“Where do you live, then?” Kari had switched languages, and Tess could tell right away that his English was better than her Finnish. Not that that was super hard.
“New York.”
Kari went a little bug-eyed. “I love New York.” No need to tell him that Tess lived farther away from the city than this sleepy little lake was from Helsinki. “So your parents,” he went on, “did they come too?”
“No. They’re in Zanzibar.” The lie came out so unexpectedly, so very easily. This is everything that Tess knew about Zanzibar: It was a place.
“Awesome,” Kari said. “Do you want it on the blocks or back in the water?”
Jaana interrupted them before Tess had a chance to answer. “Mr. Hannula,” she called out in Finnish, “do you mean to steal my boat?” Tess’s grandmother had rounded the sauna and approached with a pair of oars slung over her shoulders, making her look irritatingly intrepid. Axel was with her, already fastened tightly into one of the bulky life jackets, which jutted up around his collar like a dog’s veterinary cone, making him look the precise opposite of intrepid. Jaana’s sudden appearance seemed to scare Kari not in the least. In fact, he smiled wide.
“I wasn’t stealing it,” he answered. Then, in English, he told Jaana that he’d only borrowed it. Tess couldn’t tell if Kari had switched languages as a courtesy to her, or rather to keep showing off how good his English was. Either way, it saved her little lie from falling apart then and there.
“Well, I don’t see any problem with that,” Jaana said, also in English. “As long as you took good care—” She caught herself when she saw the empty bottles and soggy cigarette butts. Jaana peered across the lakeshore at the stilted deck. Seeing Kalle and his friends, she sighed. “So young and so determined to hurt themselves. Tell me you didn’t smoke any of these.”
“Of course not,” Kari said. “No, ma’am.”
“And look at you, no shoes in this weather. And with glass! Tarzan feet will get you only so far! You think there were broken bottles in the jungle?” Tarzan feet was clearly an inside joke between them, years past its expiration date by now. It made Kari blush. Tess blushed too.
“I suppose . . .” Jaana looked up at the deepening sky and back down at the messy dock. “We have all day tomorrow,” she said. “No need to be greedy. We’ll finish tidying up and go rowing in the morning.” She leaned her oars against the sauna wall and popped back inside to get a bucket and a broom. It took only a few minutes for the four of them to sweep the dock clean, set the rowboat back in the water, and tie it off again.
“We cooked too much, if you’d like to join us for supper,” Jaana said.
“No thanks,” Kari said. “Kalle’s grilling.”
Tess’s grandmother nodded thoughtfully at this. “Well. Regards to your parents. And ask your brother to pay me a visit when he’s got the time.”
Kari’s expression darkened almost imperceptibly. “Yes, ma’am.”
Jaana turned back to the little cottage, leaving them. Axel hesitated for a moment, glancing furtively between Kari and Tess. Then, in his patented face-palm style, he said: “Am I interrupting anything? Do you two require privacy?”
Tess told her brother not to be stupid, and he grinned because that meant he could stay. The three of them sat at the end of the dock. Axel took his time unlacing his shoes and folding up his socks before letting his feet trail in the water. But it was way too cold, and seconds later he had them tucked under his thighs. He seemed to be in no hurry to take off that dumb orange vest.
“So, you know our grandmother,” Axel said.
“I do,” Kari said.
“What do you think of her?”
Sometimes Axel was great to have around—you never had to be the one to ask awkward questions. Kari glanced at Tess, as though for help, and when none came he said: “Your grandmother is one of the nicest people I know.”
“Fascinating. That doesn’t match our own experience, thus far.” Axel thrust a palm at Kari. “Axel Fortune,” he said.
Kari took a moment to see if he was for real before accepting the handshake. “Kari Hannula,” he said, his formality matching Axel’s without mocking it. “Welcome to Talvijärvi.”
“Thank you kindly,” Axel said. “So, I’d like to pose a question to you. It’s going to be weird. Is that okay? Can I ask you a weird question?”
“God, Axel,” Tess said. She’d only just met Kari, and already her kid brother was laying it on thick.
“It’s all right,” Kari said. “Ask me whatever you want.”
“You’ve been coming here for a long time, yes?”
“I have. Every summer, since I was five.”
“Excellent,” Axel said. Then, looking suddenly worried, “But that’s not the question. The question is: Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary lately? Has anything strange been happening in Talvijärvi?”
“What do you mean strange?”
“Supernatural.”
Kari didn’t even blink; nor did he give Tess a chance to make her usual excuses. “That’s so funny that you should ask,” he said, pointing out at the middle of the lake, where the twin pines loomed atop their tiny island. The swan was still there, swimming a slow circuit around the rocks. The sun was almost down, and the swan was the color of blood. “You see that island?”
Axel nodded, obviously holding his breath.
“Totally haunted.”
“Shut up,” Axel said. His laugh hit bottom, bounced a bit, and skidded into what could only be called a squeal of delight. Tess hadn’t heard anything like that escape him since the night of the brown bear. He turned to her. “Can we go?”
“Of course we can,” she said.
10
A Ghost Story
Just yesterday in Helsinki Axel had been right on the edge of a full-scale flip out. He’d felt dizzy enough to puke, giddy enough to shout as he tore through the suitcase, searching for his father’s busted camera. He’d needed to see the picture he’d taken of the bear. Though, of course, she was more than just a bear; Axel was sure of that much already. He knew it in his legs and lungs, in his stomach and heart just as sure as he knew when a bad spell was coming over him. According to the Keeper, he and the bear had come to Baldwin in search of Sam Fortune. And now the bear was waiting for Axel up at Talvijärvi. A single word ran through his head on a loop—Äiti. Äiti-Äiti-Äiti-Äiti. It couldn’t be her, and it couldn’t be anyone else.
Axel switched on the camera, and the last shot he’d taken on that awful night flickered across the cracked display. And there she was—a youngish lady looming in the middle of the photograph, dressed like some kind of hippie art teacher. The image went fuzzy as Axel’s eyes filled up with fat, frantic tears. He rubbed them away and scrolled back through the other shots, just to be sure that nobody was playing a trick on him. But everything else was exactly as it should have been. Axel saw the torn-up garden and overturned trash can; he saw the shadowed wells of bear tracks that had skirted his home. But the bear—the bear had disappeared from the photograph, and this young woman had taken her place.
The woman stood pale in the light of the flashbulb, jagged rows of black maples sinking into the velour nothing of the night around her. She wore denim overalls, paint-spattered and rolled up to the knees. There was a burst of color running up one of her legs that at first Axel mistook for a bright sock. But on closer inspection he saw that it was a tattoo, the ink curling above her calf, disappearing below the denim of her overalls. This was a photograph of Saara Kivi—Axel’s mother. The fact that this was impossible made it no less true. Never mind that he’d seen the bear with his own eyes—smelled it, touched its matted fur when the thing knocked him over with a careless haunch. The bear had reeked of earth and musk and reality. Never mind, also, that so many things about this woman were strange—not just unfamiliar, but wrong. Her tattoo, her ironical horn-rim glasses, the way she’d twisted her lips into a pissed-off grimace. But despite all of that, there was no ques
tion in Axel’s mind. The bear was his mother. Or, rather, his mother’s ghost.
Freaking awesome.
Of course, Axel never intended to keep any of this from his sister. His first instinct was always to be honest with her. Tess might not have believed that he’d seen the Keeper at the market if she had nothing more to go on than Axel’s word—it was, after all, a pretty preposterous thing to have happened—but the photograph of their long-dead mother was proof that something paranormal was going down. Except that it wasn’t. When Axel gave her the camera, Tess couldn’t see anything but a picture of a brown bear. And while a bear in Baldwin was odd, it was hardly evidence of magic. Again Axel had to consider the possibility that this was all in his head—a much more pleasant hallucination than the wheelchair, but maybe more troubling, sanity-wise. He decided to stay quiet, doing his best not to seem too excited on the train ride up north, keeping his cool as they walked from the station, taking his time rooting around the little lakeside cottage. There’d be plenty of opportunities over the coming week to explore the woods out back. Hours upon hours to search for signs of his mother.
But Axel’s calm and steady course got scrapped the moment that Kari kid uttered the words: “totally haunted.” He damn near fell into the lake when he heard it.
“Don’t mess with me,” he said. “Do not make fun of me, because it’s cruel.”
“What?” Kari glanced between Tess and Axel, worried he was missing something. “You’re the one who asked.”
“But what do you mean haunted? Like, haunted how?” Axel said.
“There’s a ghost on the island. People see her at night sometimes.”
Her. Promising. Axel pressed for more information. “What people? Have you seen her? What does she—”
“Okay,” Tess cut in. “How about we cool it a little bit?”
“I have,” Kari said, totally deadpan.
“You shouldn’t encourage him,” Tess said.
“I’m not encouraging anybody,” Kari said. “I’ve seen the ghost, and my parents have seen the ghost, and my brother, Kalle, has seen the ghost. Last year, just after midsummer.” Here he trailed off for a moment. The sun sank behind the fir trees, and the swan went ashore on the rocky little island, apparently untroubled by the resident spirit. “It was one of those evenings when you don’t get any real night, just a few hours of twilight,” Kari went on. “No darker than this. My father had some people from his work staying with us, and we all went out on the boat so he could show off the midnight sun. They were Greeks, these people. When we were coming back home, we noticed a lady on the island. She was all alone. We asked if she needed a ride back to her cottage, but she didn’t say anything. My mom thought that maybe she was a foreigner, so we tried Swedish and English. The Greeks tried Greek. But she wouldn’t answer. So we just left her there. And by the time we got home, we couldn’t see her anymore. My mom made us go right back out. All around the island. She was so upset. She thought that the lady had drowned.”
“Did you notice tattoos?” Axel said. “Was she wearing glasses?”
Tess had been pretty patient with him so far, but that was apparently the limit. “Damn, Axel. Weird much?”
“I didn’t notice,” Kari said, as though this were a perfectly reasonable question. “In the morning my mom went around to all the cottages on the lake, to see if anybody had guests staying with them. To see if anybody was missing. But nobody was missing. Everybody was accounted for.”
Kari lifted his feet out of the water and let them drip dry for a moment before standing up. In the brief time it took him to tell his story, the twilight had ripened to full dark. Stars blasted holes in the sky one by one, and cottage windows ignited along the distant shore. “Are you two really rowing out to the island tomorrow?” He glanced at Tess, not quite making eye contact. As lost as Axel was in his own thoughts, he’d have to be blind not to see that this chubby rich kid was into his sister. Poor guy.
“Probably,” she said. “He’ll drive me crazy until I take him there.”
“That is correct,” Axel said. “That is absolutely true.”
“Well, I’d better come with you,” Kari said. “The lake gets shallow around the island—a lot of rocks just under the surface. There’s only one place where you can row ashore, and it’s hard to find if you don’t already know where it is.” This all came out a bit too quickly, but it worked. Tess told Kari to meet them at the dock the next morning. As a compatriot in awkwardness, Axel found himself happy for the older kid. The problem was that he sometimes didn’t think before speaking.
“Well played, sir,” he said.
Kari burst into a flame blush and retreated to his bright house for dinner. Tess and Axel stayed outside for a while longer, saying nothing, watching the two pines disappear against the lake.
The next day couldn’t begin soon enough, and it made no effort to—these late sunrises were really getting to be a drag. Axel rushed through a breakfast of cold cuts and buttered rye, then fidgeted as Jaana outfitted him with layered sweaters, knit socks, and a scarf as thick as a folded bath towel. Over the entire woolen riot, she buckled his puffy life jacket. Jaana didn’t make the same effort with Tess, but did insist she bring a jacket as well, slung over her shoulder if not fully fastened. The two of them seemed to have argued each other to a stalemate.
Outside the weather was windy and cold, as though they’d tipped from autumn’s summer edge to its winter one overnight. The breeze kicked up wavelets on the lake. Frost had left the grass brittle as spun sugar under their feet. A single dainty icicle hung from where the drainpipe met the gutter. As they rounded the freestanding sauna they saw that Kari was already at the dock, hugging himself on the rear bench of a beautiful power rowboat—it must have belonged to his parents. Axel wondered how long he’d been out there, bobbing and shivering.
Jaana followed them outside, and she called out to Kari as soon as she saw him. “Mr. Hannula, that boat had better be a joke!”
“Morning, Mrs. Kivi!” He waved from inside the boat, his unbuttoned shirt cuff flapping in the breeze. “I promise we’ll be careful.”
“There isn’t a chance,” Jaana said. “Not in that thing.”
As Kari’s house was to the Kivis’ summer cottage, so was his rowboat to the Kivis’ rickety skiff. It wasn’t that it was bigger—though it certainly was—so much that it was slicker. The bow tapered sharply into an elegant elfin stem, and there was a shining black outboard motor at the transom. The oarlocks were of polished brass, and the entire thing had the white, woody look you associate with yachting and New England.
“There’s no such thing as careful. Not in that,” Jaana said.
“But we won’t use the motor,” Kari said. “We can’t, even. There isn’t any fuel. Kalle used it all up.”
“I see.” Jaana squatted down on the dock and rested a hand on the gunwale. As short as her hair was, the breeze was still stiff enough to ruffle it. “Do I need to check the gauge, or can I trust you, Mr. Hannula?”
Kari’s expression looked so sincere that it almost couldn’t have been. “You can trust me,” he said. “You can also check the gauge.”
Jaana stood. “To the island and back.” She helped Axel get aboard and settled on the stern bench, where he propped his feet atop a foam cooler. “Look after him.”
“I’ll look after him,” Tess said, climbing aboard as well. The boat rocked under her, then steadied. She dropped her life jacket on the bench beside Axel.
“You’re who I was talking to,” Jaana said, untying them and tossing the line for Kari to catch. “I’d better not hear a motor.”
Their grandmother stayed on the dock, watching as Kari set the oars into the oarlocks and took his spot on the bench, his back to the little island. This struck Axel as strange—he was used to canoes, and in a canoe everybody faced forward. Grandpa Paul had a whole fleet of them out behind his trailer, some salvaged or stolen, but most bought bargain basement from a summer camp gone bust. No matter ho
w poorly their trips down to the Boils went, Sam and Paul always quit fighting for long enough to take the kids out onto the steaming creeks and springs. Everybody had a paddle, and everybody was expected to use it. A rowboat was different—you couldn’t exactly share the work. But Kari didn’t seem to mind.
“We’ll have to go around it . . . and let the breeze carry us to the north side . . . where we’ll put ashore,” he said between pulls on the oars. They’d gone all of ten nautical yards and already there was sweat speckling Kari’s forehead. “It’ll take a little longer, but we don’t have a choice.”
“Your brother’s not going to miss his boat?” Tess asked.
Kari sort of snorted. “Kalle won’t be awake for hours.” In order to compensate for the wind, he struck a diagonal course roughly between the pine island and his own summer house. Though perhaps that name wasn’t fitting—the Hannula house seemed to be battened against anything Finland could possibly throw at it, summer or winter. It was a fortress of warmth, four chimneys stabbing out of the roof like the jeweled peaks of a crown. A sauna was attached to the house via a glass walkway, and the skeleton of a new wing bulged from the east wall. The deck above the boathouse bore all the evidence of revelry; empty cider bottles along the railings and paper plates smeared with mustard, scattered by the weather.
“It’s Tuesday,” Tess said. She left it at that for a moment, allowing the words to be carried away on the breeze. “Don’t you all have school?”
The Winter Place Page 11