”

  “Would all that stuff survive?”

  “Some of it certainly would”, I said. “Wood can last a long time if it has some sort of protection, even if it’s submerged. And there could be other things not subject to decay.”

  “Oh? Such as?”

  “The local people, the Anishinaabe, were good at identifying deposits of clay that could be used to make pots. These would be reasonably durable.”

  Mike looked at me doubtfully.

  “The thing about many indigenous peoples is that they didn’t leave a lot behind. In terms of living with the land, they were very sophisticated compared t
o wastrels like us. They had no written records, so everything about them has to be deduced from their own oral tradition and from physical objects that have survived. These things would have great anthropological value today, so a decent collection of artefacts, in good condition, might be worth a lot to a dedicated private collector. If the clowns we’re facing have been contracted by such a collector to deliver something like that, a complete set, … well …”

  Mike was silent, but I knew he was holding things up to the light in his mind, turning them this way and that, looking for anything not right. I could tell that he wasn’t convinced.

  “Whatever it is, it has value to somebody”, I said. “That much is pretty obvious. If our treasure hunters are working on contract, they’ll earn nothing unless they deliver, and that means that if they don’t find what they’re looking for they’ll most likely think that I’ve found it, and then they’ll come after me.”

  Mike was nodding, indicating that he agreed at least with that part. He then turned to focus on me.

  “Let them come. We’ll sort out the sods.”

  At that point, I was very grateful indeed to have Mike in my corner because he’s smart, fearless, and has one of the quickest minds of anybody I know. But bravado has always made me nervous. By focusing on “beating them to a pulp” as a response, one runs the risk of underestimating the situation by assuming a favourable outcome. This can lead to the unconscious conviction that the problem has been solved even before one begins to grapple with it. Dangerous.

  I had put the potatoes on to boil just before Andrea came in, flushed from another day of personal success, but not looking quite so tired as she had late afternoon yesterday.

  “Just going to have a quick shower and change”, she said in passing, but slowing down enough to take a look at my colourful souvlaki skewers. “Back in fifteen minutes.”

  “Your wine and a chunk of garlic bread will be waiting.”

  Andrea’s riposte “I could get used to living like this”, came to me just as she kicked off her boots and began climbing the stairs.