The Boss Said My Father Drowned His Brother, So He Took Me to Stand in the Water novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The House on the Bluff

Pirjo greets Elin with a plate of food, Stellan sets his terms and Elin sets hers, and he promises her first light on the ice.

The heater in the truck was off, and nobody said why.

The man with the broken nose drove.

Stellan got in the back beside me and kept his gloves on the seat between us and his hands in his lap.

We went up the hill past the hospital and out along the old shore road.

The lake lay on our right, a black field running to the edge of the sky.

I held my bag on my knees.

"Your phone," Stellan said.

The second driver turned from the front seat and handed it back to him.

They had taken it from my coat pocket in the lot, and I had not felt it go.

Stellan set it in my lap without looking at the screen.

"Call whoever you like," he said. "Then tell them you went on your own feet."

"I will."

"Good."

My lock screen was a photograph of a birthday card.

It had a lift bridge on the front in blue ink and my father's handwriting inside.

It was the last one he sent me.

I saw Stellan's eyes go to it, and I turned the screen against my leg.

"Joel," the front-seat driver said quietly. "It's cold. She's in scrubs."

"Then she'll be warm in the house," Stellan said.

The driver at the wheel, Joel Rautio, kept both hands on it and the heater off.

He looked at the lake the whole way up the shore.

He looked the way a man looks at a place he has been told not to see.

The house stood at the end of a long unplowed drive on a bluff above the Lester River.

It was gray timber with a steep roof, and a steel chimney pushed a ribbon of smoke into the dark.

The air smelled of cedar and woodsmoke and hot stones.

A light burned in every window.

A small old woman stood in the open front door in a black cardigan with a silver pin shaped like a bird.

She had white hair pulled tight and a face like a good apple gone to wrinkles.

She held a covered plate in both hands.

"There she is," she said. "Come in, you'll catch your death. Joel, take her bag."

"I'll keep it," I said.

"Of course you will," the old woman said.

She took my cold hand in her warm one and smiled up at me.

"I'm Pirjo. I'm his mother," she said. "You come to my kitchen first, I've kept something hot."

"Mother," Stellan said behind me.

"She's been on her feet all night, Stellan, look at her."

She said it fondly, over my shoulder, to a man of thirty-nine as if he were nine.

She led me down a hall of dark pine, past a long table laid with a white cloth that seated forty.

The kitchen beyond it smelled of cinnamon and rye.

She set the plate before me and lifted the cloth.

There was braided pulla, still warm, and a bowl of salmon soup.

"Eat, kulta," Pirjo said. "Whatever my son thinks, the lake can wait until you've eaten."

I looked at the food, and then at her.

*Kulta* is Finnish for *dear one*.

My grandmother used to say it to me.

"You told him to bring me here," I said.

I had caught it in her voice at the door, when she said *there she is*, as if she'd been waiting.

Pirjo did not hesitate.

"I told him the Lahti girl should be somewhere safe," she said. "There's talk in Duluth, and men who'd say worse than he did. I thought, better under our roof."

"That's very kind."

"It isn't kind," Stellan said from the doorway. "It's what it is."

He had followed us without a sound.

His coat was off now, and he stood in a black sweater with the sleeves pushed up.

I saw his forearms for the first time.

They were scarred from the wrist to the elbow, as if a rope had burned through them more than once.

Pirjo patted my hand and went out, and she shut the door behind her.

Stellan did not come in.

"You'll have the room at the top of the stairs," he said. "It has a bed and a lock on the inside, and the key is on your side of the door."

"My side?" I asked.

"Nobody comes in unless you open it," Stellan said.

"Then I'm not locked in," I said.

"You're not locked in."

I put the spoon down.

"Then what am I?" I asked.

"Mine to keep an eye on," he said. "You don't leave this property without me or without Joel at the wheel."

"And if I do?"

"My men bring you back. They won't touch you. They'll stand in your way until I come."

"A man at every door," I said.

"At every door."

I looked at him for a long time.

I have watched dying men decide whether to say the thing that matters.

He looked back at me the same way, and he said nothing.

"I have two rules," I said.

"Say them," Stellan said.

"Nobody touches my bag, and nobody reads my mother's letters or my father's cards."

"Done," he said.

"I carry his last card," I said. "It stays on me."

"It stays on you."

"And you don't come into my room."

"I won't," he said. "Not unless you ask me."

It sounded like something a man says when nobody has ever asked him.

I picked up the spoon again, because my hands wanted a job.

The soup was hot and good, and I ate all of it while he watched from the door.

His hands hung at his sides.

I had noticed it in the lot and I noticed it again.

A man that big, standing that close, never once lifted a hand toward me.

He might have made a rule for his hands too, and kept it better than I kept mine.

When I set the empty bowl down, he spoke again.

"At first light I'll take you out to the water," he said.

"What's at the water?"

"The place the lake took my brother," he said. "And you'll tell me what you know."

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