Copper Heart
Page 24
Koivu was standing almost in the same place where Meritta had fallen. For a second I saw her orange shadow at Koivu’s feet, but it disappeared quickly. I didn’t believe in ghosts after all.
Slowly descending the stairs, I occasionally caressed the weathered gray walls of the Tower. It hadn’t even shuddered in the explosion. The tower viewer at the top still stood solidly on its post, and even the cobwebs in the skylights remained intact. Someone sometime in the past had done good work.
Locking the door to the Tower behind me, I returned the key to Ella, who was organizing the sausage roast. The mine area had closed a couple of hours earlier, and even the restaurant was empty now. The only people who remained were a group of some thirty people from the art camp and we interlopers who had wanted to come up the hill to bid good-bye to summer.
One of the art students sat by the fire playing a bongo drum, and another pulled a harmonica out of his pocket. Johnny sat a little farther off, tuning his guitar. His left ankle was still bandaged, but he could walk with crutches. Kaisa brought him a glass of wine.
I was surprised she had made it to the party at all. The European Championships women’s javelin final was only yesterday. Maybe she had wanted to get away from all the publicity after taking the gold. Sitting with my father and Koivu, watching her compete in the final, I had shouted like a lunatic after Kaisa sent her second throw flying more than seventy-three meters. I hadn’t even tried to hide the tears in my eyes when the national anthem played. Koivu had confined himself to clearing his throat repeatedly.
“Aniliina says hi,” Kaisa said after I congratulated her with a hug. “I stopped and saw her yesterday. She’s already doing a little better.”
Mårten Flöjt, Kaisa, and I had arranged for Aniliina to go to Helsinki for treatment in an eating disorders specialty clinic. She would be in the hospital until her vitals were normal again and her weight was above ninety pounds. After that, she would continue outpatient care and live with her father.
“You don’t necessarily ever recover from anorexia completely,” Mårten had told me over the phone. Predicting what would happen with Aniliina was difficult. At her mother’s and uncle’s funerals she had barely been able to stand. She had stopped putting up such a fight, letting her weak condition show. The therapist thought that was a good sign.
I brought Kaisa greetings from another hospital. Uncle Pena had told me to congratulate her on her winning throw. He could still speak only a few words at a time, but he could write quite well with his healthy hand.
The day after the explosion, I had gone with my father to tell Pena all that had happened. The familiar young doctor stood by while I attempted to formulate my sentences as gently as possible, to tell him that at least the worst hadn’t come to pass, that Kivinen wasn’t going to get away with fraud. The news had caused him mild arrhythmia, but afterward Pena slowly began to recover from both his heart trouble and his stroke. That he would ever be able to live at the farm alone again was doubtful, and the city council would have to look for a new chairman too. But at least Kivinen hadn’t managed to kill him. I had even brought Mikko along for the hospital visit. He had meowed pitifully the whole way in the car, but was overjoyed when he saw my uncle and curled up on the hospital bed purring. We were planning a repeat visit in the next few weeks.
Koivu shoved a stick with a piece of sausage on the end into my hands. Holding the stick carefully—I’d had the bandages removed from my hands only two days earlier—I began roasting the enormous hunk of processed pork. My skin was still tender, and I was going to have a permanent scar on my palm below my left middle finger. My legs had been sore for a week after the explosion too, so I had to shelve my marathon dreams for the time being. Despite my sore hands, I had started practicing shooting again, because using a gun without being in complete control of it felt irresponsible. Even though I had hit Kivinen almost right where I intended, that was mostly a matter of luck.
Everyone at the station had spent time talking about the mine murders with a therapist, and our group sessions had brought us close enough to make me feel almost wistful at the thought of my post ending in a couple of months. Hopponen and Järvi had even invited me to join the department’s baseball team.
Handing my stick to Koivu for a second, I went to get myself a bottle of wine. As I walked past Matti, he stuck out his empty glass hopefully, so I filled it up.
After the murders were solved, Matti had been singularly embarrassed. He and Ella had each suspected the other of Meritta’s murder. I had done a quick but earnest investigation of Matti’s grant fraud and, of course, decided not to prosecute. When I described the situation to Detective Sergeant Järvisalo, he agreed. Matti had gotten off easy, and, of course, Ella had been the one to arrange the promissory note with the bank to pay back Matti’s “loan.” Compared to Kivinen, Matti’s scam was so pathetic that not even the city council would have bothered to do anything but laugh.
Once my sausage was nicely blackened around the ragged edges where it had burst, I squeezed half a tube of mustard on it.
“Are you sure white wine goes with that?” Koivu asked, looking in horror at my delicacy. The white stripe around his left ring finger was almost tanned now, but the wound in his heart had only begun to scab over. He was considering moving away from Joensuu, even farther north. Apparently the city reminded him too much of Anita. I secretly hoped he would decide to move back to Helsinki.
A few days earlier, I had received a strange phone call.
“Hello, this is Detective Lieutenant Jyrki Taskinen of the Espoo Police Department. As you may have heard, we have major organizational restructuring going on. As part of that, we’re establishing a new unit specializing in violent crime and habitual criminality, which we’re mostly staffing from inside the department. We have one problem though. We need a woman with a law degree and police training, preferably one with at least the qualifications for detective grade two. Sergeant Pertti Ström from our department and Lieutenant Kalevi Kinnunen from Helsinki recommended you. Are you interested?”
For a moment I just listened dumbfounded until I thought to ask whether I would end up being the subordinate of my old enemy Pertti Ström.
“Ström will be working in the same unit, but you would answer directly to me.”
I promised to go to Espoo for a job interview the following week. The position would start in late November, so I would have time after my summer job ended to take a month off. Koivu was urging me to take the job, as were my parents. I hadn’t had time to talk with Antti yet, because he hadn’t been answering his phone for a few days.
The melancholy tune of the harmonica floated from the other side of the campfire, and Johnny’s guitar joined in. Someone started singing the Beatles’ “All My Loving.” Quickly I poured more wine down my throat, thinking of Jaska, who had always said the Beatles were touchy-feely tripe. I hoped he was playing backup for John Lennon now.
Kaisa sat down next to me with a leggy blonde who she had introduced earlier: “This is Elvira, my friend. The Estonian hurdler.”
She didn’t need to explain any more, and I had no trouble guessing that the sparkle in her eyes was from more than just winning the gold. It looked right when Kaisa wrapped her arms around Elvira’s shoulder. That was probably a greater victory than the European Championships.
Johnny switched from “All My Loving” to “Michelle.” Lately I had been wondering about his sense of perspective given that he had thought Meritta committed suicide just because of him. Johnny had brushed the issue aside by claiming that he had been too messed up that night to think straight about anything. After finding Meritta’s body, he had tripped going down the steps on the hill, which was where the mysterious bruises came from. We had finally had the conversation I promised to have with him after I solved Meritta’s murder. But there hadn’t been much to talk about. There was no way to change the past, and we didn’t have any future. Still, I was happy that the only witness had been my uncle’s cat when I c
ried the whole night afterward. But I was also sure I was never going to dream about Johnny again. At least not very often.
Taking slow sips from my bottle of wine, I looked at the city sleeping below, the city I hated as a teenager and later tried in vain to forget. I was never going to escape the fact that I was from here, born with copper in my heart.
As if to taunt me, Johnny plucked those familiar chords on his guitar again. Two could play that game though. But as I sang, instead of looking at him, I gazed down the hillside.
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
A familiar tall, thin, dark-haired figure climbed the stairs. I wasn’t entirely surprised, since the secretive glances and whispering I had observed between my parents and Koivu over the past few days made me guess some surprise was in the works.
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
Still, my insides filled with butterflies.
I knew happy endings usually only lasted five minutes, or at best a day or two.
Remember me to one who lives there.
Then it would be time to start again, time for facing new trials. But as I stood up and ran down the stairs toward Antti, I was ready even for a short happy ending.
He once was a true love of mine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © Tomas Whitehouse, 2011
Leena Lehtolainen was born in Vesanto, Finland, to parents who taught language and literature. A keen reader, she made up stories in her head before she could even write. At the age of ten, she began her first book, a young adult novel, which was published two years later. Besides writing, Leena is fond of classical singing, her beloved cats, and—her greatest passion—figure skating. She attends many competitions as a skating journalist and writes for the Finnish figure-skating magazine Taitoluistelu. Copper Heart is the third installment in her best-selling Maria Kallio series, which debuted in English in 2012 with My First Murder and continued in 2013 with Her Enemy. Leena currently lives in Finland with her husband and two sons.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © Pekka Piri, 2012
Owen F. Witesman is a professional literary translator with a master’s in Finnish and Estonian area studies from Indiana University. He has translated more than thirty Finnish books into English, including novels, children’s books, poetry, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction. His recent translations include the first two novels in the Maria Kallio series, My First Murder and Her Enemy (AmazonCrossing), the satire The Human Part by Kari Hotakainen (MacLehose Press), the thriller Cold Courage by Pekka Hiltunen (Hesperus), and the 1884 classic The Railroad by Juhani Aho (Norvik Press). He currently resides in Springville, Utah, with his wife and three daughters, a dog, a cat, and twenty-nine fruit trees.