Free Daughters of Babylon by Elaine Stirling

that something couldn’t be done to prevent the bank foreclosing on Helmi Kiviäinen’s boarding house; and if her son-in-law had kept a head on his shoulders and a certain something in his pants—after all, those rich American doctors and lawyers paid good money to fly in bush planes to Twice Past Sunset—his fishing camp, that poor child might have stood a chance. But people have to look after their own, and no, officer, I haven’t seen the girl in this photo since her grandmother’s funeral. St. Luke’s Lutheran paid for the service, the meal, even a grave marker out of their compassionate fund, not that the family ever attended church. I don’t know what direction she might have gone. Roger Kestral’s fishing camp has been closed for years; I don’t think the road’s even open anymore. She’s probably gone west, to Vancouver. That’s where most teenagers end up these days, isn’t it?
    A few blocks from the bus station, Silvie noticed a sign in the door of the Sudbury Theatre Centre:
     
    Box Office Manager Needed Immediately
    Apply Within
     
    “And so, within I went.”
    Dr. Shirazi set a small platter near the gift basket. “Would you do the honour? The pistachios and dried apricots from La Sorcière de Miel are wonderful.”
    While the archeologist prepared mint tea, Silvie arranged fruit and nuts on the dish and recalled her interview with the stage manager named Toby. “I’d never met a man with pink-tipped hair and black nail polish. And I thought he wasn’t using his real voice.
    “Within minutes, he had me near tears. No, I had no theatre experience, no, I had never worked in a box office—then why are you wasting my time, he wanted to know. I need someone to start in three hours.”
    Dr. Shirazi had a glorious laugh that rolled out of him in layers. Silvie was beginning to understand the attraction. They carried the tea things into the parlour and sat across from each other in the leather wing chairs, in front of the fireplace that, while still unlit, didn’t seem so cold anymore. And she told him of the moment when an imperious figure in a full tartan cape swept past the open door of the office where Toby was chewing a cuticle and muttering of disastrous opening nights, and said in a voice that wasn’t loud and yet rattled every corner of the room she wasn’t in: “Is there no one in this shambles of a theatre who can make a decent cuppa?”
    Silvina’s insecurities blew apart in that instant, like a bird’s nest struck by lightning. All that the stage manager had discouraged her from expressing, like the discipline it took to run a boarding house with her grandmother, cooking three meals a day, seven days a week for eight full-time boarders; and the joy she experienced rowing on the lake at Twice Past Sunset; and the fact that her grandmother used to act in amateur theatre when she was younger; and they loved to watch TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies together. And while most Finns drank coffee, those like her family who came from Karelia in the East, also enjoyed tea. And Silvie’s favourite heirloom, that she’d been forced to leave behind when she ran away to avoid being taken by the Children’s Aid and seeing the house she’d grown up in foreclose, had been the family’s sterling silver samovar.
    “I shot out of the chair, ran into the hall and called out to the retreating figure in plaid, ‘I can make tea!’”
    Dr. Shirazi threw his head back and laughed. “No wonder Vivian loved you on sight.”
    He poured them each a second cup, then pulled several large coffee table books from the shelves that contained tinted colour photographs of his palatial family home in Tehran and the various summer palaces where he’d grown up. Yes, it was true what Viv had told her, that his family could trace their lineage to the first Persians mentioned in the Shahnameh, Book of Kings, and they counted among their closest friends, Mohammad Rez¬ā Shāh Pahlavī, the last Shah of Iran,