Thunder Bay Read Online Free PDF Page A

into other parts of the world. He invested in diverse enterprises, among them the fledgling Canadian film industry. He became a popular escort (some reports said consort) of several stunningly beautiful starlets, one of whom he finally married. He was often referred to as the Howard Hughes of Canada. I searched until I found a date of birth, and after a calculation, realized Henry Wellington was seventy-two years old. Seventy-three winters, Meloux had said, dating his relationship with Maria Lima. Given the normal gestation period of nine months, Henry Wellington would be right on the money.
    He was still alive, according to the Internet, and living in Thunder Bay, Canada, where NMM was headquartered. He was a widower with two grown children. And that, according to the Web information, was part of the problem. His wife had died six years earlier, and in the time since, Wellington had become a notorious recluse. Again, the comparisons with Howard Hughes. Speculation was that the industrialist had gone into a deep depression following his wife’s death. Although he was still on the board of NMM, he no longer ran the company, nor did he appear in public. I couldn’t find any recent photographs of him, but I did find several taken earlier in his life. His hair was black, his face angular and high cheeked, his eyes dark and penetrating. Did he look like Meloux? Or like the photograph in Meloux’s gold watch? I honestly couldn’t say.
    Near the end, I found one odd, but compelling, piece of information that, as much as anything else, pointed toward a connection between Wellington and Meloux. As a child, one of Henry Wellington’s favorite possessions had been a stuffed cormorant given to him by his mother. The cormorant is one of the clans of the Ojibwe. Henry Meloux was cormorant clan.
    By the time I clicked off the computer, Annie had come home and both she and Jo had gone to bed. It was after midnight. Jenny was still out with Sean.
    I went to the kitchen and fished a couple of chocolate chip cookies out of the cookie jar on the counter. The jar was shaped like Ernie from
Sesame Street.
We’d had it since the kids were small. I poured some milk and sat down at the table.
    Moths crawled the screen on the window over the kitchen sink, seeking the light. Occasionally, I heard small thumps. The grasshoppers, who seemed never to sleep. Jenny hadn’t left for Iowa City yet, but the house felt different already, emptier.
    I could have gone to bed but didn’t feel like sleeping. I was thinking about Meloux, who had a son out there—an old man himself now— who’d been even less than a stranger to his father. And I was thinking about my own children, Jenny especially. I thought I knew them pretty well, but Jenny’s hesitation, if that’s what it was, to step forward into the future she’d worked so hard to open for herself worried me. It wasn’t like her. Sean was pressuring her, I figured. He was basically a good kid. I’d never been unhappy that he and Jenny had decided to date only each other. In my day, we’d called it going steady. Now it was “exclusive.” Whatever. Sean came from a good family. His mother was a math teacher, his father a pharmacist. They were Methodist, not Catholic; no big deal. Good kid and good family notwithstanding, I wasn’t going to stand by and let them make a mistake they’d both regret somewhere down the line. When you live in a town your whole life, you see the arc of those marriages that began with a high school romance. More often than not, when the teenage passion fades, and it always does, they’re left with the realization of all they wouldn’t know about themselves and others—lovers especially—and sooner or later one of them wonders and wanders and the marriage becomes history. Pathetically predictable.
    The front door opened. A half minute later Jenny stood in the kitchen doorway.
    “Still up, Dad?”
    “Couldn’t sleep. Have a good time with