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with my association with Meloux, though he didn’t know anything of what the old man had requested of me. There’d been little change in Meloux’s condition. When I asked what exactly that condition was, Wrigley couldn’t give me an answer.
    “There doesn’t seem to be any occlusion. We’ve run all the tests we can run here. I’m thinking of transferring him down to Saint Luke’s, in Duluth. Their heart people might be able to figure this one out.”
    Meloux was awake. He smiled weakly when I entered his room. “How you doing, Henry?”
    “I don’t sleep so good. I don’t crap so good. Mostly my heart is heavy. Like a bear on my chest.”
    “I’m going up to Thunder Bay today, try to talk to the man who may be your son.”
    “The watch?”
    “I have it.”
    I’d put it in a small white jewelry box Jo had given me. I opened the box, took out the watch, and handed it to Meloux. His fingers were brittle-looking things, thin sticks, but they handled that watch gently. He opened it and studied the photograph inside.
    “She was beautiful,” I said.
    The old Mide looked up. “Her beauty was a knife, Corcoran O’Connor.”
    He handed the watch back.
    “You will bring me my son,” he said.
    *   *   *
    I followed Highway 1 southeast and reached the North Shore in an hour. I turned left at Ilgen City and took Highway 61 north along Lake Superior.
    It was a beautiful August day. The lake looked hard as blue concrete. Sunlight shattered on its surface into glittering shards. Far to the east, where the pale wall of the sky hit the water, the horizon was a solid line, the meeting of two perfect geometric planes. To the west rose the Sawbill Mountains, covered with second- and third-growth timber. The road often cut along steep cliffs or ran beside a shoreline littered with great slabs of rock broken by the chisel of ice and time and the relentless hammering of waves. I drove through Schroeder, Tofte, Grand Marais, and finally Grand Portage, small towns full of tourists come north for the scenery and to escape the sweltering Midwest heat farther south.
    I crossed the border at the Pigeon River, and less than an hour later, I entered the unimpressive outskirts of Thunder Bay.
    Thunder Bay is really the modern merging of two rival municipalities, Fort William and Port Arthur. As I understand it, the French fur traders started things rolling with a settlement protected by a rustic fort near the mouth of the Kaministiquia River, which emptied into a bay on Lake Superior the French called Baie de Tonnaire. The British, when they took over the fur-trading business, built a more impressive outpost they named Fort William. A few years later, when the new Canadian government wanted to build a road through the wilderness, a site a few miles north of Fort William was chosen. It was christened Port Arthur, and the two towns began trading verbal potshots, something that went on for the next hundred years or so, until they shook hands, erased the borders, and took to calling the new union Thunder Bay. The truth is, it didn’t end the rivalry. Ask anyone who lives in the city where they’re from and no one says Thunder Bay. Either they’re from Port Arthur or Fort William.
    The city’s an old port. Like a lot of towns on the western side of Lake Superior, it’s long past its heyday. But it’s trying.
    The bay is created by a long, southerly sweeping peninsula dominated by an impressive geological formation called Sleeping Giant, sonamed because that’s what the formation resembles. The Ojibwe story is that it’s Nanabozho, the trickster spirit, turned to stone when white men learned the secret of the peninsula, which was that a rich silver mine was hidden there.
    From what I’d gathered on the Internet, Henry Wellington lived on a remote island called Manitou, which was just off Thunder Cape, the tip of Sleeping Giant. Manitou is an Ojibwe word that means spirit. That’s exactly what Wellington seemed to be. More