The Winter Place (16 page)

Freaking awesome.

Of course, Axel never intended to keep any of this from his sister. His first instinct was always to be honest with her. Tess might not have believed that he'd seen the Keeper at the market if she had nothing more to go on than Axel's word—it was, after all, a pretty preposterous thing to have happened—but the photograph of their long-dead mother was proof that something paranormal was going down. Except that it
wasn't
. When Axel gave her the camera, Tess couldn't see anything but a picture of a brown bear. And while a bear in Baldwin was odd, it was hardly evidence of magic. Again Axel had to consider the possibility that this was all in his head—a much more pleasant hallucination than the wheelchair, but maybe more troubling, sanity-wise. He decided to stay quiet, doing his best not to seem too excited on the train ride up north, keeping his cool as they
walked from the station, taking his time rooting around the little lakeside cottage. There'd be plenty of opportunities over the coming week to explore the woods out back. Hours upon hours to search for signs of his mother.

But Axel's calm and steady course got scrapped the moment that Kari kid uttered the words: “totally haunted.” He damn near fell into the lake when he heard it.

“Don't mess with me,” he said. “Do not make fun of me, because it's cruel.”

“What?” Kari glanced between Tess and Axel, worried he was missing something. “You're the one who asked.”

“But what do you mean haunted? Like, haunted how?” Axel said.

“There's a ghost on the island. People see her at night sometimes.”

Her.
Promising. Axel pressed for more information. “What people? Have you seen her? What does she—”

“Okay,” Tess cut in. “How about we cool it a little bit?”

“I have,” Kari said, totally deadpan.

“You shouldn't encourage him,” Tess said.

“I'm not encouraging anybody,” Kari said. “I've seen the ghost, and my parents have seen the ghost, and my brother, Kalle, has seen the
ghost. Last year, just after midsummer.” Here he trailed off for a moment. The sun sank behind the fir trees, and the swan went ashore on the rocky little island, apparently untroubled by the resident spirit. “It was one of those evenings when you don't get any real night, just a few hours of twilight,” Kari went on. “No darker than this. My father had some people from his work staying with us, and we all went out on the boat so he could show off the midnight sun. They were Greeks, these people. When we were coming back home, we noticed a lady on the island. She was all alone. We asked if she needed a ride back to her cottage, but she didn't say anything. My mom thought that maybe she was a foreigner, so we tried Swedish and English. The Greeks tried Greek. But she wouldn't answer. So we just left her there. And by the time we got home, we couldn't see her anymore. My mom made us go right back out. All around the island. She was so upset. She thought that the lady had drowned.”

“Did you notice tattoos?” Axel said. “Was she wearing glasses?”

Tess had been pretty patient with him so far, but that was apparently the limit. “Damn, Axel. Weird much?”

“I didn't notice,” Kari said, as though this were a perfectly reasonable question. “In the morning
my mom went around to all the cottages on the lake, to see if anybody had guests staying with them. To see if anybody was missing. But nobody was missing. Everybody was accounted for.”

Kari lifted his feet out of the water and let them drip dry for a moment before standing up. In the brief time it took him to tell his story, the twilight had ripened to full dark. Stars blasted holes in the sky one by one, and cottage windows ignited along the distant shore. “Are you two really rowing out to the island tomorrow?” He glanced at Tess, not quite making eye contact. As lost as Axel was in his own thoughts, he'd have to be blind not to see that this chubby rich kid was into his sister. Poor guy.

“Probably,” she said. “He'll drive me crazy until I take him there.”

“That is correct,” Axel said. “That is absolutely true.”

“Well, I'd better come with you,” Kari said. “The lake gets shallow around the island—a lot of rocks just under the surface. There's only one place where you can row ashore, and it's hard to find if you don't already know where it is.” This all came out a bit too quickly, but it worked. Tess told Kari to meet them at the dock the next morning. As a compatriot in awkwardness, Axel found himself happy for the older kid. The problem was that he sometimes didn't think before speaking.

“Well played, sir,” he said.

Kari burst into a flame blush and retreated to his bright house for dinner. Tess and Axel stayed outside for a while longer, saying nothing, watching the two pines disappear against the lake.

The next day couldn't begin soon enough, and it made no effort to—these late sunrises were really getting to be a drag. Axel rushed through a breakfast of cold cuts and buttered rye, then fidgeted as Jaana outfitted him with layered sweaters, knit socks, and a scarf as thick as a folded bath towel. Over the entire woolen riot, she buckled his puffy life jacket. Jaana didn't make the same effort with Tess, but did insist she bring a jacket as well, slung over her shoulder if not fully fastened. The two of them seemed to have argued each other to a stalemate.

Outside the weather was windy and cold, as though they'd tipped from autumn's summer edge to its winter one overnight. The breeze kicked up wavelets on the lake. Frost had left the grass brittle as spun sugar under their feet. A single dainty icicle hung from where the drainpipe met the gutter. As they rounded the freestanding sauna they saw that Kari was already at the dock, hugging himself on the rear bench of a beautiful power rowboat—it must have belonged to his
parents. Axel wondered how long he'd been out there, bobbing and shivering.

Jaana followed them outside, and she called out to Kari as soon as she saw him. “Mr. Hannula, that boat had better be a joke!”

“Morning, Mrs. Kivi!” He waved from inside the boat, his unbuttoned shirt cuff flapping in the breeze. “I promise we'll be careful.”

“There isn't a chance,” Jaana said. “Not in that thing.”

As Kari's house was to the Kivis' summer cottage, so was his rowboat to the Kivis' rickety skiff. It wasn't that it was bigger—though it certainly was—so much that it was slicker. The bow tapered sharply into an elegant elfin stem, and there was a shining black outboard motor at the transom. The oarlocks were of polished brass, and the entire thing had the white, woody look you associate with yachting and New England.

“There's no such thing as careful. Not in that,” Jaana said.

“But we won't use the motor,” Kari said. “We
can't
, even. There isn't any fuel. Kalle used it all up.”

“I see.” Jaana squatted down on the dock and rested a hand on the gunwale. As short as her hair was, the breeze was still stiff enough to ruffle it. “Do I need to check the gauge, or can I trust you, Mr. Hannula?”

Kari's expression looked so sincere that it almost couldn't have been. “You can trust me,” he said. “You can also check the gauge.”

Jaana stood. “To the island and back.” She helped Axel get aboard and settled on the stern bench, where he propped his feet atop a foam cooler. “Look after him.”

“
I'll
look after him,” Tess said, climbing aboard as well. The boat rocked under her, then steadied. She dropped her life jacket on the bench beside Axel.

“You're who I was talking to,” Jaana said, untying them and tossing the line for Kari to catch. “I'd better not hear a motor.”

Their grandmother stayed on the dock, watching as Kari set the oars into the oarlocks and took his spot on the bench, his back to the little island. This struck Axel as strange—he was used to canoes, and in a canoe everybody faced forward. Grandpa Paul had a whole fleet of them out behind his trailer, some salvaged or stolen, but most bought bargain basement from a summer camp gone bust. No matter how poorly their trips down to the Boils went, Sam and Paul always quit fighting for long enough to take the kids out onto the steaming creeks and springs. Everybody had a paddle, and everybody was expected to use it. A rowboat was different—you
couldn't exactly share the work. But Kari didn't seem to mind.

“We'll have to go around it . . . and let the breeze carry us to the north side . . . where we'll put ashore,” he said between pulls on the oars. They'd gone all of ten nautical yards and already there was sweat speckling Kari's forehead. “It'll take a little longer, but we don't have a choice.”

“Your brother's not going to miss his boat?” Tess asked.

Kari sort of snorted. “Kalle won't be awake for hours.” In order to compensate for the wind, he struck a diagonal course roughly between the pine island and his own summer house. Though perhaps that name wasn't fitting—the Hannula house seemed to be battened against anything Finland could possibly throw at it, summer
or
winter. It was a fortress of warmth, four chimneys stabbing out of the roof like the jeweled peaks of a crown. A sauna was attached to the house via a glass walkway, and the skeleton of a new wing bulged from the east wall. The deck above the boathouse bore all the evidence of revelry; empty cider bottles along the railings and paper plates smeared with mustard, scattered by the weather.

“It's Tuesday,” Tess said. She left it at that for a moment, allowing the words to be carried away on the breeze. “Don't you all have school?”

“My brother's taking a semester off,” Kari said. “Mom and Dad are paying him to supervise the work on our house.”

“But you?” Tess asked.

“Kalle told my school I have mononucleosis.” Kari smiled hugely and toothily, as though trying to convince all three of them that this was a good thing.

“So. About the island . . .” Axel had held off as long as he could. “Do you know if anyone else has ever seen the ghost?”

“Of course they have. Plenty of people,” Kari said. “She's sort of a local legend. The newspaper down in Savonlinna even did a story about her.”

“Oh.” Axel wasn't sure why, but the fact that sightings were relatively common struck him as not necessarily a plus. People saw Bigfoot all the damn time. “Does she always look like a lady?” he asked.

Kari took a brief break from rowing, and the wind pushed them sideways. They were nearly abreast of the island now, and Axel could see that the discussion about underwater rocks from the previous evening hadn't just been an excuse for Kari to tag along. Gray-green shadows drifted just beneath them like a herd of petrified manatees.

“What do you mean?” Kari said.

“I mean does she ever appear in a different
form? Does she ever look like something else?” Axel chewed his lips, debating. He didn't want to give himself away to his sister, but he couldn't resist. “A bear, maybe?”

Tess had been staring back at Jaana and Otso's summer place, but now her attention snapped toward Axel.

“I don't know about that,” Kari said, pulling on the oars again to get them out of the path of a granite boulder kissing the surface. “I mean . . . we
do
have bears here. But they stay deep in the forest. As long as you aren't dumb with your garbage, you'll never see them.”

They pulled past the island and doubled around, making for a pebbly beach no broader across than a bathtub. Kari slid over to the backseat, where he stood and used one of his oars to push off against the underwater rocks, punting them the final distance.

“Anything you want to tell me?” Tess whispered, leaning in to her brother.

“Nope,” Axel said, unable to look her in the face.

The gravel rattled under the hull as they struck bottom, and Kari jumped into the shallows, crossed to one of the pines, and tied off. Then he turned to help them ashore, offering his hand first to Axel, then to Tess.

Smart boy.

The island was just about as large from coast to coast as a volleyball court, with the two pines sticking out at either end. The swan they'd been watching the night before was nowhere to be seen, but there were signs of her everywhere. Feathers and down coated the rocks like puffy white lichen, cemented into place by a dried film of swan crap. The island had looked pristine from a distance, but in the moments when the breeze died down, the stench was considerable. There was also some evidence of human activity—a few discarded fishing weights and the mangled skeleton of a demon-jawed pike. It even looked like there had been some kind of structure here, once upon a time. In the middle of the island, exactly between the pines, were the remains of a brick foundation. Some pots and coiled piping were heaped into a corner, rusted and crumbling, just one rough winter away from being turned to dust.

Kari lugged the cooler to the little ruin, dropping it into the foundation and then jumping down after it, taking a seat against the old brickwork. Axel and Tess joined him. The shallow dip of the foundation kept them mostly out of the wind, but still afforded them a view of the distant lakeshore, bleak and magnificent. The Kivis' humble cottage and Kari's lake villa were the only
houses visible against a wall of evergreen. Axel saw smoke rising from the tin chimney atop the freestanding sauna and could faintly make out Otso's wheelchair sitting empty beside the open door. Over at the Hannula house, some gulls had collected on the deck, screaming insanely atop the leavings from last night's party. Axel eyed the birds and the forest. There was something else there, farther away, faintly visible above the treetops. Something made of stone.