Page 5 of Home Ice

He shook his head, genuinely pleased, scrolling something on his phone without looking at it. That was a skill they must have taught in PR school.

“The response out there is—it’s very good, Rafe. Very warm. People like you. That’s not nothing. It’s kind of rare, and it’s worth keeping.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say after a comment like that.

“Which is sort of what I wanted to grab you about.” Mark stuck his phone in his pocket. “Got a minute tomorrow? Nothing bad. Might even be fun.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Great. Ten thirty, my office. I’ll put it on the calendar. It’s a good idea, I think, and you’ll like it. A couple of sponsorship people got excited over the break. They think you’d be a great fit for this one guy. Nothing complicated—we’ll talk tomorrow.”

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He drew it out again, glanced at the screen, and grimaced. “That’s Deckert wanting a call back. Gotta handle that.” He was already moving, keys out, walking backward two steps. “Hey—good day today. I mean it.”

I got into my truck and sat there a minute without starting it. Trier’s skates were on the passenger seat.

It had been the biggest day of my life, and it had gone better than anything I’d let myself imagine. What I mostly felt, sitting in the cold in the concrete quiet, was that I couldn’t remember why I’d been so careful about it.

I reached over and squared my phone to the edge of the console, and then the skates so the blades sat parallel to the seat seam, and then I started the truck.

This one guy, he’d said.

Whatever Mark wanted, I already knew what I was going to say. I always did. That was one thing people liked about me.

Chapter two

Niko

The drawer front was a sixteenth of an inch proud on the left side, and I’d been looking at it long enough that my coffee had gone cold. I wanted the drawer to sit flush in a hundred-year-old sideboard, and looking at it harder wouldn’t get it there before Callahan, the piece’s owner, arrived.

I shaved a whisper off the runner, eased the drawer home, and watched it settle into the case. My shop smelled of walnut and linseed oil. For about ninety seconds, I lived in the pleasure of that drawer sliding in and out without a sound.

My shop occupied the ground floor of an old brick commercial building. I rented both floors: the workshop below and my apartment up the back stairs, close enough that I could come down in socks when I couldn’t sleep. It still had the original storefront glass and glazed front door.

There was a knock on the door’s glass, and my ninety seconds were over.

It was Callahan. His appointment was for 7:30, and it was only 7:02. I saw him through the door. He was a round, pink, delighted man in a parka built for an Arctic expedition, waving with his entire right arm and holding a bakery box in his left hand.

I opened the door.

“Niko. I know I’m early. I’m always early. My wife says I’m going to be early for my funeral, and I said, Deb, that’s the one appointment where being late is the whole point.” He stamped his feet on the entry mat, dislodging a bit of winter slush.

Callahan set the bakery box on the end of the bench. “Those are for you. The cherry ones. You mentioned cherry in October.”

I had mentioned cherry exactly once last October when the sideboard arrived and got placed on my schedule.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Is that it?” He gestured at the sideboard. “Oh my God. Oh, look at it. That’s the original pull, isn’t it—you found the original pull?”

“Researched the maker. It was a small shop out of Grand Rapids that went under in the fifties. A salvage dealer in Ohio had a set of their pulls off a wrecked piece. It’s the same pattern from the same years.”

“Grandma loved this piece.” He laid one hand flat on the top. “Deb thinks I’m crazy, you know. She says, Frank, it’s furniture. And I say, Deb, my grandmother rolled out dough on this for forty years. That makes it more than furniture. It’s a witness.”

I didn’t have an answer to that, so I talked about the project itself.

“The veneer on the right side was a problem,” I said. “Somebody patched it in the seventies with the wrong species. I took it back to the substrate and matched the original walnut. You’ll see the seam if you look close. I left it that way on purpose.”

“Why?”