They told me they would send a car along for me-their regular van was broken. I waited forty-five minutes inside the tiny terminal, drinking a cup of bitter coffee from a vending machine to entertain myself. When the limo finally came, it was a beat-up station wagon which I almost missed until it was rolling away. Then I could read THUNDER BAY HOLIDAY INN painted on its side. I went racing after it, yelling frantically, my canvas bag bumping me in the leg. I longed for the gigantic, impersonal efficiency of O’Hare with its ranks of surly, illiterate cab drivers.
The car stopped fifty feet ahead of me and waited while I came panting up to it. The driver was a heavyset man dressed in a graying white pullover. When he turned to look at me, a pungent draft of stale beer swept over me. The forty-five minutes I’d been waiting he must have spent in a bar. However, if I tried to get a cab I might be there all night. I told him to take me to the Holiday Inn and I leaned back in the seat with my eyes shut, grasping the side strap. It couldn’t be any worse than riding with Lotty sober but the memory of my own accident was too fresh for me not to be nervous. We moved along at a good clip, ignoring honking horns.
It was well past eleven when my driver deposited me, intact, and I couldn’t find any place in walking distance still open for dinner. The motel restaurant was closed and so was a little Mandarin place across the street. I finally took an apple from a basket in the lobby and went to bed hungry. My shoulder was sore and the long flight had worn me out. I slept soundly and woke up again after nine.
My shoulder had recovered in the night-most of the stiffness was gone. I dressed more easily than I had for days, only feeling a twinge when I pulled the heavy wool sweater over my head. Before going down to breakfast I reassembled the Smith & Wesson and loaded it. I didn’t expect Bledsoe to jump me in front of the entire crew of the Lucella Wieser, but if he did the gun wasn’t going to do me much good with the barrel unattached to the hammer.
I hadn’t had much appetite while my shoulder was in pain and I’d dropped five or six pounds. This morning I felt better and sat down to pecan waffles, sausages, strawberries, and coffee.
I was a latecomer in the little restaurant and the middle-aged waitress had time to talk. As she poured my second cup of coffee I asked her where I could rent a car. There was an Avis place in town, she said, but one of her sons had a couple of old cars he rented out if I didn’t need anything too fancy. I told her that would be fine as long as they had automatic transmissions, and she trotted off to call her son.
Roland Graham his name was, and he spoke with a Canadian accent, a lilting drawl that sounds as if it has a trace of Scots buried in it. His car was a ’75 Ford Fairmont, old but perfectly clean and respectable. I told him I’d only need it until the next morning. The fee, payable in advance in cash, was thirty dollars.
The Holiday Inn was in the heart of town. Across the street was the largest Presbyterian church I’ve ever seen. A modern city hall faced the motel, but the street behind us had a lot of run-down stores and premises to let. As I got down to the waterfront the stores gave way rapidly to bars and girlie joints. I’ve often wondered whether seamen really have the primitive appetites port towns attribute to them, or whether they go to sleazy joints because that’s the only thing the locals offer.
Finding the Lucella turned out to be a larger problem than I’d anticipated. Thunder Bay is an enormous port, even though the town itself doesn’t have more than a hundred thousand people in it. But much of the grain shipped by water in North America passes through that port heading east and south, and the lakefront includes mile upon mile of towering elevators.
My first thought had been to stop in at each elevator to see if the Lucella was docked there, but the miles of towers made that seem like a waste of time. I did go into the yard of the first one I came to. After bumping around the mud-filled ruts, I found a tiny, green-sided office. But a harassed man inside handling the phone assured me that he didn’t have the foggiest idea of where the Lucella was; he only knew she wasn’t there.
I went back into the town and found the local newspaper. As I’d hoped, it listed the ships that were in port and where they were. The Lucella was docked at Elevator 67, the Manitoba Grain Co-op.
There didn’t seem to be any logical order to the yard numbers. I was near number 11, but I went past yard 90 without seeing the Manitoba Grain Co-op and wasted time backtracking. I finally found it another two miles down the road, well past the town.
I turned the Ford into the gravel yard, my heart pounding with nervous anticipation. The Manitoba elevator was enormous, some two hundred giant paper towel tubes banked together. Huge though it was, it didn’t dwarf the ship tied up on its eastern end. The Lucella’s red hulk gleamed sleekly in the late morning sun. Above her, like clouds covering and revealing Mount Everest, hovered a mass of white smoke. Grain dust. The Lucella was loading.
The yard was a mess of gravelly mud. In the corners of the elevator, out of the sun’s reach, a gray-white residue of winter was still melting. I parked clear of the more obvious holes and picked my way through the mud, the metal shards, pasteboard, and grain clumps making up the now familiar elevator scene.
The Smith & Wesson dug uncomfortably into my side as I climbed the Lucella’s ladder to the main deck. I stopped for a minute at the edge of the hardhat area to survey the busy scene and ran a surreptitious finger under the leather holster digging into my diaphragm. Squinting at the whitened figures, I couldn’t be sure if any of my quarry were present. I thought I might recognize Bledsoe’s stocky body, but it was hard to say.
I went into the pilothouse and climbed the four flights to the mahogany-paneled bridge. Only the first mate, Keith Winstein, was there. He looked up in surprise when I came in. He recognized me at once.
“Miss Warshawski! What-is Captain Bemis expecting you?”
“I don’t think so. Is he around? And what about the chief engineer and Martin Bledsoe?” It would be really annoying if Bledsoe had returned to Chicago.
“They’re all in Thunder Bay this morning. Going to the bank, doing that kind of business. They won’t be back until late afternoon. Not until right before we sail, I’m afraid.”
“You’re sailing today?” I sat down on one of the mahogany stools. “Your office said you’d be here through tomorrow.”
“No, we made good time up from Detroit. Got here a day early. Time is money in this business, so we started loading last night at midnight. We’ll finish around four and sail at five.”
“Any idea where I can find Bledsoe or Sheridan?”
He shook his head regretfully. “Everyone keeps bank accounts in Thunder Bay because we’re here so often. This is a good chance to catch up on personal affairs-I’ll be taking off myself for a few hours as soon as the second mate gets back.”
I rubbed my forehead in exasperation. “Where do you go from here?”
Winstein was getting a little irritated. “We take this load to St. Catharines, at the other side of the lakes. Why do you ask?”
“What’s your route, I mean-do you stop anyplace along the way where I could get off?”
The first mate looked at me strangely. “If you’re thinking of sailing with us, you’ll have to clear that with the captain, Miss Warshawski.”
“Yes, well, let’s assume he’s going to give his permission. Where’s the nearest place I could get off?”