10. Nolan
Chapter ten
Nolan
After the break-in, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone had watched me sleep. That someone was still watching.
I sat up the usual way: right side, top arm, and feet flat.
Elias appeared at my door with two coffees.
I joined him and looked back at the room: the pad, the roller, and the lacrosse ball. None of it was worth stealing. That was the part I couldn't get past. Whoever came in had wanted nothing a thief would want. They'd wanted to know how much of me was held together with duct tape.
Now they knew. For fourteen years I'd sold the same story. I played hurt, never complained, and dragged myself through every minute, fully committed. It worked because it was mostly true, and the parts that weren't were private.
Last night a stranger walked in and found everything I kept to myself: the heating pad and the pills.
If any of it ever got out, the story was over.
It wouldn't short-circuit my career, but it would poison the meaning of it.
It was my legacy, and I'd spent my whole life making sure my story was told my way.
I carried the mat into the living room and dropped it by the recliner.
The bedroom was enemy territory, but they'd ignored the front room.
I pulled my knees to my chest, one at a time, then used the roller and shifted my weight onto the ball while the rain started again, ticking against the windows.
Elias sat on the sofa and sipped his coffee. I watched him from the floor.
At seven sharp, my door buzzer sounded. Elias answered it, and a few minutes later a drill bit into my own front door.
The locksmith was a woman named Dee, mid-fifties, with a toothpick in the corner of her mouth and a canvas roll of tools she laid out on the hallway floor. She glanced up when I came to the door, took in the whole six-one of me, and went back to her drill.
"You want the deadbolt and the knob, or just the bolt?"
"Both. And the back door, too."
She nodded. "You're the hockey one."
"Yep, that's right."
"My brother-in-law won't believe this. He's going nuts about the season." She backed the drill out and caught the cylinder in her palm before it dropped. "I don't follow it. No offense. In the time he takes to tell me about a power play, I could've re-keyed his whole house."
"None taken."
She set the old cylinder on a towel and turned it under the hall light, and something in her face shifted from bored to mildly interested.
"Whoever you had in here before was good," she said.
"How do you mean?"
"Pins are clean." She tipped it toward me like I'd know what I was looking at.
"No scoring or scratches on the plug. It wasn't forced.
This lock was opened, not beaten." She shrugged and set it down.
"Either somebody had a key, or somebody who knew what they were doing took thirty seconds with a pick and didn't leave a mark. "
For Dee, it was a comment about the ordinary world. For Elias, it was evidence.
"So a new lock fixes it?" I asked.
"Fixes it for now." She fitted the new cylinder and started setting it. "But as soon as you go handing out keys again…"
"Understood."
"Bolt's in. I'll do the back."
She gathered her roll and walked through the condo directly to the back door. That put her out of range of hearing voices in the kitchen, so Elias placed his call to Seattle.
"Okay," Michael said. "Everybody with a key, a code, or a habit of being inside that unit. Walk me through it, and don't clean it up. The list is only useful if it's ugly."
It wasn't as ugly as he wanted it to be.
"Cleaning service, twice a week. Tuesdays and Fridays, while I'm at the rink. They have a key and the alarm code."
"Company or individuals?"
"Company. The crew rotates. I know the regulars, Rosa and a guy named Vic."
"Meal service?"
"Drop-off three times a week. They don't come in. Cooler goes to the package room downstairs."
"Massage therapist. Your file says home visits."
"She's here every week during the season, but I let her in."
The building's office had keys. Michael read my list back in his flat, keyboard-clatter voice. There were nine people.
"That's it?" Michael asked.
"One more," I said. "There's a friend. She watered my plants during a road trip my first year here, and I never took the key back."
"Name?"
Dee's drill whined in the distance.
"She's not part of this."
"Nolan," Michael's voice stayed level. "Right now nobody's part of anything. I use this list to clear people, not accuse them."
"Hannah Kessler," I said. "Internal medicine at Barnes-Jewish. Clear her first. She's the one name on that list I'll vouch for."
"Noted twice," Michael said. "For what it's worth, the vouching tells me more than having the key does."
Elias had drifted into the living room while we talked. By the time Michael finished the list, he had returned.
"The other units," he said. "Has anything changed hands in the building in the last six months? Sales, new leases, or corporate rentals."
"That's casting a wide net for a break-in," Michael said.
"Humor me," Elias said.
"Already on it."
I understood. Elias thought the break-in was internal, someone who had been in the building before last night.
***
Skipping the optional skate would have felt like hiding. I didn't.
Half the roster was on the ice by eleven, and none of it looked like work.
The morning after a game, an optional runs itself.
There are no whistles and no drills. The coaches lean on the boards with their coffee, letting us find our own way back into our legs.
The older guys who'd played twenty minutes the night before moved slow, and the kids went hard because the kids always go hard.
Jamie was out early, snapping pucks at the same top corner he'd hit in Game One, over and over, like he was trying to convince the net it hadn't been an accident.
By the time I'd done a slow lap, he'd talked Brick into a game with three other guys: five shots each, top shelf only, the loser buys the room's coffee for a week.
Brick was a thirty-five-year-old defenseman who'd scored eleven goals in seven hundred games.
"You're giving a defenseman top-shelf-only," I said, skating past. "He hasn't lifted a puck since Taylor Swift was in high school."
"I'm generous," Jamie said.
Brick's first one went in off the crossbar with a sound like a rifle. He didn't celebrate. He looked at Jamie, then at me, and skated slowly to the back of the line.
"That's one," he said.
The kid buried four out of five. Brick got the one lucky bar-down and missed the rest by a foot. He agreed to pay up without a word.
I felt Elias before I saw him.
He'd peeled off when we arrived at the arena, but now he was up in the tunnel by the Zamboni gate, out of the way, with a lanyard around his neck Doyle's people had given him. He wasn't scanning exits. Instead, he was watching me.
I skate cleanly: economical crossovers and turns leading with the right side. It was a compromise with my hip that others couldn't see.
Elias saw it.
I left the ice for water and he walked down the tunnel to meet me at the bench gate.
"You skate differently when you think no one's watching," he said.
"I skate the same as always."
"You skate beautifully on your own. It's not the same as in a game, and you know it isn't."
I knew. "You're supposed to be watching the exits," I said.
"The exits won't go anywhere."
I turned toward the far end and caught Brick at the near circle, not shooting, with one glove off, pretending to fix a lace.
He'd had plenty of time for that, but he was busy watching Elias and me.
When he saw me pick up on it, he didn't look away.
He held my gaze for a beat, flipped a puck up onto his stick, and went back to losing to a rookie.
The locker room afterward smelled wrong, and it took me a second to place it. Someone was wearing cologne. It was expensive, and there was a lot.
Misha wore it.
"You smell like the perfume counter at Nordstrom," Wes said, dressing two stalls down.
"Is Kazimira." Misha didn't look up from his skates. Everyone waited for more, but there was nothing else.
"His sister," Jamie said. "He told me. She sent it before the Final as victory cologne. He has to wear it, or she knows."
"She always knows," Misha said.
I sat in Vern's stall and did my job. I answered a beat writer with a question about Boston's forecheck. The equipment guys asked about the new steel, and I said it felt good. I was fine. I'm world-class at sounding fine.
Still, something had changed overnight. I was more aware of every answer I gave, as if I were floating near the ceiling and looking down, watching.
Jamie dropped onto the bench next to me with his skates half unlaced. "Petey looked at the shoulder," he said, before I could ask. "It's nothing. Rotator's clean."
"Good."
"You were right to push me, though. It was grabbing at the top of the reach. I figured that was normal."
"Some of it's normal." I peeled the tape off my socks. "The trick is knowing when it's not. You don't have to figure that out alone. That's why the team hired Petey."
Brick found me in the players' lot, standing with Elias beside the gray truck we rode in on the way to the arena. Elias had swapped it overnight without a word. Brick walked up to us peeling a banana.
"Maddie made a cake for breakfast," he said. "Game One. Put one candle in it. I asked if she's doing that every game the rest of the way." He took a bite of the banana. "She says yeah. Says if we don't win the Cup, at least I'll be fat and happy on cake."
Elias pulled out of the lot and took Lindell home, wipers going, with the blue ribbons on the planters in the median wilting in the rain.
Dee had finished before we left for the rink, and Elias had carried the new keys in his pocket all day. We used them to get back into the condo. The spare set sat on the island in a small manila envelope, the kind banks use, with a receipt folded around two brass keys.
Elias sat on the sofa and opened his laptop.