Thunder Bay (27 page)

Schanno was waiting for us on his front porch. He had a black nylon carry-on that appeared fully stuffed. He also had a zippered vinyl rifle bag.

“I brought my Marlin and scope,” he said as I opened the tailgate. He put the rifle inside, next to mine. “I didn’t know what we’d need.”

“I’m hoping we can do this smart enough not to need any firepower.”

“Are you carrying?”

“Brought my rifle, that’s all. You can’t take a handgun into Canada. To get the rifles across the border, we’ll have to convince them we’re coming up to hunt.” I watched him toss in his black bag. “You’re not carrying, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. Getting to Wellington is going to be all the trouble we need.”

Schanno opened the back door. “Well, hey there, fella.” He ruffled Walleye’s fur and slid in beside the dog. “Morning, Henry.”

Schanno was damn near chipper, the most animated I’d seen him since Arietta’s death.

“Walleye going with us?” he asked, as if the idea of taking an old dog along was perfectly okay with him.

“We’re dropping him off at my place. Stevie’s going to take care of him for Henry.”

“Good. A boy needs a dog, Cork.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Meloux’s smile.

“Where’s that dog of yours? Trixie?” I asked.

“Boarding her with Sally Fellows until I get back.”

Stevie was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the house. When he saw me coming down Gooseberry Lane, he jumped up. I pulled into the drive, and he ran to greet us. He opened the door in back. Walleye popped out. Stevie hugged him and buried his face in the old dog’s soft fur. Meloux and Schanno both gave me pointed looks.

Jo came out the front door. She walked to the Bronco and leaned through the driver’s door, which I’d left open when I got out.

“Anin,
Henry,” she said.

“Anin,”
he replied.

“Good morning, Wally.”

“Jo.” He gave her a big, rather dopey grin.

“Thank you,” she said to him.

“My pleasure.”

“You’ll be careful?”

“Old pros,” Wally said.

She turned to me. “Call.”

“I will.”

She hugged me. Stevie and Walleye trotted off together toward the backyard. I got into the Bronco, backed out of the drive, and returned the final wave Jo gave me.

Then I took us north toward Canada.

C
anadians are sensible about firearms. They don’t like them. They don’t like the idea of their fellow citizens owning them. They’ve passed laws that give good, sharp teeth to gun control. The United States has a homicide rate three times that of Canada; two-thirds of those homicides are committed with firearms. A child in the United States is twelve times more likely to die of a firearm injury than a child in Canada. I could go on. The evidence in support of Canada’s attitude and legislative action is so convincing only an idiot wouldn’t get it.

For much of my life I’ve been a cop. I own a handgun. It was my father’s before it was mine. He wore it on his hip when he was sheriff of Tamarack County. I did the same. I have hunted all my life. I feel comfortable handling a firearm. Too many people don’t really get that a gun is made to kill. You can use it for target practice, sure, but it’s like a lion on a leash, a bad gamble that it won’t turn and draw innocent blood. An enormous percentage of people who are injured or killed by gunshot wounds are hit by a bullet that wasn’t meant for them or even meant to be fired in the first place. They’re accident victims. I’m not a gun-control freak, but even as a law officer I was all for getting firearms out of the hands of the ignorant and out of the reach of the criminally minded.

So I understood, in theory, the paperwork and the scrutiny the Canadian customs people put us through in order to get our rifles across their border.

It was black bear season in Ontario, and customs officials at the entry point north of the Pigeon River were used to hunters. Our problem was that none of us had a hunting license. I was able to give
the woman who reviewed our firearms declarations the name of a lodge well north of Thunder Bay that, as a kid, I’d visited with my father, and I told her the outfitter had promised to obtain licenses for us. Although I knew that kind of arrangement wasn’t unusual, I wasn’t sure if she was going to buy the story.

Finally she addressed Meloux, who’d sat quietly while Schanno and I were being grilled.

“Are you hunting, too, Grandfather?”

Her hair was red-brown, her eyes moss green. She didn’t look Shinnob. But neither do I.

“I am going to visit my son,” Meloux said.

“Where does he live?”

“In Thunder Bay.”

“These men are taking you?”

“Yes. It is kind of them.”

“How long will you stay?”

“I do not know. He may not want to see me.”

She looked concerned. “He should see you out of respect.”

“We’ll make sure it happens,” I put in.

She approved our declarations and sent us on our way with a final word to Meloux. “Enjoy your visit, Grandfather.”

“I will, Granddaughter.”

As we drove away from the border entry, Schanno let out a low whistle. “Lucky she was Ojibwe.”

“Lucky?” Meloux laughed quietly.

With the change to eastern standard time, we hit the outskirts of Thunder Bay at half-past three. It was hot and humid, and a mean-looking bank of black clouds was bullying its way into the western sky. I drove to the marina off Water Street, where I’d met Morrissey and the motor launch that had taken me to Manitou Island. I parked in the lot near the renovated train depot. We walked to the end of the first dock, where there was a small observation area overlooking the bay.

“Where’s the island?” Schanno asked.

I pointed beyond the breakwater toward the great ridge on the peninsula in the distance. “It’s nestled up against Sleeping Giant.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“It’s hard to distinguish from the mainland behind it. Here.” I handed him the Leitz binoculars I’d pulled from the back of my Bronco.

Schanno put them to his eyes and held steady for a minute. “Nope. Still don’t see anything.”

“Believe me, it’s there.”

“He’s
there,” Meloux said. His old eyes were intense, as if he could actually see his son on the far side of all that blue water.

“You’re close, Henry,” I told him.

Schanno handed back the binoculars. “How do we get across the bay?”

“In a boat.”

“And what boat would that be?”

“One we rent, probably.”

“Big bay, lot of water to cross.” Schanno didn’t sound excited. “Any way to come at it from the Sleeping Giant side?”

“As nearly as I can tell from the map, there’s no harbor there. This is pretty much it.”

“Where do we rent the boat?”

“This is a marina. They’ve got to rent boats somewhere.”

“Any idea where?”

“No, but I know someone who could probably tell us.”

I led them to the slip where Trinky Pollard docked her sailboat. The boat was tied up, but I didn’t see Pollard on deck.

“Ahoy, Trinky!” I called.

“Ahoy?” Schanno said.

“I saw it in a movie. Trinky!” I tried again.

“What now?” Schanno said.

“Find an office and ask, I guess.”

“Well-thought-out plan of action,” Schanno noted.

“Remember, you volunteered.”

We headed back toward the depot and the shops. As we approached, I heard a voice call out, “O’Connor?”

Trinky Pollard stood in the doorway of the Waterfront Restaurant, the little bar and grill at the end of the complex.

“Trinky, it’s a pleasure to see you again,” I said as we approached.

She shook my hand and eyed my companions.

“This is Wally Schanno and Henry Meloux, friends from back home. Guys, this is Trinky Pollard.”

“I was just having a beer inside,” she said. “Care to join me?”

“We’ll take a rain check on that, Trinky. Right now we’re in the market to rent a boat.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Another visit to Manitou Island?”

“Yeah.”

“In a rented boat?” She looked at me knowingly. “No official invitation this time, I take it.”

“Not exactly.”

She was wearing a white billed cap over her silver hair, a T-shirt that said
HARD ROCK CAFE LAS VEGAS
, dungarees, and boat shoes. She stood in the doorway considering things.

“I think I know a boat with a captain who’d take you—if she had a better idea of what’s going on,” she said.

I glanced at Schanno and Meloux. I figured Henry didn’t care one way or the other, but I wanted to be sure about Wally.

He shrugged. “If I’m going to be out on that lake, I’d just as soon be on a boat with someone who knows what she’s doing.”

I turned back to Pollard. “If you’ve got the boat, Captain, I’ve got the crew.”

We sat on the deck of her sailboat drinking cold Labatts from a cooler. I told her what had happened on my last visit to the island and what had happened since. Then I gave her the salient details of Meloux’s connection to the recluse across the bay.

“And your part in this?” she asked Schanno.

“I’m here as a consultant.”

She laughed, an agreeable sound. “Now there’s a word that tells people absolutely nothing.”

“Wally was a cop, too,” I explained. “County sheriff for a while before he retired.”

“Really? You look too young to be retired,” she said, which clearly pleased Schanno. “You’re here to watch Cork’s back, I’ll bet.”

“That I am.”

She glanced at me and tilted her head slightly to let me know she approved of my choice in backup.

“Your wives, they’re okay with this?”

“Jo understands.”

Schanno said, “I’m a widower. My wife passed six months ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

While we sat, the wind had risen, and the bay had filled with whitecaps. Thunderheads tumbled out of the west like a stampede of black bulls.

“And you think that despite what the Canadian police have said, Wellington’s on his island and at the bottom of all this?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

Trinky Pollard appraised the sky. “If we’re going to make it today, we need to cast off soon.”

I put my beer down. “I wasn’t thinking we’d sail over in daylight.”

She nodded at the clouds pouring in from the west. “Unless you want to wait until tomorrow night, we need to beat this storm. We’ll anchor on the lee side of the island. It’s not unusual for a sailboat to use Manitou as a windbreak. Come dark, we’ll be very close to our objective.”

“Our?”

“Take it or leave it,” she said.

“I don’t know how much help we’ll be in a storm. We’re not exactly old salts.”

“A good captain can sail with a crew of kangaroos.” She stood up. “Look lively, mates. We’ve got work to do.”

A
s soon as we were clear of the breakwater, Pollard turned off the boat’s engine, and we hoisted sails. With Pollard at the wheel and the wind hard at our backs, we shot toward Manitou Island just ahead of the storm. Meloux sat on deck looking so calmly at the rough water that you’d have thought he was on a pleasure cruise in the Caribbean. I didn’t know a jib from a spinnaker, but Trinky Pollard was clear when she issued her orders, and the bow of the sailboat cut through the whitecaps with exhilarating grace.

“Ever lost a boat?” I called above the wind and the slosh of the waves breaking against the hull.

She kept her eyes on the island ahead. “No. But then I’ve never sailed in water this rough before.”

I figured it had to be a joke. The look on Schanno’s face said he wasn’t so sure.

“Don’t worry,” she called out. “Do exactly as I say and we have a better than even chance of making it.”

Behind us, the storm hit the city. I watched a curtain of rain close over the buildings of the central district of old Port Arthur, then it overtook the huge, abandoned industrial works along the shoreline. A tongue of lightning shot from the black clouds and licked the water half a mile back. Seconds later came the boom of thunder, and I couldn’t tell if the quiver that ran through the deck was the shock wave or just another jolt from the hull as the bow split the whitecaps.