Episode 71 · The Locker Key

The house was dark except for the kitchen. Maxim had left the light on over the stove, the way Mary used to when someone was coming home late.

Soles fed the dogs first. Then he put his phone in a bowl of rice, because it still showed nothing but a black screen, and went to the drawer where his mother had kept the family’s papers.

He found receipts for seeds, the warranty for a pump Kale had replaced and a sheet on which Mary had divided a month’s expenses into two columns. Nothing from the work on the bank. Nothing from the port. At the table Kale had talked about the crew and about the odd stubborn machine, but he had never brought work papers into the house.

He closed the drawer and stood with his palm on the handle.

His parents’ bedroom still smelled of them. Their clothes hung pressed against one another. He took down Kale’s work jacket and went through the pockets: a short screw, a receipt faded almost white, a length of string knotted at one end. He laid them on the bedspread without deciding whether they were worth keeping.

When he turned to hang the jacket back up, he saw the key ring on the hook behind the door.

Two keys. The shed key he knew at once. The other was smaller, on a metal tag with a number stamped slightly crooked. Kale had talked about his locker at the port whenever he forgot his gloves there and came home with his hands smelling of oil.

Soles sat on the edge of the bed with the key in his palm. Someone had searched for papers in the garden, in the archive, in the files of the restoration. No one had searched where his father had changed his clothes every morning.

Maxim came in after midnight. Soles heard the gate, then the dogs, then his cousin stopping in the kitchen doorway at the sight of the bowl of rice.

— Is that dinner?

— That’s my phone.

— Tesa’s at home. She told the doctor his cast was an insult. Then she told me I drive like a hearse.

— Do you?

— Tonight, yes.

Soles showed him the key. Maxim turned the tag toward the light and read the number twice.

— You want to go now.

— I want to call the investigator.

Maxim looked at him a moment longer, then handed over his own phone without a word.

The investigator answered on the fifth ring, in the voice of a man who had been asleep. He listened. He did not ask why it could not wait until morning.

— I’ll call the port first thing and ask them to keep the crew’s documents. Don’t open that locker on your own.

— I only want to know what’s in it.

— So do I. That’s why I want us both to be able to say afterward what state we found it in.

Soles turned the key between his fingers. It annoyed him that the man was right. If he opened the locker first, any paper he found could be called into question, and no one would notice the ones that were missing.

He read out the number on the tag. The investigator repeated it back correctly.

By morning the phone had come back on in the rice, with a dark bruise spreading from one corner of the screen. It showed three missed calls from Maxim and none from anyone else.

The quays smelled the same. Soles had expected them to be different without Kale on them, but at the service gate he met the same mix of diesel, salt and wet iron, and the same barrier raised halfway, which nobody bothered to lower. The investigator was waiting by the guard booth with a coffee from the machine and the face of a man who had slept, but not enough.

— Better? he asked, looking at Soles’s jacket.

— No.

— Good. At least you don’t lie about that.

The storekeeper came on foot from quay three, a reflective vest over his sweater and a thick register under his arm, held shut with an elastic band. He recognized Soles before anyone could introduce him. He stopped, wiped his palm on his pants and held it out.

— You’re Kale’s.

— Yes.

The man nodded several times, as if he had something more to say and could not find where to begin. Then he turned and showed them the way.

The locker room was a long hut built onto the maintenance workshop. Two rows of lockers faced each other, names on tape or scratched into the paint. Soles knew where they would stop before they got there. For two years he had worked here himself, and afterward he had come back often enough to drag his father out to lunch or bring him the gloves he had left at home.

There was no name on the door anymore. The tape had been torn off. Beneath it remained a paler rectangle with sticky edges. The number matched the tag.

— You open it, the investigator said. I’ll watch.

The key went in stiffly, then turned all at once with a dry click. Soles pulled the door.

The locker was empty.

Not emptied in a hurry. Clean. The top shelf had been wiped. On the metal floor was a darker circle where Kale’s thermos had stood for years, and two parallel scratches left by boots. The hook was bare. It still smelled, faintly, of oil and of the green soap Kale had scrubbed his hands with at the end of every shift.

— It was cleared, the storekeeper said quietly, as if apologizing. That’s what we do. Thirty days, nobody comes, we pack it up ourselves. But somebody came.

He opened the register on the lid of a toolbox and ran his finger down the months. Then he turned the book toward them.

Date, locker number, contents, collected by, signature. On Kale’s line: work clothes, boots, helmet, thermos, personal effects. Under the heading for who had collected them: for the family.

Beside it was a signature Soles knew. He had seen it on the handover sheet for a pool pump, at the bottom of a page he had filled in himself.

Varren.

The date was a week after the funeral. Soles had still been in the hospital.