Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
DEATH IN SUNSET GROVE
THE END OF SUNSET GROVE
Chapter 1
Siiri Kettunen woke up to such a dreadful racket that she thought she was in hell. She heard booming overhead, banging from beyond the wall, and battering somewhere in the distance and remembered that Sunset Grove had been threatening its residents with a plumbing retrofit for some time now. Scaffolding had surrounded the retirement home in May, followed by a swathe of plastic; the only thing missing was a moat. Windows were to be kept shut, and that went for balcony doors, too; not a ray of sunshine made it inside. Spring had been sunny and unusually warm in Helsinki, but indoors it was pitch-dark and as stuffy as a studio-apartment sauna.
Siiri glanced at her clock radio. The time was seven minutes past six on a Monday morning, and her home was threatened with imminent ruin. Very dedicated they were, these construction workers, although some of Sunset Grove’s residents had had their doubts when they discovered that the contractor carrying out the retrofit was foreign and most of the workers were Polish, Russian, or Estonian.
The noise grew increasingly intolerable. Someone was hammering on the wall so violently that Siiri was afraid the building would come crashing down around her ears. Did these demolition men think all senior citizens were deaf? And that that gave them the right to run riot in the middle of the night like a bunch of lunatics, without a thought to the residents’ comfort? Slowly she pulled herself up, lowered her old feet to the grey linoleum, and paused to let the thrumming in her head subside. When she was a girl, her ankles had been so lovely that men had always paid her compliments, but age had turned her legs to fat stumps. She gazed at her feet and listened to the blood rushing through her head. Odd. One would think that the din from tearing down walls and drilling up floors would drown out the hum in her calcified veins, but, on the contrary, it seemed that her head wouldn’t be quietening down at all today.
She snatched her robe from the foot of the bed, jammed her feet into her slippers, and stood. She didn’t care for the slippers; it was Irma who had made her buy them. But if she went traipsing about in stockinged feet, she was bound to slip and bump her head, and Irma had no interest in tending a paraplegic. Thinking about Irma brought a smile to Siiri’s face, and she wished it were ten already. Then she could pop down the hall for a cup of instant coffee and the paper. But Irma wouldn’t be awake at this hour, demolition or no demolition, because she took the strongest sleeping pills money could buy.
‘They’re perfectly safe,’ Irma would say, gold bracelets jangling as she waved a hand dismissively through the air. ‘My bedtime candies. I never feel groggy; they just give me a good night’s rest. When you’re old, it’s important to get your rest and to be able to sleep soundly. I always wash them down with whisky; it has such a lovely calming effect, too.’
After stretching her aching limbs, Siiri padded into the kitchen and forced herself to drink two glasses of water. The second one proved a challenge. She drank three gulps, rested a moment, took a deep breath, and drank one more. It was important to get your liquids. Dehydration was an inevitable part of aging, which was why even seventy-year-olds, young as they were, couldn’t tolerate alcohol the way they used to. Dehydration also meant all sorts of cramps. Your gums swelled, your skin itched, and your bowels stopped up, and then doctors would prescribe you all sorts of pills instead of telling you to drink more water.
Today, her usual two glasses required Herculean effort. But at long last she completed the task and stood there panting for a moment, as if she had just performed some major athletic feat. The pounding and buzzing intensified. The noise was coming from all directions: from inside her head, outside it, and, now that she thought about it, from her front door, too.
She cast a doubtful eye at the door, as if it would be able to explain what was going on if she glared at it demandingly enough. Apparently, there truly was someone out there, trying to batter their way in with a sledgehammer. Siiri started looking around for her handbag. It wasn’t on the telephone table or in the living room, nor was it on her bed or nightstand. It turned up on the wicker chair in the entryway, right where it was supposed to be. She slipped it over her arm, a defence against any and all misfortune, and cautiously cracked the door.
‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ rang out so high and shrill that the boring and bashing momentarily ceased. Irma was awake!
‘Isn’t it dreadful? It’s like we’ve gone to hell! Which is where we’ll find ourselves if this keeps up, since we refuse to die like decent people. A little mass euthanasia might be the just thing now. Döden, döden, döden.’
‘Irma! What are you doing up at this hour?’
‘Are you deaf? My apartment is being smashed to bits by a sledgehammer. A fellow with a beard showed up in the middle of the night, marched into my bathroom, and started work. I was so startled I just threw something on and dashed down here for refuge. Do you have any breakfast for me?’
Irma certainly was energetic. Despite the hour, she was wearing a stylish blue summer dress and a white crocheted shawl over her shoulders. Her footwear, however, was pink and peculiar. Plastic shower shoes of some sort.
‘Crocs. They’re the latest craze,’ Irma explained, as she opened Siiri’s fridge to see if there was any cake for breakfast. ‘Did you hear those construction workers talking to each other? Blathering like the Tower of Babel outside my front door before six in the morning. I’ll tell you, though, one of them could swear quite proficiently in Finnish. The “fucks” were flying; that’s what woke me up.’
Siiri had never heard the word cross Irma’s lips before. She looked in surprise at her friend, who blithely continued rummaging through the fridge, humming a song from her youth: ‘Life’s a gas and we’ll be fine, now that I’m yours, now that you’re mine . . .’
Siiri pointed Irma towards the foil-wrapped pound cake on the bottom shelf. It was two days old, or, rather, she had bought it two days ago. In all likelihood, it had been baked a month ago somewhere in the Baltic countryside. What difference did it make? It still tasted delicious. Siiri turned on the tap, but nothing happened. The water had been turned off, and without warning! Luckily there was still some in the kettle from yesterday. Siiri put it on to boil and took the instant coffee from the cupboard. She knew Irma thought cake tasted best when it was dipped in coffee.
‘Yum, cakesies,’ Irma said. ‘And cakesies always need a good dunking, that’s what makes them so good. Oh my, luckily noise doesn’t deafen the taste buds.’
They sat at Siiri’s table, enjoying their cake and coffee and browsing through the newspaper. An incessant thunder rumbled overhead, as if someone were jackhammering Siiri’s ceiling. A counterpoint was provi
ded by arrhythmic blows from next door, where someone appeared to pounding on the floor or wall of Irma’s apartment. As usual for a summer Monday, there was precious little of interest in the paper. There were only two obituaries, both equally dull. They scanned the titles of the deceased: Beloved engineer, grandfather and brother. Dearly missed director of public sanitation.
‘Is Olavi Edvard’s family really trying to say they loved him for being an engineer?’ Irma said, and she cackled so hard that she choked on her cake. She coughed for a while, coughed and cackled, swatted the air and dabbed at her watering eyes with her handkerchief. ‘Oh my! Shall we put “beloved typist” in your obituary?’ She took a big swig of coffee and chuckled some more. Then she sighed deeply, eyed the grey plastic covering the window, and pulled a flat green object out of her handbag.
‘This is an iPad. It’s spelled little i big P-a-d and Anna-Liisa says you should pronounce it like you’re Swedish.’
‘You bought it?’ Siiri cried in horror. Irma had murmured vague threats about her intentions, but Siiri hadn’t imagined the day would actually come when a tablet computer would appear in Irma’s handbag. Or among the cake crumbs on Siiri’s kitchen table, for that matter. ‘Didn’t it cost a fortune?’
‘Not at all,’ Irma said, stroking the gadget as if it were a pet. The machine started purring, and pictures appeared on the screen. It really did come to life at a touch, a caress. ‘Actually, I haven’t the foggiest idea what it cost. I put it on my Stockmann card, and when I do that nothing ever seems to cost much. The bonus points just pour in. The salesperson assured me it was a good buy. Durable, high quality, and pretty to boot, don’t you think?’
Irma went back to petting her gadget. It obeyed her commands: a deck of playing cards appeared on the screen, and Irma demonstrated how handy it was to be able to play solitaire without actual cards. Siiri thought it was stupid. She had no interest in watching Irma fraternize with the contraption at her breakfast table. They were supposed to be finishing the newspaper and discussing current events, so they could keep up with the times.
‘The paper’s in here, too, in my tablet!’ Irma crowed, and her bright soprano rose above the cacophony of the demolition. She jabbed and swatted at the screen, which seemed to upset it. Now it was refusing to follow any of her orders.
‘I know I saw it here yesterday,’ Irma said, breaking into ‘The Robber’s Song’ and bossily tapping at her computer. ‘Listen here, you scamp!’
Her gesticulations took the form of increasingly expansive arcs, and Siiri was afraid that Irma would break her expensive toy. She folded up the paper and set it next to the front door in a paper bag. She could hear pounding from the corridor, too, not just from Irma’s apartment, and she caught snippets of Slavic grumbles amid the thuds.
‘Well, I can’t find today’s paper on this iPad now, but I know for a fact it’s stashed away in there somewhere. The boy at Stockmann showed me, one swoosh and you can read the same articles you have in that rubbish bag over there. Actually, I’m not sure about the obituaries. No, they must be there, since they’ve started publishing them on the Internet, too.’
‘Is that the Internet?’ Siiri asked sceptically. Irma had lowered her toy to her lap and was running a forefinger and thumb across it as if she were searching a cat for fleas.
‘No, you silly goose!’ Irma squawked, still swiping the screen. ‘This isn’t the Internet, it’s how you get to the Internet.’
‘Where is it, then?’
‘The Internet? Why, it’s . . . it’s everywhere . . . and nowhere, really, there’s a special word for it. I’m sure Anna-Liisa remembers . . .’
‘Outer space?’ Siiri suggested.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. This isn’t rocket science; a child can use a computer and so can I, now, although this machine doesn’t want to behave at the moment. I was going to show you something I knew would tickle you. They taught us in class that you can use a computer to track trams, but for the life of me I can’t find the app. These things are called apps, did you know that? I wonder if that’s it? Agh, now it wants to play Sudoku! Why didn’t you come to the computer class with me when you had the chance?’
The very thought had been enough to terrify Siiri. She had never cared for classes and hobbies that required a regression to the school desk. That’s why she hadn’t learned a thing during her French course at the community centre all those years ago. After that, she had given up, despite the fact that her friends had started taking classes of all descriptions once they retired, and it had been . . . goodness, almost thirty years since then. There was no end to the dance steps and knitting styles she could have learned in that time, if she had been so inclined. But Siiri had just ridden the tram, watched TV and read the same books over and over. She felt like a lazy underachiever, and stupid, too, as she observed the determination Irma brought to her battle with her recalcitrant gadget.
‘This is impossible. That’s it, I’m turning this thing off. Where’s the power button? Oops – OK, so that’s where it is. But believe you me, it has a map where you can see the location of every single tram in Helsinki at this very moment. In real time, as they say. You can plan your little jaunts much more handily. Or could, if you bothered to develop an interest in the conveniences modern life has to offer.’
Irma sounded so melodramatic that Siiri felt even guiltier about being such an underachiever. How had she let so many years of her life go to waste? Could she still make up for all the squandered moments?
Suddenly, there was a blood-curdling howl from the bathroom, followed by a smash. Then everything was dreadfully still. Siiri and Irma stared at each other in horror.
‘Saatana! Saatanan paska!’
The cursing was cut off by another crash. Irma clutched her green flaptop to her chest. Her eyes were as wide as plates and she tried to whisper as softly as possible: ‘I told you! They know how to swear in Finnish.’
An agonizingly long silence was followed by several sequential crashes and an unpleasant tinkling from the bathroom, as all the mirrors and glass objects tumbled to the floor and shattered. The bathroom door was ajar, and Siiri saw smoke billowing out into the living room. Irma started hacking and swatting it away; Siiri jumped up but was too panicked to move. Maybe the smoke was simply dust, yes, that was it. Demolition dust; there was so much of it around these days that several residents were afraid they’d contract asthma.
Then a brawny, bearded fellow wielding a sledgehammer emerged from the bathroom. He wasn’t wearing noise blockers or a neon vest, just a pair of overalls sprouting pockets and loops and other curious extremities. Irma squawked and gripped her flaptop more tightly, as if it were a shield against extraterrestrial invaders.
‘Perkele,’ the man said in unmistakable Finnish. He didn’t look their way; perhaps he thought he was alone. Siiri gawked at him, paralyzed with fear. She felt a stabbing pain in her head and didn’t dare breathe.
‘Vittu saatana,’ he continued, roughly slamming his sledgehammer into Siiri’s floor. Siiri was afraid it would punch a hole through to the apartment below. She couldn’t recall who had moved in after the fat lady had moved on – died, that is. And that had been a year ago, at least. Maybe more.
Siiri looked around and focused on breathing. The dirty, demolition-dusted ogre was standing stock still in her living room. Irma surreptitiously shifted her most precious possession into her handbag, which she then protectively lifted into her lap. When Siiri could breathe normally again and the stabbing pain in her head had subsided, she decided to get a grip on herself. She strode up to the man briskly and extended a hand.
‘Good morning, I’m Siiri Kettunen. Please excuse the robe, but I wasn’t expecting visitors this early.’
The man gaped at this white-haired ninety-five-year-old in her threadbare bathrobe, her faded, pale eyes taking him in with a cheerful curiosity. Uncertainly, he took Siiri’s hand in his grimy paw and started speaking in crude English. Scratching his gut, he explained that there
had been a mistake. He wasn’t supposed to come through the wall into Siiri’s apartment. Then he told Siiri and Irma to calm down, although they felt they had behaved with admirable poise under the rather surreal circumstances, and looked around to determine where the exit was.
‘This way,’ Siiri said, opening the front door for the disoriented sledgehammerer. He stalked out in his big, filthy boots, leaving behind crumbs of concrete and a gaping hole in the wall between Siiri’s and Irma’s apartments. A faint whiff of perfume drifted from Irma’s bathroom into Siiri’s, which just a moment ago had been as neat as a pin.
‘Goodness gracious,’ Siiri said to herself as she examined her bathroom. The shower had a hole big enough for a man to walk through, rather round and beautiful, actually, and the floor was strewn with hunks of concrete, tile shards and other detritus. A pair of pipes and a length of electrical wiring protruded nastily from the jagged wall. The sink was still in place, but the cabinet above it hung askew and its contents had dashed to the floor. Broken bottles, jars, and the rest of Siiri’s toiletry paraphernalia were scattered among the wreckage.
‘How horrible!’ Irma wailed, peering over Siiri’s shoulder. She had finally roused herself from her chair to see what sort of destruction the devil of a demolition man had left in his wake. ‘Shameless!’
They could look right into Irma’s apartment. It was hard to make out much of anything because of the debris, but Siiri could see that Irma’s sink had been yanked up from the floor and lay just beyond the hole, cracked. They huffed and harrumphed until they wore themselves out. The fact was, no matter how much they cursed immigrant labourers and plumbing retrofits and Sunset Grove, where the staff was incapable of doing anything properly, it wasn’t going to change a thing. Irma was the first to step away from the threshold. She paced Siiri’s living room before collapsing to the sofa. And then she started to laugh in the lovely way only Irma Lännenleimu could laugh: starting from a high, tinkling chime and gradually dropping like a bel canto singer, gliding from falsetto to a chest-voice staccato. Soon she was slapping her thighs, and finally, after she had settled down, she still jiggled as she dabbed at her tears with a handkerchief. Siiri smiled at her friend, moved a couple of cushions aside, and plopped down next to her.
Escape from Sunset Grove Page 1