He was, he knew, boring, and while he didn’t mind being bored by himself, he couldn’t imagine anyone else standing for it. If he’d been a stepping stone for her, he was a willing one. Temporary or not, Stan had loved his marriage and adored Louise. He couldn’t bring himself to blame her for ending it. She had clearly given him more than he’d given her.
At the end of the letter, after wishing him well, Louise wrote that Stan could find his car at the corner of Main and Robert in Penetanguishene, Ontario. She was sorry to have taken it without asking, and sorry to not be able to return it, but she was certain it was safe and would remain where she’d left it until he could manage a trip up there to fetch it.
It was a five-hour bus ride to Penetang. Stan sat in a window seat beside an older woman who was going to visit her son in prison. Manslaughter, she said, over and over again. Stan told her he was visiting relatives. The bus left the station at Bay and Dundas in early orange light, picked its way through empty city streets and found countryside to the northwest. They sped past the tiny airport at Malton, a field and a windsock, and found the northern highway, number 27. Here the landscape was hills and trees, one farm bleeding into the next, and towns with curious names, each of them a brief stopping point for the bus—Kleinburg, Nobleton, Schomberg, Bond Head. Further north, near Barrie, Stan saw a sign for a town called Utopia.
The bus stopped for half an hour in Barrie to off-load some passengers and pick up others. Stan took the opportunity to stretch his legs. He walked along Dunlop Street past an artillery gun cemented to the sidewalk as a war memorial. Apparently, Barrie had sent more than fifty men to their deaths in two wars. So many for such a small town. Late morning light bounced off Lake Simcoe and shimmered between the shop windows on the street. Stan walked down to the water and gazed north, up the bay to where it widened and disappeared in distance. It looked so different from the lake he knew back in Toronto, so empty and wild. He imagined that people had stood in this spot for thousands of years and seen pretty much the same view. Trees and water and sunshine.
An hour and a half later, he was walking the streets of Penetang, looking out over a different bay on a different lake. He’d seen his car at the central intersection as the bus chugged past, and now he was trying to remember his way back to it. There wasn’t much to the town, so he didn’t worry about getting lost, but he had no other reason for being there, and an idea had begun to demand time in his mind. He wanted to get back to Barrie as quickly as possible.
The car was parked by the side of the road, across from a furniture store. There was no ticket on the windshield, and no sign it had been tampered with in any way. Only in a prison town, Stan thought. It was unlocked and the keys were as Louise had described them, under the passenger side of the front seat. There was a full tank of gas. Stan imagined Louise insisting on it and Jim begrudgingly paying for the fuel. How does one get to Winnipeg from Penetanguishene without a car, Stan wondered.
The car had been sitting in the sun all morning, the air inside hot and stuffy. As he sat down on the driver’s side, Stan was overcome by the smell of his wife’s perfume. It was more than just the after-effect of her presence; it had been spilled into the upholstery somewhere on the back seat. He tried not to imagine how that had happened, and instead just opened all four windows before starting the car. He drove to the edge of town and found the highway south. In Barrie, he found Dunlop Street again and pulled to the curb beside the real estate office he’d walked past that morning. Shoreline Lots, the window said, Prime Wooded Property.
“Somebody’s been having fun in this car,” the salesman laughed out loud and waved his hand in front of his nose. “Smells like Paris, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.”
Stan was following the lakeshore roadway north out of town. Beside him sat Gino (Gene) Auden, sales agent for Simcoe Realty, specialist in vacation and cottage properties.
“My folks were the first Italian family in Barrie, so they say,” he boasted, shaking Stan’s hand in the office. “Changed all our names right away to try and fit in, but I like Gino, it’s more manly than Gene I think.”
Gino Auden was a giant of a man, over six feet tall and easily more than 250 pounds. He kept his thinning hair shaved close to his head and sported a Clark Gable moustache on an otherwise perfectly groomed, perfectly round face. He had rings on four of his fingers, and his fingernails, Stan noticed, were perfectly manicured. He reminded Stan of many of the League higher-ups he’d met in his time. Men who took care of their appearance, who were certain of their power.
“I think you’re going to like what I have to show you,” Gino said, for the third time. “Cottage country is moving, you know. Muskoka’s all well and good for those rich Toronto types, but ordinary schlubs like you and me deserve a place to relax as well, am I right?”
He is right, Stan thought. He’d never imagined even wanting to own land in the country, let alone being able to afford it, but that morning the pictures in the office window on Dunlop Street had enticed him, and the prices were suddenly within reach. Gino directed Stan along a single- lane country road crowded in by trees. The road ran along a ridge above Kempenfelt Bay. Here and there, the water shone blue through a gap in the forest. They drove through Shanty Bay, a hamlet of a dozen or so houses and one small whitewashed church, and eventually turned down toward the lake on a dirt road rutted here and there with washouts from a recent downpour.
“There’s absolutely no development this far up yet,” Gino said, pointing out the open window to the thickly wooded land crowding the shoreline. “Only the old-timers, folks who’ve lived up here year-round for a century or so. And you want them types around in case anything goes wrong. It’s awfully quiet up here at night, and dark. Nice to know someone’s around even if they’re a mile away, am I right?”
Again, there was no arguing with Gino. By his own count, his practised patter had sold fifteen lots along this stretch of Simcoe shoreline in the last five months.
“Right here will do, sir.” Stan pulled the car to the edge of the road and stopped the engine.
“Are you ready for paradise?” Gino smiled at him from the passenger seat. He’d turned to face Stan and his body blocked the entire view from the passenger-side window.
The way down into the property from the road was a narrow cut through thick pines, untrimmed, their lower branches brushing the ground in wide skirts. Stan inhaled deeply the combined scents of evergreen and lake water. Squirrels leapt from tree to tree thirty feet above his head.
“That’s your fresh air you’re smelling, Stan.” Gino slapped him on the back and took the opportunity of contact to pull him by the arm past the last of the pines, his left arm opening wide, like a maître d’ showing off the prize table. What remained of the property was a deep grass meadow speckled with yellow dandelions and buttercups. Here and there, giant weeping willow trees bent their long soft branches to the earth around elephantine bodies. The land ended at large boulders falling away into the gently rolling waters of the lake.
“Christ Jesus,” Gino sighed, looking out across the water, “if every showing looked like this I’d have none of these lots left. You’ve hit it on a great day, I’ll say that.”
The property was 150 feet wide and ran from road to lake another 150 feet, forming a near-perfect square. There was a small, falling-down cabin near the lake, doubling as living shack and boathouse, though no boat was present.
“The owner built that cabin in Shanty Bay and floated it here just as you see it. Easier than hauling the materials. That hazy patch of land there,” Gino pointed directly across the lake, “is Georgina Island—Indian reservation, but don’t worry, they can’t get you all the way over here—and that close bit of land there just the other side of the bay is Big Bay Point. There’s