An hour later, I was aboard Wanda III, taking a short spin around Lake Muskoka. Well, not really a spin. Wanda III doesn’t spin. She’s a lady, and she takes things more calmly than the powerboats and motor launches we could see coming up and down a narrows on our right.
“This is Millionaires’ Row,” Hamp said, pointing at the huge summer homes of the wealthy of another age. I tried to remember what Norma McArthur had told me about Millionaires’ Row back at the lodge. Funny that Hamp should be pointing it out. His cottage was as large and as impressive as any of these hundred-year-old follies. “That’s where Sir John Craig Eaton built his summer house. He kept the lawn in front cut as though he were in the city. Over there, behind the white boathouse, lived Sir Wilfred Chambers. I hear that he had to blast away a small mountain to put in a tennis court back in the 1920s. Next to it, with the green gingerbread, is the house of Ettie Cohen. You know, the Titanic survivor? Ettie went into a lifeboat only when Captain Smith insisted. She wrote a book about it. This place was built for her by an admirer from Seattle. Lumber baron. Now look up on the hill beyond the point. There’s the place where General Fields, the breakfast cereal man, and the heiress of his chief rival built a secret love nest with twenty rooms. They thought nobody up here in Canada would know that they were not-what’s the phrase? — legally united.”
I remembered hearing that Hampton Fisher was a bit of a prude years ago. He was a lot of other things too, including being the closest thing to a genius to enter the boardrooms of newspapers he controlled. He had always been a paradox: a guy who hated germs and shunned society, but who went swimming under the polar ice cap and climbing in the Himalayas. I remembered that Vanessa had told me he set up the NTC network himself and still owned a controlling share of the voting stock. Years ago in the Falls, I never got a good look at him because he never went out. Once, I was watching Peggy shoot a scene in front of the American Falls. When I turned around and looked up, there was Hamp Fisher watching the same thing from his penthouse balcony. It struck me then as a little eerie, but I could never figure out why.
Fisher had aged well. His hair was too long for a boardroom. Still, the grey temples reminded me of the old “Men of Distinction” ads I’d seen in ancient magazines in people’s summer cottages. His yachting outfit was immaculate too, like another page in the same old magazines, but he brought the effect off with panache. He didn’t look as though he had his drinking water flown in from California any longer. Maybe he never had. At the moment, he and Peggy were sitting together in white wicker chairs, like the one I was sitting in, at the rail of Wanda III. We were shaded from the afternoon sun by a canvas cover of stretched blue duck, through which Wanda’s smoke stack protruded into the air. We were in the open air, too, of course, sipping drinks from a table set up aft of the funnel. Hamp was drinking Perrier, Peggy, coffee from a tall silver Thermos, and I, ginger ale in a crystal tumbler with the name of the ship embossed in the glass. There were others aboard, too, although I had only seen one of them when I came up the gangplank.
After hearing about the rich and famous of Millionaires’ Row, I heard about how they loved Muskoka, how they were thinking of building a cottage when the lease on the one they had expired. Hamp made an attempt or two at asking me about me, but I couldn’t get up enough steam. Peggy kept interrupting me and buttering up my past. She kept quizzing me about the case I was working on. After a while, I sketched it in for them in broad outline. Of course both had heard about the murder, and Hamp knew the people at NTC. Peggy recognized the parallels with the movie Laura, and moving to it was as good a way as any to get away from the more obscure facts of my investigation. Peggy launched into an appreciation of the face structure of Gene Tierney. “It’s her jaw, really. Any good orthodontist could have spoiled all that.”
When I got the chance, I wondered out loud about their presence on the lake. “Isn’t there a need for both of you to be elsewhere? Aren’t the boardrooms and the sound stages crying out ‘Where are they?’”
“Let ’em holler,” said Peggy, and Hamp grinned his endorsement. “We both worked flat out this winter, Benny. I did two movies, back to back, no rest in between. And Hamp has been trying to step back and let his organization run things. What’s the use of setting up a big structure if you don’t stand back and see whether it works or not? Oh, I’ve brought up a few scripts with me, but, to be honest, I haven’t read one of them. Hamp sometimes reaches for one of his boxes, but he knows better than to do it when I’m around.”
“You see the tyranny I live under, Mr. Cooperman. Not a minute to call my own.”
“But you have had time to do some scuba diving, I understand.”
“Not this year. Last year’s experience rather spoiled it for me. Oh, I’ve made a few small dives, just enough to keep the McCordick brothers happy. I get my diving gear from them over in Bala. But last spring, at the end of April, I dived a wreck here on the lake.”
“The only wreck I know about is the S.S. Waome, which sank coming out of Port Carling in the mid-1930s.”
“That’s the one! She sank in a freak squall in the fall of 1934. It was like a water spout. Came out of nowhere. Waome heeled over to port, water rushed in through the mooring chocks. She lies in eighty feet of water. I’ve seen her. By the end of the summer, I expect there will be few serious divers who haven’t seen her.”
“Why all the interest?” I wondered out loud.
“I expect it has to do with Dermot Keogh’s death. There are morbid sensation hunters even among skilled scuba divers, Ben.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“She looked a lot like the Segwin that still plies the lake. But Waome was built with big glass windows and large freight doors close to the waterline. When the squall heeled her over, the water rushed in faster than I can tell it. Three were lost, the captain suffered a heart attack, the rest of the crew swam to a nearby island. In the summer, the steamship would have had twenty, maybe fifty passengers, but this was early October, so there was only one. One of the ship’s officers, a man named Thompson, tried to rescue him from the saloon, but the door was closed on them by the water and both were trapped. The company called on divers from Prescott, on the St. Lawrence, to get the bodies. When I saw her, she was still in one piece, lying right side up. Hadn’t let the cold, dark waters break her up.”
“Was Dermot Keogh on that dive?”
“It was his idea. We planned the dive summer before last when Peggy and I were staying with him, while we were looking for a place last summer.”
“It was horrible,” said Peggy. “I get goosebumps just thinking about it. We had to go to a hotel in Bracebridge, just to get away from the media. Some holiday.”
“Were you in the water with him when it happened?” I watched Hamp Fisher look straight at me, as though he was trying to figure out how much of this I wanted to hear. Then he looked away in the direction of the funnel and sipped his Perrier.
“Dermot was a good diver for an amateur,” he said. “He had been checked out on all of the equipment we took with us. The McCordick brothers know their equipment and are careful who they rent it to. I hadn’t leased Wanda III yet, so we were using a Sea Ray 200 with two inflatable rafts. There were six of us: two to stay topside and four divers. Dermot and I were teamed up, and Jeff Hetherington and Penny Freeman were buddies.”