Forbidden Guest House novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Not for Rent

Hedy remembers Gran's instruction, Kari and Leif open Room Nine for the first time in forty-five years, and Gran's payment ledger says the mortgage was paid off in 1981.

"That room isn't for rent," I said.

I pointed over my shoulder at the chalkboard without looking at it.

"It says so. In paint."

"I saw." He didn't move. "It also says canoes at your own risk. I'm not here for a canoe."

"Sir, I just threw my fiance out of my dining room. I don't have the energy for a bit."

"It's not a bit."

He tapped the card in its plastic sleeve.

"My grandfather was Leif Mattson too. He died in March. He was eighty-six."

"I'm sorry."

"The last thing he said to me was, 'Loon Lake. Room Nine. She held it for me.'"

He said it flat.

"Then he closed his eyes and didn't open them again."

I looked at the card.

I looked at the loops in Gran's capital L.

"My grandmother died eighteen months ago," I said. "If she held a room for somebody, she never told me."

"She told me."

Hedy was standing in the dining room doorway with the ladle still in her hand.

She had gone the color of the tablecloths.

"Say your name again," she said.

"Leif Mattson."

Hedy sat down on the bench by the coat hooks.

Hedy doesn't sit down during service. Hedy doesn't sit down during tornado warnings.

"Hedy?"

"She made me promise," Hedy said. "In the hospital. The week before."

She was looking at him, not at me.

"She said, 'If Leif Mattson ever comes, give him the key.' I thought it was the morphine talking."

"What key?" I said. "Nobody has a key. The key's been lost since before I was born."

"It's not lost. She just never told you where it was."

"Where is it?"

Hedy pushed her glasses up into her hair.

"I don't know that part."

Leif looked from her to me.

"So I can have the room," he said. "Once somebody finds the door."

"You're very calm for a man with a dead person's reservation."

"I drove three hours behind a camper. This is the most exciting thing that's happened all day."

I didn't laugh.

I almost did.

We tore the front office apart after the last table cleared out.

The desk drawers. The key cabinet. The cigar box of spare keys for rooms one through eight.

"Did she have a safe?" Leif asked.

"She had a coffee can for tips."

Hedy came back from Gran's old room with her arms full.

"Her jewelry box. Her Bible. Her hymnal. Her sewing tin."

"She didn't sew," I said.

"She sewed buttons on for guests. Badly."

I pried the lid off the blue Danish cookie tin.

Spools. Needles. A pincushion shaped like a tomato.

Under the felt lining was a brass key on a faded red ribbon.

A paper tag hung from the ribbon in Gran's handwriting.

9.

Nobody said anything.

Then Hedy said, "Well. That's that," and blew her nose on a dish towel.

The three of us went up the stairs together.

The hall light buzzed at the end like it always had.

I had walked past Room Nine ten thousand times.

I used to press my ear to it as a kid and imagine a ghost in there.

Gran would catch me and send me down to peel potatoes.

I held the key out to Leif.

"It's your reservation."

He shook his head. "It's your house."

I put the key in the lock.

It turned.

The door swung in.

The room smelled like cedar and old paper and something sweet I couldn't name.

Hedy found the lamp.

It was 1981 in there.

A wall calendar from the hardware store, still on July.

A braided rug, a white iron bed made up tight, a quilt I'd never seen.

A man's red flannel shirt hung over the back of the desk chair, folded at the collar.

On the windowsill stood a mason jar of lilacs, dried brown and still holding their shape.

Leif stopped in the doorway.

He was looking at the shirt.

"That's his," he said. "He had that one in every picture before I was born."

On the dresser was a stack of envelopes tied with kitchen string.

I counted them.

Eleven.

Every one was addressed in Gran's hand to Leif Mattson, Duluth.

Every one had the same words printed across the front by hand in neat capitals: MOVED, NO FORWARDING.

None of them had been opened.

"She wrote him," I said.

"He never got them," Leif said. "He'd have told me. He told me about the boathouse a hundred times."

"Your grandfather built our boathouse?"

"In 1979. He said it was the best thing he ever built."

Hedy pressed the dish towel to her mouth.

On the desk, under the flannel shirt, lay a green clothbound ledger.

The kind Gran bought by the dozen for the kitchen orders.

Across the cover, in her handwriting: What I Paid.

I opened it.

Every page was a column of dates and dollar amounts, each one marked Moen Lakeland Bank.

Every month, every year, in the same blue pen.

It went back forty-five years.

I took out my phone and photographed the first page.

Then the second.

Gran taught me to keep a copy of anything a bank ever touches.

Leif held the lamp closer without being asked.

I photographed every page.

On the first page, near the top, one line was written in red.

The pen had pressed so hard it tore the paper.

July 3, 1981. He paid it all off. Why do they still bill me?

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