Her Enemy

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “She didn’t seem at all shy to me,” I interjected. “Quite the opposite.”

  “I was just getting to that. In junior high, she started to change. Yes, she was still meticulous, but she started to have a little more spirit. We ended up fighting a lot then and spent less time together—typical preteen girl stuff. We didn’t really become friends again until our senior year in high school. She still would get on my nerves sometimes; she could be really stubborn. And although I don’t like speaking ill of the dead, she was nosy too.”

  “Was Armi a gossip?”

  “She wasn’t a busybody at all,” Minna said quickly, as if fearing that Sari would interrupt. “She did always want to know about people and what made them tick, but she never talked behind their backs.”

  “Armi definitely knew how to get people to talk. She knew everything there was to know about me,” Sari said.

  I didn’t doubt that one bit. Sari struck me as the sort of person whose favorite hobby was talking about herself.

  “Armi may have been a little tactless to be a nurse. She was a little too direct. She didn’t dress things up,” Minna explained. “That was why she did better working in an outpatient clinic like she did, where you only ever deal with one patient for a little while. She could never understand how I worked in a hospice surrounded by people who were all going to die. Armi wanted to heal people. That was why she had such a hard time with Mallu’s situation, that she couldn’t have children no matter how much she and her husband tried. Armi spent a lot of time studying medical journals and talking with Dr. Hellström about how to help her sister.”

  “Did she talk to you about Mallu’s accident?”

  “Several times,” Minna replied. “Armi blamed the driver of that car that almost hit Mallu for causing her miscarriage. In fact, she even mentioned it to me the last time we met. She said something strange like, ‘If only I could make it up to Mallu.’” Minna’s brow wrinkled. “She really did say ‘make it up.’ But the accident wasn’t her fault.”

  A chill went through me as I recalled Mallu’s husband’s thinking that he saw Armi behind the wheel of the car that nearly ran them down. What if one of them really believed Armi was responsible for the loss of their baby?

  “There is no way Kimmo killed Armi. Armi liked helping people, but she knew how to set her feelings aside when she needed to. If she had known something dangerous about someone, she would have gone straight to the police,” Sari said, still speaking too loudly.

  More chills. Was Armi’s death my fault? Armi wanted to tell me something that someone else didn’t want me to know. Was it about the hit-and-run driver or Sanna’s murderer? Had that person been among us at the Hänninens’ party? I thought back to that pleasant late-spring evening, trying to figure out which of the partygoers could be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  “Well, if we’re going to think about other possible suspects for the murder, then I guess I should ask about your alibis too,” I said, trying to sound playful. “Where were each of you between one and two last Saturday afternoon?”

  “At work,” Minna said quietly.

  “Between one and two? I guess I was in Tapiola shopping,” Sari said angrily. “Is that a good enough alibi for you? I saw at least a dozen people I know, including Mallu. I guess I could have slipped away to strangle Armi at some point, but why would I have?”

  “Was Mallu in Tapiola?” I remembered her claiming she was home the whole morning.

  “Yeah, I saw her at the outdoor market looking at wild mushrooms. I remember because she said she couldn’t afford them living on unemployment.”

  “What time did this happen?”

  “I couldn’t say exactly. Maybe around one thirty.”

  Mallu in Tapiola at one thirty looking at mushrooms? Would a person who had just murdered her little sister then calmly go off to do her grocery shopping? Who knew? I was starting to feel as though I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.

  When we parted, I made Sari promise to contact the police with her side of the story. It was already nine o’clock at night—too late to go see Mallu again. The thought of returning home terrified me, though; I knew I had treated Antti unfairly, but I wasn’t in the mood to apologize quite yet.

  The house was quiet, with no sign of Antti even in his office. Two flashes drew me to the answering machine. The first message was a direct recording from Antti, not a phone call: “Hi. I’m going for a walk.”

  The second message was from Annamari Hänninen, her hysterical voice asking me to call back no matter what the hour. She wanted to talk about Kimmo. After considering for a moment whether I was really still up to calling her back today, I realized this would give me an opportunity to ask some questions I had about Sanna.

  At first, Annamari seemed as though she wasn’t going to answer. Seven rings later, however, she picked up and whispered a frightened hello.

  “Maria! Could you come over here right now? We have to talk. I know it’s late, but this is important.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” Throwing on my denim jacket, I jumped on my bike and set off pedaling.

  The beauty of the evening seemed to demand a slower pace. Seagulls and ducks swam along the shore of Otsolahti Bay, and the dog walkers were out in force, their pets sniffing each other, tails of various sizes and lengths wagging excitedly. As I rode over Westend Bridge to the road that hugged the far shore, I admired the pillar of light made by the setting sun. A blackbird trilled, competing with the song of a finch, with doves and nightingales providing accompaniment in the background. The tiny yellow blossoms of the cloverlike bird’s-foot trefoil had already burst into flower along the shore.

  For a moment, I thought about biking by the breakwater to see whether Antti was sitting in his favorite spot, but in order to save time I kept focused and stayed on the larger streets.

  I had only once visited the house where Annamari and Kimmo lived, and then only downstairs in the sauna facilities. The location where the house stood was beautiful, opposite the water with a wide street separating it from the seashore. If this family had nothing else, they had plenty of money. I had always appreciated how unspoiled and down-to-earth Antti was, and now I realized I could probably say the same for Kimmo. Neither of them had that self-assuredness that often accompanies growing up with lots of money, and in fact, just a pinch more of that might actually have done them both good. Insecurity and whining seem particularly unattractive in men, and this case I was working on seemed to have an overabundance of that type, especially if I counted Makke’s constant self-pity.

  Coming to answer the door, which was arched by climbing roses, Annamari didn’t seem particularly self-confident either. Her usually perfect makeup now ran in smeared little streams into the wrinkles around her eyes. Her hands were in constant motion, flitting up to her hair, touching her shoulders and forearms, and then moving back to her hair as the tone of her voice oscillated almost as erratically.

  “So lovely you could come! Tell me everything about Kimmo! Are they treating him properly? Why do they insist on keeping him in jail? My little Kimmo is no murderer.”

  “Didn’t Eki Henttonen call you?”

  “Yes, he did, but he wouldn’t really tell me anything. Men are like that. They don’t understand a mother’s feelings. Would you like a little cognac? I know I need some at least.”

  Based on her breath, I could tell she had a good head start on me. No wonder. I hoped it would make her feel better.

  “He was talking as if Kimmo is guilty,” Annamari said as she handed me a snifter nearly filled to the brim with cognac. At first, the contents burned the roof of my mouth and throat, but then they moved pleasantly down to my stomach in a warm stream. The finish was heavenly—I guess there really were differences in cognacs. Up to this point, I had never had the wherewithal to sample anything much above cheap one-star cut brandy.

  “The police have found a lot of evidence against Kimmo. None of it will necessarily hold up in court
though.”

  “The police came today and rummaged through Kimmo’s things. They took a lot with them when they left.”

  “What did the officers look like? Did they have a search warrant?” Apparently, Ström had beat me here. Irritating.

  “One was big and rude, and the other one was smaller with red hair. They waved some piece of paper at me, and asked me all sorts of questions about Kimmo. Had I noticed anything out of the ordinary in his personality? Was he violent as a child? Did he have many girlfriends? Did I beat him?” Annamari shook her head, with good reason. That kind of questioning sounded just about right for Ström’s primitive grasp of psychology. Ström had decided that Kimmo was a deviant sex murderer, and now he was grasping for ways to support that hypothesis wherever he could.

  “They also wanted to know where I was on Saturday. Was I able to prove when Kimmo came home? But I left for Stockmann in Tapiola at eleven and then went for my massage. I went to get the twins after their lunch so we could go into the city. I wasn’t home at all. If only I had known.”

  “Exactly what time did you go to Risto and Marita’s house to get the boys?” I asked.

  “One fifteen, maybe one thirty. I don’t remember exactly. The boys weren’t ready yet, so we had to wait for the two o’clock bus.”

  The walk home from Armi’s house would have taken Kimmo only fifteen or twenty minutes. Why the hell had every person I talked to spent Saturday running around downtown Tapiola? The only people home in town seemed to be Antti and me, home nursing our hangovers.

  “What do you and Henttonen intend to do to get Kimmo out?” Annamari demanded.

  “Well, my intention is to gather evidence showing that someone else murdered Armi. Now, I know you may not want to talk about this, Annamari, but I’ve heard rumors that Armi suspected Sanna’s suicide was really a homicide.”

  I knew this wasn’t going to be a pleasant subject, but I hadn’t expected quite as strong a reaction as I now received. Turning bright red, Annamari’s breathing sped up and she began to shake uncontrollably.

  “Murdered!” Annamari’s voice was piercing. “No one murdered Sanna! It was an accident! Sanna was just celebrating…too much. She drank, she must have been tired, she fell in the water. That’s all. A horrible accident! I don’t care what people say. Why would Sanna have committed suicide? And why would you think anyone killed her?” With trembling hands, Annamari poured herself more cognac.

  I wondered whether she could have become this worked up in a conversation with Armi and rapped those skittish hands around the neck of her future daughter-in-law. Would a mother murder his son’s fiancée and let him take the blame, though? My notions of motherhood were still idealistic, even though none of the mothers I knew seemed to live up to them.

  “Did Sanna leave anything personal behind? Letters, diaries, notebooks?” I thought the best way I could get a handle on Sanna’s death was by getting into her thoughts. Maybe I would learn she was planning to commit suicide and could put the idea of a second murder to rest.

  “Sanna filled dozens of diaries,” Annamari said proudly. “But Henrik and Kimmo burned them all after she died. They claimed she would have wanted it that way. And we think her last one went into the sea with her. I do still have some of her old schoolwork and papers in a closet upstairs. Would you like to come look at them?”

  Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Annamari led me into a walk-in closet filled with miscellaneous stuff. A couple of shoeboxes of Sanna’s papers stood stacked in one corner. As I carefully leafed through the topmost box, a photograph fell out of a stack of what looked like lecture notes. A very innocent-looking Sanna kissing an ugly man with a black beard.

  “Who is this man?” I asked Annamari.

  She wrung her hands as if not wanting to answer. “That’s that horrible Otso Hakala. Thank God he went to jail for selling drugs.”

  “Was Sanna dating him?”

  “No! She didn’t even like him. He just controlled her using all those drugs.”

  “Could I take these with me? I might be able to find something new in them.”

  “How is dredging up the past going to get Kimmo out of jail?” Annamari asked dubiously. I didn’t have an answer, but Annamari relented anyway.

  While Annamari went downstairs to get me a bag to pack all of Sanna’s things into, I pocketed the photograph. After banging around on the main floor for a while, Annamari yelled up that she was going out to the shed. Suddenly I had a vivid memory of Sanna. It was a night about this same time of year—late May or early June, a couple of days before school was set to end and Sanna would graduate. After band practice, the boys and I went to the only park in town to drink. Then other people started showing up, including Sanna. One year had been plenty of time for her to gain a terrible reputation in our small town. Most people couldn’t understand how a loser like her could get six perfect scores on her college entrance exams. Having only admired her from afar, I didn’t really know Sanna, but I envied the intense color of her brown eyes and the diffident beauty of her manner.

  At some point, Sanna and I were the only girls left. That always happened, since most small-town girls felt they had to keep up appearances and go home to sleep like good little dollies. Sanna sat on a rock rolling a cigarette. That was a sign of degeneracy as well, since a girl who smoked should at least buy packs of proper “light” cigarettes.

  Even though I didn’t smoke, I asked Sanna for one. In retrospect, I realize this was an attempt to get closer to her. Even at that age, I longed for other women to relate to.

  Sanna rolled me a cigarette, licked the glue surface with her kitten-pink tongue, lit the result in her mouth, and handed it to me. Then followed my miserable attempt to act like I did this every day while simultaneously trying not to vomit. The evening was hot, but Sanna was wearing tight black jeans and a worn brown leather jacket. She held her beer bottle close, with both hands wrapped around it. I tried to think of some great conversation starter, but my mind felt completely blank. Then the boys started raising a racket about going to some bar, and Sanna left with them.

  At Sanna’s graduation, we had all stared at her scars. I remember how she stared back at us, at once defiant and ashamed, how I tried to smile in reply to the challenge of her drunken eyes, how she offered me a drink from her bottle as if in thanks.

  Then Sanna moved, disappearing into Helsinki. We bumped into each other a couple of times in the city and said hi. Two girls from the sticks. She stayed the same, just as thin and girlish. Only the skin of her face paled, like a death mask. I didn’t dare tell Sanna I went to the police academy; I just said I worked various jobs before getting into law school.

  I would see her at the university behind a glass of beer back when you could still get that in the café, and sometimes she would be in the courtyard of the Porthania Building smoking with that same old brown leather jacket slung over her shoulder. She said she was doing her thesis on the metaphorical language of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Did she ever complete that thesis?

  Annamari returned with a large Stockmann shopping bag, pulling me back into the present moment.

  “Could I maybe come get the papers later? I’ll bring a backpack so carrying them is easier,” I suggested. I didn’t want to leave the papers at the Hänninens’ for a single moment longer than I had to, but transporting them now would be a pain.

  “Henrik is calling again tomorrow. What will I say to him?” Annamari asked, wringing her hands like the heroine in a gothic novel.

  “Tell him the truth.” I remembered Henrik Hänninen’s strangely diabolical dark eyebrows.

  “I can’t stand to listen to his shouting. Isn’t there any hope of Kimmo’s release?”

  “There is always hope” was my banal attempt at comfort. Annamari’s company was depressing, and when I opened the front door to leave and smelled the climbing roses, I felt as though I were escaping from somewhere suffocating.

  Once on my bike, I pointed my wheels toward the b
reakwater, wanting to see the place where Sanna died. On that dark March night, the breakwater would have been a lonely place, strangely far from the homey lights glimmering on the shore. How did Sanna feel when she fell into the water? I thought about the frigid grip of the sea at only one or two degrees above freezing as I rode far too fast along the narrow strip of gravel leading out to the breakwater. Suddenly my front wheel slammed into a rock. I turned the handlebars violently—and then it happened.

  The handlebars separated from the frame of the bicycle. I madly squeezed the brake levers to no avail. The world turned upside down, the water and sky trading places, and suddenly I was in the water, under the water, scraping the gravelly seafloor and drawing my lungs full of something cold and salty, fighting hopelessly toward the surface.

  Fortunately, the water was less than a meter deep so near the shore. Fortunately, I had injured only one wrist and my left knee.

  “Damn it!” Sitting in the seawater, I watched my handlebars floating a little farther off. They had felt a little strange on the way to the Hänninens’.

  Slowly, how damn cold the water was and how badly my knee hurt sank in. I fished the handlebars out of the water. My poor bicycle was a couple of meters farther on down the shore, so I waded over to it and carried it over my shoulder back to land. The brake lines had snapped with the force of the collision, so the bike was nearly useless, and I was wet through.

  With more cursing, I rammed the handlebars back into place, tightened the bolt as well as I could by hand, and started riding carefully back around the bay. I couldn’t figure out how the handlebars had managed to come loose. I had just done my spring tune-up and checked all of the components, especially the brakes. I felt lucky, though; even though I ended up in the water, the handlebars could have come off in a much worse place. For example, I could have been riding at my usual clip around a steep curve—there were two on my way to work—turned the handlebars quickly, and…