Copper Heart (14 page)

I returned to Meritta’s paintings down in the studio. In the first stack, I found a few familiar images, some powerful
landscapes of the Old Mine, and a series of pencil sketches of Kaisa throwing the javelin. On the bottom of the first stack, I found a grotesque picture of Meritta’s brother. I doubted Jaska had agreed to sit for Meritta, so she had probably painted it from memory. Jaska was in his rocker uniform of worn-out jeans, a leather jacket, and a black T-shirt. A guitar hung around his neck. He was posing on stage with his legs spread in classic axman stance. His alcohol-swollen face wore a smug expression.

It was a spiteful painting, perfectly merging how Jaska viewed himself with how the rest of us saw him. I hoped Jaska would never see it. Actually, I wished I had never seen it.

The second stack was mostly Meritta’s series of Kaisa and Johnny. In some of the paintings they were together, and Meritta used light and shadow to play with the similarities and differences of the male and female form. Some of the paintings depicted Kaisa with her javelin. Depending on the mood of the piece, the spear sometimes seemed like a phallic plaything and at other times like a weapon. In one of the pictures, Johnny, barely recognizable because he was covered in so much mud, stretched to reach a soccer ball.

I don’t understand much about art, but I liked Meritta’s work instinctively. Something told me it was high-quality work. The way she could transform familiar people into images that portrayed so much more than the models themselves was fascinating.

Did the paintings belong to Aniliina now? I wondered what price they would fetch.

On the bottom of the second stack were two more paintings. At first glance they were almost black, but upon closer inspection the minimal light in them revealed holes, tunnels, and endless caverns. They were at once disturbing and familiar.

Meritta had told Matti that all of her mine-themed paintings were in her gallery in Helsinki. But what else could these be, and why had Meritta lied? Did she want to conceal them from Matti for some reason?

I stared at the paintings for so long that their blackness made my eyes throb.

“So all the men left?”

I jumped. Aniliina had crept up behind me. She ran her thin hands through her tangled hair, and her mouth appeared almost blue in her wan face. Everything about her conveyed one simple message: I am miserable. And the misery had begun long before Meritta’s death.

“Yeah, and I’m about done too. But before I go, would you mind answering a few questions? You must have known your mother best.”

“I didn’t know her at all. And she didn’t know me.”

Nevertheless, Aniliina led me into the kitchen, where we sat down, I on the couch and she curled up in the armchair in the sun. Compared to Aniliina, talking to Ella and Johnny had been easy.

I thanked my lucky stars I wasn’t fifteen or even nineteen anymore. Especially at fifteen, life had been pure misery. I was desperately in love with Johnny, wanted to leave home, didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and didn’t recognize my own body. While choosing a career was still difficult, and loving Antti was tricky, all in all life felt much better now than it had fifteen years earlier. Maybe that was growing up.

“I feel like coffee. Can I make some?” I asked Aniliina, nodding toward the coffeemaker. “Do you want some too? Coffee or something else?”

“I don’t want anything.”

“You really should try to eat.”

“No I shouldn’t!” Aniliina’s voice was furious, as if I had attacked her. I considered what I actually knew about anorexia. Why wasn’t Aniliina in the hospital anymore? She looked appallingly thin.

“I don’t want to end up a fat-ass like my mom or my grandma. They’re so ugly. How can you even stand having breasts?” Aniliina looked curiously at my body, which I considered only moderately curvy although clearly feminine.

When the coffee was ready, I poured Aniliina a cup anyway.

Aniliina got up and went into the kitchen. “There’s some
pulla
and cake here if you want it with your coffee.” She pulled the pastries out of the cupboard and practically pushed them at me. “Grandma’s chocolate cake is to die for. Have a taste.”

I took a piece of the delicious-looking cake as Aniliina stared at me triumphantly. I wondered what my acceptance signified to her. Sure, I knew lots of women who watched what they and others ate, like my sister Helena or Koivu’s girlfriend, Anita, but I had never experienced anything this intense.

“Had Meritta been acting strange lately? Was she happier or more depressed than usual?”

“She was fucking thrilled just like she always is when she’s painting something new. And of course her new man, that Johnny guy, was keeping her all cheery. Mom was really into him.”

“So everything was good?”

“Except me.” Aniliina rubbed her coffee cup between her palms like a hiker might on a cold winter day, sipping gingerly. “Me, she just screamed at. First she wanted me out of that prison—the hospital, I mean—and then she was constantly threatening to send me back. And I’m not going back there, not ever!” Aniliina’s dark eyes burned in their sockets.

“Are you here all alone now or is Kaisa coming to stay the night again?”

“Kaisa’s flying to Helsinki tonight. The Grand Prix starts tomorrow. Dad said he might come if they finish their recording session today. But I can manage just fine on my own,” Aniliina said a little more graciously. “At least better than with Grandma and my drunk-ass uncle. Grandma just cries and goes on about how she always knew something bad would happen to her poor little baby girl. I’d have to agree with her on that.”

“Why?” I asked more sharply than I had intended.

“She means all the men and the paintings Mom did. I mean how she irritated almost everyone. I’ve always wondered why someone never killed her before. She was such a fucking bitch.”

With this, tears began flowing down her cheeks, which she tried to pretend weren’t there. Gradually, she started rocking back and forth, curling up like a snowman melting in the rain. Her empty coffee cup fell to the floor. I pulled a handkerchief out of my bag and ended up wiping away her tears. To my surprise, she didn’t resist and even let me stroke her hair.

“She was still my mom though,” Aniliina finally stammered. Then, as if ashamed of her outburst, she straightened up. “Did you have anything else? I need to go for a jog.”

“Do you know where I can find Kaisa before she leaves for Helsinki?”

“Yes, she’s supposed to be at the field practicing until three.”

Leaving Aniliina alone felt awful. Hopefully her father was on his way.

“If you remember anything that seems important, call me anytime. Even if you just want to talk…” I didn’t want to force myself on Aniliina, but I wanted her to know I was at her disposal. Leaving her both my home and work numbers, I decided
to talk to her father, Mårten, about changing the locks as soon as he arrived.

From their house, the sports field was only a quarter of a mile away. Seeing it filled me with memories of shouting and sweat, the sudden pain of a tackle, and the tingling excitement of my team scoring a goal. But seeing the field so quiet, with only a couple of old men rounding the track, felt strange. Then I saw a solitary tall figure on the javelin runway. Choosing a javelin from the rack, Kaisa hefted it in her hand, looked down at her check marks, and then walked slowly to the other end of the runway to start her takeoff. First a couple of slow, almost exploratory steps, then an explosive spurt that brought her throwing hand back. The spurt came to a halt just before the white scratch line, from which she hurled the javelin into the air. The arc of the projectile was smooth and powerful, and it seemed like ages before it touched the ground several meters past the thickest white line drawn across the field. Was that the fifty-meter line? Or sixty? If that was the case, that was a phenomenal practice throw.

When I saw the coach rush to Kaisa from his observation post, I was sure it must be the sixty-meter line. Both seemed satisfied. Kaisa jogged a quick lap around the grass, stretching her shoulders and waiting until the runners had passed before taking off again. Her second throw also sailed past the thick white line, but not as far as the first.

The sports announcers on TV always commented on the purity of Kaisa’s technique. I wasn’t really familiar with the finer points of the javelin throw, but I could see that her takeoff was precise, her throwing hand stayed in a good position, and she put her whole body into the throw, not just her shoulder and arm.

The third throw landed just short of the line, making Kaisa shake her head. I walked closer. From fifty feet away it would have
been difficult to tell the thrower’s sex if I hadn’t already known. That slender, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped body could have belonged to any young athlete. Only closer up could I make out the rise of her pert breasts under her training shirt, the smooth skin of her face, and the graceful line of her jaw. Kaisa wasn’t one of those female athletes who bothered with makeup or sexy sports outfits. But even with mussed hair and normal sweat pants, she exuded an unself-conscious charm. Back when she won her first Finnish Championship, she still walked hunched over, a teenage girl obviously ashamed of her height, who seemed to stand up straight only while on the throwing runway. Now she walked with her head held high and her back straight, but still she hated all the media attention.

I didn’t know whether interrupting Kaisa in the middle of practice would be considered lèse-majesté. Detective Antikainen had already interviewed her on Saturday. She had been one of the last people to talk to Meritta before she died. Even though Kaisa’s statement didn’t contain anything out of the ordinary, something was still bothering me—her intense look Friday night when she asked Johnny if he and Meritta were in a relationship, and the fact that Johnny had lied to her about it.

I also wanted to talk to her about Aniliina. Apparently she had been good friends with both the mother and the daughter.

Kaisa and her coach seemed to be taking a break. He ambled toward the maintenance shack, and she collapsed onto the high-jump pit and started slurping a sports drink out of a green plastic bottle.

“Hi. You got a second?”

“I’m on my break.” Kaisa sounded irritated, but not unwelcoming.

“Nice throws. How far out is that thick white line?”

“Sixty-two. The cutoff distance for the first round in Helsinki.”

“But then you must have thrown at least seventy that one time…”

“Tomorrow at the Grand Prix I need to throw the top distance for the summer,” Kaisa said as someone else might say they needed to go grocery shopping the next day.

“Hopefully they’ll show it on TV. I’m just coming from the Flöjts’ house. Aniliina said I would find you here. While I was over there, I noticed Meritta had painted some pretty impressive pictures of you. How long have you been modeling for her?”

“We started sometime in the winter. I didn’t really pose though. She mostly just came here to the field and painted, even in the sleet.”

Kaisa didn’t seem to consider it anything special that
she
had practiced in the sleet.

“Were you friends?”

“Yes.” Tears welled in Kaisa’s eyes, and she wiped them with the back of her hand. “I ain’t never met anyone who understood me so well. She
got
why I throw and everything else too…Why did she have to go and fall? I hate that Tower! They should tear it down and stomp on the pieces!” Kaisa slammed the ground with her hand. “But I guess I just have to go on like everybody else. That’s what Meritta would have wanted me to do.”

“Did Meritta seem like herself Friday night?”

“No, she didn’t. She was angry about something. When I left, she said that hopefully she’d be in a better mood the next day. She was supposed to paint me the next day, on Saturday.”

Kaisa claimed she didn’t know the cause of Meritta’s anger. We had just moved on to talking about Aniliina when the coach returned and glared at me with a look that said I should make myself scarce. I obliged, heading toward the cafeteria at city hall in hopes they might still have something decent to eat.

Paperwork took up the rest of the day. Luckily when I arrived home, a letter from Antti was waiting in the mailbox. He was an excellent letter writer. Occasionally I wondered whether I had fallen in love with him just because of a letter I read while solving my first murder. In his letters, Antti was both more direct and gentler than he was in person. And he wrote lovely long missives, often a page in the morning, another during the day, a couple in the evening, and then another batch of pages the following day.

Reading the letter, I giggled at Antti’s description of an Episcopal Church bazaar that some university colleague had dragged him to. Then I came to a passage that abruptly smothered my merriment:

I usually don’t even notice jewelry. But at the bazaar I saw this ring made by a local jewelry designer. Suddenly I found myself thinking that an emerald like that would look perfect on your finger. I mean what I’m writing. Let’s get married as soon as I get out of here. Being away from you has made everything so clear. I know that you are the one I want.

Even before he left, Antti had wanted to get engaged, but I dragged my feet. I thought that being apart would help me see what I really wanted. But so far all I had learned was that I could live without Antti and still be happy. Loneliness didn’t bother me. And to me that felt like a good prerequisite for sharing a life with someone: I loved Antti, but I wasn’t dependent on him. Five days out of seven I would have said yes if he proposed. But on the other two days, even the thought of getting married made me shudder.

I spent that whole night trying to get my thoughts down on paper, but I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to say. Finally I fell
asleep frustrated, even though Mikko had tried to cheer me up by dragging an enormous mouse inside the house.

At around one a.m. I woke to the sound of the phone ringing. After answering, I started pulling on my jeans with my free hand.

“Hi. It’s Aniliina. There’s someone here. Upstairs…He had a key.”