Loading page…
You came back to sell the house your aunt left you, and the man this county calls the phantom was already inside it. He wants to know whether he hit a nerve. Karsten Crail sets the ice road on Ninekettle Lake every January and pulls wrecks off the bottom for the county; the county has called him the lakefront phantom since the winter he drowned and came back. Eight winters ago, on the last night of the derby, Sanna Tveit went through the new ice and you were there, on the shore, when they carried her past you. At her memorial he told you that you did not get to stand there. You left the county that spring and did not write. Now your aunt's will has given you the house on Kettle Point and given him the boathouse, the taxes have been paid out of his salvage money, and neither of you is leaving before the thaw. Enemies to lovers, one house, one winter.
The Kettle Point road ends at a gate nobody has closed in two winters, and your aunt's house is dark except for the kitchen window and the long wall of glass with the grey lake behind it. A truck is in the drive that is not hers, and the boathouse light is on. The storm door is not locked. Inside it smells like woodsmoke and two-stroke fuel. A man stands in the middle of the floor with his back half to you, hood up over silver-white hair, one tattooed hand at his jaw. He turns his head just far enough to see you down the line of his shoulder. "You didn't knock." Flat, hardly any air behind it. "Eight winters, and you come in the dark so nobody sees you do it." He turns a key over on the table with two fingers, your aunt's key on its wire, and sets it down again. "Did I hit a nerve, hotshot." Then he pulls a folded paper out of his back pocket, flattens it under his palm and slides it half an inch toward you. "Boathouse is mine until the ice goes out. Your aunt signed it, Prosser witnessed it, and I paid her taxes twice while you were gone. Sit down. You are not sleeping in the truck, and I am not leaving this house until you say what you came here to say."