Thunder Bay (34 page)

He said simply, “You’ve come a long way to talk to me. I’m listening.”

“When I was a young man,” Meloux told him, “I loved your mother, and she loved me.”

“My mother has been dead for sixty-five years.”

“You are wrong,” Meloux said. “In you, I can see that she lives still.”

Wellington studied the old Mide carefully but not with a cold eye. “Tell me how you knew my mother.”

Meloux told his story, much as he’d told it to me. As he talked, the box of sunlight on the polished floorboards changed. At one point, the wind rose slightly outside, and the sound of it through the pines was
a steady, distant sigh. I heard heavy thuds from a far part of the house, hut Wellington gave no sign that they were important. I wondered if there was someone else in the house besides Benning.

Wellington listened patiently and with an intensity that made me believe every word Meloux spoke was being processed and filed away and could be accessed a decade later, verbatim.

When Meloux finished, Wellington said, “I’m to believe that Leonard Wellington was not only not my father but was a killer as well?”

“No,” Meloux replied. “The killing is on my shoulders.”

“But he was a man with murder in his heart, yes?”

“That was one thing in his heart.”

“Do you have the watch?”

Meloux brought it out from his shirt pocket. Wellington crossed the room, and took it from him. He walked to a window that looked south across the lake. The late-afternoon sun struck him and seemed to ignite the white he wore. He looked at the photograph in the pocket watch for a long time.

“This is the only proof you have?” he asked.

“She gave me her love and I stole the watch,” Meloux said. “In their ways, they were gifts I did not ask for, but I took them gratefully.”

Wellington turned. I couldn’t read his face.

“I require more,” he said.

He and Meloux locked eyes. For the next half minute, it was as if Schanno and I didn’t exist.

“I will take you to Maurice’s cabin,” Meloux said.

“Now?”

“Now.”

Wellington studied the sky outside the window. “In four hours, it will be too dark to see.”

Meloux stood up. “Then you had better keep up with me.”

Wellington smiled. “Very well.”

He took a few minutes to change his clothes. Under Benning’s watchful eye, Meloux, Schanno, and I went out to my Bronco, where I put a few things into my day pack: a flashlight, three bottled waters, bug repellent, and my Swiss Army knife. For good measure, I took
Schanno’s loaded Colt from the glove box and slipped it in the pack. I didn’t know Wellington, and I hadn’t been able to read him. I didn’t know what his true agenda might be. It was possible he was simply as intrigued as he appeared to be. It was also possible that he planned to have us all whacked in the isolation of the woods. Whoever it was that had trailed us in the green SUV was probably lurking somewhere near. The weight of the Colt in the day pack gave me a measure of comfort.

“What do you think?” Schanno asked, coming around the Bronco as I shut the door.

“About Wellington?”

“Him, yeah, but I also meant about Meloux hiking to the ruins of this burned-down cabin.”

“Meloux hikes from Crow Point into Allouette all the time. A good ten miles round-trip.”

Meloux was standing not far away, but his attention was focused on the lake and the distant ridges. He didn’t seem to hear our conversation.

“Three days ago he was in the hospital, and word was that he wasn’t coming out,” Schanno said.

“Tell him your concern, if you want to.”

“My
concern? You think I’m not talking sense?”

“Try talking sense to Meloux. After everything he’s been through to get here, if he told me he was going to fly to this cabin, I’d say happy landing.”

“All right, how about this? It’s been seventy years since he was here, Cork. Hell, I can’t even remember what clothes I wore yesterday. You really think Meloux’s going to be able to find his way?”

“I guess we’ll see. By the way, your Colt Python is in the pack.”

“Good. I’ve been thinking about the guys in that SUV. Should we take the rifles?”

“How good are you with the Colt?”

“Pretty good,” Schanno said.

“Unless Wellington comes out with a bazooka, let’s stick with that.” I walked over to Meloux and risked intruding on his thoughts. “You doing okay, Henry?”

“I’m near the end of the journey, Corcoran O’Connor.”

“Can you tell he’s your son?” I thought about the faint copper color of Wellington’s skin and his dark eyes. They could have been from Shinnob blood, or just as easily from the Cuban blood of his mother.

Meloux didn’t answer immediately. The wrinkles around his eyes, already deep, went deeper as he stared at the log house. “My heart is out there waiting for his to come and meet it. We will see.”

That didn’t strike me as a resounding yes. Meloux had risked much to be here: his health, his life, and, because he’d admitted to murder, his freedom. I wanted the answer he gave me to be absolute and affirmative. I wanted him to say that the moment he set eyes on the man, he’d known Wellington was his son. All the evidence was there, yet I felt the old man holding back. To be a son, to be a father, these things were more than just a blood tie. Maybe that’s what the hesitation was about. Did the relationship matter if, in the end, Wellington didn’t give a damn?

Wellington came from the house and spoke to Benning on the front porch, a conversation too quiet to be overheard, then he joined us. He’d dressed rugged: L.L. Bean boots, Levi’s, a brown, long-sleeved Henley, and a camouflage jungle hat. He also carried a small pack. I wondered how much our loads might resemble each other.

“After you, sir,” he said to Meloux with what seemed to be genuine respect.

Meloux crossed the yard, heading west, parallel to the lake. Where the grass met the pines, he spent a few minutes studying the ground, then he was off, leading the way.

He didn’t burn up the woods with his speed, but he did keep a remarkably steady pace for a man who’d seemed ancient to me my whole life, and who, as Schanno noted, was lying in a hospital bed only days before. It helped that he was following a trail. It wasn’t well worn, but to an eye familiar with hunting or tracking, it was clear we were walking where others had walked before. This was August. The bugs swarmed: biting deerflies, blackflies, gnats, and mosquitoes. Schanno was slapping himself silly behind me, so we stopped and put on the DEET I’d brought. Wellington declined my offer to share the ointment, as did Henry. We crossed slender threads of creek water running silver between white rocks. In the middle of a small meadow,
Meloux stopped, not from weariness, I realized, but to take in the beauty of the lavender wild bergamot that grew in profusion and whose leaves filled the air with a refreshing mint scent. Smells are the time machines of human perception. A scent can take you instantly back to a particular place and time. Watching Meloux stand, transfixed, with his eyes gently shut, I wondered if, in that moment, he was a young man again, in love, walking through the meadow with Maria.

“Are you tired?” Wellington asked. “We can rest.”

Meloux opened his eyes. The moment was gone. He shook his head and we moved on.

We came to the gray, rocky slope of a long ridge, where the trail disappeared. Meloux studied the incline. We’d been hiking for nearly an hour without a significant rest. Despite the DEET, bugs kept landing on my neck, trying to lap at the sweat there. I was aware that Schanno had been keeping a wary eye on the woods at our backs, and he was doing that now. Wellington watched the old Mide with intense interest.

Meloux put his hand on the stone of the slope. “Over seventy winters, things change. Trees die, others grow, and the way becomes clouded. But rocks do not change so easy. The rocks, I remember. There,” he said and pointed upward toward a small, dark gray spire around which nothing grew. “I used to think of it as a
manidoo,
a spirit showing the way.”

With that, he began to climb.

There’s no adequate measure of the human spirit, no scale to weigh the courage of the human heart. Just when you think you’ve plumbed the depth, dredged the last bucketful from the well, you discover how wrong you are. Once, when I was a cop in Chicago, I was the first to respond to the report of a shooting in an apartment building on Hyde Street. I arrived at the scene, the third-floor hallway, to find a wounded man propped against a hissing radiator. He had a bullet in his heart. Two more had shattered bone in his chest and lodged somewhere deep in his internal organs. The bare floor under him was slick with his blood. A dead man lay at his feet, a .38 Ruger near his outstretched hand. The dead man’s windpipe had been crushed. A small boy peeked from the doorway of the nearest apartment.

“Daddy?” he whispered toward the wounded man.

Somehow, from somewhere unimaginable, that father found the strength to smile. “’S okay, Boo,” he said. “He won’t hurt you.”

And if that weren’t miracle enough, he managed to reach out and hug his son, who ran to him before I could prevent it.

It had been about drugs, about threatening the boy, and finally about what a father would do to protect his son. The wounded man died. The truth was that he was dead even as he crushed his killer’s windpipe to keep his son safe, but he’d tapped the deep reservoir of strength that lay behind his love for his child, and he’d done what, as a father, he needed to do.

I watched Meloux haul his ninety-year-old body up the ridge, and I knew that at that moment there was more to his strength than could be accounted for by those long walks from Crow Point to Allouette. It was possible, I supposed, that he might kill himself in this effort, but I understood there was no way any of us could stop him.

We climbed out of the shadow of the ridge and into the sunlight of early evening. It was seven thirty
P.M
. So far north, the sun would still be around for quite a while. Meloux led us down the other side, into shade again, and onto a trail that ran along a rushing stream.

Ten minutes later, we entered a clearing grown over with fire-weed and lupine. On the far side stood an old log structure, five feet wide and twice as long. The roof had collapsed decades before, but the four walls were still solid.
The smokehouse,
I thought.

We were in a deep trough between two hills. Sunlight hit the higher slopes and the pine trees there burned yellow and I heard crows arguing in the branches. Where we stood, everything was shadow and silence.

Meloux walked ahead slowly, parting the deep weed cover, peering carefully. Finally he stopped and turned back to us. “Here,” he said, indicating the ground at his feet. “Here, I cut the throat of the man who was my friend. And here, I put a bullet in the heart of a man who was not.” He turned to his right and went a couple of dozen paces, then walked in a slow circle. Finally he signaled for us to come.

As I neared him, I saw, deep in the tangle of undergrowth, the long black bones of burned timbers half buried in the earth.

“Dig here,” he instructed. “It should not be deep.”

Schanno and I pulled the weeds, then got on our knees and began to dig with our hands. Three or four inches down, we hit solid wood. We scraped the dirt away, revealing rotted floorboards. Because I knew his story, I knew what Meloux expected to find, and we kept scraping at the dirt until we uncovered the thing.

“Here it is, Henry,” I said. I took the knife from my day pack and ran the blade along the slits that outlined the trapdoor. I poked until I located the hole where a strand of rope had once served as a handle, and I cleaned it out. I glanced up at Meloux.

“Open it,” he said.

I jabbed my index finger into the hole and lifted. The door resisted at first, then gave. The cool, earthy smell of trapped air escaped. The light in the clearing was waning, and the pit below the trapdoor was too dark to see into clearly.

“In the pack,” I said to Schanno. “My flashlight.”

He dug it out and handed it over. I flicked it on and shot the beam through the opening of the trapdoor. The pit appeared to be a cube three feet wide and deep. It was filled with deer-hide bags gone brittle with time, each as large as a softball. A quick count gave me a dozen.

I stood back. “Care to take a look, Mr. Wellington?”

I held the flashlight while he knelt and reached into the pit. The bag he grasped fell apart as he lifted it and dull yellow sand spilled out.

“I’ve never seen gold dust,” I said, “but I imagine it looks pretty much like that, doesn’t it?”

Wellington stood up. “Put the trapdoor back.” He studied the sky. “We should start home. It’ll be dark soon.”

He didn’t look at Meloux, just turned and headed toward the trail along the stream.

I lowered the door back into place. Quiet as a congregation leaving a church, we abandoned the clearing.

W
e moved more slowly on the return and didn’t make it back to the log home before nightfall. Wellington pulled a powerful light out of his pack and led the way. I brought up the rear with mine. Wellington had no trouble following the trail, faint as it was, and I figured this wasn’t the first time he’d been to the burned ruins in the little clearing. We stopped often for Meloux to rest. He’d proved his point, and now he was feeling the physical cost of the journey. I shared the bottles of water in my pack. Wellington had brought his own. He also had trail mix, which he offered around. We didn’t speak except for the necessity of safety: “Careful of that log,” or “Watch your step.” When I finally saw the lights of Wellington’s place ahead of us, I felt a deep relief.