declined.
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.
