The light at the end of the hallway went out. I hadn’t heard a door open or close. I leaned to the crack. The hallway was dark now. I listened for the sound of shuffling on carpet, breathing, anything that would tell me where Wellington was.
The light directly outside the room where we hid came on suddenly. I opened the door. The hallway was deserted. Wellington, it seemed, was truly a ghost after all.
Meloux said, “I do not understand.”
“A timer, Henry,” Schanno guessed. “The lights go on and off automatically. It’s a way of making it appear someone is here when they really aren’t.”
“My son is not here?” Meloux looked confused and disappointed.
Schanno said, “When you saw him before, where was he, Cork?”
I led them to the other end of the hallway, to the anteroom where I’d been given my mask, then I opened the door to Wellington’s sanitized inner sanctum. The bedroom was still glaring white, but Wellington wasn’t there. I opened one of the doors leading off the bedroom. A bathroom with a sunken tub, a shower, and a pedestal sink, all tastefully done in white and sea green marble tile with modern stainless-steel fixtures. There was a vanity as well, the mirror outlined with bright bulbs, the sort of thing I associated with wealthy women who spent a lot of time on their makeup.
Behind me, Schanno said, “Take a look at this.”
He came into the bathroom holding a white robe, the kind Wellington had been wearing when I saw him.
“Where’d you get that?”
“In the closet. Along with this.” He held up a pair of black silk pajamas on a wooden hanger. “About as night and day as you can get.” He looked around the bathroom. “Very nice. Anything interesting?”
“Check out the vanity.”
“Whoa,” Schanno said.
He was probably responding to the wig of long white hair draped over a wooden head-shaped stand on the vanity. I checked the drawers. Makeup, but not the kind most women wore. Theatrical stuff. Gum spirit, liquid latex, foundation, a creme color wheel, a contact lens case with brown-tinted lenses inside.
“Wellington’s, you think?” Schanno asked.
“If it is, he’s even stranger than I figured.”
Meloux stood in the bathroom doorway, looking lost. “What does it mean?”
“I’m not entirely sure, Henry. Let’s check the bedroom carefully.”
In the closet hung several of the white robes, but also dress shirts, a couple of Hawaiian numbers, and slacks. In a shoe rack were casual shoes, deck shoes, and three pairs of New Balance athletic shoes. The dresser held briefs, undershirts, socks, sweaters, sweat suits. In the drawer of the nightstand were a couple of paperback mystery novels and a wire-bound notebook. The notebook contained dialogue sketches, exchanges like those between characters in a play.
Edwina: You can’t mean that.
Gladstone: If you’d been paying attention, you’d have seen this coming.
(Edwina crumples in a faint.)
Gladstone: Your dramatics will do you no good, my dear.
I read a couple of pages; it didn’t get any better. Behind the last page of the notebook was a flyer, folded in half. I opened it and discovered an advertisement for a production at the Loghouse Theatre, a melodrama titled The Nightcap, written and directed by Preston Ellsworth and starring the same. The production ran from June 1 until August 31, at eight P.M. every night except Monday.
Henry breathed deeply, almost a sigh of relief, I thought. “It was not my son you saw here.”
“That’s a good guess, Henry.”
“But why this pretending?”
“The question of the day.”
“What now?” Schanno asked.
I looked at my watch. A few minutes before nine.
“How long does a play last?” I asked. “Couple of hours?”
“About that.”
“Takes the actors a while to change, get their makeup off?”
“I’d guess.”
“So if we hurry, we might have a shot at catching Ellsworth before he leaves the Loghouse Theatre.”
“A shot,” Schanno agreed. “A long one.” He glanced at Meloux. “Unless we get lucky.”
FORTY-ONE
By the time we piled into the dinghy and began to row back to Trinky Pollard’s sailboat, the wind and rain had let up a bit. While Schanno and I pulled on the oars, Meloux used the flashlight to signal. Pollard was waiting for us as we drew alongside. When we were aboard, she tied the dinghy to a stanchion at the stern.
“So?” She turned to us expectantly.
“How quickly can you get us back to Thunder Bay?”
“Is someone after you?”
“Other way around, Trinky. There’s a man we need to get to. We know where he might be, but unless we get there fast, we could lose him.”
“Then let’s pull that anchor up and get under way.”
She used the engine to take us back. It was faster, she explained, than lifting the sails and tacking against the wind. The dinghy trailed behind at the end of its line. As we rode the black swells of the bay, I filled her in on what we’d discovered on Manitou Island.
“A stand-in? Why? And why so eccentric?”
“If Ellsworth really is our man and we can get to him, maybe we’ll have the answers.”
“In the meantime,” Pollard said, “why don’t you three go below and get out of the rain. I don’t have dry clothes to offer, but I’ve got a bottle of Glenlivet in the cupboard. It’ll brace you some, warm your innards anyway. I’ll let you know when we’re inside the marina breakwater. You can give me a hand docking.”
Schanno shook his big, wet head. “It doesn’t sit right with me, you up here alone.”
“I’m alone at this wheel most of the time,” she told him. “There’s nothing for you to do.”
“Keep you company at least.”
She seemed pleased. “If that’s what you want. But you two”-she nodded at Meloux and me-“no reason both of you need to stay out in the weather.”
I went below with the old Mide. I found the Scotch and offered it to Meloux, who declined. I decided against it, too. The water was rough, and although I hadn’t experienced any seasickness on the way over, I didn’t want to take any chances. We still had a lot ahead of us on the far side of the bay.
The swells knocked us about. Outside I couldn’t see anything but the black night and black rain and the white spray that hit the window. Meloux seemed oblivious to the pounding the sailboat was taking. Silent and as near to brooding as I’d ever seen him, he stared at his hands, folded in his lap.
Even though Wellington’s absence from Manitou Island was not my fault, I still felt as if I’d let Henry down. I’d given him false hope, led him to believe we’d find his son there. What we found were simply more questions. There might have been something hopeful in the fact that the madman I’d seen earlier probably wasn’t Henry Wellington but someone pretending to be him. But what did that say about the real Wellington, that he was willing to allow such an unattractive portrayal? He probably was nuts, though not necessarily in the way people believed.
Schanno opened the cabin door and stepped in. “We’re rounding the breakwater.”
“You were good company for Trinky?” I asked.
“Remarkable woman,” he said. “She’s thinking of sailing down the Saint Lawrence and the East Coast to the Caribbean next year.”
“Alone?”
“That’s what’s been holding her back. She’d like a mate.”
“Speaking nautically?”
Schanno gave me a sour look. “Topside now,” he said.
The breakwater had done its job, and the lake surface was relatively smooth as we entered the marina and docked. We tied up and hauled in the dinghy.
“I’ll deflate it later,” Pollard said. “Let’s get you to the Loghouse Theatre.”
“You know where it is?”
“In Thunder Bay, I know where everything is.”
“Lucky for us,” Schanno said and gave her a goofy, big-toothed grin.