As Red as Blood (The Snow White Trilogy) (4 page)

She leaned against the darkroom wall and closed her eyes. Something was bothering her again. Something out of place, something off. Her brain had recorded something, and now it was trying to figure out what didn’t belong. Lumikki opened her eyes and realized what it was.

The backpack.

Tuukka never wore a backpack. He had a black leather Marimekko shoulder bag that could barely fit the books he needed on any given day. And when they didn’t fit, he left
some of them at home. Colorful fabric Marimekko bags were part of the standard uniform for high school girls, but Lumikki had never seen anyone with a leather one except Tuukka. As an accessory, it landed perfectly in the gray zone between conformity and individuality, a carefully considered movement in step with the herd, but with a subtle twist thrown in. But now Tuukka had been carrying a dingy gray backpack, frayed at the seams and stained at the corners, slung over one of his shoulders. Definitely not in keeping with the image of a demigod descended from on high to grace mere mortals with his presence. And it had been stuffed full without looking heavy.

Lumikki could solve this equation instantly.

The usual morning crowd was gathered at the Central Square Coffee House: mothers with their babies and mush and conversations about sleep schedules, college girls drinking lattes that gnawed gaping holes in their monthly budgets and pretending to study for exams while really daydreaming about the future, and a couple of men in suits with laptops playing Angry Birds or checking Facebook instead of working on their PowerPoints. Coffee machines whirring and gurgling. The scent of cappuccino and hazelnut syrup hanging in the air. Pastries that looked far more delicious than they really were. The sweat that came over you instantly when you walked in the door wearing a winter coat.

Lumikki sat at a corner table with her back to the rest of the café as she flipped through a magazine and drank her tea. At a nearby table sat Tuukka, Elisa, and Kasper.

Once Lumikki had realized that the cash was in Tuukka’s backpack, she rushed after him immediately. She had snatched her coat, mittens, scarf, and knit hat from the coatrack. Running out of the school, she slipped and slid past the smoking spot and came to the churchyard, where she stopped and looked around for the boy. At the end of the park path, almost at Häme Street, she spotted the gray backpack swinging from his shoulder. Ignoring the cold air tearing at her lungs, Lumikki continued running, eventually slowing to a light jog and then a brisk walk to keep an appropriate distance. See but don’t be seen. Maintain line of sight.

Her breathing, more like panting, went directly from vapor to icy glitter that stuck to her eyelashes and the locks of hair protruding from under her hat. In temperatures this far below zero, everyone’s hair looked prematurely gray.

Lumikki had seen Tuukka enter the Coffee House, and she waited a few minutes before following him inside. By then, the boy was already deep in conversation with Elisa and Kasper.

Now Lumikki was doing her best to remain invisible. Inconspicuous. Fortunately, she knew how to be someone else. Immediately upon entering, Lumikki had gone to the restroom, peeled off her outerwear and sweater, let down her hair, and arranged it in a side braid—a style she never normally wore. Instead of coffee, she ordered tea. She was browsing a women’s magazine, although normally she’d have grabbed the sports pages or
Image
magazine. She sat in a different way, held her hands in a different position, tilted her head like someone else.

People thought they recognized each other from a distance based on clothing or hair. Superficially, that may have been true, but Lumikki knew that, in reality, recognizing another person was a much more complicated process influenced by hundreds or even thousands of different factors like height, posture, walk, bearing, body and face proportions, expressions, and even microexpressions that flitted by so fast they almost never registered consciously. That was why disguising yourself as someone else was so difficult. According to some people, it was actually impossible without significant plastic surgery and years of practice.

Still, surprisingly small changes could trim away your most recognizable characteristics if you knew what to do. If someone had been consciously looking for Lumikki, knowing that she was in there, of course they would have recognized her. But if you just scanned the room expecting a crowd of strangers, Lumikki was just another slightly hippie-looking poet girl drinking chamomile tea. A girl with nothing conspicuously familiar about her.

So Tuukka, Elisa, and Kasper took no notice of Lumikki, even though they were sitting almost right next to her. After all, they had more important concerns. They had a problem.

“What should we do with it?” Elisa asked the boys.

As soon as she’d entered the coffee shop, Lumikki had noticed how terrible Elisa looked. Her skin was normally fair, but now it looked almost gray. She had dark rings under her eyes and had been careless when she washed or wiped off her last layer of makeup. Her bleached blond hair clung unwashed to her head. Instead of being stylish and coordinated, her
clothing looked like she’d thrown on whatever her hand happened to land on first. Elisa would never have been caught dead looking like this at school. The fact that she had the nerve even to come to the coffee shop in such a state was startling.

Elisa was one of the most beautiful girls in school. She also acted the part, and her poise made everyone believe in her beauty even more strongly. Seeing her like this, exhausted and scared, you realized the beauty was a carefully constructed mask whose single most important factor was not the right color of lip gloss or professionally applied eye shadow, but a heavy dose of self-confidence and flirtatiousness. Elisa’s smile made boys’ hearts flutter and palms sweat.

To this day, Lumikki had never figured out the true nature of Elisa and Tuukka’s relationship. Obviously, they had dated at some point, but now they seemed to be just friends. Maybe friends with benefits. Elisa toyed with the small male population of the arts high school as she saw fit, and of course, as a being descended from a higher sphere, Tuukka was most girls’ fantasy, but some other glue seemed to bind them together too. Maybe they imagined that, as the alphas of the school, they were so far above everyone else that they could never seriously consider dating anyone else.

“What should we do? Duh. We should keep it, of course. Duh. And keep our mouths shut,” Kasper said.

Lumikki wondered how Kasper had gotten into the school in the first place. He seemed to concentrate more on ditching class than doing homework. The whispers in the hall said he was on the verge of expulsion if things didn’t change.
Kasper dressed in black and wore flamboyant gold jewelry. Keeping his hair slicked back required a significant amount of gel, and in his world, he clearly thought he was some sort of bling-bling rap artist even though, in reality, his performances evoked more pity than excitement in the audience. Kasper was a weird dude, and you couldn’t tell whether he was a chump or an actual small-time thug. For ages, Lumikki had wondered why Elisa and Tuukka hung out with Kasper at all. Elisa glanced around and lowered her voice.

“We can’t keep it,” she said.

The panic in her voice was audible.

“What do you think we should do then?” Tuukka asked. “Go tell the police?”

Kasper snickered. Elisa’s dad was a cop. Occasionally, she received good-natured and sometimes less good-natured ribbing about that fact.

“It isn’t ours. We ended up with it by accident, so someone out there is looking for it, and if they find us, we’re screwed.”

Elisa was desperate to convince the boys.

“Come on, Elisa, think. What can we really do? How can we explain everything that happened without getting in trouble? We should have done something right then that night,” Tuukka pointed out.

“We did do something,” Kasper said, snickering.

Elisa sighed. “Yeah. We acted like regular geniuses.”

“It seemed logical at the time,” Tuukka said. “But you get what I’m saying. If we tell about the . . . it . . . we have to
tell about everything else. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t risk that.”

“Neither can I,” Kasper said.

Lumikki heard Elisa’s fingernails drumming nervously on the tabletop as she spoke.

“My memory’s way too fuzzy to say anything for sure. I can’t even sort out what happened when. Mostly I just know that my house was a god-awful mess in the morning. You don’t even want to hear all the places I found puke.”

“I bet you’ve got a lot of scrubbing to do so your dad doesn’t realize you weren’t just sitting at home studying physics all weekend.”

Kasper leaned back in his chair with an amused look on his face.

“Are you crazy? Today’s when the maid comes. She’s cleaning everything up right now. I promised to pay her double if she does it in half the usual time and keeps her mouth shut. If I could just remember everything that happened, maybe I could—”

“Get us all in really, really big trouble? That sounds like an awesome plan.”

Tuukka’s voice had a hard, threatening edge to it.

Elisa was silent for a moment. At the next table, someone made it to the next level on Angry Birds and gave a satisfied, “Yes!”

“Okay, fine,” Elisa said. “We’ll keep our mouths shut. For now. We’ll wait and see what happens. But I have to say, I have a really bad feeling about this.”

“Maybe ten grand will make you feel better,” Tuukka said.

“What? No, I don’t want any.”

“Of course you do. I’ve got three bags. Ten thousand each. We’re all in this together.”

There was some rustling and the sound of a zipper as Tuukka opened his backpack under the table. Lumikki turned her head slightly and watched out of the corner of her eye as two opaque black plastic bags were transferred from Tuukka’s backpack to Elisa’s and Kasper’s bags.

Elisa pressed her face into her hands and gave an anguished sigh.

“Fuck. This morning, when I woke up, I was so hoping this was all just a bad dream.”

“No one saw you, did they?” Kasper asked Tuukka.

“No.”

“And no one had gone in the darkroom?” Kasper asked.

“And just left all that there? I seriously doubt it.”

But there was tension in Tuukka’s laugh. Suddenly, he stood up.

“This meeting is over. You can leave now.”

“I’m still drinking my chai,” Elisa said.

“If I was you, I wouldn’t hang around town looking like that any longer than I had to,” Tuukka said. “And I mean that with all the love in the world, baby.”

“Yeah. You’re one to talk,” Elisa threw back, but she did get up.

Lumikki waited until the trio had left. Then she tried to gulp down the rest of her tea. God. Did people really drink
this stuff voluntarily? She ended up leaving the dregs of the overpriced dishwater in her cup. When a safe amount of time had passed, she bundled up and stepped back out into the biting cold. She’d have time to think on the way home.

A bitter, electric cold wind was blowing across the stone bridge over the rapids that ran through the middle of the city. Lumikki hurried her steps, processing what she had heard. Tuukka, Elisa, and Kasper had somehow ended up with the money last night. How, Lumikki didn’t know. Whose money was it? Did they even know? Maybe not. Probably not. They seemed even more confused than usual about what had happened the night before.

The money had obviously been bloody already, and the three of them had come up with the genius idea of washing it in the school darkroom. That was the hardest part to understand. Who would ever think to go to school in the middle of the night to clean a pile of dirty money?

At least we were only drinking.

Suddenly, the words of the perfume mafia echoed in Lumikki’s head. So people must have been doing more than just drinking at the party last night. Some of them, at least. Maybe Elisa, Tuukka, and Kasper. That might explain why they’d come up with such a ridiculous solution. And it would also explain why they couldn’t tell anyone about what happened.

A policeman’s daughter. A principal’s son. The scenario was so classic it made Lumikki shake her head. Kids from good families desperate to be rebellious? Playing dangerous games with drugs and alcohol and who knew what else because they couldn’t get enough excitement from anything else? Or did they just want to get really messed up?

People were sliding all over the place at the intersection by the train station. No amount of gravel the city spread around was enough to ensure traction in a place where thousands of pairs of feet polished the ice every day. Lumikki let her combat boots slap harder on the ground.

The situation had gotten significantly more complicated. She didn’t want to go talk to the principal now. Or the police. She didn’t want to get involved at all, even though the trio weren’t her friends in any way. They didn’t mean anything to her, but she definitely didn’t want to end up in the middle of the shit storm that was sure to blow up if she snitched.

An anonymous tip to the police? That was definitely an option. Would they take it seriously? Probably, if someone had reported thirty thousand euros missing. And if they didn’t take her seriously, it wouldn’t be her problem anymore. She would have done her duty.