Copper Heart (27 page)

“What did Pena say to her?” I didn’t want Dad to get bogged down again on how Pena had never married because of his fear of women.

“At first I thought it must be city business. Pena asked whether she was sure that some contract said something. Then he sighed and said that she would have to do something, even though it wouldn’t be pleasant. After hearing her reply, he smiled.”

“And then?”

“That was all.” My father spread his arms. “Then he said something about some colors. But the most interesting thing about it all was the tone of the conversation; it almost felt intimate, and I’ve never heard Pena use that same voice with anyone but his cats.”

I knew the tone my father meant—my sisters and I called it Uncle Pena’s “kitty-kitty voice.” It was an utterly unmanly cooing, similar to the exaggerated way mothers talked to their babies in diaper commercials.

Pena had undoubtedly been infatuated with Meritta.

But I wondered about their talk of colors. The colors of the political parties—red, blue, and two shades of green? Or the colors of paints Meritta was using for some project? Presumably the artists’ association had some sort of contract with the city. But so did Kivinen’s company.

Attempting to use finesse, my parents began trying to pry out my plans for the future after Antti returned. I was the only one they had left to marry off, after all, now that Helena and
Petri had tied the knot a few weeks before Antti’s dissertation defense. My aunts had asked why we couldn’t combine the defense and our wedding.

“Hell’s bells, now that I’m actually finishing this thing, I want to be the center of attention for at least one day,” had been Antti’s reply.

Hopeless knothead that I am, I let slip at the dinner table that a couple of days earlier I had been considering having a baby. They were, predictably, overjoyed. But at the point that they started counting months and explaining how I could inherit all of Helena’s baby accessories if Antti and I got down to business right after he returned to Finland, I beat a hasty retreat. Any hint that they expected something of me, and I rebelled. Where did the feeling that I always had to accomplish something before I could have their approval come from? Get tens on my tests, graduate summa cum laude, go to law school instead of the police academy…and now have a baby and get engaged.

Missing out on life as a thirty-year-old just to rebel against my parents was idiotic. But did I treat Antti the same way I treated them? I would believe he loved me so long as I could show him that I could get along perfectly well without him first. I could dare to get married if he still wanted me after returning from overseas. Was that it? Was I crouched on the top of a glass mountain after all, waiting for a prince to succeed in climbing up the slippery slope? Or was I the one climbing an endless glass mountainside, the same stretch I had started on more than fifteen years ago?

Johnny is sure to like me if I score this goal. If I perform really well at our gig. If I lose five pounds. If I dye black streaks in my hair. I was like the person in “Scarborough Fair,” requiring
miracles of myself before I could surrender to love. Maybe it was time to grow up.

At four in the morning, while I was in the middle of an incoherent dream, the phone rang.

“Hi. It’s Johnny. I…Never mind.”

The call ended before I could realize it had begun.

14

I woke up to someone pounding furiously on the front door. The rain appeared to have stopped, and the sun was high in the sky. I had tossed and turned after Johnny’s call, lying awake and thinking about whether the caller really was him or just a prank. The alarm clock on the dresser said 11:05. A moment later the pounding was on my bedroom door.

“First you leave threatening messages on all my phones and then you just sleep! Are you serious?” Ella yelled ferociously just outside my room. She knew where we kept the spare key behind the third step and had let herself in.

An instant later she was next to my bed with her hands on her hips, looking even bigger and more broad-shouldered than usual. Even when I managed to drag myself up out of bed, I was still six inches shorter than her.

After putting on a full pot of water for coffee, I stuck my head under the ice-cold tap for a full minute. Slowly my brain was starting to get back in gear. Tuija had seen Ella on the mine hill the night of the murder. That was what I was supposed to talk to Ella about. That and the grant for the art camp.

“I’m glad you came,” I said as I poured our first cups of coffee.

“I would rather not have. How official is this discussion going to be?”

“Completely off the record.”

I didn’t even intend to use the tiny tape recorder I employed now and then to record conversations illegally.

“Nothing you tell me now can be used against you in court.”

While Ella gathered herself, I made myself a couple of open-faced sandwiches and poured muesli on some yogurt.

“It’s true what Tuija Miettinen saw. I did go back to the Old Mine on the night Meritta was murdered. But I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t go back to meet Meritta or to look for my brooch that night. I was looking for Matti.”

“Was Matti there?”

“I don’t know. After the party we went home. I fell asleep around two and then I woke up at three to Ville talking in his sleep. That was when I noticed Matti wasn’t in bed next to me. At first I thought he was just up calming Ville down. But when he didn’t come back after some time, I peeked into the studio. He wasn’t there either. With my mom sleeping on the couch in the living room, I knew the children would have someone with them if I left. So I decided to go looking for Matti.”

Just then Mikko started scratching at the front door. As I let him out, I stopped for a moment to breathe in the scent of the spruce forest drying in the sun. The contrast between the peacefulness outside and Ella’s tumultuous confession felt strangely incongruous.

“Why did you assume that Matti would be at the Old Mine?” I asked, still watching Mikko from the door as he bounded along the edge of a stand of seedling trees, harassing thrushes until he found an appropriate-smelling place to do his business.

“That brooch of mine…I probably dropped it when I went up in the Tower again looking for Meritta. That was when you
were at the bottom of the Tower talking with Kaisa and Johnny. I wanted to talk to her about…”

Ella’s words trailed off and she crumbled a piece of bread in her fingers. Her cheeks were glowing red. I didn’t have the patience to give her the time she needed.

“About the art camp money?”

“Exactly!” Ella’s voice sounded relieved. “Maria, Matti lied to you. It wasn’t Meritta who used the art camp grant, it was Matti.”

I had suspected as much. Now the conversation my father had overheard between Pena and Meritta was starting to make sense. Ella turned even redder, and I felt sorry for her. Matti had pulled a scurvy trick on both of them, Ella and Meritta.

“I went to ask Meritta if she could let it be. I would’ve been able to get the missing money from somewhere. I tried to get her to understand Matti. Last winter things were so tight. First the car broke down, and then Matti had to spend thousands on dental work. Matti was panicking that he couldn’t work anymore. We just didn’t have money for canvases and paints. The art camp grant money came at the end of January, and Matti thought he would have plenty of time to pay it all back before the summer. Only Matti and Meritta could see the artists’ association accounts, so no one else would have ever needed to know.”

“So why did Meritta get uptight about it?”

“Because they actually needed the money at the end of April to rent class space and buy plane tickets for a teacher to come from Denmark, and when Meritta went to the bank, the account had fifteen thousand less than she expected. Meritta rushed over to our house and started yelling about how she knew city politics used to work like this but that she wasn’t going to be party to
any more fraud. If the money didn’t show up in the account immediately, she was going to contact the police.”

In the previous municipal elections, Meritta had campaigned on the need to raise the level of integrity in local politics, to stop overlooking little infractions and open up every decision for public scrutiny. Irregularities in the finances of her own artists’ association would have been unbearable for her in more ways than one. I thought of the millions thrown to the wind in the Saastamoinen Construction bankruptcy scam and almost laughed. That was taxpayer money too.

“So what did Meritta say to you?”

“She said that Matti must be pretty pathetic to send his wife to clean up his mess. That he would have to handle it himself.”

I understood Meritta’s comment perfectly, since this situation was exactly the same thing. Ella had come to tell me about Matti’s blunder because he didn’t have the nerve.

“Did Matti go back to the Old Mine to talk to Meritta?”

“I don’t know…I haven’t dared ask him.”

Ella had never been the crying type; this was maybe only the second time I had ever seen tears in her eyes. The first was when one of our classmates had died in a car accident during our sophomore year. That time we had wailed together, but these tears were Ella’s alone. All I did was move the roll of paper towels a little closer to her.

“So I need to talk to Matti,” I said.

“He isn’t home today. He’s in Lieksa teaching a class. He won’t be home until tomorrow morning.”

“Tell him to call. I’ll notify Detective Sergeant Järvisalo that I’ve spoken to you. And don’t be so sad. If this is really just about the misappropriation of fifteen thousand marks, no one is going to be charged with anything.”

But I could see in Ella’s eyes that she was afraid there could be something more.

“By the way, I saw Johnny that night too, but I couldn’t tell you about it until now,” she said as she headed out the door.

After working for twelve days straight, not having to go into work felt unnatural. Saturday was market day in town, but I wanted to enjoy my solitude. So I fetched the papers, drank another cup of coffee, and decided to go walking in the forest. Mikko stayed to bask in the sun on the sauna steps.

Uncle Pena’s farm was located in the center of a thick evergreen forest. Behind a cow pasture now overgrown with trees rose a cliff several dozen feet high. Climbing to the top, I waved to the Tower gleaming on the horizon. From such a distance it looked like a forgotten toy in a sand box. Turning, I looked toward the fragrant swamp on the other side of the rocks, where during the best summers you could find cloudberries and later in the year, cranberries. We almost never saw moose in these parts, so I was surprised to spot an unusually large gray-brown bull rubbing his antlers on a pine tree at the edge of the bog. I sat down on the rock to watch it.

At his parents’ cabin in Inkoo, Antti and I had spent hours watching moose go about their business. There was always something calming about watching the controlled movements of such a large animal. Perhaps I wasn’t as urban as I imagined myself to be when I moved to Helsinki. Just living in Espoo had reminded me how much I missed hiking in the woods.

Where would I be living a year from now? I was getting tired of constantly moving. And finding a job was going to be an even bigger problem. If only Antti was here with me to assure me that we could figure out how to make everything in both of our lives fit together. And to help me forget about Johnny, who
the police were searching for right at that very moment. I missed Antti so much. His face, his voice, his warm skin against mine…Only the knowledge that it was four thirty in the morning in Chicago prevented me from rushing to the phone.

The moose raised its head and looked toward me. The wind must have carried my scent to it. I felt like moving closer, but I didn’t want to spook it. Antti would have joked that if I met a bear in the woods, I probably would assume it was more afraid of me than I was of it.

And what if Antti and I did get married? Lately, I had seen more than enough examples of disastrous marriages. Weren’t Antti and I the same as Meritta and Mårten Flöjt? Wasn’t our work the most important thing to both of us? We’d at least have to think carefully about having children. We were sure to fight constantly over who had to watch them, just like the Virtanens. But Antti and I could always sense each other’s need for space, and we wanted the same things. What happened to Johnny and Tuija couldn’t happen to us, right? And at the very least our marriage would never turn into a business partnership like the Kivinens’.

But was I really ready for it?

On the way back to the house, I collected a bouquet of buttercups and bellflowers from the most open corner of the pasture for the living room table, putting my thoughts in order as I did so. In my mind I had created a sort of ranking of suspects, with Johnny unfortunately at the top. Matti was a strong second, and Kivinen had climbed into third.

After leaving a blank space in my list, I added Tuija’s name. Just out of spite. And then, to be honest, I added Ella too. She was extremely aggressive in the way she handled her husband’s business. If she had been mad enough, she could have pushed
Meritta off the Tower to protect Matti. I wasn’t so sure about Jaska’s murder though.