Copper Heart (2 page)

Later, on my evening jog, I still had the feeling the Tower was watching me. When I came to Arpikylä, I had decided to start living a more healthy country lifestyle: lots of exercise, lots of sleep, more vegetables, and a maximum of one glass of beer on weekdays. I could already feel the results; my feet felt so
light running that I was half-considering entering the Helsinki City Marathon in August. Koivu had said that the Joensuu Police Department was putting together a team and they might recruit me.

I glanced at my watch and picked up the pace. I had lit the sauna stove as I was leaving the house since I was only planning on running about six kilometers. But I had already run eight, and the trip back to the house was a good ten minutes. The fire had probably gone out by now.

My heart was beating twice as fast as the Simon & Garfunkel song playing through my headphones, but I didn’t bother skipping to the next song. This part of the forest had always been a little unnerving because the pine trees grew so close together. Anything could be hiding in their dark shadows. The sound of a car approaching in the distance only heightened the sense of danger.

A muffler-challenged Nissan sprang over the hill, rattling by me and then braking suddenly. When the driver’s-side door opened, I felt like turning and running in the other direction. The light of the sun setting behind the pine trees reflected off the car door directly into my eyes, preventing me from seeing the driver’s face.

“Maria!”

There was something familiar in that voice. As I ran up to the car, I realized that the man behind the wheel was Johnny. I cursed my muddy tracksuit, sweaty face, and tangled hair. If I was meeting Johnny for the first time in about ten years, I wanted to look better than this.

“That’s my name,” I said, trying to sound casual even though the hand I extended was shaking.

“I heard from your mom that you were coming here to work. I’ve been meaning to come by and say hello sometime.”

For a moment I said nothing and just stared. Johnny was still drop-dead gorgeous, just like he was when I was fifteen. Actually, he looked better now. He still had the muscular body of an Adonis, and his almost-too-perfect boyish face had developed sexy furrows over the years.

“Yeah, I’m acting sheriff for the summer. I’m living at my uncle Pena’s farmhouse. And so what are you up to?” I asked, as if I didn’t know. “Did you end up coaching?”

“More or less. I was running classes at the city rec center out in Tuusniemi for a couple of years, but then I got a job here. Me and Tuija got married about ten years ago and have two kids, but we’ve been separated for about six months now.” Johnny smiled faintly.

“Do you have a place here?” I tried to sound nonchalant and brushed some of the red locks that had escaped my ponytail out of my eyes.

“We have a house on the west side of town, but I moved out in the spring. For the summer I’ve just sort of been bouncing around, but mostly I’ve been at my parents’ place. My job has an apartment lined up for me, but it isn’t available until August. It’s a permanent position with the city, and they’re going to pay my rent. Tuija’s had a dentist office here for about five years. You know she went to dental school, right?”

I nodded. Having Johnny open up with so much so fast, as though only a couple of weeks had passed since we last saw each other, made me feel stupid. Maybe seeing me wasn’t a big deal for him.

“Can I give you a lift? I’m going to pick up the kids from Tuija’s parents’ cabin, and your uncle’s place is on the way.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I think I’m going to finish my run. But next time you’re in the area, stop by. You know the way. It’d be nice to catch up.”

Johnny promised he would, although I wasn’t sure I believed him. A few seconds after I started running, the Nissan rattled by me again. My heart pounded much harder than my pace justified as I cantered after the cloud of dust, my knees so weak I could barely run.

Over the years I had thought more times than I care to admit about what would happen if I saw Johnny again. Whatever I had imagined, it wasn’t this sort of blushing teenage girl nonsense. I must have looked idiotic. Johnny had shown up in my dreams not two nights before, for hell’s sake. For the past five years, I’d dreamed about him at least once a month. In the latest dream, we had run into each other in the sports department at Stockmann in Helsinki. I had been looking at soccer balls when Johnny suddenly grabbed my arms and started kissing me.

“Humiliated” was the only word for how I felt upon waking from one of those dreams. Fifteen years had passed since all of that, so why wouldn’t my memories of Johnny leave me in peace?

In the final kilometer, I put the hammer down like Lasse Virén chasing the pack at the end of the ten thousand meter at the Munich Olympics. When I got home, a weak fire was still burning in the sauna stove, and when I blew on the embers, they flared up enthusiastically. A couple of logs into the firebox, and the flames were crackling again. In the yard I did some crunches, push-ups, and a few pull-ups on the rug-beating pole, then stretched and grabbed my one permitted cold beer from the cellar.

Johnny had been my first love. He played soccer and guitar, and for a while he had coached the junior soccer team I played on before my breasts grew so big I started standing out too much from the boys. At that point, I gave up soccer to play bass in an otherwise all-boy rock band. Our band, Rat Poison, practiced
in the same basement as Johnny’s band, the Snow Tigers. We played punk, and the Tigers played softer, folk-infused rock, but sometimes we jammed together on a Beatles song or some other classic that everybody liked. And, of course, our blowouts after practice were legendary.

I threw more water on the rocks, and the steam hissed pleasantly. It had probably been ten years since I’d last seen Johnny. His real name was Jarmo, but everyone had called him Johnny as long as I could remember. I always thought of him as Johnny, and whenever I heard someone talking about Jarmo Miettinen, it always took me a second to understand they meant Johnny.

I grabbed my beer and went outside to cool off. Mikko, my uncle Pena’s beautiful gray tabby, was crouched on the roof of the sauna stalking birds. Compared to our cat, Einstein, who was enormous, Mikko looked dainty. Hopefully Einstein was getting along at Antti’s parents’ place in Inkoo. I tried to shake the melancholy that suddenly crept over me. I missed Antti; there was no point pretending I didn’t.

Antti still had three months left in Chicago. Just before Christmas, he had defended his dissertation in mathematical category theory. My mind went back to his focused expression during his defense, and his long, graceful fingers reaching up to pull back his shoulder-length hair. Antti didn’t have much in common with my stereotypical image of a talented mathematician—instead of coke-bottle glasses and thick rubber-soled shoes, he had a striking aquiline profile and almost always wore black jeans. I wondered how his style of dress was going over at an American university.

Mikko meowed at the dressing room door. He was the only cat I knew who liked being in the sauna. I let him in, and he
climbed up to his usual place on the middle bench, curled his tail into a neat coil and began to purr. Did he miss Uncle Pena?

While in Chicago, I received news that half of Uncle Pena’s body had been paralyzed by a brain hemorrhage and that he was lying in a hospital bed unable to speak. His heart had been acting up for years. But this time it looked as though he might never leave the hospital. That was when I came up with the solution to both our housing problems: I could look after Uncle Pena’s farm and do some good old-fashioned physical labor alongside my sheriffing. And out in the country, I would have more space to contemplate the fundamental questions of my life—such as Antti’s repeated marriage proposals, and why I couldn’t answer with anything but “not yet.”

I found it bewildering that Antti wanted to marry me. We had been dating for more than a year and a half and we had been living together for six months—I thought mostly out of necessity—and for the past four months we had had the entire Atlantic between us. But I was finding life in Arpikylä much easier than life alone in Antti’s apartment in Helsinki, where everything from the dishes to the sheets constantly reminded me of him.

I threw more water on the rocks, and the hissing as it boiled off made the cat scoot down to the bottom bench. Antti took life so damn seriously. I guess that’s why he wanted to get married. And have kids. I knew I loved him and I guess I wanted children someday too. I was thirty years old already; the clock was ticking. Hiding out here in the backwoods wasn’t going to change any of that. But I didn’t want my age or any damn clock to force me into anything I wasn’t ready for.

I threw one last ladleful of water onto the rocks and continued to ruminate. Now Johnny had appeared in my life out of nowhere.
Johnny and Tuija were getting divorced. I didn’t want to think about that either.

After scrubbing myself clean and dumping a bucket of well water over my head to rinse off, I went to the cellar for some of my uncle’s suspiciously strong home-brewed mead and then flopped down on the couch to watch a cop show about land speculators bumping each other off in Northern California.

The following day I had lunch with Ella in the city cafeteria midway between our places of work. We ate together a couple of times a week.

Ella was gushing about the upcoming opening gala for the recently renovated Old Mine complex.

“Have you received an invitation?” she asked in concern. Good old Ella. Ella had always been there—we had lived next door to each other when we were kids and had been in the same classes all through school except for one year in junior high. However, we didn’t become good friends until high school. Neither of us really fit the mold of small-town girls. One boy in our class, who didn’t even like me, once said that there were only “two chicks in the class who aren’t chickens too, Ella and Maria.” I was still pretty flattered by that.

Ella was a different kind of tomboy than me though. She was significantly taller, with broader shoulders and smaller breasts, and she almost always dressed in brightly colored pantsuits. She kept her dark hair cut short and slicked down flat. She had traded her large glasses for contact lenses, which made her brown eyes shine softly in her round, rosy-cheeked face. Ella was practical and sensible without being motherly. She was artistically talented but not one bit bohemian. She was basically born to be the cultural affairs administrator for a small town, and had been working as such for a couple of years now after having realized
she needed to get active in Social Democrat politics to secure the job. Ella’s husband, Matti Virtanen, was a painter.

“Yes, I have. Kivinen’s secretary invited me when she came to get the permit for the fireworks. Is Kivinen really the godsend for the city he seems to be? Where is he getting the money for the lease on the Old Mine anyway?”

“Don’t you read the papers? Mostly it’s money from a couple of good business deals he made with his wife’s inheritance. He’s from here, and I guess he feels some freakish affection for the place.”

I had read a few articles about Seppo Kivinen—the main shareholder and CEO of Old Mine Ltd—and my father had told me a little about him too. When Arpikylä Travel, which was owned half by the city and half by a local entrepreneur, was headed for bankruptcy, Seppo Kivinen appeared out of nowhere with an MBA and big plans. He had a detailed analysis of how to make the Old Mine profitable again. After a complete renovation, they would have an amazing network of adventure caves, a renovated Tower, an improved and expanded mining museum, a first-class restaurant, a gold-panning sluice, an alpine slide on the hill, and who knew what else.

“Aren’t adventure parks like the one he’s planning kind of old news? They used to be all over the place, but it seems like most of them went under.”

Ella took such a pull on her glass of buttermilk that a white mustache appeared on her upper lip.

“Kivinen has plenty of ideas—you have to hand him that. On top of all the mine-themed attractions, he plans to convert one of the big ore-processing halls into a javelin practice space for Kaisa Miettinen. And Matti and Meritta are holding a mining-themed art camp in August that’s already booked solid.”

“But it all takes so damn much money! Is the city backing all the loans or something?”

“There has been a lot of controversy over that. But Kivinen is employing nearly a hundred people, which means a lot in a town where the unemployment rate is almost thirty percent.”

Of course I understood that, and I knew that was precisely the pretext Kivinen had used to wheedle subsidies from every source imaginable. There was the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and the Regional Development Fund. Apparently Kivinen had been pals with an influential government minister. Although nowadays he didn’t mention the connection as often—the politician in question was doing time for insider trading.

I decided to change the subject. “By the way, guess who I ran into yesterday? Johnny Miettinen.”

Ella smiled at me pityingly. Although I had gotten over my worst Johnny delirium back in high school, since then I might have forced Ella to listen to me whimper about him a few times when we were drunk.

“Does he still give you the chills?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“He is a looker,” Ella said, laughing. “Even out here in the boonies we deserve a little eye candy every now and then. Goodness knows there isn’t much of it.”

I shoved the last forkful of mashed potatoes into my mouth and glanced at my watch. Lunches with Ella tended to stretch longer than expected, and this one was no exception.

“I have a date with the president of a hunting club in fifteen minutes,” I said, standing up. “Apparently they had some poachers last fall. Fingers crossed that I don’t make a complete fool of myself. Before he shows up, I should probably speed-read the hunting act that parliament just overhauled.”

Sheriff Jussi had painted a rosy picture of his work: hardly any crime—mostly little break-ins and drunks on mopeds—and some light administrative work, issuing licenses and the like. Maybe the job was easy for someone who had been living here the past ten years. But I didn’t really know the marching orders around city hall or who any of the local muckety-mucks were anymore. So I had to work twice as hard. In Finland, the offices of small-town sheriffs are a sort of local government dumping ground for all sorts of legal administration from simple debt recovery and permit issuing on up to leading the police department and acting as public prosecutor.