Chapter 5 of 7Nobody Waved

The furnace quit on Thursday morning, and Evelyn Sterling knew exactly what it would cost. The museum had $4,180.23 in the bank. A new furnace would take most of it. The board was already circling a $2.4 million offer for the land, and Harrison Shaw had told her that any scandal would end her job here.

She had been in the gallery since before daylight with her coat on and a scarf wound twice around her neck, and the radiators along the north wall were cold to the touch. The damp came off Lake Superior in a slow gray rain that had been falling since the night before, and every window in the old Coast Guard station had begun to sweat on the inside of the glass.

Maya Singh came down the hall with her hood still up and her nose red. "It's colder in here than it is outside."

"Then go stand on the porch."

"The furnace quit."

"The furnace died. There's a difference."

Maya blew on her hands. "The Hartley letters are going to curl. That's a whole box of them."

"Then move the box off the outside wall while I find us somebody. Cold pulls damp through plaster, and I am not explaining ruined correspondence to a donor in the first week of November."

"Is there a heating man in this town?"

"There's Flores." Maya was already scrolling with one thumb. "He does the VFW hall and the Lutheran church and the motel out on 41. He's got the boatyard down at the harbor."

Evelyn Sterling wrote the number on the corner of a purchase order and dialed it from the desk phone.

"Flores."

"Mr. Flores, this is Evelyn Sterling, at the Maritime Museum. Our furnace has stopped."

"Stopped or quit?"

"It made a sound like a dropped bucket, and then nothing."

He didn't answer right away. "That's a quit. I can come by after lunch."

"How much is a service call?"

"We'll see once I've had a look at it. Open the cabinet doors under your sink tonight, or you'll be paying me twice."

She hung up. Maya went out for pasties at the co-op and came back with two of them in foil, still warm, and they ate standing up in their coats because the office had gotten too cold to sit in.

A little after one, a truck pulled up the walk. The man who got out was solid in the shoulders, in a canvas coat and work pants, with dark hair going gray at the temples and a bag of tools in one hand.

"Ms. Sterling."

"Evelyn. Come in before the rain follows you."

He stepped inside, took his hat off, and looked up at the pressed-tin ceiling and the long room with its photographs of ore boats along the wall, and something in his face loosened. "I haven't been in here since I was nine years old. Third grade. They had the big lens in the window then."

"It's in storage now. Everything is in storage."

"That's a shame." He pulled a flashlight out of his bag. "Where's the basement?"

"Second door on the left. The stair is uneven at the bottom."

He was down there a while. She heard him knocking at the pipes, and once a long metallic groan that came up through the floorboards.

"Is it bad?" she called down.

"It's a coal furnace somebody converted to oil, probably in the fifties. It's not bad. It's old."

"Which is worse?"

"Old is fine, if the parts exist."

Something clanked against the concrete floor. Then his voice came up the stairwell again, patient, as if he had all afternoon. "Do the parts exist? I'll know after I call Marquette."

He came up wiping his hands on a rag. "There's an Ace up there that stocks parts for burners nobody else will touch. The blower is gone. I can have one here by tomorrow morning. Four hundred for the part, and my time on top of that."

Evelyn did the arithmetic and did not care for the answer. "The museum has $4,180 to its name. That's the whole museum."

"That's the whole museum?"

"That's all of it, and a board that would rather spend it on paint."

Mateo looked at the cold radiator, then at the ceiling, then back at her. "Then I'll find you a used one. It'll rattle, but it'll keep your pipes alive."

Maya came through with the foil from lunch still in her hand. "Is it fixed?"

"It's diagnosed," Mateo said.

"Is that better?"

"It's cheaper."

He packed his tools while Maya went back to the boxes. The diary sat on the corner of the desk where Evelyn had left it that morning, and he saw it when he came to the sink to wash his hands.

"What's that?"

"A keeper's diary. It came out of a trunk in storage."

"Which keeper?"

"Elara Peterson."

He stopped with his hands still under the water. Then he shut the tap and stood a moment with his back to her. When he turned around he had the rag in his hands and he was not wiping anything with it.

"Say that again."

"Elara Peterson. She kept the light up the coast."

"My grandmother knew her."

"Knew her how?"

"She did the Peterson wash. She was eighteen that winter." He folded the rag and put it in his bag, then took it out again. "She used to say the keeper had the whitest shirts in the county and hands like a stevedore."

Evelyn Sterling waited. Waiting was the one thing she had always been good at, and she had learned in three days that people filled the space if you let them.

"After the inquiry, the Petersons were gone inside of three weeks. House shut up with the dishes still in the cupboard, beds stripped, nothing sold. My grandmother said the neighbors stood on their porches and watched the wagon go down the point road before first light, and nobody waved."

"Why did they leave?"

"Nobody ever knew. Not her, not her mother, not one soul in this town." He picked up his hat. "If you said that name in my grandmother's kitchen, she would find something that needed doing in the other room. Her whole life, and never a reason."

"Mateo." It was the first time she had used his name. "Does anyone else in Port Clement still remember that winter?"

He put his hat on and settled it. "Only the ones who don't want to."

He went out into the rain and down the walk to his truck, and she stood in the doorway of the cold building with her arms crossed and watched the tail lights until the gray took them.

Then she went back to the desk, opened her notebook to a clean page, and wrote one line at the top of it: Elara Peterson left Port Clement within three weeks of the inquiry. She underlined it and set the pen down. It was the first hard fact of the whole week that had come from a living person rather than a page, and it left her with a question she could not put down: why would a woman who had kept the light burning for years pack her house in the dark and never come back to say why.