“Are you here all alone now or is Kaisa coming to stay the night again?”
“Kaisa’s flying to Helsinki tonight. The Grand Prix starts tomorrow. Dad said he might come if they finish their recording session today. But I can manage just fine on my own,” Aniliina said a little more graciously. “At least better than with Grandma and my drunk-ass uncle. Grandma just cries and goes on about how she always knew something bad would happen to her poor little baby girl. I’d have to agree with her on that.”
“Why?” I asked more sharply than I had intended.
“She means all the men and the paintings Mom did. I mean how she irritated almost everyone. I’ve always wondered why someone never killed her before. She was such a fucking bitch.”
With this, tears began flowing down her cheeks, which she tried to pretend weren’t there. Gradually, she started rocking back and forth, curling up like a snowman melting in the rain. Her empty coffee cup fell to the floor. I pulled a handkerchief out of my bag and ended up wiping away her tears. To my surprise, she didn’t resist and even let me stroke her hair.
“She was still my mom though,” Aniliina finally stammered. Then, as if ashamed of her outburst, she straightened up. “Did you have anything else? I need to go for a jog.”
“Do you know where I can find Kaisa before she leaves for Helsinki?”
“Yes, she’s supposed to be at the field practicing until three.”
Leaving Aniliina alone felt awful. Hopefully her father was on his way.
“If you remember anything that seems important, call me anytime. Even if you just want to talk…” I didn’t want to force myself on Aniliina, but I wanted her to know I was at her disposal. Leaving her both my home and work numbers, I decided to talk to her father, Mårten, about changing the locks as soon as he arrived.
From their house, the sports field was only a quarter of a mile away. Seeing it filled me with memories of shouting and sweat, the sudden pain of a tackle, and the tingling excitement of my team scoring a goal. But seeing the field so quiet, with only a couple of old men rounding the track, felt strange. Then I saw a solitary tall figure on the javelin runway. Choosing a javelin from the rack, Kaisa hefted it in her hand, looked down at her check marks, and then walked slowly to the other end of the runway to start her takeoff. First a couple of slow, almost exploratory steps, then an explosive spurt that brought her throwing hand back. The spurt came to a halt just before the white scratch line, from which she hurled the javelin into the air. The arc of the projectile was smooth and powerful, and it seemed like ages before it touched the ground several meters past the thickest white line drawn across the field. Was that the fifty-meter line? Or sixty? If that was the case, that was a phenomenal practice throw.
When I saw the coach rush to Kaisa from his observation post, I was sure it must be the sixty-meter line. Both seemed satisfied. Kaisa jogged a quick lap around the grass, stretching her shoulders and waiting until the runners had passed before taking off again. Her second throw also sailed past the thick white line, but not as far as the first.
The sports announcers on TV always commented on the purity of Kaisa’s technique. I wasn’t really familiar with the finer points of the javelin throw, but I could see that her takeoff was precise, her throwing hand stayed in a good position, and she put her whole body into the throw, not just her shoulder and arm.
The third throw landed just short of the line, making Kaisa shake her head. I walked closer. From fifty feet away it would have been difficult to tell the thrower’s sex if I hadn’t already known. That slender, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped body could have belonged to any young athlete. Only closer up could I make out the rise of her pert breasts under her training shirt, the smooth skin of her face, and the graceful line of her jaw. Kaisa wasn’t one of those female athletes who bothered with makeup or sexy sports outfits. But even with mussed hair and normal sweat pants, she exuded an unself-conscious charm. Back when she won her first Finnish Championship, she still walked hunched over, a teenage girl obviously ashamed of her height, who seemed to stand up straight only while on the throwing runway. Now she walked with her head held high and her back straight, but still she hated all the media attention.
I didn’t know whether interrupting Kaisa in the middle of practice would be considered lèse-majesté. Detective Antikainen had already interviewed her on Saturday. She had been one of the last people to talk to Meritta before she died. Even though Kaisa’s statement didn’t contain anything out of the ordinary, something was still bothering me—her intense look Friday night when she asked Johnny if he and Meritta were in a relationship, and the fact that Johnny had lied to her about it.
I also wanted to talk to her about Aniliina. Apparently she had been good friends with both the mother and the daughter.
Kaisa and her coach seemed to be taking a break. He ambled toward the maintenance shack, and she collapsed onto the high-jump pit and started slurping a sports drink out of a green plastic bottle.
“Hi. You got a second?”
“I’m on my break.” Kaisa sounded irritated, but not unwelcoming.
“Nice throws. How far out is that thick white line?”
“Sixty-two. The cutoff distance for the first round in Helsinki.”
“But then you must have thrown at least seventy that one time…”
“Tomorrow at the Grand Prix I need to throw the top distance for the summer,” Kaisa said as someone else might say they needed to go grocery shopping the next day.
“Hopefully they’ll show it on TV. I’m just coming from the Flöjts’ house. Aniliina said I would find you here. While I was over there, I noticed Meritta had painted some pretty impressive pictures of you. How long have you been modeling for her?”
“We started sometime in the winter. I didn’t really pose though. She mostly just came here to the field and painted, even in the sleet.”
Kaisa didn’t seem to consider it anything special that she had practiced in the sleet.
“Were you friends?”
“Yes.” Tears welled in Kaisa’s eyes, and she wiped them with the back of her hand. “I ain’t never met anyone who understood me so well. She got why I throw and everything else too…Why did she have to go and fall? I hate that Tower! They should tear it down and stomp on the pieces!” Kaisa slammed the ground with her hand. “But I guess I just have to go on like everybody else. That’s what Meritta would have wanted me to do.”
“Did Meritta seem like herself Friday night?”
“No, she didn’t. She was angry about something. When I left, she said that hopefully she’d be in a better mood the next day. She was supposed to paint me the next day, on Saturday.”
Kaisa claimed she didn’t know the cause of Meritta’s anger. We had just moved on to talking about Aniliina when the coach returned and glared at me with a look that said I should make myself scarce. I obliged, heading toward the cafeteria at city hall in hopes they might still have something decent to eat.
Paperwork took up the rest of the day. Luckily when I arrived home, a letter from Antti was waiting in the mailbox. He was an excellent letter writer. Occasionally I wondered whether I had fallen in love with him just because of a letter I read while solving my first murder. In his letters, Antti was both more direct and gentler than he was in person. And he wrote lovely long missives, often a page in the morning, another during the day, a couple in the evening, and then another batch of pages the following day.
Reading the letter, I giggled at Antti’s description of an Episcopal Church bazaar that some university colleague had dragged him to. Then I came to a passage that abruptly smothered my merriment:
I usually don’t even notice jewelry. But at the bazaar I saw this ring made by a local jewelry designer. Suddenly I found myself thinking that an emerald like that would look perfect on your finger. I mean what I’m writing. Let’s get married as soon as I get out of here. Being away from you has made everything so clear. I know that you are the one I want.
/> Even before he left, Antti had wanted to get engaged, but I dragged my feet. I thought that being apart would help me see what I really wanted. But so far all I had learned was that I could live without Antti and still be happy. Loneliness didn’t bother me. And to me that felt like a good prerequisite for sharing a life with someone: I loved Antti, but I wasn’t dependent on him. Five days out of seven I would have said yes if he proposed. But on the other two days, even the thought of getting married made me shudder.
I spent that whole night trying to get my thoughts down on paper, but I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to say. Finally I fell asleep frustrated, even though Mikko had tried to cheer me up by dragging an enormous mouse inside the house.
At around one a.m. I woke to the sound of the phone ringing. After answering, I started pulling on my jeans with my free hand.
“Hi. It’s Aniliina. There’s someone here. Upstairs…He had a key.”
“Stay where you are. Lock the doors to the downstairs if you can. Don’t even try to go see who is there.” I dialed our patrol car’s number on the rotary phone, but no one answered. After ten rings, the call transferred to county dispatch. As I pulled on a shirt without a bra—there wasn’t time—I explained the situation. The on-call officer at the county promised to keep trying to reach the patrol car.
I grabbed the crowbar I had been using as a dumbbell, threw it in the back of the Lada and put the pedal to the metal. The summer night was at its darkest, the birds momentarily silent. I reached the center of town in six minutes, taking another minute to navigate to Aniliina’s street. Only a lone wino staggering down the sidewalk witnessed my reckless dash. The whole drive I berated myself for not changing the locks at the house even though we knew Meritta’s keys were missing. If something happened to Aniliina, it would be my fault.
When I arrived, I didn’t see the patrol car or any other vehicles. The house was dark and eerily quiet. I left the iron bar in the car but inside my pocket I squeezed the small knife that I always carried. Slowly I crept toward the front door, which was open. With my ears straining like a cat’s listening for a mouse, I stepped into the entryway.
From the studio came quiet sounds of movement and a strange, muffled metal rattling as if someone were trying to open a lock. In the darkness I could just make out a vaguely human shape crouched in front of the cabinet where Meritta stored her paint. I crept from the door toward the stacks of paintings.
Then we both froze when we heard the siren of an approaching police cruiser. Suddenly I was blinded by a flashlight and left momentarily helpless as the figure rushed past and out the door. Although he had only a two-second head start, by the time my eyes readjusted to the dark, he had already disappeared into the small grove of trees behind the house that lead to the Sump.
The sound of the siren grew louder, and then the patrol car careened into the yard with lights flashing. Just as it stopped, I heard the sound of another car engine starting in the Sump.
I screamed at Järvi and Timonen as they vaulted out of the car. “Are your dipshit brains really so small that you don’t know not to run your sirens at full blast when you’re chasing a burglar! And the lights? Really?”
“But the county said the Flöjt girl might be in danger…We just thought we’d let the burglar know the police were on their way and he’d better clear out,” Timonen said in their defense.
Aniliina! For a moment I had completely forgotten about her. Running back inside, I threw myself down the stairs and found the door to the sauna suite locked.
“Aniliina! It’s me, Maria. Are you OK?”
When the girl opened the door, she was visibly shaking.
“It’s alright. He’s gone. And I’m staying with you the rest of the night. Now what happened?” I asked.
Aniliina said she hadn’t been able to sleep, so she decided to take a bath. She had just finished drawing the water when she heard something upstairs. She explained she had turned off all the lights in the house except for in the bathroom, which was windowless. The intruder might have thought she was sleeping or away from home.
Even though I promised to stay with her and assured her that the police would come by regularly to check on the house, Aniliina didn’t want to stay. And she wouldn’t listen to a word about going to her grandmother’s house.
Finally I said, “I have a free sofa at my place. You can stay with me if you’re not allergic to cats.”
She agreed and went to get her stuff. While I waited, Detective Järvi appeared in the studio carrying an orange suede bag.
“He brought this back,” he said excitedly. “It was the murderer, wasn’t it?”
“Yep. If you would’ve just kept your goddamn siren off!”
I tried to sketch the dark, hunched figure in my mind, but all I could recall was a vague shape doing its best to conceal its features. He—or she, since there wasn’t really any way to know—had been wearing a ski mask that concealed his face and hair. He had been a little taller than me—I was sure of that judging from the sound of his panting as he rushed past me. And his smell…Was there something familiar about it?
“Will you grab some gloves from the car?” I asked Detective Järvi. “Let’s take a look in that purse. Then you can give it to county forensics when they come tomorrow to dust for prints.”
Carefully I picked up Meritta’s purse by the handles. A faint hint of perfume still clung to the suede, mixed with the stronger, stuffy aroma of tobacco smoke. Strange. Meritta didn’t smoke. On the side of the handbag was a dark stain, and I remembered the punch Aniliina had spilled at the party.
Aniliina couldn’t take her eyes off the purse, as if the orange gemstone fastened to its lock were the mesmerizing eye of a cobra. Was she thinking of her final encounter with her mother, that terrible fight? When Detective Järvi returned, I moved over to the smoking table and put on disposable gloves before opening the bag.
Nothing out of the ordinary inside, just birth control pills, a wallet, and makeup. Powder, mascara, an orange-and-gold-toned eye shadow palette, an eyeliner pencil, and vermilion lipstick. The wallet contained a Visa debit card, a library card, a few member cards, a picture of a round-cheeked Aniliina at about age six, and a little cash. But no keys.
“Is anything missing but the keys?” I asked Aniliina, who was still staring.
“Her sketchbook,” she finally said. “Mom always had it with her, even though she didn’t use it much for sketching. She wrote grocery lists and phone numbers in it mostly. But I think that’s all…”
“What keys did your mom carry?”
“Besides our house key, she had ones for the art school and the Old Mine. I guess she probably had some little keys too, for her suitcase, the padlock on the woodshed, and stuff like that.”
Aniliina looked so exhausted that I decided to finish asking questions in the morning. Before leaving for my uncle’s house, I forced her to take a sleeping pill. Since she barely weighed ninety pounds, it made her pass out on the couch almost as soon as we arrived. Mikko curled up protectively beside her. As for myself, I took a big shot of whiskey to help settle my rage, but it didn’t work.
What had the intruder been looking for in Meritta’s house? Why had he brought back the purse? And his smell…Why did it seem so familiar?
8
The next morning I awoke to the sweet smell of coffee and the sound of someone clattering around in the main room. A second passed before I remembered what had happened the previous night.
Looking a little shy, Aniliina smiled when I stepped into the room.
“Fresh coffee first thing in the morning? I’m in heaven,” I said and then proceeded to make myself a sandwich and spoon yogurt into a bowl. To my astonishment, Aniliina also ate an orange and a cup of yogurt, even though it wasn’t nonfat.
“That cat is really nice. He slept by my feet the whole night. I want a cat too, but Mom’s allergic.” When Aniliina realized what she had said, her eyes welled up. “Well, now I can get a cat,” she mutter
ed. “Mom did like cats though. She felt bad that we couldn’t…Maybe I won’t because of…”
Aniliina didn’t resist as I pulled her into my arms. I could feel her spine and collarbone through the violet fabric of her winter pajamas. The muscles around her vertebrae felt like little more than dry tendons, her close-cropped hair like hemp fiber bristles, as if I were holding a desiccated plant in my arms. Aniliina cried a little and then, after calming down, announced that she wanted to go home.
“I won’t be afraid during the day, and those policemen will stop and check on me sometimes. And I’m sure Dad will be here tonight. He said he would be.”
When I dropped her off, I came in to have another look at Meritta’s paintings and asked Aniliina if I could take a few with me to the police station, feeling like they might be important.
After digging the mine paintings out of the stack, I stared at Johnny’s portrait again. Apparently noticing my expression, Aniliina said bitterly, “Mom always drooled over him the same way you are. I guess he was better than the ass-grabber from last summer though.”
“One of your mom’s boyfriends did that to you?”
“Yeah. I think his last name was Hiltunen. He said I had almost as good an ass as my mom. She saw it and threw him out on his own ass.”
I could imagine. Meritta had definitely liked erotica, but she had also lobbied against sexual harassment and brothels. I had a hard time imagining her socializing with the kind of men who went around pinching underage girls.
“The guys at school do the same thing. They call me princess of porn and think that means they can touch me any way they want. Mom didn’t have a clue about all the stuff that got thrown at me because of the crap she said in the news.”
“Maybe they were just jealous because your mom was famous.”
“Bullshit! Maybe they would have been if Mom had been like Kaisa. A sports star or something. Maybe it would have been better if she only did impressionism. If they couldn’t tell what she was painting, they would have just thought she was strange, not perverted.”
Copper Heart Page 11