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A letter written by a seriously ill middle aged man facing the end of his life is found in a safety deposit box after he passes away. The document, immediately thought to be Jack Quinn’s last will and testament, sends his oldest friend on a quest to find his birth parents, his adoption only revealed to him shortly before he died. The search for the identity of the decedent’s birth parents takes Mark Purchell, a man who has been Quinn’s friend for over forty years, from his hometown of Ottawa to a small town on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Along the way, Purchell encounters and is assisted by a number of intriguing characters, including a seedy but well-meaning neighbour, a stern librarian, a retired police officer, members of the clergy, a newspaper editor, a haughty hotel maitre d’ and a spirited waitress named Elaine. His investigation of The Hidden History of Jack Quinn eventually leads to a newspaper archive and a surprising answer to a departed friend’s last request.
In 1949, an architect and amateur magician named George Fenwick was to leap from an apartment building that he had designed and first occupied when it opened in 1936. Twenty six years later, John and Patricia Delaney rented the same apartment that George Fenwick had occupied. For reasons that neither of them were ever able to determine, the mystery of Mr. Fenwick’s suicide appeared to have something to do with certain photographs found in their apartment, photographs an obsession shared by George Fenwick and his father, Richard. Their pursuit of this puzzle would led John and Patricia Delaney through all manner of investigation, from peculiar neighbours, newspaper reporters, policemen, a private detective, magicians, libraries, bookstore owners, and even each other.
Like some people recently retired, Mark had taken on a diversion that pretty well takes up much of his time. At one time, he collected baseball cards, a pastime that required him to acquire cards through trades with fellow enthusiasts or winning cards through arcane competitions when the application of Facebook allowed him to accumulate cards more easily.
Several years later, on an airplane flight from Montreal to New York City, Mark glimpses a television show being shown on a computer laptop belonging to a woman sitting in a seat across the aisle of that flight. Mark thinks and then becomes convinced that one of the actresses playing a woman in that show is in fact his first girlfriend. That realization results in a search for the identity of that woman though a variety of methods and sources, an effort that culminates in a rendezvous with his memory.
