Snow Woman
Page 31
Hanninen threw his cigarette butt out the window before he replied, now in a tone full of pity and sympathy. “You must really need a vacation. I didn’t have anything to do with Elina’s death.”
“Then why was your car seen on that road around one thirty on the morning of the twenty-seventh? Your red Chevy is hard to miss. And this teenage kid who lives out there just happens to be a car buff, so he was sure of the make and model. He even remembered the license plate number, but that wasn’t hard.” Hanninen had registered his Chevy a couple of years earlier with a vanity plate that read KAR-199.
I hadn’t expected a confession, and Kari Hanninen didn’t offer one. He just laughed and said that driving to Nuuksio wasn’t a crime. I didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with anything.
“Oh, don’t you worry. We’ll find what we need,” I told him as I left.
I had to make myself believe that, because otherwise nothing about my job or the world would make any sense.
I felt so emotional that I didn’t dare get behind the wheel of my own car yet, so I aimlessly wandered the streets for a while. Watching a two-year-old screaming in his stroller, his mother pushing him along with her face set in irritation, I wondered what went wrong to turn innocent young children into Hanninens and Malmbergs. Hanninen’s horoscope was probably right. Becoming a mother wasn’t going to be easy for me. Frequently I became so entangled in other people’s business that I ignored my own issues. I was only ten weeks along. It wasn’t too late yet to terminate my pregnancy.
Thinking that made me snort. There was no way I was doing that now.
I would have to learn from all the Millas and Niinas I had met in my life to try to at least avoid the failures I’d seen. I knew I wouldn’t always succeed, that I’d make some mistakes—possibly with results I wouldn’t know about for decades. But I was feeling more ready to accept the challenge.
My walk had deposited me into a small park where kids squealed with delight as they slid down a frozen hillside on their behinds. Watching them for a moment, I tried to imagine that joy in my own child’s face. Then I pulled out my phone and dialed Antti’s number.
“Hi. It’s me. Let’s go to lunch,” I said.
“Sure. How soon?”
“Fifteen minutes. I’ll pick you up at your office.”
Marching back to the Fiat, I set off into the traffic of downtown Helsinki. The winter sun made the world a little brighter, already hinting that in two months’ time it would drive the snow away with its warmth. At the end of the bridge, I switched on the radio. Kollaa Kestää was singing “A Farewell to Arms”:
Today I’m gonna stand up on my own feet,
Today I’m goin’ out in the world, to walk on my own road,
Today I want to see for once what’s beyond these four walls.
Joining in on the chorus, I decided to believe the words of the song at least until the end of the day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2011 Tomas Whitehouse
Leena Lehtolainen was born in Vesanto, Finland, to parents who taught language and literature. As a child, she made up stories in her head before she could even write. At the age of ten, she wrote 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 a Finnish figure-skating magazine, Taitoluistelu. Snow Woman is the fourth installment in the bestselling Maria Kallio series, which debuted in English in 2012 with My First Murder and continued in 2013 with Her Enemy and Copper Heart. Leena lives in Finland with her husband and two sons.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2012 Pekka Piri
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 three novels in the Maria Kallio series, the satire The Human Part by Kari Hotakainen, the thriller Cold Courage by Pekka Hiltunen, and the 1884 classic The Railroad by Juhani Aho. He currently resides in Springville, Utah, with his wife and three daughters, a dog, a cat, and twenty-nine fruit trees.