Balsam Sirens Read online

  “Anything I can do?” Mike asked, as I began preparing the remaining ingredients for our Greek salad.

  “Help yourself to more beer, if you want. There’s a bottle of sauvignon blanc in the fridge that you could open. Get a tray from the cupboard up there, second from the right end, three glasses from the cabinet in the next room, and take it all outside. And get on the horn to your contacts and have the swine who’s behind all our aggro delivered trussed at the front door in fifteen minutes. Think you can manage all that?”

  Mike mumbled something about “smartass” but set about his tasks.

  Andrea reappeared and we all trooped outside. The barbecue was fired up and the garlic bread was heating, lemon and parsley wafted powerfully from the potatoes, and the composé elements of the salad – romaine, tomatoes, cucumber, yellow pepper, chopped onion, olives, plenty of rich dark olive oil, a generous pinch of dried oregano, and crumbled feta cheese – looked like they simply could not wait to be combined.

  Dinner was an utterly relaxed affair. Our surroundings looked on in approval. Filaments of conversation and discussion floated out over the lake at irregular intervals.

  Then Mike offered to clear the table. Andrea rose to help, but he waved her down again, piled everything onto a tray, and trundled off to the kitchen. Time for my heart-to-heart.

  I explained to Andrea the situation as we understood it, but leaving out everything related to my encounter with the diver two days earlier. She began asking questions, and I went through how we considered this was all linked to Harold’s death. The matter of the strange “treasure” came up, and I walked Andrea through the details of what I had dug up during the day, connected it back to my visit to Clarence and Donaldson, and then related to her the flash of insight I had had in the car driving back this afternoon from my shopping expedition to Coboconk.

  As it all sank in, Andrea became sombre, then shocked, and when she began to grasp the implications and the naked criminality of the whole thing, her anger flared, at whom exactly I wasn’t sure. But it’s a natural enough reaction when this kind of black slime oozes its way into one’s life. It was clear that she had grasped the realization that this was something having the potential to engulf both of us.

  “How did Harold find out about all this?” Andrea demanded.

  “I don’t know. That’s one of the things I want to determine.”

  “And these other people, whoever they are …?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “So how do we …? Are we just going to sit around and …?”

  “Andrea, I don’t like this any more than you do. I asked Mike to come here and help specifically because I have no intention of just sitting around.”

  “But, but … the police!”

  “The police have already closed the investigation into Harold’s death because they have no evidence and no expectation they will turn up any evidence. And since Harold’s death is viewed as an isolated accident case in the eyes of the police, then that’s it. There was no crime here.”

  “So far, but …”

  “Yes. So far. What I’ve just told you is my best speculation at what’s going on behind the scenes, and the police won’t turn up to look into anything unless there’s more than just speculation at play.”

  “Speculation? What use is speculation then?”

  I took Andrea’s hands in mine, looked at her for a few moments, hoping to avoid any further rise in temperature.

  “Whoever killed Harold did it for a reason. It isn’t just that they might have wanted him out of the way, because death by outboard motor would be a truly bizarre assassination method. But at the same time everything I’ve seen tells me that it wasn’t just an accident. The information that Harold passed along to George through his attorney, and the fact that Harold’s body was found where it was, just at the coordinates of one of the four points in Harold’s information, is not a coincidence. So, my first assumption is that there’s something near where Harold’s body was found that somebody else wants. My digging today through the paperwork from Clarence and Donaldson gave me one theory.”

  I related this theory to her and the reasons why I thought it was credible. She sat ruminating.

  “Try as I might”, I continued, “I’ve not been able to come up with any other theory that’s anywhere near as convincing. If I can determine what these people are looking for and why, then Mike and I have a much better chance of protecting us all.”

  “Yes”, Andrea said slowly in a resigned tone, but one that failed to cover the underlying anger and feeling of offence. “I can see, I think, that you’re doing all you have to do. But this really worries me. Are you sure there’s no other way?”

  We talked more. There were questions. It was painfully clear that I didn’t have all, or even most of, the answers. There were some long silences.

  Andrea is not in the least fatalistic or given to throwing in the towel early. She fixed me in a long look. Her hesitation and deep concern were clear. But the determination that I knew of old was back in her eyes once more.

  “What’s our next move?”

  “Well”, I began, “the more we know, the better off we are, so one activity is to dig like hell to find out more details of just who’s behind all this. If we have enough background information, it could be possible to go public with it and make it next to impossible for these clowns to continue operating under cover of a general lack of information. And if we can find the right kinds of information, then we can look for ways to drag the police back into things.”

  There was another long silence.

  “I’m sorry about all this. I didn’t want, or expect, any of this to happen, and now I just want to find a way to make it all go away.”

  She nodded.

  “What can I do?” she asked at length.

  I nodded in turn.

  “I’ll be working on this again tonight. Can you work with me?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  I squeezed Andrea’s hand, smiled at her, and she smiled back weakly.

  Rising suddenly, I shouted “Mike! More wine.”

  There was an ursine rumble from somewhere within the house, then Mike tripped down the stairs carrying our partly consumed bottle of sauvignon blanc and a replacement bottle.

  I looked at Andrea.

  “Which lamp do you suppose this genie came out of?” I asked, inclining my head toward Mike.

  Mike rumbled again, almost suppressed a belch, and plunked himself down at the table.

  “Drink up chill’un. Even though we have a problem to solve, it’s summertime, and the livin’ should be easy.”

  There were a couple of snorts from Andrea and me, and then we set to work on replenished glasses and watched Balsam Lake preparing to put itself to bed.

  Twenty-four

  Andrea and I sat together in our family room, and I walked her through my notes, referring to the Clarence and Donaldson files as I came to an important item. Although I knew the material intimately, Andrea didn’t. So I stepped through it all systematically in order to lay out for her a detailed picture of what I thought was going on and why I thought it. But I knew before an hour was up that Andrea was struggling. The effects of a long day of sustained physical activity, a good meal, a couple of glasses of wine, and the effort of having to put up with Mike’s and my company made the extra mental concentration she was trying to call forth now just a bit too much. Andrea struggled against her weariness, but when her eyelids fluttered a second time, I called off the exercise.

  “You’re beat, Andrea. You need to go to bed.”

  She wanted to argue. I know she was annoyed at not being able to muster the energy needed. She wanted to stay, I’m sure. I did need her help, and it really was energizing having her working next to me, but it wasn’t going to happen and she knew it.

  “I’m sorry”, she said. “You’re right. I just can’t do this”, and she rose to leave.

  “Don’t stay up too late”, she
said, then headed off wearily to bed.

  I sat there thinking about things for five minutes. I was feeling guilty, impatient, and frustrated, but I forced myself to go back to my notes.

  What more could I find out in all this?’ I asked myself. When it came right down to it, my rather vague speculations about a collection of aboriginal artefacts had unconvincing aspects, and the more I thought about it the less convincing it became. It felt like I was missing something.

  How else could I approach this? The question practically posed itself to me.

  Well, Whelan, my alter ego replied to me caustically, you could start thinking more incisively about all this nebulous treasure nonsense. What was McCleod really up to? Maybe he wasn’t the kind of artsy-fartsy flake you seem happy to assume he was. You could work on that for a start. Is it just possible that real money is behind it all? He couldn’t just transfer his money or his valuables around electronically like you can today. So how did he get his returns converted to something that was bankable, and how did he get all those somethings back to Toronto and to the bank?

  I thought about this for a while. McCleod had ships, and he shipped things in them.

  Bravo, Whelan! my evil alter ego muttered in the background. Not even Einstein would have been able to work that out!

  There was a sort of internal standoff at that point, an exchange of rough expletives at fifty paces between me and my alter ego. I won.

  So, ships were no real problem. McCleod or his agents would be paid in Toronto or at various points along the north shore of Lake Ontario as goods were either loaded onto or off the ships. Then there would be – what? Transfers of money or gold back to Toronto in the ships’ safes or strong boxes? But what about things that were then to be carried further by rail? The same thing? Payment at the ports or payment at the end stations? Then how would the money come back? In strong boxes on railway carriages?

  But McCleod also had boats where there were no railways, where the only means back and forth were his own boats. Presumably he would set up arrangements similar to those for his rail shipments. And in all these cases, we wouldn’t be talking about fortunes that had to be shipped back to Toronto. There would be dozens, probably hundreds, of small payments that had to be organized. So what if he lost one or two of these small consignments? We’d be talking about just a few thousand dollars in today’s money, hardly incentive enough to have driven everything we had seen. It seemed as though all this was a non-problem. The only fortune, the real treasure, would be what had accumulated in McCleod’s banks in Toronto.

  I dropped my pencil and gazed off into space for a moment. Snippets of text that I had come across in the files fluttered through my mind. I recalled more than one occasion where there was a note about money being shipped with care and under guard on a boat or ship. So presumably sometimes there were larger amounts of cash or gold that needed extra attention. Other lines and notes also came to mind. I recalled the item saying that McCleod had a serious setback – no, what had he called it, a disaster – during one of these shipments. Nothing new emerged. Could the disaster have been the loss of one of his collections of artefacts? He might well have considered something like that to be a disaster.

  Not being willing to admit that I was looking for something that wasn’t there, I had no option but to go back over the whole thing again from the top.

  Time check. Almost ten thirty. I would be here until well after midnight. But there was no other way, so I turned to a clean page on my note pad and prepared to root through it all again. Once more, with feeling.

  My cellphone vibrated. The display was just a number, a local number, but I had no idea whose.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mark. This is John Woodhouse.”

  There was a long delay here.

  “Hello? Are you there, Mark?”

  “Yes. Are you the John Woodhouse I went to primary school with? And were you sitting in The Repose four nights ago?”

  “Yes and yes.”

  “But … why? How?”

  “We should get together, Mark.”

  “When? Now?”

  “I’m in The Repose at the moment. Maurice will likely stay open for at least another hour. Come on down.”

  And then the line went dead. Just like that.

  I was mystified and annoyed but intrigued. Of course I would go and meet him.

  I let Mike know where I would be, picked up my keys, went out to the car, and headed off to Rosedale.

  There was no traffic. I didn’t meet even one car during the short five-minute drive, but when I arrived at The Repose I was slightly surprised to see at least ten cars parked among the oaks in front of Maurice’s place.

  I locked the car and went in. Maurice smiled from behind the bar, gave his signature friendly wave, then pointed toward the Salon Fénelon. I could see John, the same figure I had spotted when Andrea, Kate, and I were there, seated now on his own near the windows. He gave a wave of greeting and began to rise when I was about six feet from his table.

  We shook hands warmly, and looking at him closely I could see the face of the boy who had helped me overcome my problem with the dreaded Mick Ahearn all those years ago.

  “Have a seat”, John said, and just before sitting down himself, he waved to Maurice and pointed at his own glass of beer then at me.

  “How did you find me? And what made you want to get in touch after all this time?”

  “Not difficult, Mark. When I saw you here the other night, I made a promise to myself to get in touch. On my way here to The Repose, I suddenly thought on a whim that it was as good a time as any to contact you. So here I am. How are you?”

  I brought him up to date on the past twenty years. We talked in a roundabout way about Rosedale, Largs, and Coboconk, and then John filled me in on his story.

  He had studied at the University of Toronto, first modern languages, then law. He had passed his exams, met all the requirements for practising law in Ontario, and hung out a shingle in Toronto. He did well. But then someone local to Rosedale had heard that he was a practising lawyer and got in touch. There was a problem this individual wanted help on, and more out of curiosity than anything John agreed to take on the case.

  “It wasn’t much of a case. Some personal gripe. I contacted the other guy’s lawyer and we worked out an agreement. It took a while, but we convinced those two grumpy old sods that they weren’t going to get anything better. They signed.”

  Here John stopped. Fifteen seconds passed but he still just sat there.

  “And how does all that connect to you and me being here now?” I asked.

  John shrugged. “The other guy was a First Nations chap from Curve Lake. We talked. He told me there was history. Referred to a ‘document’. I dug out the background. Started reading it. Found out things.”

  By then I realized that John was a man of few words. I waited for him to go on. Then I made some “and then?” hand motions.

  “Just whispers, at first. Found some odd gaps in a few of the records. Came across a name.”

  John stopped again. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts, so I didn’t prod him.

  “All just handwritten notes. Then a pattern. Irregularities. It had to do with a young girl. I dug further. Two days more serious research. Found the same patterns but different cases. One of them was the last thing I expected.”

  John took a sip of his beer, set the glass down, looked at his hands, then fixed me in a steady gaze.

  “I’m Anishinaabe. Taken from my parents when I was one year old. Raised by Alf and Margery Woodhouse. I don’t know why or how this happened. You can guess the rest.”

  “Well …, no, I can’t, John. Is that all you know?”

  “There aren’t many facts, Mark. There’s a lot of rumour and insinuation.”

  I was beginning to guess that this was hard for John. In his own time, I thought.

  “The story is that my natural parents were both “drunk Indians”. There’s no evidenc
e for that, of course. My adoptive parents were good people. I can’t complain about my upbringing. Alf and Margery truly did love me and I have nothing but fond memories of them. But this information, well … it taints everything. Alf and Margery are both dead now. They left no records about me, so … no easy way to clear this up.”

  John had been looking off into the distance, but then he focused on me.

  “But then I said to myself, ‘You’re a lawyer, for God’s sake’. I started digging. Systematically. Appalling record keeping, almost non-existent. Connected the few dots I did have. Dredged up what I could. There was a birth certificate, for a boy. Born to Joseph and Amanda Longfeather. The date was my birthday. Joseph and Amanda are both dead now, far as I can tell. Found one more tatty record. Joseph and Amanda’s baby taken into protective care on May 18, 1980. Just a few weeks before I was adopted by Alf and Margery. The baby had a birthmark, just here, on the left side of his neck”, and as John spoke he pulled down his shirt collar to show me a birthmark at that location.

  There was a longish silence here.

  “I don’t know what to say”, I offered feebly.

  “Well, try on my shoes.”

  “Are you still looking?”

  John nodded.

  “I arranged for my practice to be looked after while I took three months off work. To research who I am.”

  “Wow! I still don’t know what to say.” But this time I didn’t know what to say because I still didn’t know how to ask him why this had anything to do with me.

  “I’m glad you took the trouble to look me up”, I said, if only as a means of trying to limp toward the light and some kind of understanding on just what was going on here.

  “Not getting ready to leave, are you, Mark? Because this will be a two-pint evening at least”, and here he waved again at Maurice, giving the universal signal for another round.

  To break another lengthening silence, I asked John where he was looking.

  “Pretty much anywhere I can think of, Mark. It’s a blank space, but it’s well contained. I’m still who I am. Still a lawyer. Still somebody who grew up here. Don’t know where I came from, that’s all.”