Balsam Sirens Page 25

  “Yes”, I said in response to Andrea’s question. “James Donaldson was indeed Arthur Donaldson’s nephew. The elder Donaldson told me that himself when I went to meet him. And as we passed a few minutes, James Donaldson was quite happy to reveal that he had been working with his uncle for about six months and was keen to learn more about the business.”

  “But why did he come to work at Clarence and Donaldson just when he did?” Andrea asked.

  “Well, I don’t know for sure”, I said, “but I’ll bet that he got wind of a ‘McCleod gold’ story and wormed his way into the office to see if he could find out whether it was true. Evidently he learned enough to convince himself that there was a fortune out there and it could be his for the taking.”

  “But how did Dickson get involved then?”

  “I’m doing quite a bit of guessing here, Andrea. Jocko’s information indicates that James was not only a gambler but a player on many fronts. A very slippery fish. My bet is that he got to know quite a few underworld types, but he also dug out their backgrounds. I doubt very much that James would ever get his own hands dirty, and it would also be my bet that he would dig out the backgrounds, all the warts, on anybody he hired to do something. He seems to have been accomplished both in dangling the carrot and in wielding the stick.”

  “So”, Andrea said, after a long pause while she reflected and looked out over the lake, “how did James convince Dickson to play along, and how did he know he could trust Dickson?”

  “I’m pretty sure now that James never did trust Dickson. And I expect he got him to go along by giving him almost the complete picture on the gold and making himself look, in Dickson’s eyes, like a sucker who could be duped.”

  “But how could he … how could James be sure about …?”

  “I believe that the basic reality here, Andrea, is that Dickson and James Donaldson were both psychopaths, but in the psychopath stakes Dickson came in second. Dickson probably thought all along that he was outsmarting James, a sissy who wrinkled his nose at any wet work, but really it was James in the driver’s seat all the time. I doubt that James would have let Dickson get out of it alive no matter what happened.”

  “But now James Donaldson is dead. Was all this just pointless violence? At the end of it, Dickson didn’t find the gold, so James Donaldson didn’t know where it was or even if it existed. Seems like he wasn’t that bright after all.”

  “That’s where it gets interesting. We assume that James didn’t know where the gold is. But that assumption likely is wrong.”

  Andrea blinked, in stunned silence, trying to make sense of what I had said.

  “Just listen to this guy!” Mike said through a huge grin. “I just love this stuff! He can spin these tales without any effort. But the kicker is that most of the time he’s right.”

  Andrea shook her head, not really listening to Mike, trying to fit all the pieces together.

  “It appears that James Donaldson was a gambling addict”, I continued. “But he was also, I suspect, a very accomplished white-collar criminal. I doubt that he ever lacked for money. And like a lot of high rollers, I expect he enjoyed the thrill. But McCleod’s gold would have been the real deal for him. All he needed to do was wait until the fuss over Dickson died down, then he could quietly go and collect his gold.”

  “But couldn’t Dickson have just come clean and told the police about James?”

  I shook my head.

  “Dickson almost certainly didn’t know him as James Donaldson, probably never even saw his face. Dickson might well have worked out that he had been screwed, but he had no credible story that the police would buy.”

  “You told me earlier”, Andrea began, “that you thought James was headed for the airport. Where do you think he was going?”

  “I’m not entirely sure, but he might have been off to hide in the Caribbean until things settled down.”

  “What makes you think it was the Caribbean?”

  “Jocko did some digging for me. He found that James had made six identical trips over the past four years. He had flown to London then taken a flight from there to Aruba.”

  “Why not fly directly to Aruba from here?”

  “I think he wanted to stay out of the direct view of US authorities.”

  “Why Aruba?”

  “I doubt that he was interested in Aruba”, I said. “I think that from there he probably hired a plane to fly him to a financial haven, likely Grand Cayman. I suspect he had quite a wad stashed away there, and once he had converted the gold to currency it would have ended up there as well.”

  Andrea just shook her head.

  “It’s incredible! How did you work out all this?”

  Mike was about to say something, but I held up my hand to stop him.

  “It’s patterns. I see patterns. And there are key points in patterns. If you can confirm that the information at those points is correct, the probability that the pattern reflects something real goes way up.”

  Andrea didn’t ask how it came about that James was eliminated by the crowd that held his gambling debts. I had already told her how, with Jocko’s help, I had planted the suspicion that he was about to vanish, and the chances were very good that once that happened he would have been impossible to find.

  So, indeed, I had condemned him.

  Forty

  Our remaining time at Largs was well-spent. One of those days stood out. Andrea spent it with Kate. I spent it with John Woodhouse. And that evening, all five of us, Andrea, me, Kate, Mike, and John, got together for a memorable meal at The Repose.

  And I did a lot of thinking about the future.

  Mike remained with us the whole time, and we had one more session thrashing through the remaining details of the case.

  It was a representative warm late summer afternoon. Andrea, Mike, and I were out at the picnic table, nibbling on raw vegetables and dip, sipping wine, being soothed by lake sounds, and drifting toward an evening meal of grilled fish.

  “At one point”, Andrea began, “it seemed to me that you felt this whole business revolved around the Daniella and where she had settled out there on the lake bottom.”

  “It did look like that”, I said. “At one point, we considered ourselves lucky that Dickson had access only to general public information. We felt that he might have twigged that the Toronto Archives would have something worthwhile, but it seems that he never did make that connection. I think it was the newspaper article that made the case for him. The one where McCleod lamented the loss of his favourite lake boat, the Daniella, and then went on to say that there was only one occasion when he suffered disaster. He didn’t actually say that he had lost something of great value when the Daniella went down, but he made it very easy for anybody to think that was the case. The assumption that old McCleod’s comments invited was not only plausible, it was convincing. But it was aimed at people in the middle of the nineteenth century.”

  I paused here.

  “But at that point, we knew nothing about James Donaldson and the role he might have played. By then it might also be the case that Dickson’s mental state was crumbling. Maybe he had begun to suspect that he’d been hopelessly outflanked by James, or whoever he knew him as. Maybe he was losing his grip on the world, or maybe his ability to process information was degrading. I don’t know. He might just have been descending into the most horrific psychopathic darkness. Or maybe he was just overwhelmed by his own greed.”

  “What was it that McCleod actually had done?” Mike asked.

  “Well”, I began, “he was so secretive and devious that we might never know that. But I think that he was concerned about getting the value from his land in Hastings County into a bankable form and getting that money into his bank in Toronto.”

  “But what’s so special about Hastings County?” Andrea asked. “Why would land there be particularly valuable?”

  “In the normal course of events, land would have low value there”, I said, “but there was a gold rush there in
1860, and old McCleod took advantage of it.”

  “Gold? So he was after gold?”

  “No”, I said. “He knew that going after gold was a mug’s game. He bought a lot of land before gold fever really got going, when it was still fairly cheap. Then he sold it when land prices skyrocketed and everyone wanted someplace, any place, to stake a claim.”

  “He really was a crafty old devil!” Andrea said, almost admiringly.

  “He certainly was”, I said. “But he was surrounded by a strange social landscape that he had to navigate. Everybody knew of McCleod then. They knew he was successful, and they knew he was rich. Given that nobody ever seemed to know just what he was up to. I doubt that anyone considered him an easy target, but I think he worried about being exactly that – an easy target. So, he wanted his rivals and his enemies to be unsure about what he had done with the money he had extracted from his land holdings, which they would assume had been converted to gold. That gold might have been lost somewhere in Balsam Lake or might be somewhere else. McCleod was almost paranoid and a master at disinformation. He might have overestimated the risks from his rivals and those who envied him. He almost certainly did. He could have had no way of knowing that his disinformation would set in motion a series of events a hundred and fifty years later.”

  Mike was nodding.

  “But then”, Mike said, “we know a fair bit about what happened when and where concerning the Daniella, or at least we think we do. Why has it proved so difficult, then, to locate this sunken boat and to find the place where its treasure might be, if that treasure actually exists?”

  I pondered Mike’s question as I got up to refill glasses.

  “We need a baseline here. And that baseline is that almost nobody today is interested in the history of steamboats on Balsam Lake. Hell, very few people even know that they existed. So, far from there having been an army of treasure hunters out there over the years, the reality is almost complete ignorance. The Balsam Lake of yesteryear, and what happened on it, has pretty much sunk without trace today.”

  I paused here, as much to formulate what I would say next as to let what I just said sink in.

  “It’s against that background that we need to distinguish between what Dickson knew and what James Donaldson knew. Dickson apparently wanted jam today, and he would do anything to get it. James Donaldson likely was in no rush. If he knew only the approximate location of the Daniella, that would have been good enough for him. He could wait until the excitement over Dickson died down and then come back and search at his leisure.”

  “But the question still remains”, Mike said, “why Dickson apparently couldn’t find the Daniella.”

  “I’ve thought a lot about that, Mike. And I’m afraid that I just don’t know.”

  I refilled all our glasses, then looked at my glass contemplatively.

  “It might be just that –”, but then I stopped abruptly.

  Andrea told me later that it had taken me a while to answer her prompts and that finally Mike had poked me with an elbow.

  “Hey, kid! Wake up! You can’t just fall asleep like that in the middle of a discussion.”

  But it was Andrea who tuned in first.

  “I don’t think he was daydreaming. You weren’t, were you, Mark?”

  “No. I wasn’t. And I think I might just know the explanation, at least to that question. It’s your glass of wine, Mike.”

  Their expressions were nonplussed.

  “Refilling the glasses just now made me recall something. And I think it might be the key. When they completed the Trent-Severn Waterway, they made some changes. One of those changes was needed for the Kirkfield Lift Lock to work. They had to raise the water level in Balsam Lake by eight feet.”

  “And?” Mike asked when I failed to continue the explanation.

  “Prior to that change in lake level, the reef out there”, and I pointed toward the lake, “would have been visible. It would possibly have stuck several feet out of the water. That’s not something that anybody could have driven a boat onto unknowingly.”

  We all looked at one another.

  “But those numbers that were on the sheet Harold passed to George. They pretty much pinpoint that very reef!”

  “Yes”, I said. “They do, Mike. But even that number of decimal places doesn’t pinpoint a location exactly. At best it indicates a range, and that range varies depending on latitude. Plus, we don’t know where he got those numbers from.”

  “So where do you think the remains of the Daniella are?”

  “No real idea, Mike. But I’d wager that the high point of the reef extends quite some distance either way from the point we’ve been focusing on. The Daniella could be anywhere along there.”

  Mike nodded, convinced. He didn’t need anything more detailed than that as an explanation.

  In due course, Mike got ready to go back to Toronto. Andrea gave him a long thank-you hug and extracted a promise from him to spend time with us later at our condo in Toronto. We had one more beer together, and then Mike asked his one remaining question.

  “How did McCleod get so much gold to Largs?”

  I had spent a lot of time thinking about that.

  “Well, there’s no certainty that there was ever any gold here at all. When McCleod sold his Hastings County stakes, he did have to get his profits back to Toronto. The most direct way was south to Peterborough and then by one or more routes to Lake Ontario and on to Toronto. But there were other possibilities. The Gull River was always a good north–south travel route. And McCleod had a lot of dealings in furs, so he had trappers and agents through what is now northern Victoria County and parts of Haliburton, Hastings, and Peterborough Counties. It wouldn’t have been difficult for some of his agents to pass through or near Madoc. A steady trickle of McCleod’s profits from land sales, probably in the form of gold, could have, and I stress could have, made its way from Hastings County to Largs. You can imagine what kinds of problems would be associated with that approach, but it’s conceivable. It’s not hard to imagine that there were quite a few unscrupulous buggers who had suspicions about what McCleod was up to, knew that he had to get his profits out, and would have been more than prepared to help themselves, and that McCleod was aware of all this. But old McCleod seems to have kept everyone guessing.”

  “So”, Mike said, after a short pause, “there might never have been any gold at all, shipwrecked or otherwise.” He shook his head a couple of times. “Just a siren song. With consequences to match.”

  “That might be the case. Or maybe there was gold, at least here in Largs, and McCleod managed to get it all out in the Jackson on one trip or in several trips. Or maybe he really did lose it somewhere out there in the lake. He made a big public deal about the Daniella going down, and everyone knew that it had gone down. They just didn’t know what was on it. Even the story about a steam leak could have been a ruse. Old McCleod really did keep them all guessing.”

  “Are you going to keep looking for it?” Mike asked.

  “Well, I can hardly keep looking for it because I haven’t been looking for it. No, I think I’ll keep going through McCleod’s records. There’s a good chance that I’ll be able to show that all his profits did make it to Toronto and that there wasn’t any gold lost here in the lake.”

  “That likely won’t stop people speculating and thinking that there really is a store of lost gold out there on the bottom of the lake.”

  “You’re almost certainly right”, I said. “Look at the story of the Ghost Island treasure, still alive and well after two hundred and fifty years.” And it was precisely because of the attraction of that kind of story that James Donaldson would have continued to be a serious potential danger to Andrea and me.

  After Mike had left, Andrea and I continued our own personal discussions. Some of these discussions were long. Some of them were full of anguish. Over the previous two weeks, I had come to the searing realization that too much of my thinking and too many of my actions – far to
o many – were self-centred to a degree that had put Andrea, the best thing in my life, at serious risk, and that Mark Whelan had a lot of reflecting to do.

  Consequently, many of these discussions were about my work, about me, about us.

  But these soon expanded to cover the world we lived in and continue to live in, about the people who inhabit it – good people, blameless people caught wrong-footed by events, innocent and defenceless people, irresponsible people who are neither particularly good nor particularly bad, amoral and grasping people, twisted and damaged people, and then the people who could really be called nothing other than evil. The whole glorious and ghastly spectrum offered by the human race.

  We talked about George. About what had happened to us as a result of my taking on his case. About what might have happened had I decided not to take him on. About the many possible ways that evil can rise up from the muck and engulf us. About the limited extent to which we can prevent this happening. About how far we should go to help other good or innocent people and how much we should put ourselves at risk.

  There were no good answers. There were few answers that were even marginally acceptable. There was mostly just a big grey area where nobody really knew what the hell was going on.

  I had spent a lot of time, on my own, going through what had happened, trying to determine whether there were things I could or should have done to change the outcome. Many things are possible in hindsight. Putting myself back into those times in the past days, would a less self-centred outlook have made me less willing to assume that everything would work out all right? Possibly. But I honestly couldn’t see what alternative actions I might have taken that would have made a great difference to the eventual outcome.

  It was clear that Andrea had spent a lot of time reflecting as well. She faulted me for not letting her in on the whole picture earlier, but eventually, reluctantly, she came to the conclusion that this, by itself, likely would have made no real difference to the ultimate result. She knew why I did what I had done, but she still was unhappy, unsettled. She knew that we were not the ones who had suffered most, far from it. We talked a long time about this, particularly about our responsibilities to each other, given how our lives could be invaded in the ways we had just seen. We spent time considering our responsibilities to others. I spoke at length about my responsibility to Andrea. And I ended by saying that it would be best for me to wrap up my PI business and do something else.