“Look what I found,” she sang.
“What is it, hjärtat?” Beata called.
Emil leapt forward and snatched it out of Astrid’s hand. He stuffed it into his pocket just as their mother entered.
“Only a dirty sock.” He sent his sister a glare that threatened a grisly death if she didn’t keep her trap shut.
“Socks in the dining room? Must you treat my vacation home like a pigsty?”
“Sorry, Mor. Won’t happen again.”
But Beata surveyed her precious dining room with suspicion. Emil followed her gaze, hoping he hadn’t missed another damning detail. Thankfully, her prized mahogany dining set edged with a wave pattern gleamed in the gaslight. Her navy linen runner embroidered with golden seashells was spotless. Her grandfather’s oil painting of Sweden’s coastline—which Emil had put safely away during a rousing game of strip poker—once again reigned supreme above the sideboard. The brass mariner’s clock marked the hour with its clear, undamaged chime. He was in the clear?—
“Oh, the disrespect!”
He glared at the damn model boat that drew her ire. His father loved the miniature sloop almost as much as he loved sermonizing about its humble origins. So naturally, several beers in, Emil had turned it on its side and laid a leaf covered in bird shit across the hull.
“If your father saw this, he’d be crushed.” Beata lifted the leaf with two fingers, righted the model, and lovingly polished the nameplate emblazoned with Njord’s Favor, 1900.
“Or would he use it as a fresh opportunity to guilt me into working for him?”
“It’s a family business. Why wouldn’t you want to help your father? He’s losing sleep over circling competitors…”
Emil stopped listening. How many times had they had this exact conversation? For his father, the sloop, and by extension, Nordstar Boatworks, was a monument to everything the family had achieved since stepping off the ship from Sweden. It represented survival, then prosperity. It was a testament to their skill and grit.
But for Emil, it was a gilded trap. Every polished deck and glistening brass fitting screamed of a legacy he was expected to uphold, but had never chosen. He wanted freedom, not someone else’s dream shackled to his back. And if his father thought fabricating tales of doom about his thriving business could force him to heel, he was dead wrong.
“He has my brother’s help,” he interrupted.
Beata’s hands plunked onto her hips. “And God bless him for it! What have you done in the month since you moved into my vacation home?”
Spent a good chunk of his savings on carousing, that’s what. Thank Christ he’d bought a few shares of Nordstar Boatworks back when he’d had steady work. Not only did the sensible investment provide a small, steady return each month and allow him to pursue his own goals, but it kept the shares in the family’s hands and gave Far no excuse to accuse him of abandoning them entirely. If only the old man viewed the silent partnership like Emil did.
“We agreed it would be best for all if I stayed here until the summer,” he reminded her. “Far fewer shouting matches and someone to keep an eye on things.”
“But you also led us to believe you’d have cases by the end of the year.”
“Why, that’s three days from now,” Astrid piped up.
Emil ignored her. “Building a detective agency takes time.”
“I’m worried about you, min raring.” The shadow that passed over his mother’s face, momentarily softening her features, made Emil shift uncomfortably. “You seem lost.”
“I’ll have a case soon?—”
“That’s not what I mean. When you begged us as a boy to let you work at the newspaper instead of the shipyard, I supported you. The work was safer, more intellectual. What mother could refuse? There was always the understanding that you’d use your skills for the family one day. But you left us for Tacoma to do police work, of all the dangerous things!”
“I never agreed to that plan, and I was always clear about how much investigating meant to me.”
“But you didn’t stick with that either! You barely lasted a year before you went back to the Puget Sound Post?—”
“On assignment. I couldn’t tell you because it was confidential.”
Her expression only grew stormier. “Then explain why, once you’d solved your case, you quit the force, moved home?—”
“Back and forth, back and forth,” Astrid intoned from the doorway.
“—and still treated your father’s renewed offer like it was beneath you.”
