Thunder Bay

  “And you simply want to give this to him?” She seemed to think it was a sweet idea.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Do you wish to offer it for sale?” This seemed to strike her as not such a sweet idea.

  “No. I’d like to tell him a story that goes along with it, and to ask him something.”

  “Ask him what?”

  “That’s between him and me, Ms. Helprin.”

  She looked at the watch, then at me, her face young and uncertain.

  “If you could just show him the watch,” I said, “I’m betting he’ll see me.”

  Betting? That was a long shot.

  “Mr. Wellington is currently in a meeting. If you’d care to wait, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was a waiting room without reading material. I sat in the easy chair and stared at the exotic fish shooting through the water in the aquarium. For a long time, the only sound was the click of Ms. Helprin’s keyboard as she typed and the burble of the aerator in the fish tank. I thought about what I might say to Wellington: Your brother’s history isn’t what it seems.

  Or maybe it was. Maybe it was a well-known and well-kept family secret that Henry Wellington had been sired by a Shinnob. On the other hand, maybe it was all a horrible coincidence, and Henry Wellington had no connection whatsoever with Meloux.

  Fifteen minutes passed slowly. Without any apparent indication that her boss was free, Ms. Helprin stood up and said, “I’ll be right back.” She disappeared through another door. A couple of minutes later, she returned. “Mr. Wellington will see you now.”

  The man at the big glass desk in the inner office stood up to shake my hand. From what I’d learned on the Internet, I knew he was sixty-two years old, though he looked a decade younger. He was small and fit, with a crown of silver hair around a balding center. He wore an expensive gray suit, white shirt, red tie. His eyes were earth brown and sharp in their appraisal. In our conversation, he was succinct without being rude.

  “I appreciate your time, Mr. Wellington,” I said.

  “I can only spare a minute, Mr. O’Connor. Have a seat.”

  I sat in a chair with a curved, gray-metal back and a soft leather cushion that molded perfectly to my butt and spine. The office had a rich, spare feel to it. Not much furniture, all of it modern and well made. The wall behind Wellington was all glass, with a beautiful view of the bay and Sleeping Giant in the distance.

  “The watch, of course, intrigued me. You have a story that goes with it, I understand.” He folded his hands on his desk and leaned forward.

  “The photograph is of Maria Wellington, yes?”

  He nodded. “My father’s first wife.”

  “She wasn’t your mother, correct?”

  “That’s right. After her death, my father remarried. Do I get to hear the story?”

  “Only if your brother chooses to tell it to you. The man who gave me that watch and its story asked me to share it only with Henry Wellington.”

  “Ah.” He sat back and looked disappointed. “So it’s really my brother you’re trying to see.” His eyes narrowed. “Mr. O’Connor, my brother wants to be left in peace. A simple request. Yet he’s hounded mercilessly by people like you. I’m tired of all the schemes concocted to try to get to him. Exactly what tabloid do you work for?”

  “I’m not a journalist. I’m a private investigator.” I hauled out my wallet and handed him a business card. “I’ve been retained by the man who gave me that watch to deliver it and its history personally to Henry Wellington. This is important. My client is dying.”

  “The man’s name?”

  “That’s for the ears of Henry Wellington.” It was my turn to lean forward, not an easy thing in the curved chair. “Look, for a lot of years I was the sheriff of Tamarack County, down in Minnesota. If you need a character reference, I’d urge you to call the sheriff’s office. I’m not trying to scam you. It’s simply an unusual and pressing situation. Keep the watch for the time being. All I’m asking is fifteen minutes of your brother’s time. I guarantee that what I have to tell him, he’ll want to hear. It’s important to him. And urgent as well.”

  A man in his position, I figured, had to be able to size up circumstances—and people—quickly. Wellington considered for all of ten seconds, staring at the watch in his hand.

  “I can’t guarantee anything, Mr. O’Connor. Henry has the final say as to whether he sees you or not. And I can tell you right now, he sees almost no one these days.”

  “I can’t ask any more than that. Thank you.”

  “How can you be reached?”

  “My cell phone. The number’s on my card.”

  He stood up and offered his hand in parting. A gracious gesture, I thought. “Again,” he cautioned, “I make no promises.”

  “I understand. And the watch?”

  “It will be returned to you before you see my brother.”

  I was hoping he’d add something like “Scout’s honor,” but all he gave me was a steady stare as I walked to the door and left.

  TEN

  It was two thirty in the afternoon. I needed lunch. I went back to the marina, to the little restaurant/bar in the remodeled depot. I got a table on the deck overlooking the docks, ordered a Reuben and a beer, and stared out at the sailboats cutting across the bay. The wind off the lake was cool and pleasant.

  I got the Moosehead first, and while I drank it, I thought about what I’d accomplished so far. In two days, I’d identified the man I suspected was Meloux’s son, tracked him down, and had, I believed, a good shot at an interview. It seemed impressive. While I was more than willing to give myself credit for brilliant detecting, it felt too easy. Something was wrong with the picture, but I couldn’t exactly say what.

  The one solid fact was that the woman Meloux had called Maria Lima—not a common name in Canada, I was pretty sure—had become the first wife of Leonard Wellington. About her I felt certain. That she had a son named Henry who was born in the year and month when, according to Meloux, his own son would have been born had the distant possibility of coincidence. That I would be allowed to see this man who’d become Canada’s most notorious recluse seemed the biggest stretch.

  Yet that was exactly what Meloux had predicted. The watch would be my passport.

  I ate the Reuben, a pretty good one, and was working on my second beer when my cell phone rang. No information on caller ID.

  “O’Connor here.”

  “This is Henry Wellington.”

  “Mr. Wellington—” I began.

  “Be at the Thunder Bay Marina at three thirty, the end of dock number one. You’ll be met by a man named Edward Morrissey, my personal assistant. He’ll bring you to Manitou Island.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Mr. O’Connor, should you be tempted to speak to the media before or after your visit, rest assured I’ll see that you wish you hadn’t.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good.”

  “What about the watch?”

  “It will be in Mr. Morrissey’s possession.”

  Without so much as a good-bye, he was gone.

  I strolled down to the dock a few minutes early. Edward Morrissey was already there.

  He wasn’t an imposing man at first glance. Not tall—just under six feet. Dark curly hair. I put him in his mid-thirties. When I got closer, I saw that he was hard all over, well muscled, with a broad chest, narrow waist, thick arms, and a neck like a section of concrete pillar. He wore sunglasses and didn’t remove them. I saw myself, small, approaching in their reflection.

  “You O’Connor?”

  He’d been leaning against the railing of the dock, but came off when I neared him. He wore jeans, tight over buffed-up thighs, white sneakers, a black windbreaker.

  “That’s me.”

  “Morrissey,” he said. He didn’t offer his hand. “Supposed to take you to the island.”

  “I’m ready.”

  He stepped clo
se to me. “Lift your arms.”

  “What?”

  “I need to pat you down.”

  “I’m not carrying.”

  “I need to be sure. Also, I’ll be checking for any camera you might have hidden.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “You want to see Mr. Wellington?”

  I lifted my arms. While Morrissey went over me with his big hands, I noticed the woman on her sailboat a few slips down who’d talked with me that morning. She was sitting on a canvas deck chair, drinking from a beer bottle, watching the proceedings with amusement. She lifted her beer in a toast to me.

  “All right,” Morrissey said when he was satisfied I was clean. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re supposed to give me something.”

  Morrissey reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and brought out the little box that contained the watch. “This?”

  “Yes.”

  I held out my hand, but Morrissey slipped the box back into his pocket.

  “Mr. Wellington instructed me to deliver it directly to him,” Morrissey said.

  “The other Mr. Wellington promised me—”

  “I don’t work for the other Mr. Wellington.” He turned and walked toward the end of the pier, where a launch was waiting with a pilot at the wheel.

  Morrissey was dead silent most of the way out. He sat directly opposite me on the small launch, his arms crossed, the wind batting his curly hair and pulling at the collar of his windbreaker. His eyes behind the impenetrable dark of his shades might have been closed and he might have been sleeping, but I guessed not. I figured he was taking my measure. My assessment of Edward Morrissey was that he was less a personal assistant than a bodyguard, and the bulge under his black windbreaker wasn’t a whisk broom to dust lint from his employer’s black suit.

  We crossed the bay at a good clip. As we drew nearer Sleeping Giant, an island emerged, taking shape against the rugged backdrop of the peninsula. It lay, I guessed, a quarter mile off the mainland. It was relatively level and heavily covered with boreal forest, tall pines mostly. Finally I made out the white outline of a dock jutting into the lake. A few minutes later, the pilot at the wheel cut the engine and began to maneuver us in. We moved at a crawl, and when I looked over the gunwale of the launch, I understood why. Beneath the clear water of Lake Superior, I could see a series of wicked shoals through which the pilot was carefully navigating.

  From a kiosk at the far end of the dock, a man emerged and walked out to meet us. He wore white shorts, a white shirt, boat shoes. As we came nearer, I saw that he also wore a gun belt with a filled holster.

  The launch nosed up to the dock. Morrissey stood up and tossed a line to the man.

  When we were tied off, Morrissey said, “After you, O’Connor.” I disembarked. Morrissey was right behind me.

  The man on the dock returned to the kiosk. We met him there. He wrote something on a sheet attached to a clipboard, then said to me, “Lift your arms, please.”

  “Another pat down? I’ve already been through that routine with Morrissey here. Hey, I like a good tickle as well as the next guy, but come on.”

  The man had cold gray eyes. “Arms, please,” he said in a voice that told me he wasn’t amused.

  I suffered another body check.

  “You the one who gives out the hall passes?” I said when he’d finished.

  He went back to his clipboard, made another brief notation. “Stick with him,” he advised me, pointing toward Morrissey, “and there won’t be any trouble.”

  “This way, O’Connor,” Morrissey said.

  He stepped off the dock onto a path of crushed limestone that disappeared into the trees cloaking the island.

  ELEVEN

  This is the forest primeval. The towering pines and the hemlocks bearded like druids of eld ... something, something.

  Longfellow, I think. Jenny would have been able to quote the whole damn thing. Me, I could barely remember the first couple of lines. Primeval was right, though. The trees grew close together, tall and, in this place, forbidding. They formed a dark roof over us and a wall around us. Green-black moss crept over everything—the pines, the rocks, the rotting, fallen tree trunks. It was cool but not so quiet. I heard dogs barking somewhere in the trees. The only other sounds were the crunch of limestone under our feet and the sizzle of Morrissey’s windbreaker as he swung his heavy arms.

  He kept me in front of him.

  “Just stick with the path,” he said.

  Which didn’t follow a straight line, but wound through the trees so that periodically what was behind was as lost to me as what was ahead. After a few minutes, we walked into a large clearing. At the center stood a mansion built of stone. It was two stories with a couple of wings off the large center section. There was a portico with Greek-looking pillars, and on the second story each of the rooms had a balcony. Half a dozen chimneys pushed through the roof. I could see that gardens had brightened the grounds at one time, but now the plots were a tangle of wild undergrowth.

  I’d learned from my Internet research that Manitou Island had been the family retreat. After his wife’s death, Wellington had sold his luxurious home in Thunder Bay and retired to the island permanently. In the past five years, he’d been seen publicly on only a handful of occasions, the last nearly two years before.

  People were entitled to their privacy, but it also seemed that, like the banning of a book, the obsession with privacy increased the attraction of what could not be had.

  The few relatively recent photos that I’d found on the Internet were of a robed figure, druidlike, among the trees of Manitou Island. The white wisp the woman at the marina had spoken of.

  Morrissey’s hand on my back urged me forward.

  “I don’t know what’s in that box,” he said as we mounted the steps to the lodge, “but it must be something. Mr. W. sees nobody, I mean nobody, from the outside anymore.”

  He stepped ahead and opened the door, beckoning me to enter.

  The moment I was inside I caught the smell of disinfectant or bleach. It pervaded the place. Not overwhelming, but everywhere. It was also uncomfortably warm and stuffy.

  The common area we entered was a maze of stacked newspapers hip high, with a couple of narrow corridors running through it. Sheets covered the furniture, which had been pushed to the walls. Morrissey had pulled off his shades. He pointed toward the stairs beyond the clutter, and we maneuvered our way there. Upstairs, he directed me down a dark hallway to a door near the end of one of the wings. We entered a kind of anteroom. Morrissey went to another door and knocked.

  “Who is it?”

  “Morrissey, Mr. Wellington. I’ve got your visitor.”

  “Show him in.”

  Before we entered, Morrissey reached to a table beside the door and pulled a surgical mask from a small box there. He handed it to me. “Put this on.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You want to see Mr. W., you put on the mask.”

  I took it, and as I tied it around my face, Morrissey did the same with another. In addition, he took a pair of latex examination gloves from another box on the table.

  “Should I put on gloves?” I asked.

  “You planning on touching anything?”

  “Not intentionally.”

  “See that you don’t.”

  He opened the door and stepped in ahead of me.

  The gloom of the hallway, of the whole place, hadn’t prepared me for what lay beyond that door. The room was claustrophobic, tiny for such a great house. Jammed into it were a bed neatly made and covered with a snow white comforter, an easy chair of smooth white leather, an enormous television with a fifty-two-inch screen, a rolling garment hanger hung with nothing but white robes, and, lining the walls, stack upon stack of unopened Kleenex tissue boxes. The room was dark except for a tall standing lamp of highly polished steel that cast a small circle of cold light down around the easy chair. The chair faced the television, so all I could see was
its smooth white back.

  The television was on, tuned to a station broadcasting the intimate, unpleasant details of a heart operation. I watched the heart pump away inside the open chest cavity, while several hands in bloody surgical gloves worked around it with scissors and clamps. Everything in the gaping wound glistened, wet and raw.

  “Did you close the door?”

  The voice came from the chair, the same voice I’d heard from the hallway. It was thin and a little peevish, like a bad clarinet.

  “It’s closed,” Morrissey said.

  The bloody hands on the television gripped the heart, and I was afraid maybe they were going to pull it out of the body.

  The screen went black. I didn’t mind.

  The chair swiveled slowly, bringing me face-to-face with Henry Wellington.

  His hair was long and white, very much like Meloux’s. Although he wore a white robe, it was clear the fabric hung on a slender frame. His face, like mine and Morrissey’s, was half covered by a surgical mask. I tried to look into his eyes, to see if there was something of Meloux there, but his turning had put the lamp at his back and his face was deep in shadow.

  “Bring me the box,” he said to Morrissey.

  Like a good lackey, Morrissey stepped forward, took the little jewelry box from the pocket of his windbreaker, and, with his latex-covered hands, delivered it to Wellington. Then he retreated to the place where he’d stood before, just at my back.

  Wellington fumbled with the watch. For an engineer, he seemed oddly stumped by how to open such a simple mechanism. Finally he succeeded in freeing the catch. For a minute, he studied the photograph inside.

  “You have some story about the item and my mother?”

  “It’s for your ears only,” I said.

  “Leave us, Mr. Morrissey.”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Mr. Wellington,” Morrissey cautiously offered. “I think I should be here if you need me.”

  A reasonable argument from a bodyguard, I thought. Whatever else I felt about Morrissey, he was a man who took his job seriously.