Snow Woman (13 page)

“What’s that?” he breathed.

From the forest to the left came a thumping and breaking of branches. Someone was coming through the woods—fast. Immediately I envisioned Madman Malmberg charging through the trees like Rambo carrying an assault rifle with a knife between his teeth and the glint of murder in his pale, babylike eyes. Palo pulled his revolver. Seeing the panic in his face, I realized just how afraid of Malmberg he was.

After my own initial panic subsided, I recognized the sound coming through the trees. Even though I wasn’t frightened anymore, I also didn’t have any interest in mixing it up with an angry moose. Based on the noise, there were two of them. Hopefully they’d be too afraid of us to come any closer.

“Put your gun away. Hunting season is over,” I said, trying for a lighthearted tone. Moose didn’t frighten me, and the pounding of their hooves was already fading in the darkness. But what did frighten me was the panic in Palo’s eyes and how fast he had grabbed his gun. The chance for a miscalculation was huge. I’d heard stories about cops in similar states of mind—and of the accidents that uncontrolled fear could lead to. Fear was beginning to creep into me, but I wasn’t afraid of Madman Malmberg. I was afraid of Palo. And
for
him.

“They were moose,” I said again when he kept aiming his weapon. “Holster your gun and let’s keep going. The body was found right up here. We’ll take a look and then get out of this forest.”

The darkness concealed Palo’s face, but his posture conveyed some degree of embarrassment as he inserted his pistol in his hip holster and turned back up the hill along the ski track.

The crime scene was the same as before: almost out of sight of the ski track at the top of a small rise was a large fir tree with weeping branches, the kind of tree we pretended was a cave when we were kids.

This case still made no sense.

“But Rosberg was a doctor,” Palo said as I contemplated the crime scene. “She should have known about the drug interaction.”

“Actually Elina wasn’t a doctor. She was a psychologist who studied some psychiatry. She didn’t have an MD or prescription privileges.”

I remembered the pathologist saying the danger of interactions between erythromycin and sleeping pills like Dormicum and Halcion had been discovered only recently. Although the instructions for erythromycin now contained appropriate warnings, how often do people actually read the label on a medication?

I tried to remember how Dormicum tasted. Did it taste like anything? Now I wouldn’t even be able to test that because acetaminophen was about the only drug allowed during pregnancy. But could you drink a large amount of Dormicum mixed into something like whiskey, which I’d heard Elina enjoyed, without detecting the taste?

“OK, theory number two. Someone wanted Elina to sleep and served her whiskey laced with Dormicum without knowing about Elina’s antibiotics,” I said. “Elina ended up delirious and basically went sleepwalking. Whoever gave her the whiskey didn’t mean to kill her but is afraid to tell us because she thinks we’ll charge her with murder.”

“Could be.” Palo was watching me intently the whole time, but I could tell he was also listening to the forest. He kept scanning for movement in the trees and jumping at any strange sound. I continued thinking out loud, trying not to feel the cold, which sneaked into every opening of my coat and through the worn rubber of my boots.

“I have two candidates for that theory: Milla Marttila and Aira Rosberg. Milla could have given Elina the laced whiskey so she wouldn’t hear her sneaking out that night. And Aira admitted she took a sleeping pill so Elina’s coughing wouldn’t keep her up. Maybe Aira took a big swig and then gave the rest to Elina so they could both sleep.”

“But Marttila left earlier in the evening,” Palo pointed out.

“Yeah. Maybe she took the medicine earlier. Then again, Dormicum is pretty fast acting.” I shook my head. “I don’t know. This is pointless. Let’s go!”

We slogged back the same way we came. The moon was nearly full and was now peeking out from behind a cloud. The forest was still very dark. On Boxing Day it would have been barely half full, so it wouldn’t have been a particularly good light source. We hadn’t found a flashlight on Elina, but of course someone could have taken it. I would have to ask Aira whether any flashlights were missing.

More lights were shining in the house by now, as if Aira had lit the lamps to guide us back. Enclosed within its walls, the house looked inviting and warm, a refuge where neither frost nor Madman Malmberg could threaten us. But that was only an illusion. Evil had slipped through the walls of Rosberga Manor and had somehow lured Elina into the forest to die.

“Flashlights? I hadn’t thought of that,” Aira said as we sat in the kitchen holding cups of tea. Palo stared dubiously at his. Maybe my theory about Aira and the whiskey had put him on guard. I let the warmth soak from the ceramic cup into my hands, occasionally pressing my numb cheek against it too.

“We have several flashlights so course participants can go out for walks. I don’t know exactly how many, but I could collect them all and see if any seem to be missing.”

“You said you took a sleeping pill that night. Did you wash it down with whiskey?” I asked.

“Whiskey?” Aira sounded dismayed. “I don’t really drink alcohol. Sometimes a glass of wine or a drop of cognac, but I’ve only tasted whiskey once.”

“Did Elina drink whiskey?” I asked.

“She did like whiskey, but she was particular about her brands. Only Scottish whiskeys and preferably malt. Sometimes I’d buy her a bottle of Laphroaig.”

“Did she have any tucked away at the time?”

“Certainly. I bought her a bottle for Christmas. Just a moment.” Aira rose and opened an upper cabinet. Inside were a few bottles of wine, a half-drunk Meukow, and an almost-full Laphroaig. I could almost taste its deep, smoky flavor on my tongue, but guilt immediately followed the illusion of pleasure. Delicacies like that would be off-limits until August—or longer if I intended to nurse.

“Who’ll drink the rest of this now?” Aira said to herself. “Elina had a glass with Tarja Kivimäki on Christmas Eve. Maybe she’d like it.”

Aira put the bottle back in the cupboard and sat down again. “I’ve been writing letters and making telephone calls all day canceling the spring courses. No one could ever replace Elina. I don’t know what’ll happen to Rosberga.”

“Unless Elina stated otherwise in her will, then I assume you’ll inherit all of this,” I said more pointedly than I really intended.

“Yes,” said Aira. She seemed unperturbed by my statement. “It would feel strange to move away. Other than a few years, I’ve lived here my whole life. After nursing school I worked at Meilahti Hospital for a while, but then my father got sick, and then my mother. I cared for them, and then Elina’s mother, who suffered from leukemia for years. My brother, Elina’s father I mean, never would have survived alone. When he died ten years ago, Elina and I sold most of the farmland. I worked for a few years before retiring—Elina found me a position at a private rest home in north Espoo so I could easily commute from here. I was born in this house and would prefer to die here too. But—”

The banging of the front door interrupted Aira’s musings. Footsteps sounded, and at first I didn’t recognize the woman who walked into the room. Johanna Säntti was wearing jeans, and her hair was down. From a distance, she looked like a schoolgirl. But the eyes that looked into my own in greeting were still the eyes of an old woman, surrounded by a web of wrinkles.

“Johanna is leaving tomorrow to visit her children,” Aira said.

“It’s good I bumped into you,” I said. “Will you be staying there long?”

“I doubt it. The closest hotel is in Oulu, and I’ll have to take the bus back and forth to Karhumaa.” There was something new in Johanna’s voice, something that sounded like indignation.

“Couldn’t you stay at home?” I asked.

“Leevi will likely refuse to allow it, especially when I tell him I filed for divorce. My parents don’t want to see me either. My little sister, Maija-Leena, is living in my house watching the children. Maybe Leevi will marry her now.” It was impossible to mistake the tone in her voice; the anger and sarcasm were palpable. Johanna Säntti was no shrinking violet. Why had I ever thought so? Transgressing against everything she had ever learned by seeking an abortion must have required immense courage.

“I met with the lawyer you recommended today, Maria. She convinced me there isn’t any way Leevi can keep me from my children. Some of them might decide not to see me, but at least I’ll see Anna and the little ones.” Johanna’s defiant voice trembled a bit, and I realized that she wasn’t quite as brave as she appeared. I imagined what it would be like to know your entire village was doing its best to turn your children against you, but I couldn’t.

“Do you mind telling me a little about your life, Johanna?” I asked. “I’m curious, not so much as a police officer but as a woman. I’ve never met someone with nine children before.”

A sigh came from Palo’s direction. Apparently the patience that had enabled him to stretch out his workday had just come to an end. Fortunately Johanna ignored him.

“What’s there to tell? Praying and making babies. I don’t really know how to talk about it. Elina told me to write an autobiography. She said it would help me understand my life better. And I did.”

“Could I read it?” I asked.

“Why would you want to?” Johanna looked straight at me. A lock of hair fell over her face as she did so, and she brushed it away clumsily, like a woman who had spent her life wearing her hair up. “If I give you what I wrote, will you tell me about your life? You’re the first female police officer I’ve met.”

I had a strong feeling that Johanna was laughing at me, but the expression in her eyes was almost childlike in its innocence.

“It’s a deal,” I replied.

When Johanna went to get her manuscript, I said to Aira, “She’s obviously better.”

“Only because she keeps telling herself that her husband killed Elina,” Aira answered dryly. “If he’s guilty, she thinks she’ll get the children for herself.”

Johanna returned and handed me a stack of neatly printed pages.

“Milla taught me to use the computer,” she said enthusiastically. “You can keep it. I can print a new version anytime.”

I wondered at the echo of triumph in her voice. Maybe Aira was right. Maybe Johanna’s new confidence really was a result of self-deception. I thought of Leevi Säntti, whom I had never met but implicitly detested. Now
there
was a culprit I could accept.

As we left, I wished Johanna a good trip. At the same time I considered whether she could have murdered Elina in hopes of framing Leevi for the crime. It sounded fanciful, but since nothing about Elina’s death made sense, why not? There was something ritualistic about a woman frozen in the forest, something both insane and sacrificial. Maybe Elina had been the offering that Johanna believed her God required for recovering her children.

Or maybe I had read too many bad psychological thrillers.

Palo resumed his hysterical glancing around as soon as we drove through the gates.

“You’re wound up pretty tight,” I finally said. “You should take a little time off and get away somewhere so you don’t have to worry about Malmberg.”

“How am I supposed to get time off?” Palo asked irritably.

“Go to a docto
r . . .
or a shrink. Getting a death threat like this is stressful. Anyone can see that.”

I glanced at Palo, and from his expression I could tell the idea didn’t sit well with him. And I understood. The Finnish police force still followed the old code: officers weren’t allowed to experience emotions beyond anger, irritation, jealousy, sexual desire, and the occasional surge of joy when a family had a baby boy or Finland won the Ice Hockey World Championships. Fear wasn’t on the spectrum. Everyone was afraid sometimes, but you didn’t dare show it.

I was used to hiding my own fears even better than the men because everyone assumed I’d be the first to feel afraid. Maybe I had succeeded too well at concealing my fears, even from myself. Maybe that was the reason I wasn’t particularly concerned about Malmberg.

“If I went on vacation, I’d just think about it more,” Palo said. “At work I’m safer. Where else would I always have a cop with me? Although maybe you and I shouldn’t be together, since he wants both of us.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, just as a call came in over the radio. Ström was on the line. He’d found two eyewitnesses for the garbage dump murder. According to their statements, a stout blond man in his thirties had killed Lindström. When presented with photographs, they identified Madman Markku Malmberg.

“Bastard killed his own father!” Palo moaned in horror.

“Have there been any other sightings?” I yelled into the radio.

“No, none. He has enough contacts to hide as long as he wants if he has the sense to keep his head down. Just remember Larha,” Ström said, referring to another fugitive case two years earlier in which the killer Ilpo Larha had managed to evade capture for three weeks before dying in a bloody standoff with police. I was sure the malice in Ström’s voice was intentional. I was furious. Anyone else in the department would have tried to reassure us. Anyone else would have said they were checking with Malmberg’s contacts and would have him in custody in a couple of days.

But not Ström. Ström knew full well what a serious miscalculation we’d made in assuming Malmberg was going after his father’s murderer. Instead, he had killed his father himself. I didn’t know how many other enemies Malmberg had, but I was sure of the two names at the top of his hit list now.

Palo and Kallio.

That was when I started to be afraid.

8

As I drove home, I knew I had to tell Antti about Madman Malmberg. He would wonder why I was carrying a weapon anyway.

“How dangerous is he?” Antti asked after sitting quietly for a few seconds staring out the window across the dark fields.

“Dangerous enough,” I admitted. “But he’s also an escaped convict with a new murder charge dogging him. He’ll probably stay out of sight instead of hunting Palo and me.”

“Couldn’t you get a security detail or something?”

“We don’t have the resources for that. And his threat was made six months ago. Malmberg might have forgotten about the whole thing by now,” I said. I was trying to convince both of us.

“This feels lousy coming right when I’m suddenly worrying about two people’s safety.” Antti tried to smile. “Speaking of which, when are we telling our parents and friends the good news?”

“Let’s wait a few more weeks. Early pregnancy is always risky. Most miscarriages happen before the twelfth week.”

“I bought some old issues of
Two Plus One
at the library book sale. They should tell us how to care for a baby.”

“Antti!” In bewilderment I stared at the stack of magazines. A beautiful mother with an even more beautiful baby graced each brightly colored cover in blissful symbiosis. “Do I have to read those?”

Antti’s expression was a mixture of satisfaction and embarrassment. “I’ve been so stressed trying to get these papers submitted and about the whole beltway construction thing, you’ve got to let me be happy about this,” he said a little apologetically.

“Of course you can be happy.”

I sat in Antti’s lap and buried my face in his black sweater. The heat of his body was so arousing that I started kissing his neck below the ear, his jaw, his lips, and soon Antti was pulling my shirt up and off. Ignoring Einstein’s disapproving looks from the bookshelf, we made love on the living room rug.

Sex left me feeling awake and refreshed, so I picked up Johanna’s autobiography and settled on the bed to read. Occasionally Antti interrupted me with a ludicrous quote from
Two Plus One
, but after I shushed him a couple of times, he realized I must be reading something important.

I had always liked autobiographies. Voyeurism must be part of that, my innate desire to invade other people’s lives. To me, the most interesting life stories were about perfectly ordinary people. A spate of these had been published in recent years, and now I tried reading Johanna’s account as I would any of them—just a description of the life of an unknown thirty-three-year-old Ostrobothnian woman, but it didn’t really work. The neatly printed pages with their understated lines told me far too much.

I was born thirty-three years ago in the village of Karhumaa in Yli-Ii County, a little north of Oulu, Finland. At that time the village had an elementary school, a church, two stores, two banks, a health center, and the Farmers’ Society Hall, which was also used as a prayer room. The county seat, Yli-Ii, was twelve or thirteen miles away, so people didn’t leave the village much. My parents were farmers, as were their parents before them. I had three older brothers and after me came one more brother and then my little sister, who is ten years younger than me. Six children actually wasn’t very many in our village. Many families had ten children or more, because at least ninety percent of the people in the village are Conservative Laestadians. Our religion forbids contraception and abortion. A large number of children is considered a blessing from God.

Despite the strict religion, I remember my childhood being happy. There were lots of children in the village to play with, and I learned to bake and do farm chores. Because I was the oldest girl in the family, the role of mother’s helper naturally fell to me. By five years old I could milk a cow, and by seven I was cooking right alongside my mother. I was ten when my little sister was born, and I remember being the proudest child in the world because Father didn’t think we needed anyone to take over the housekeeping while Mother was recovering because I could handle everything.

I have good memories of elementary school too. Because I could already read when I was five, they put me in school a year earlier than usual. Our teachers were strict and sometimes heavy handed, but as I was a good, obedient student, they never had any reason to scold. I did have one problem though: my hair. My curls were so tight my hair would never stay in nice, clean braids. I received constant reminders about my curls falling out of my braids, but cutting my hair was out of the question too. Early on I realized there was something worldly and evil about curly hair, but I can also remember letting my hair down sometimes when I was alone and enjoying its weight on my shoulders and the way it tickled my face.

I got onto the academic high school track mainly because the new school system was coming the next year, which would have meant my next required grade was moving to the middle school in Yli-Ii anyway. I remember getting the best scores in my class on our entrance exams, an achievement I was secretly proud of. I awaited middle school with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread. On the one hand, I was thirsty for more learning and excited about new subjects and teachers, but on the other hand I was afraid of having to interact with sinners at my new school. The summer before middle school was full of warnings from family and community members. When I first started school, my oldest brother was already in tenth grade, my second brother, Simo, was repeating the eighth, and my third brother was in seventh grade. Simo being held back was a source of shame for the entire family. I can still remember my father’s face when he heard about it and the beating Simo got.

I imagine my brothers were told to make sure I behaved myself in school. Actually, we all watched out for each other. That was always a part of life in our village. The bus took us to school at five to eight and left for home at three fifteen. We didn’t have much time left to sin. In the early years, most of my teachers were in the faith too, so things like watching television in school or dancing weren’t a problem yet.

But the school had a library kept by one of the Finnish language teachers—not my Finnish teacher, who was very religious, but another one who was about thirty years old and must have been selected for his position by mistake. Either that or he was the son of the headmaster’s best friend, but he had certainly abandoned the faith of his fathers. The library had plenty of religious children’s and young adult books, but it also had nonfiction and classics, and now and then Mr. Yli-Autio would bring in modern books too. Only the students who weren’t in the faith had the courage to check out those books.

I remember my last year in middle school—my seventh year in school altogether—especially well. On Wednesdays school ended at two o’clock, but the library stayed open until our bus left. I would spend that blissful hour from two to three sitting and reading forbidden books. Mr. Yli-Autio had noticed my love of reading and gently led me away from the Anni Swans and Lucy M. Montgomerys, which I remember being off-limits too even though the characters were always going to church, to the modern young adult novels. Those had lots of things I couldn’t understand, like people who kissed each other without being married, and girls who had babies even though they were single. I didn’t understand how you could get a baby without a husband.

Gradually I began to see that there were many things in the world I didn’t have a clue about yet. The hardest thing was realizing that the people everyone in my village called sinners or too worldly could be nice and interesting too. There was another girl in my class who was a bookworm. Anne’s dad was a doctor and her mother was an artist. Of course we became fast friends. She always wanted to save the world, which included shaking up all of my narrow views and luring me into sin. My parents didn’t look favorably on our friendship, but they didn’t presume to say no when a man like Anne’s father called them to ask whether I could stay after school one Friday for a sleepover at Anne’s house. We were in the ninth grade then. By that time I had developed into a woman. I was wearing a bra and had gotten my first period, both of which I was trying desperately to hide from my father and brothers. Trying to keep womanly things like that secret feels pretty crazy now since the women in the village were always walking around with big bellies and there was a birth about once a month.

At Anne’s house I wore makeup for the first time in my life and put on a pair of Anne’s jeans when we went out on the town that night. Anne’s parents also seemed to think it would do me good to get a little distance from my community’s traditions.

. . .
He said he had noticed me years before in church and thought I would be the girl he would make his wife.

I stopped reading and quickly flipped through the pages in my hands. Obviously one or two pages were missing. How vexing. I wanted to know what happened during Johanna’s first night on the town. Had she left the pages out on purpose or had she destroyed them entirely, maybe due to feelings of guilt or shame?

The need to sleep was suddenly overpowering. Antti was already snoring softly next to me, a picture of a baby against his cheek. I threw the magazine to the floor and carefully set Johanna’s story on my nightstand. I only listened to the creaking of the house for a few seconds before falling deep into a snow-scented, fluffy white world in which Madman Malmberg had never existed.

At work the next morning, I finally managed to arrange a meeting with Niina Kuusinen, and after handling a couple of routine matters, I was ready to dive back into Johanna’s autobiography. Apparently the preacher Leevi Säntti had come on the scene.

He said he had noticed me years before in church and thought I would be the girl he would make his wife. I had dreams of going to medical school after my matriculation exams. My admiration for Anne’s father was probably part of it. My parents wouldn’t hear a word about my plans, even though I had the highest test scores in five subjects. Calculus was the only one I didn’t get a perfect grade in. My parents recommended home economics school or secretarial college, but neither interested me.

I have to admit I was a little infatuated with Leevi too. He was eight years older than me, so twenty-six, good looking, and a stylish dresser for someone in our village. He always looked polished. His father and grandfather were famous preachers and had amassed a significant fortune. The Säntti house was one of the nicest in the county. Leevi was already off to a good start as a preacher and had plans to start a family as soon as he finished building his own house next to his parents’. He said he chose me because I was the right age and beautiful in the eyes of God. Of course that flattered me. Other than one crush in school and Anne’s father, no one had ever called me beautiful.

We were married two weeks after my high school graduation. The whole village attended the wedding, along with Laestadian brothers from all over Northern Ostrobothnia. I was proud to become the wife of such a well-known, respected man, and I felt like a queen that day. My dress was spotless white and close-fitting, and I managed to do my hair so a few curls peeked out from under my veil. I didn’t dare wear the lipstick Anne had given me, even though I wanted to.

I was completely unprepared for what happened that night though. As a strict believer, my health teacher had sidestepped our sex talk by saying that was only something for after marriage. My mother said it was my husband’s job to teach me. I’d read random things in books and magazines, and I had pieced some of it together, but reading is different from experiencing something personally. In retrospect, I realize Leevi was actually quite experienced sexually. He hadn’t bothered to save himself for marriage the way I had.

I wasn’t prepared for the pain, the blood, or the shame of having someone touch the parts of my body I hadn’t dared even to let my own mother see for years. The same thing kept happening night after night, and after a few weeks I learned to tolerate my husband’s sexual needs. I must have gotten pregnant during the first week we were married. My first baby, Johannes, was born in March, one week after my nineteenth birthday. In November, I was pregnant again, and from then on my life has been mostly pregnancy, nursing, and caring for my children and the house. Leevi is away a lot preaching, and although my mother, my sister, and my mother-in-law have helped a lot in caring for the family, I haven’t had any trouble with extra free time. Usually I collapse into bed at night completely exhausted from the ruckus of the day.

After my fifth child, Matti, was born, I made a discovery that is hard to write about. Matti was a big baby, almost ten pounds, and getting him out tore me down there pretty badly. As I was rinsing the scars, I discovered that spraying water on specific parts felt pleasurable. I discovered the sin of masturbation, which I’ve never confessed. Apparently the sin started affecting me, because I began having more and more rebellious thoughts. When I turned twenty-five, I remember wanting to run away for the first time. I daydreamed about taking the bus to Oulu, buying makeup and new clothes, eating food someone else had cooked, and sleeping in a bed someone else had made, between sheets washed by someone else. But of course I never ran away. I was too attached to my children. On the surface, I looked like an industrious, humble preacher’s wife who was raising her children to walk the paths of righteousness too. I felt horrible punishing my children for normal curiosity about their own bodies and suppressing their imaginations. I never wanted to make them as ignorant and repressed as I was.