The Winter Place

by Alexander Yates

  “My little brother went missing right where Mr. Järvinen’s father did. I just . . .” Tess let her voice go wobbly and trailed off. She even pretended that she was trying to suppress some tears. But then, before she knew it, she really was trying to suppress them. Funny how that could happen.

  “I guess I just wanted to talk to him,” she said.

  “Of course,” the nurse said, standing aside to let them both into the tidy little home. “Hurry in. You two are getting soaked.” She took their dripping ponchos and hung them up in the entryway before leading them deeper into Pyry Järvinen’s house.

  “Can I fix you two some tea?” the nurse asked, totally contrite.

  “No, thank you,” Tess said, feeling guilty.

  “Well, just let me know if you change your mind.” They entered a dark room at the back of the house, where they found an old man slumped in a big wicker chair, bathed in the light of a blaring television set. He didn’t seem to notice that he had guests. There was a Moomin cartoon in the DVD player, and the merry voices of the characters were so loud that they caused framed maps and paintings hanging on the walls to vibrate. The nurse picked up a remote that was sitting atop the television and muted it. “Mr. Järvinen,” she said, her voice just as loud as the cartoons had been. “Pyry. You have some guests.”

  Even though the television was muted, Mr. Järvinen kept his eyes on it for a moment. Then he turned and took them in. He was by far the oldest old man Tess had ever seen—Pyry Järvinen made Jaana and Otso look almost middle-aged. He seemed no bigger than he had in that blurry photograph, as though he hadn’t grown an inch since then. He had clear plastic tubes coming out of his nose and running down the sides of his face, and one of his fingertips was hooked up to a little monitoring device. It chirped once, from the corner.

  “Hello again,” he said. Mr. Järvinen seemed happy enough to see them. “Nice of you to come back.”

  “You haven’t met these two people before,” the nurse boomed, her voice endlessly patient and put out all at once. “But this young lady is the one they were talking about on television last night, remember?” Then she lowered her voice and said to Tess: “Mind, he won’t.”

  Mr. Järvinen nodded. His eyes drifted back to the muted cartoons on the screen.

  “She’s the one whose brother is missing,” the nurse said. “That little boy they’re searching for up at the lake.”

  “Terrible thing,” Mr. Järvinen said, shaking his head.

  “It is,” the nurse all but shouted. “It really, really is.” Then she turned back to Tess and Kari. “I suppose I can leave you to it. So you said you just . . . you want to talk to him?”

  “Yeah,” Tess said, sort of shrugging. “I think it would help.” She wished she’d thought to come up with a better lie than that. Goodwill had gotten her and Kari through the door, but it wouldn’t last forever.

  The nurse eyeballed her for a long while, an equal measure of sympathy and vague suspicion on her face. “Are you sure you don’t want anything warm to drink?” she finally said.

  “Thank you,” Tess said. “Not right now.”

  “Well. Just holler if you need any help with him.” Mr. Järvinen’s nurse put her loose headphone back into her ear, but Tess had noticed that she’d switched the music off. “And try not to be too long. I meant it when I said he needs his rest,” she said, leaving the three of them in the dark room.

  There was a long and tremendously awkward silence. It seemed quieter for the fact that Tess could see the Moomins shouting on the screen but not hear them. Kari wandered past the television, to admire a framed map that had been tacked up to the wall. Tess wondered if it was just so he wouldn’t have to look at Mr. Järvinen.

  “My mother drew that,” the old man said, his voice warm and foggy. “It’s the lake, the way it looked before the mill closed. You can see the mill right . . . there.” He pointed. “Look,” he said. It was only after Kari did look that the old man continued. “You can see the castle, too. And our house—all the houses. Bring it here so I can show you. You can put it in that essay of yours.”

  “We aren’t writing an essay,” Tess said. She picked up a stool and placed it as close to his chair as she could. She didn’t want to have to yell, lest the nurse overhear her questions.

  “Aren’t you?” Mr. Järvinen said, glancing from Kari to Tess, confused. But then his confusion ebbed away. “Well . . . I can tell you the same thing I told the others. I haven’t seen my mother since I was a little boy. Never bothered looking for her in the first place. Because my poor mother died, and it’s no great mystery to me where she is and where she isn’t.” He winked at them. This was clearly a line he’d used before.

  Tess glanced at Kari, and he raised his eyebrows. “I don’t have any questions about your mother,” she said. “I wanted to ask you about Väinö Järvinen, your father.” Considering what an awful dad Väinö had apparently been and the way he chose to exit this world, Tess had expected at least some reaction to the mention of his name. But the younger Mr. Järvinen gave her nothing. His eyes drifted back to the television, where the Moomin family was putting on a play in a floating theater. Tess got up, shut the television off, and returned to her stool.

  “Could one of you please get me the remote?” Mr. Järvinen said.

  “In a minute,” Tess said. She took him by the hand, hoping to focus his attention, but the old man snatched it right away. So, maybe her mention of Väinö had gotten a reaction, after all. “I guess you don’t want to talk about it,” she said, “but I have a few questions that I really need to ask you. I think that what happened to your father might be the same thing that’s happening to my little brother. I want to know if Väinö ever—”

  “Nothing happened to my father,” Mr. Järvinen said. He no longer sounded quite so foggy, or warm. “He ran away from home. It was a choice he made, not a thing that happened to him.”

  “All right,” Tess said. “I’m sorry. What I want to know is, did he ever say anything to you about somebody named the Keeper?” The old man blinked at her. “Maybe about the man who lived in the castle?” she tried. “The one who promised he could bring your father to Aino.”

  At this Mr. Järvinen snorted. “Kagg,” he said, brushing a wrinkled hand through the air as though to dismiss the word. It had no meaning to Tess, but Kari’s attention snapped away from Aino’s hand-drawn map.

  “You don’t . . . You mean Erik Kagg?” he said, looking perplexed.

  “You know your history,” Mr. Järvinen said, though he didn’t sound particularly impressed by this fact. “Erik Kagg. It’s stupid, I know. I already knew it was stupid when I was a little boy. My God, what a waste my father was.”

  Tess was getting lost. “Who are you—”

  “Kagg was that Swedish count, remember?” Kari said. “We read about him when we took Axel to Erikinlinna. He’s the one who built it.”

  “Erik Kagg, living in his castle.” Mr. Järvinen shook his head. “He must have been an old guy by then. Older than me, even.” It seemed like he was trying to summon a laugh, but all that came out was a bitter cough. “A waste,” he said again, running the back of his hand over his wet lower lip. This had happened well over half a century ago, but the hurt in Mr. Järvinen’s eyes still seemed fresh. “You should probably get on back to your class,” he said.

  “Wait.” Tess was having trouble absorbing this information. “Your father said that Erik Kagg was the Keeper?” This seemed, somehow, not quite right to her. She’d spent almost no time with the Keeper, but their conversation back in Baldwin had given her enough of an impression. The old man had none of the bearing of an ancient Swedish count. Unless perhaps the centuries had softened him?

  Mr. Järvinen coughed again, louder this time. He fell into a fit of them, and for a second Tess was worried that his nurse would hear and come running. But the coughs subsided. “I told you that I don’t know about any Keeper,” Mr. Järvinen said as he emerged from the fit, his eyes watering
. “My father just told me that he met the old count in the castle. And that Kagg showed him how to find ghosts in the forest and promised to bring him to my mother.” The old man went quiet for a while. He made to wipe his tears away, but they had already sunk back into his eyes. “I used to go out into the woods looking for my father, you know. I did it for years. Just so I could tell him that I hoped he’d never find her. Even dead, my mother was better off without him. We both were.”

  “Why would you go looking for your father?” Kari said.

  “I was young, and I was angry.” Mr. Järvinen’s head began to list to one side. He stretched his neck, and it popped terribly. “Would one of you, please, just give me the remote? We’re missing the best part.”

  “But he died,” Kari said. “Your father froze to death in the castle.”

  “Bah!” Now Mr. Järvinen did achieve a laugh. “I’ve no doubt he’s dead today, but my father certainly didn’t die back then. I’m curious. Which is the version they told you? That my uncles were so angry with him that they forbade us from attending the funeral? Or that I said the body was cursed, and our whole family refused to receive it?”

  “I guess . . .” Kari looked suddenly ashamed. “I heard both of those.”

  “And more, I’d bet. This town hates a story that doesn’t have an ending,” Mr. Järvinen said, pointing first at Kari and then at Tess, as though he held them personally responsible for that fact. “When spring came, and they found a dead man in Erikinlinna, everybody decided to make that their ending. Never mind that it wasn’t Väinö.”

  “Are you sure that it wasn’t your father?” Tess said, leaning forward on her stool. “I mean, it had been months. The body must have been . . .” She didn’t really want to finish, and thankfully Mr. Järvinen didn’t force her to.

  “Oh, it certainly was,” he said, sneering darkly. “But my father had a particular feature that made him hard to miss. He was a woodcutter and a drunk—two things that don’t mix very well at all. He had a bad accident when I was just a baby and cut his left hand all to pieces. The doctor in town was only able to save three of his fingers. But the body they brought us, rotten though it was, had a full set. Ten fingers. Ten toes. It was probably just some drifter. Or maybe . . .” Mr. Järvinen brightened. He also seemed on the verge of another coughing fit. “Maybe it was Erik Kagg. Mystery solved! Now, would one of you give me that damn remote and rewind my show back to the middle?”

  Tess got up off her stool, but then she had to sit back down again. She was shaking. For a moment she could almost feel the Keeper’s mangled hand, Väinö’s mangled hand, clutching her tight around the stomach. She swallowed a mouthful of spit, worried that she might actually be sick on the poor old man’s yellow quilt. Kari noticed immediately.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Tess said. She got up again, and this time she was able to stay standing.

  “No,” she said.

  She walked over to the TV, turned it back on, and reset the DVD. She set the volume even louder than it had been before. Then she took Aino’s map of the lake off the wall. The mill, the castle, even the still on the pine island had been labeled in careful calligraphy. Each individual house bore the name of the family that owned it. The woman knew how to draw—Tess could say that much for her.

  “I’m going to take this,” she said to Mr. Järvinen. “Can I please take this?”

  “No, you cannot,” the old man said, raising his voice to be heard over the Moomins.

  “Okay,” Tess said. “I’m going to take it anyway, all right? I’m really sorry, but I need it. I promise I’ll give it back.”

  “No, you . . . What are you—”

  Tess opened the fasteners on the back of the frame and pulled Aino’s map out. She gently rolled it up.

  “Stop that right now!” Mr. Järvinen shouted.

  “I’m so sorry,” Tess said, her cheeks hot and pink. Then she turned and walked quickly out of the dark little sitting room. Kari rushed to follow her, looking baffled. Väinö’s son hollered after them, calling for his nurse. But the cartoons were much too loud, and Tess and Kari had already reached the front door.

  20

  The Pine Island

  It had been only a few hours since Tess and Kari left Mr. Järvinen’s house, and already she thought that they might be getting close. They were back at the lake, standing in the same patch of cleared forest where Bigwig had appeared nearly a week ago, poring over Aino’s hand-drawn map. Kari was holding his poncho out to shield the map from the rain, but even so the paper was fraying at the edges, coming apart in their fingers. A stray raindrop landed on a corner of the map and passed right through like a wet bullet. Tess felt rotten about it. She promised herself that if she made it through this, she’d find a way to make it up to Mr. Järvinen.

  Tess had told Kari everything the moment his older brother dropped them back off at the lake. Kari hadn’t given her a choice—he’d threatened to go right back into town unless Tess explained why they’d stolen from the old man. But it was good—the telling had helped. After all, she was only just starting to put things together for herself. Saying it aloud to Kari was as much a way of explaining it to the both of them. Tess wasn’t sure that she had all the details right, but the gist of the story was simple: Väinö Järvinen, the grief-stricken woodsman who had abandoned his son and disappeared into the forest more than sixty years ago, was the Keeper. Väinö was the drifter who had appeared before Tess and Axel back in Baldwin on the night their father died. It was Väinö who had made contact with her brother at Talvijärvi and scooped him out of the world.

  “But I thought that what was happening to Axel was the same thing that happened to Väinö,” Kari said. “Wasn’t he supposed to be a victim of this Keeper guy?”

  “He was that, too,” Tess said. She had no doubt that a Keeper had once lured Väinö into the woods and shown him the path. And thanks to the younger Mr. Järvinen, Tess had a pretty good idea of who that original Keeper was. But for whatever reason, the job had been passed on to Väinö. He’d spent decades lost in a wilderness of grief, tricked out of his own life. And now he was the man doing the tricking.

  “And the map?” Kari said. “Why do you need it?”

  “To find where his cabin used to be,” Tess said. She knew that this last leap was the biggest, strangest one of all. To go looking for Väinö at the site of his old home meant that she had to believe that the corpse in the castle belonged to the original Keeper—Erik-freaking-Kagg. An ancient Swedish count who by all rights should have been dead for eight hundred years or so. Väinö had taken Kagg’s place in the forest, and Kagg had taken Väinö’s in the ground. “Erikinlinna was his home,” she said. “If Kagg returned there, then maybe Väinö will return to his.”

  Tess could tell that Kari wanted to believe her but simply didn’t. Not even a little bit. But still, here he was, shivering right beside her and holding up his poncho to keep the map dry. A lot had changed since Aino had drawn it. Homesteads dotted the shoreline in her time, but in the many decades since, they’d been replaced by summer cottages, their farms all gone to weed. The mill closed and the forest crept back, advancing on the water. With none of Aino’s landmarks left, Tess and Kari had to follow the contours of the shore, orienting themselves by their distance from the island. It lay off to the left, the two old pines bending under the weight of the slush.

  “Shouldn’t it be here?” Kari said.

  “Almost.” Tess pointed to a spit of rocky land on the map, curling into the lake like a tail. Then she peered up at the shoreline. They could just make out a few of the rocks in the distance, sticking up out of the ice like dorsal fins. “Past there and over that hill,” she said. She rolled the map up carefully and handed it back to Kari, who wrapped it in his poncho. The woods became dense and untended beyond the clearing, so they cut across the shallows. Nearly an inch of rainwater had accumulated on the ice, and it splashed around their boots as they made their way
carefully over the slick surface. It was a strange feeling, to be walking through water, atop ice, atop still more water. But it was thick enough—Tess had watched grown men and women from the search parties taking shortcuts across the lake all week long.

  They reached the rocks and cut back to the shore. The ground rose up ahead, and Tess saw that what had looked like a hill on Aino’s map was actually an outcropping of bald granite wearing a crown of orange-barked pine trees. Kari paused, pressing a gloved hand against one of the trunks for balance.

  “Do you smell that?” he said.

  Tess did—an oily sweetness hung in the air, rich and pungent against the clean smell of the rain and woods. The odor got stronger as they climbed the rise, and when they reached the top, she could see a few threads of tar-black smoke drifting through the trees. There was something at the far foot of the slope. The snow down there had been trod flat in a rough little circle, all around the husk of a dead pine tree. And within that circle Tess could see a black blotch of smoking ash sitting under a soggy cardboard lean-to. A blue tarp lay crumpled across a bank of overturned snow, partially covering a glinting pile of open cans and empty bottles. It was a campsite.

  “Careful!” Kari yelled. But Tess was already sliding down the slope on her butt, going as fast as the ice and snow would let her. The moment she hit level ground again, she was running. According to Aino’s map, this was exactly where the Järvinens’ cabin should have been.

  As Tess got closer she saw that it wasn’t a dead tree in the middle of the campsite but rather an upright stack of red bricks. A fireplace and a chimney—the only pieces of Väinö and Aino’s home that had survived the endless winters. The campsite around the fireplace looked like it had been only recently abandoned. The embers in the fire pit were still smoking, and an open jar of pickled herring sat atop a stone, slowly filling with rainwater. Beside that was a bottle of syrupy pine schnapps, the cap sitting loose atop the mouth.