The Boss Said My Father Drowned His Brother, So He Took Me to Stand in the Water novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Night Door
At the hospice, the Harbor Master tells the night nurse and two drivers that Elin's father left his brother on the ice, and Elin hangs her badge up and walks to his truck on her own feet.
Two men came through the hospice night door at ten past two, and one of them asked for me by name.
"Is Elin Lahti on tonight?" he asked the night nurse, politely.
I was in the hall with an armful of clean sheets.
I heard my name the way you hear a dropped glass.
The house has ten beds, one nurse after midnight, and me.
Nobody comes to our night door at two in the morning unless somebody is dying.
"I'm Elin," I said.
He wore a canvas work coat, and his nose had been broken more than once.
He did not look at the sheets or the nurse, only at my face.
"Mr. Kivela would like a word," he said. "He's in the lot."
I knew the name.
Everyone in this city knows it.
That family tows the ore boats into the harbor, runs the trucks on the docks, and owns the saunas up the shore where men go to settle things.
They call the man at the head of it the Harbor Master.
"I'm on shift," I said. "Room four turns at three."
"It'll be quick," the man said.
He held the door for me with the flat of his hand.
The night nurse put down her chart.
"Elin, you don't have to go anywhere," she said.
"I know."
I set the sheets on a chair, because I couldn't think what else to do with them, and walked out into the cold.
It was ten below, with a wind off the lake.
The lamp over the lot turned the blowing snow orange.
A black truck stood at the far end with its engine running and its back doors open.
A second man in a canvas coat leaned on the fender.
A third man shut the cab door and came toward me across the snow.
He was tall, in a black wool overcoat with the collar turned up.
His hands were bare in the cold, and the knuckles were scarred.
His eyes were a pale gray and they did not move around.
"Miss Lahti," he said. "I'm Stellan Kivela."
"You're parked in the ambulance bay," I said.
"Am I?"
"You are."
He did not look at the bay.
"Your father was at the helm of the tug launch that took my brother out onto the harbor ice," he said.
He said it quietly, so quietly I stepped closer to hear him.
Behind me the night door opened, and the nurse came out in her cardigan with her arms wrapped around herself.
"That was three years ago tonight," Stellan said, to me and to her and to the two drivers all at once. "The ice opened under the launch, and your father came back alone."
"I know how long he's been gone," I said.
"Then you know my family buried an empty box for a boy of twenty-six," Stellan said.
"I'm sorry for your brother," I said.
"I don't want that from you."
"It's what I have."
The wind threw a handful of snow across the lot.
"By morning your father had run," Stellan said. "He's hidden three years, and he isn't here to answer for it."
"What do you want?" I asked.
"You'll answer for him," he said. "You'll come with me tonight, to my house on the bluff."
"And then?"
"You'll stay until Tauno Lahti walks out of whatever hole he's hiding in and takes your place."
I had sat at four hundred deaths.
I knew what a man's voice does when he has decided something in the dark and carried it a long time.
His voice did not rise or shake.
That was the worst of it.
"Your father is a coward and a thief," he said. "He left a boy in the water, and I won't have his daughter pouring coffee for the dying while it goes unpaid."
"That's enough," the nurse said.
She was fifty-three, and she had worked nights for thirty years.
She took out her phone.
"I'm calling the police," she said.
"Call them," Stellan said.
Nobody moved.
The two drivers did not shift their feet or glance at each other.
The nurse stood with her thumb over the screen.
I watched her understand what it meant that no one in that lot was afraid of the police.
I looked at Stellan Kivela, and I thought about my mother.
She had died in this house, in the bed by the window of room two.
The last thing she said to me about my father was, "Don't believe a word they say about him until you've seen it yourself."
I unclipped my badge from my scrubs.
It had my name and my photo on it, and I had worn it for five years.
I hung it on the top button of the nurse's cardigan, where she couldn't miss it.
"Hold that for me," I said.
"Elin," she said.
"Room four turns at three, and she needs the pillow under her left hip."
"Elin, don't."
I picked up my bag from the snow where I had set it down.
"I'll go to your house on my own feet," I said to Stellan. "But I'm not going to stand in your water for him."
He said nothing.
"I'm going to find out what my father did," I said.
Something crossed his face and was gone.
He stepped aside, and I walked past him and past the open door of the cab.
I went round to the passenger side and opened that door myself.
The man with the broken nose came after me and reached for my bag.
"Leave her bag," Stellan said.
The man with the broken nose stopped with his hand in the air.
"She keeps it."
I climbed up into the seat.
Stellan shut the door behind me.
He did not put a hand on my shoulder or my back.
I had braced for it, and it did not come.
The space where his hand should have been was the loudest thing in that cold lot.
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