needed to kick in a lot. I was hoping the PI license might help toward that. All the pieces of the crazy jigsaw puzzle of her educational financing had fallen into place, and she was prepared to go.
Or was she?
She’s gone through phases. Hasn’t every kid? Her hair’s been every color of the rainbow. For several months at the beginning of her junior year, she was into Goth. Thank God the only things she’d pierced were her earlobes. A week after she turned eighteen and no longer needed our consent, she got a tattoo. A small yellow butterfly on her shoulder. When I found out, I nearly went ballistic, but Jo pointed out that there were worse things than a small butterfly.
She was back to the color of hair God had given her-ice blond, like her mother’s. Like Jo, too, she was willowy and had smart blue eyes. The truth is that it never mattered to me what she chose to look like on the outside. I saw her with a father’s eyes, and she was lovely. And intelligent. I always knew she would leave Aurora, go out into the world to make her mark. I’d steeled myself for that separation long ago.
It had never occurred to me that she might decide to marry at eighteen.
“How long have you known?” I asked.
“A couple of weeks.”
“Great. I just love being on the outside of things.”
“She asked me not to say anything because she was afraid you’d get upset and overreact.”
“Me? Why would I overreact? Just because they’re kids and Jenny’s got her whole future ahead of her and Sean can’t see beyond some crazy dream of being Hemingway.”
“He’s a poet.”
“What?”
“Sean writes poetry.”
“Whatever.”
“You see?”
“I have a right to be concerned. Hell, we have a right to be concerned. Why are you taking all this so calmly?”
“Because Sean hasn’t proposed, and if he does, she’ll talk to us before she decides anything. We need to give her room, Cork, and trust her. Jenny’s nothing if not levelheaded.”
I stopped pacing for a moment. “What if he doesn’t propose, just asks her to go off and live with him in Paris?” That brought another thought to mind. “Jo, are they already sleeping together?”
“She’s eighteen.”
I stared at her. “What does that mean?”
“What she chooses to do with her body is her own right.”
“Meaning she’s sleeping with Sean.”
“I don’t know, Cork.”
“So she could be pregnant.”
“We’ve had multiple discussions about safe sex. Jenny isn’t stupid or impulsive.” She stood up and kissed my cheek. “We just have to be patient, Cork, and trust her, okay? She’ll talk to us before she decides anything.”
I rubbed my temples. “God, I don’t know if I’m ready for this. It was so much easier when the question was whether or not she should have braces.”
“Any word on Meloux?” Jo said, obviously changing the subject. “No. I called George LeDuc from Sam’s Place, but he couldn’t tell me anything.”
“What are you going to do about your promise to find his son?”
“What every self-respecting detective does these days. Get on the Internet. Mind if I use your computer?”
“Be my guest.”
I left her to her reading and went into her office, which was down the hallway beyond the stairs.
It took me an hour of Googling before I had what I believed was a decent lead.
I found Maria Lima referenced on a site named Ontario Past. When I clicked on the site, I discovered there was a school in the town of Flame Lake called the Wellington School, which had been built in 1932 with funds donated by Maria Lima Wellington. The town had been constructed by Northern Mining and Manufacturing, a large company founded by Leonard Wellington, in order to house workers from the nearby gold mine he owned. Using Google again, I found that Maria Lima Wellington was the daughter of Carlos Lima and the first wife of Leonard Wellington. She’d died young, leaving a son. The son’s name was Henry.
According to the Internet information, Henry Wellington was the man responsible for making Northern Mining and Manufacturing (NMM) a major corporation. He had an interesting history. After receiving his engineering degree from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, he joined the Canadian Air Force. Although no Canadian fighter squadrons were involved in the Korean War, as part of an exchange program, Wellington served with a U.S. squadron of Sabre-equipped fighter interceptors. He was the only Canadian to achieve the coveted rating of Ace. After the war, he became a test pilot. When his father died, he took over NMM. As a result of what one of his contemporaries characterized as his “brilliant, restless, and iconoclastic” mind, he developed innovative techniques for refining minerals, and held a number of lucrative patents. Under his direction, NMM had expanded its mining operations across Canada, and 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
