Her Enemy (15 page)

“One fifteen, maybe one thirty. I don’t remember exactly. The boys weren’t ready yet, so we had to wait for the two o’clock bus.”

The walk home from Armi’s house would have taken Kimmo only fifteen or twenty minutes. Why the hell had every person I talked to spent Saturday running around downtown Tapiola? The only people home in town seemed to be Antti and me, home nursing our hangovers.

“What do you and Henttonen intend to do to get Kimmo out?” Annamari demanded.

“Well, my intention is to gather evidence showing that someone else murdered Armi. Now, I know you may not want to talk about this, Annamari, but I’ve heard rumors that Armi suspected Sanna’s suicide was really a homicide.”

I knew this wasn’t going to be a pleasant subject, but I hadn’t expected quite as strong a reaction as I now received. Turning bright red, Annamari’s breathing sped up and she began to shake uncontrollably.

“Murdered!” Annamari’s voice was piercing. “No one murdered Sanna! It was an accident! Sanna was just celebrating…too much. She drank, she must have been tired, she fell in the water. That’s all. A horrible accident! I don’t care what people say. Why would Sanna have committed suicide? And why would you think anyone killed her?” With trembling hands, Annamari poured herself more cognac.

I wondered whether she could have become this worked up in a conversation with Armi and rapped those skittish hands around the neck of her future daughter-in-law. Would a mother murder his son’s fiancée and let him take the blame, though? My notions of motherhood were still idealistic, even though none of the mothers I knew seemed to live up to them.

“Did Sanna leave anything personal behind? Letters, diaries, notebooks?” I thought the best way I could get a handle on Sanna’s death was by getting into her thoughts. Maybe I would learn she was planning to commit suicide and could put the idea of a second murder to rest.

“Sanna filled dozens of diaries,” Annamari said proudly. “But Henrik and Kimmo burned them all after she died. They claimed she would have wanted it that way. And we think her
last one went into the sea with her. I do still have some of her old schoolwork and papers in a closet upstairs. Would you like to come look at them?”

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Annamari led me into a walk-in closet filled with miscellaneous stuff. A couple of shoeboxes of Sanna’s papers stood stacked in one corner. As I carefully leafed through the topmost box, a photograph fell out of a stack of what looked like lecture notes. A very innocent-looking Sanna kissing an ugly man with a black beard.

“Who is this man?” I asked Annamari.

She wrung her hands as if not wanting to answer. “That’s that horrible Otso Hakala. Thank God he went to jail for selling drugs.”

“Was Sanna dating him?”

“No! She didn’t even like him. He just controlled her using all those drugs.”

“Could I take these with me? I might be able to find something new in them.”

“How is dredging up the past going to get Kimmo out of jail?” Annamari asked dubiously. I didn’t have an answer, but Annamari relented anyway.

While Annamari went downstairs to get me a bag to pack all of Sanna’s things into, I pocketed the photograph. After banging around on the main floor for a while, Annamari yelled up that she was going out to the shed. Suddenly I had a vivid memory of Sanna. It was a night about this same time of year—late May or early June, a couple of days before school was set to end and Sanna would graduate. After band practice, the boys and I went to the only park in town to drink. Then other people started showing up, including Sanna. One year had been plenty of time for her to gain a terrible reputation in our small town.
Most people couldn’t understand how a loser like her could get six perfect scores on her college entrance exams. Having only admired her from afar, I didn’t really know Sanna, but I envied the intense color of her brown eyes and the diffident beauty of her manner.

At some point, Sanna and I were the only girls left. That always happened, since most small-town girls felt they had to keep up appearances and go home to sleep like good little dollies. Sanna sat on a rock rolling a cigarette. That was a sign of degeneracy as well, since a girl who smoked should at least buy packs of proper “light” cigarettes.

Even though I didn’t smoke, I asked Sanna for one. In retrospect, I realize this was an attempt to get closer to her. Even at that age, I longed for other women to relate to.

Sanna rolled me a cigarette, licked the glue surface with her kitten-pink tongue, lit the result in her mouth, and handed it to me. Then followed my miserable attempt to act like I did this every day while simultaneously trying not to vomit. The evening was hot, but Sanna was wearing tight black jeans and a worn brown leather jacket. She held her beer bottle close, with both hands wrapped around it. I tried to think of some great conversation starter, but my mind felt completely blank. Then the boys started raising a racket about going to some bar, and Sanna left with them.

At Sanna’s graduation, we had all stared at her scars. I remember how she stared back at us, at once defiant and ashamed, how I tried to smile in reply to the challenge of her drunken eyes, how she offered me a drink from her bottle as if in thanks.

Then Sanna moved, disappearing into Helsinki. We bumped into each other a couple of times in the city and said hi. Two girls from the sticks. She stayed the same, just as thin and girlish. Only
the skin of her face paled, like a death mask. I didn’t dare tell Sanna I went to the police academy; I just said I worked various jobs before getting into law school.

I would see her at the university behind a glass of beer back when you could still get that in the café, and sometimes she would be in the courtyard of the Porthania Building smoking with that same old brown leather jacket slung over her shoulder. She said she was doing her thesis on the metaphorical language of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Did she ever complete that thesis?

Annamari returned with a large Stockmann shopping bag, pulling me back into the present moment.

“Could I maybe come get the papers later? I’ll bring a backpack so carrying them is easier,” I suggested. I didn’t want to leave the papers at the Hänninens’ for a single moment longer than I had to, but transporting them now would be a pain.

“Henrik is calling again tomorrow. What will I say to him?” Annamari asked, wringing her hands like the heroine in a gothic novel.

“Tell him the truth.” I remembered Henrik Hänninen’s strangely diabolical dark eyebrows.

“I can’t stand to listen to his shouting. Isn’t there any hope of Kimmo’s release?”

“There is always hope” was my banal attempt at comfort. Annamari’s company was depressing, and when I opened the front door to leave and smelled the climbing roses, I felt as though I were escaping from somewhere suffocating.

Once on my bike, I pointed my wheels toward the breakwater, wanting to see the place where Sanna died. On that dark March night, the breakwater would have been a lonely place, strangely far from the homey lights glimmering on the shore. How did Sanna feel when she fell into the water? I thought
about the frigid grip of the sea at only one or two degrees above freezing as I rode far too fast along the narrow strip of gravel leading out to the breakwater. Suddenly my front wheel slammed into a rock. I turned the handlebars violently—and then it happened.

The handlebars separated from the frame of the bicycle. I madly squeezed the brake levers to no avail. The world turned upside down, the water and sky trading places, and suddenly I was in the water, under the water, scraping the gravelly seafloor and drawing my lungs full of something cold and salty, fighting hopelessly toward the surface.

Fortunately, the water was less than a meter deep so near the shore. Fortunately, I had injured only one wrist and my left knee.

“Damn it!” Sitting in the seawater, I watched my handlebars floating a little farther off. They
had
felt a little strange on the way to the Hänninens’.

Slowly, how damn cold the water was and how badly my knee hurt sank in. I fished the handlebars out of the water. My poor bicycle was a couple of meters farther on down the shore, so I waded over to it and carried it over my shoulder back to land. The brake lines had snapped with the force of the collision, so the bike was nearly useless, and I was wet through.

With more cursing, I rammed the handlebars back into place, tightened the bolt as well as I could by hand, and started riding carefully back around the bay. I couldn’t figure out how the handlebars had managed to come loose. I had just done my spring tune-up and checked all of the components, especially the brakes. I felt lucky, though; even though I ended up in the water, the handlebars could have come off in a much worse place. For example, I could have been riding at my usual clip around a
steep curve—there were two on my way to work—turned the handlebars quickly, and…

Was this the work of some idiot passerby? Vandals had knocked my bike around before. They had the air let out of my tires more than once, and once someone had even slashed them. Painted bright green, my old men’s bike had its own personality—in the whole world there wasn’t another one like it, and I had no intention of giving it up. Perhaps my easily recognizable bicycle irritated someone. Or—did I irritate someone?

I like to think my teeth were chattering only from the cold when I finally dumped my bike at our front door. I walked in, tearing my clothes off and dropping them in a wet heap on the dressing room floor, followed by ten minutes under a burning hot shower.

When I finally stepped into the living room wrapped in a thick bathrobe, Antti looked at me in concern.

“What on earth happened to you?”

“I fell into the bay on my bike. Do you want some tea?” I tried to sound calm, even though I was afraid. Despite our earlier fight, being with Antti felt wonderful.

“How did you end up in the bay? Where?”

“My handlebars came off just as I was on the path out to the breakwater.”

“They came off? But we just did a tune-up on both bikes less than a month ago.”

“I’m thinking someone wanted to play a nice little practical joke on me.” The forced nonchalance in my tone did not fool Antti.

“That must have been scary.”

I let Antti take me in his arms.

“Your nose is still freezing. Put on some wool socks so you don’t catch cold. I’ll get the vitamin C.”

Antti’s concern brought tears to my eyes. The day had been far too long, and I was afraid. Who had sabotaged my bike? Antti stroked my hair, and Einstein rubbed his head sympathetically against my shins. Even though there might be a murderer on the loose, I still had my tall, dark, and handsome man, and a big, ferocious cat to come home to.

I was sitting on the breakwater looking out to sea. Suddenly slimy, algae-covered hands stretched out of the water and began pulling me into the depths. Under the water, I saw Sanna’s green face. Her hair swirled around her, moving with the water current, and her body was covered in scales, all the way down to a mermaid tail. Sanna had come to take me away.

I woke up to Einstein, agitated by my kicking, jumping off the foot of the bed and knocking over the radio sitting on the floor. The clock said five o’clock in the morning, and the birds were already making a racket outside. Pulling my pillow over my ears, I curled up closer to Antti and fell back into a fitful sleep for another two hours.

After our morning coffee, we gave my bicycle a thorough going-over. There was nothing wrong with it—the handlebars just should not have come loose like that. Now Antti seemed perplexed by the incident as well.

“Maybe that hideous green paint is getting on someone’s nerves. Although I have a hard time imagining someone just walking around with an Allen wrench loosening handlebars. Do you have any secret enemies?” Antti asked, only half kidding.

I was starting to get unnerved again. Who would have wanted to hurt me? I remembered Annamari going outside while I was in the house. But would she even have known how to sabotage my bike?

Then I went through all the places where I had left my bike in the last few days, still ending up none the wiser.

“Are you sure this bike accident has something to do with Armi’s death?” Antti asked, as I was standing in the yard ready to leave for work. I didn’t know how to answer, and pedaled away.

With fog rolling in off the water, the day was cooler than the previous few had been, and most of the dog walkers I normally saw seemed to have decided to stay home instead of taking their usual loop around the bay. I found myself riding slower than usual because my knee still hurt a little. Hopefully I would be able to go for a run later. That would help calm me down.

After lunch, I went to see Kimmo and nearly blew my top when I heard that Ström had questioned him for at least two hours already that morning without any legal representation. If Ström had still been at the station, I would have given him an earful. Instead, I suggested to Kimmo that we file a complaint and refuse any further interviews, but he just shook his head in resignation.