Chapter 7 of 7The Name Stayed

"Two point four million dollars," Maya said, holding the letter up over the desk. "That is what the museum's land is worth to them. And Mr. Shaw picks the day the board votes."

"Then the day is the whole problem." Evelyn Sterling set down her coffee and pulled the tote bag closer. "The county sealed the inquiry file. What I have left is one book, written by a woman this town forgot."

"So read the book." Maya sat on the stool beside the desk. "Let me scan it first, every page. Then nobody can make it disappear."

"If the board decides the diary is a liability, a scan is the first thing Mr. Shaw asks me for." Evie laid the diary on the blotter. "We stay quiet until we know what it says."

Maya set a paper sack on the desk: coffee in a Kwik Trip tray, a pasty from the shop on the square, still warm through the paper. "You want half?"

"Leave it. Then go open up front."

"Saturday." Maya stood and pulled her sweatshirt straight. "The guest book has not had one name in it since Tuesday."

"Then pull the accession files for me. The drawer with the family names, and whatever the boat offices handed over when they closed. Crew lists, harbor papers, that kind of thing."

Maya stopped in the doorway. "What are we looking for?"

"A surname."

The building had been a Coast Guard station before it was a museum, and on a gray Saturday it held the cold of the lake in its walls. She switched on the desk lamp and opened the diary.

Elara Peterson had kept the light three miles up the shore, and she had written the wreck down while her hands still ached from the tower stairs. The entry for November 28, 1924 named the captain a sot and named the mate the only sober man aboard. Now Evie read what came after.

The gale had not let up. The lighthouse log showed the lantern turning all night, and so did the diary, entry after entry in the same upright hand.

"The captain called for the wheel to come about. The sea would have taken her broadside, and the mate told him so. The order came again, and he did not answer it."

"Here is what I saw from the tower. The boat went down the side with men in it, and the mate took it along the hull and brought off the last of them before the deck broke."

"Any man on this shore would call that brave. There is no other word for it, and I have looked for one."

Evie turned the page. The handwriting loosened a little there. Even her capitals leaned.

"Their boat came into the cove below the light. One of them could not stand. The mate asked me for hot water for another man before he would take anything himself, and I had to make him sit down."

"He gave his name as Eino Koskinen, and he would not say one word against the man who had gone down with the Rose."

"I asked him once why he was not angry. He said the lake took what it took, and the town would say what it said. I did not know what he meant, and I have thought about it since."

Evie closed the diary. Then she took an index card and wrote a name across the top in pencil: Eino Koskinen. She looked at it before she picked up the phone.

"Flores Boatworks."

"Mateo, it is Evelyn Sterling."

"The furnace again?"

"No." She turned the card over in her fingers. "The diary gave me a name, and I want to know if it means anything on this harbor."

"Give it to me."

The pencil had gone blunt at the end of the word, and she said it slowly into the receiver. "Koskinen. Eino Koskinen."

She heard a tool set down on metal. "Say that again."

"Eino Koskinen. He was the first mate on the Rose. Elara Peterson wrote him into her book."

A radio murmured behind him, the marine forecast and then nothing, as if someone had reached over and turned it down.

"That name has been on this shore a long time," Mateo said. "Longer than the Shaws, if you want the truth of it."

"Do you know the family?"

A wrench rolled on the bench and stopped. "I know the name. People here say it a certain way, and then they change the subject." He paused. "Go through the old tug office papers. The museum took that whole office in boxes. If a Koskinen stayed on this water after the wreck, the crew lists will say so."

"Thank you."

Something turned over in the yard behind him, a compressor or a lathe, and then he was back. "Evie." His voice dropped. "Come by the yard before you knock on any doors. Some doors in this town open easier with somebody standing beside you."

She wrote that on the back of the card, then crossed the room to the accession drawer and pulled it open against the swelling of the old wood. Inside were folders tied with string and a bundle of crew lists from the years after the wreck, from a tug and barge office that had once run coal and ore out of the harbor. In the bundle, in a clerk's pencil: "Koskinen, E. — engineer."

Evie sat back. The man who had rowed a boat through a November gale had stayed on the same water, under the same name, in the town where the inquiry had laid the blame on him. She wrote "tug Anna May, engineer" below his name on the card.

Then she called the library.

"Poole residence."

"Mrs. Poole, this is Evelyn Sterling."

"I remember." A drawer slid shut at the other end. "You found something."

"Elara Peterson wrote his full name. Eino Koskinen, the first mate."

"Yes," Agnes said. "That name is in the tax rolls going a long way back, and I have seen it in the cemetery records."

"So they stayed."

A cup rang against a saucer at the other end. "So the name stayed. That is not the same thing."

"Do you have anything on him at all?"

"I have the same index card you do." Another drawer. "You have one woman's book, and this town has a plaque the Shaw family paid for. A court weighs a book and a plaque, and it does not weigh them evenly."

"Then I will bring you something heavier than a book."

"Bring me a paper no Shaw ever touched, and I will walk into that courthouse with you."

Maya came back with the guest book under her arm and found Evie still at the desk.

"Nobody," Maya said, meaning the museum. Then she leaned over and read the card. "Koskinen. Is that him?"

"That is him. And that is him on a tug crew list, years after the wreck."

"So he lived."

"He worked. That is all the list says."

Maya pulled the other stool over and sat down. "So what do we do with a name?"

"We find out what happened to him after the inquiry." Evie put the diary back in the tote. "And to anyone who carried that name afterward."

"And if they do not want to be found?"

Evie folded the card and put it in her pocket. "Then I tell them what the book says, and they decide what to do with it."

Maya looked at the empty guest book, then out the window at the gray water. Somewhere in Port Clement a family had lived with whatever people meant when they said the name a certain way, and the board was still waiting on a word from Mr. Shaw.