An Ontario Provincial Police officer had spotted a car moving along Lang Street in Cobalt with its headlights out about an hour or two earlier. At the same time, the Maples and the Dixons had walked down the hill towards the lake in search of their two missing children, who weren’t at the hospital and hadn’t come home. From a vantage point up on Prospect Avenue, they could see the dark car, followed at a distance by the cruiser. The car appeared to be chasing a sort of two-headed, ten-speed bicycle ripping along at top speed in the darkness on the road that led to mine Ninety-nine, a single flashlight showing the way. It didn’t take them long to figure out who was on that bike.
Fifteen minutes later, Constable Dave McLaren and four parents were all inside the headframe, standing over an embarrassed man whose arm was reaching down a hole not much wider than a groundhog’s. He had been shouting at the top of his lungs. There was no sign of the children. A few heated questions directed at the man, an employee of Edison S. S. Brown, soon made known the whereabouts of Wynona Dixon and Dylan Maples. They had gone down the hole!
The parents couldn’t believe it. They were frantic. But Dave McLaren, who had been an officer in these parts for as long as anyone could remember, was as smooth as the ice on Cobalt Lake. He sat the Brown employee down in his cruiser (“Driving without your lamps on, boy, that’ll get you somethin’, least till I figure out what else to set you back with”) and made a call to two buddies of his, named Darragh and McKinley. They arrived in a little more than half an hour, bearing picks and shovels and ready to work. Though their arrival seemed to calm the Dixons somewhat, it did very little to make the Maples feel better: Darragh and McKinley looked to be almost as old as Theobald T. Larocque himself and moved at about half his speed. But boy, could they swing their tools! Apparently they’d worked in the mines “in our day,” as they put it, and the earth seemed to fall away like an avalanche when they attacked it.
Everyone kept hoping to hear from Wyn and Dylan, but not a sound came from the tunnel. When Darragh finally put the last spade through, John Maples couldn’t wait any longer. He scrambled down the hole and shouted for his son.
And there they were: just sitting there, smiling like he hadn’t seen them smile in months, each of them clutching a glittering brick of silver.
Mom and Dad and the Dixons were angry at first, but it didn’t last very long. We blasted the whole story at them and they listened like little kids being told an adventure. But we had to tell them most of it on the run. We barely had time to talk. We wanted to get back to the hospital in Haileybury. Before long we were on our way, with the royal treatment—a police cruiser for an escort. Dave McLaren got us into Theo’s room and then left us there to talk to him.
The old man was just as we had left him. His body was stuck full of tubes. His eyes were closed. His breathing was slight. Wyn moved up close to him and took his hand, a wrinkled, weak hand that long ago had been young and deft enough to perform that magic trick that fooled Lyon Brown. She put her lips up close to his ear.
“We found it!” she whispered. There was no reaction.
We stayed up all night with him, but he never spoke, never opened his eyes or even gave any sign that he knew we were there. In the morning we left, dejected, to go home to our beds. We both slept for fifteen hours.
I dreamed again of old Cobalt. I was sitting on the bench this time with the Silver Kings. The coach tapped me on the shoulder and I leaped over the boards. I looked at my wingers: Wynona Dixon and Theo Larocque. We swept through the Montreal Canadiens and scored with ease.
The parental units asked the Dixons and Frank and Joe over for dinner that night. Mom made all my favourites: roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, chocolate cake and ice cream. And pie, of course, lots of pie. The food just kept on coming. Afterwards the adults sat Wyn and me down for a chat.
The silver would be excavated. Darragh and McKinley had been down to see it already. They estimated its worth at many millions of dollars. Dad had decided to put together a case for the Larocque family. He was going to sue the pants off Brown Industries. John A. seemed to have the spring back in his step, and Mom was teasing him in a very different way. They aren’t such bad sorts really, the parental units. But there was one bit of bad news. We were packing up right away and would be back in Toronto in two days.
On the way upstairs to bed that night Mom and Dad escorted me to my room, pretending that they were going to lock me in. Then Dad got serious.
“I think there’s one thing we all learned over the past few months,” said Dad, as though he was about to launch into a sermon, “and that’s to search for and then accept the truth about things. I learned it, and so did you kids. There’s even a lesson in that for Mr. Larocque. He should have wanted to know the truth about his parents. In the long run, the truth only hurts those who deserve to be hurt by it. And he didn’t.”
Even Mom, who was kind of rolling her eyes when he started talking, had to agree with that. “Spoken like a truly guilty man,” she said, and then she dragged him off to their room.
Two days later I said goodbye to Frank and Joe and Wyn in the driveway of our house. I stood there in the cold northern air wearing an ordinary jacket and no mitts or toque. I slapped Frank in the face and caught Joe a shot in the ribs, just when he didn’t expect it. Then they both jumped me and knocked me down, pitching me into a snowbank and piling on top of me.
“That means they like him,” said Dad, as Mom watched with some concern. “Come on, Dylan, we’ve got to go.”
Wyn tapped me on the shoulder as I turned to climb into the Jeep. She reached out her hand and we shook.
“Good job,” she said, and smiled.
“Yeah, good job,” I said. “Uh, could you maybe send me an email message or something sometime?” Wyn Dixon didn’t have a cellphone.
“Maybe,” she said, and smiled again. Then she shoved a package into my hands and was off, down the hill with Frank and Joe, wearing that red coat with the black buttons.
When the Jeep pulled out and we headed down Lang Street, I glanced back out the rear window. She was looking at me and she didn’t look away.
As we left Cobalt that day I tried to take it all in. It was really an amazing place. And the people were amazing, too. I had made a lot of friends. As I gazed out the window of the Jeep it didn’t seem to me that there were as many stores closed or homes boarded up as when we came here. Why had I felt that things looked so bad? We went past the big, colourful murals painted on the buildings downtown, pictures right out of history, of miners hard at work, just like Theo Larocque in his prime. I remembered thinking that this brave little town hardly looked like Canada at all when we first got here. It was Canada all right, heart and soul.
I opened up the package Wyn had given me. It was a pair of mukluks, just perfect for the northern snows.
But still, I was happy to get back to Toronto. And in about one day I had returned to being a “city boy.” I had a lot to tell Bomb and Rhett, though they didn’t seem to really get the significance of what had happened up there.
A few days later a message came from Wyn. She had been down to check on Theo at the Haileybury hospital the day after we left. The night nurse told her the most amazing story. She had gone on her rounds very early that morning. When she got to his room she found him sitting up in his bed. He was as dead as Cobalt’s glory.
And on his face was the biggest grin anyone had ever seen.