Snow Woman

by Leena Lehtolainen

  16

  Several years had passed since I’d last held a newborn. The Jensens’ seven-pound-eleven-ounce girl felt so insubstantial in my arms. She weighed half as much as our cat.

  “Relax, babies are surprisingly durable,” Kirsti Jensen said with a laugh. The baby rested peacefully in my arms, her mouth making tiny sucking motions. Our weekend jaunt to Tammisaari was turning out to be a nice idea. Although the small country town was hibernating, walking down the narrow streets lined with wooden houses felt almost like being abroad. Compared to Jorvi Hospital in Espoo, the facility in Tammisaari was small and homey—and didn’t smell like death. The family room was full of life. Along with Eva, three little Jensens were sitting on the double bed. Antti was rocking in a rocking chair, and Lauri and Kirsti were giving competing versions of how the birth had progressed. Jukka Jensen had gone to the cafeteria to get ice cream for everyone.

  I had never been the type to coo over a tiny newborn, and Eva’s baby’s wrinkly, sour-smelling face had a strange dignity that made me want to speak with deference. I realized I was starting to grow accustomed to the idea of having my own baby.

  After half an hour with the Jensen circus, we drove east to Inkoo to Antti’s parents’ cabin in the woods. We hadn’t seen them in ages. A couple of years earlier, they had sold their house in Tapiola and now rarely visited the metro area. We’d decided not to tell them about the baby just yet, although my father-in-law looked at me inquisitively when I declined the glass of wine he offered. They were discreet people though and didn’t pry. My parents definitely would have started asking uncomfortable questions in the same situation.

  “Should we tell them about baby Sarkela now or wait a bit longer?” Antti asked as we sat in the sauna after taking a quick night ski out on the frozen waters of the Baltic Sea.

  “What do you mean baby Sarkela? What makes you think the baby’s going to have your last name?” I teased, although I hadn’t even considered the naming issue yet.

  “Well, because you always know who the mother is, but you can never be sure of the father,” Antti said with a grin. “The baby is going to be more bonded to you anyway, whether you have the same name or not.”

  I admitted that Antti’s logic was sound, and Sarkela was a significantly rarer last name than Kallio, but we decided not to set anything in stone just yet. When we got out of the sauna, Antti’s parents were still watching the same endless talk show on TV. It was about alternative medicine. My mother-in-law was interested in the subject, and she had asked curiously about Eva’s birthing experience because Eva had spent most of the time it took her cervix to dilate floating in a bath of warm water. For a few seconds I listened to the lecture on how medical schools used to treat even acupuncture as flimflam before I decided to head to bed and read. A familiar voice from the TV stopped me in my tracks.

  “I don’t think traditional medicine should shut out things like astrology or homeopathy so quickly,” the voice said. When I looked at the television again, Kari Hanninen’s charismatic face almost jumped off the screen. I changed my mind and sat down next to Antti’s mother on the couch to listen to Hanninen’s presentation on how astrology and psychoanalysis could work together.

  “The occult sciences and medicine have the same goal. We all want to help people. But while medicine, psychology, and psychiatry often forget the patient’s emotions and just focus on physiology—deadening feelings with drugs—astrology tries to help people understand themselves and treat themselves right. Star charts can help you see all kinds of things in a person, such as a predisposition for alcoholism. I would never tell someone that the stars had fated them to be an alcoholic and that they couldn’t do anything about it. But I can look to the stars for healing power.”

  The women in the studio audience clapped. You couldn’t deny how convincing he was. Even when he’d talked to me about Madman Malmberg, a vicious murderer, he had really seemed to care what happened to him. Still, I regretted giving him my birth date. I didn’t actually want to know what he saw in my horoscope—or imagined he saw.

  The talk show host must have been reading my mind. He said to Hanninen, “In your work you’ve met all kinds of people and faced some pretty incredible situations. Markku Malmberg, the man who killed himself and a police officer earlier this month in Nuuksio, was one of your patients. Can a star chart show you things like a future career in crime or a violent death?”

  Hanninen laughed at the question. “Astrology doesn’t actually tell the future. But yes, you can see violent tendencies and specific times of potential crisis in a person’s life.”

  “Did you see that in Markku Malmberg’s star chart?” asked the host.

  “Yes, clearly. But the end result didn’t have to be Markku and the police officer he abducted losing their lives. To use the old cliché, it wasn’t written in the stars.” Hanninen’s smile was just the right amount of sad. He brushed his thick hair off his forehead. Antti had taken my hand when the conversation turned to Nuuksio.

  “How much advice do you dare give your clients?” asked the host. “For example, if someone comes and asks you about what profession to choose or who to marry, do you answer?”

  “Of course. But the ultimate responsibility is always with the person himself. I’m truthful if a chart shows that two people aren’t right for each other or if someone isn’t a good fit for a job, such as being an actor. But I also always try to look for alternatives. I don’t like abandoning people to their problems.”

  The interviewer moved on to a crystal healer, but every now and then the camera panned back to Kari Hanninen, who was sitting comfortably and seemed to be exchanging significant glances with several girls in the front row. Then the show switched to a tango singer bleating a sappy love song, and Antti and I retreated to the kitchen to make some tea. We didn’t talk about Kari Hanninen and astrology until the next day as we were driving home.

  “The fact that you don’t want Hanninen to make a chart for you actually means you believe in horoscopes,” Antti said to irk me as he passed a tractor creeping along the side of the road.

  “No it doesn’t! I just don’t want him thinking he knows me because he knows my sign—oh my God!”

  That last exclamation was caused by a BMW speeding toward us. It veered back into its own lane only seconds before it would have demolished our poor little Fiat. Though I should have been used to the number of kamikaze drivers on this country road between Inkoo and the freeway to Espoo, I was so frightened I almost didn’t notice my phone ringing. It was the station.

  “Hi, Maria, it’s Akkila. You said to call if the hospital had any news. There’s a message here that says Aira Rosberg is starting to get her memory back.”

  “What? Thanks. I’ll head straight there.” I ended the call and asked Antti to make a detour and drop me off at the hospital.

  “Back to work?” Antti asked with resignation in his voice.

  “I won’t be long. I can walk home if I need to,” I said.

  “Oh no. I’ve got a book with me. I’ll wait for you in the lobby. Or do you think they’d let me see the maternity ward? I could compare it to the one we just saw in Tammisaari.”

  I grinned. “You don’t look very pregnant.”

  The doctor on call in the ICU said Aira was doing so well they were moving her to the recovery ward the next day. The return of her memory wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for though. The doctor said Aira remembered Elina’s disappearance, but not that she’d been found dead. No one had told her yet. I managed to talk the doctor into letting me see her for just a few minutes.

  Aira was awake and half sitting up in bed, but she still looked older and smaller than I’d ever seen her at Rosberga. When she noticed me, a slightly uncertain smile spread across her lips, but then recognition flared in her eyes.

  “Sergeant Kallio. How are you? You came and spoke at the institute a few weeks ago.”

 
; “Hello, Ms. Rosberg. How are you feeling?” I asked, keeping things a little more formal since she’d apparently forgotten she’d been using my first name.

  “My head hurts sometimes, and I can’t quite remember some things . . . I guess I fell . . . I must have been looking for Elina. Has anyone found her yet?”

  I shook my head. Lying was hard, but telling her Elina was dead wasn’t my job. A dark shadow passed across Aira’s face, and she shook her head, bewildered, when I asked her where Elina might have gone.

  “I thought she was with Joona . . . Joona Kirstilä, her boyfriend. They were supposed to go to Estonia together, to Tallinn. Have you been to Rosberga? Maybe they’ve come back.”

  With Joona to Tallinn? I’d never heard anything about this before. Or was Aira mixing things up, maybe remembering the previous Christmas? I had to ask Kirstilä. Maybe Aira was faking. Her pale-blue eyes looked sharp. But I wasn’t a doctor.

  “She hasn’t come back,” I replied. “Do you remember anything about your own accident? Where did you fall?”

  Aira Rosberg shook her head again. “Remembering hurts,” she said in the helpless tone of an old woman. It sounded strange coming from her, despite how fragile she looked. “It gives me headaches.”

  Just then a nurse knocked on the glass. It was time for me to leave. I wasn’t going to get anything out of Aira now, and my questions might even hinder her recovery.

  “Ask Elina to come see me when you find her,” Aira pleaded as I opened the door. Her voice was small and reedy. I nodded as a lump filled my throat. How was Aira going to react when she learned Elina wasn’t coming? Why did she have to experience the worst anguish of her life twice?

  I tried calling Joona Kirstilä, but he didn’t answer. Maybe he was out looking for his lost words in some bar again.

  I spent the rest of my night mending my old black graduation dress. Because we didn’t wear uniforms at work, we had all decided to wear civilian clothes to Palo’s funeral too. The dress was torn under the arm from some long ago overenthusiastic dancing. I’d had it for a good ten years, and it was probably time to retire it. I had a bad habit of getting attached to clothes and then wearing them until they were literally falling off my body.

  Looking at my closet, I caught myself wondering how many of my dresses would still fit me in the summer and came up with a big fat zero. The thought of maternity clothing was so unpleasant I decided to rebel and grabbed a “near beer” from the fridge. At least it gave me the comfort of that familiar taste.

  The next morning a report was waiting on my desk with details about the tire tracks Forensics had found outside the gates at Rosberga the night of Aira’s attack. Since we couldn’t go around inspecting everyone’s car tires, maybe we could get permission to look at the tires of cars owned by people who frequented the house in order to rule them out. Like a madwoman, I plowed through the urgent paperwork that had piled up on my desk, hoping to make time for this. The next day was going to be a complete loss, I knew. I had an appointment with my OB and then there was Palo’s funeral.

  After lunch I tried calling Kirstilä again. He sounded hungover. Between his cat, Pentti, meowing angrily into the receiver and Kirstilä’s tubercular hacking fits, I could barely understand what he was saying. I finally realized he was telling me that he had no idea what trip to Estonia Aira was talking about.

  “I’m not going to jail for that hash, am I?” Now it sounded as though Kirstilä was opening a can of cat food.

  “Doubtful,” I said, although I probably shouldn’t comment. “Nowadays you can get off without being charged if the amount is as small as what you had. But get yourself a lawyer. Hitting an on-duty cop is a pretty big deal.”

  “So you bastards just get to say anything you want to me and I don’t have any right to defend myself?” Kirstilä was sounding more alert. Maybe he’d opened a bottle of beer along with the cat food.

  “Sergeant Ström does have a bit of a mouth on him,” I admitted.

  “I bet he hates any guy with long hair, and my being a poet just makes it worse,” Kirstilä said, sounding like a sullen, bullied schoolboy. Still, his description of Ström was dead-on—his ability to look at the world through such narrow blinders was astonishing, condemning everything unfamiliar to him right down to the Chinese food they occasionally served in the station cafeteria.

  “Speak of the devil . . .” I muttered to myself as Ström appeared at my office door.

  “That Molotov cocktail case,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Taskinen and I are handling it. We already have some suspects, the same skinheads who’ve been causing trouble all over. Pretty pathetic, going at foreigners that way. At least they could stand up and fight face-to-face.”

  “Cut the crap. What do you need me for?”

  “We need to question the mother of the family. She can’t be in the same room with other men without her husband present, but we can’t legally have him there. You wanted multiculturalism, and now you’ve got it. It won’t take long.”

  “OK. Give me five minutes.”

  Lifting my finger from the mute button on the phone, I discovered Kirstilä had hung up. I still had one more question to ask, but it could wait.

  Mrs. El-Ashram was wearing a full burka and answered my questions in muffled monosyllables. Talking to a woman while barely able to see her eyes was odd. I’d just been accusing Ström of racism, and now I found myself wondering about Mrs. El-Ashram. Did she really want her daughters walking around fully veiled too?

  The sudden urge to drop all the routine questions about the attack on their home and satisfy my real curiosity about these “foreigners” was disconcerting. Even more disconcerting was how much Mrs. El-Ashram reminded me of the way I’d felt reading Johanna’s autobiography. I liked to think of myself as tolerant and open-minded, but I drew the line at wife beating, burkas, and female circumcision. Early the previous fall I had been assigned a difficult case. A school nurse and elementary school teacher had filed a criminal complaint about the abuse of an eight-year-old Somali girl. The girl was out of school for a week without any explanation and then started bleeding in the middle of class. It turned out the girl’s mother and aunt had circumcised her in the family bathroom.

  I spent weeks going around and around with the district attorney, the refugee authorities, and social services about whether to press charges. Two weeks later the tabloid headlines were all about anti-immigrant riots in Joensuu and a psychotic Somali killing a Finnish schoolgirl in Tampere. After that, we quietly shuffled the case off to Child Protective Services. I had often wondered if it was the right thing to do and if I would have intervened more aggressively had it been Finnish parents abusing their children that way.

  Somberly I resumed questioning Mrs. El-Ashram and listened patiently to her answers before bringing her back to her husband. Then I returned to my office and made a call to Milla’s mother.

  I had spent a lot of time thinking about how to approach Ritva Marttila since it didn’t seem appropriate to ask her over the phone whether her daughter was really hers, and if not, why the adoption wasn’t recorded anywhere.

  Ritva Marttila’s manner of speaking was brusque, like Milla’s. But were their voices similar? I wasn’t sure. “Milla? Yes, we have a daughter by that name, although she hasn’t shown her face at home for years. What’s she done now?”

  I intentionally left her question unanswered. “Is Milla Marttila your biological daughter?” So much for tact.

  “Biological . . . What do you mean?”

  “Is she your and your husband’s daughter, or was she adopted?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Of course she is. What kind of lies has she been telling you? What else has she been lying about? I can show you her birth certificate if I have to.”

  “Does Milla have a habit of lying?” I asked.

  In
answer I received a confused account of what a horrible brat Milla had been, always accusing her father of terrible things. Although Ritva Marttila had just confirmed the population registry’s information that she was Milla’s mother, I wasn’t ready to believe that everything Milla had told me was a lie. But it wasn’t my job to go digging into the Marttilas’ family past any more than I already had. Unfortunately, wives tended to believe their husbands more than their children when accusations of incest came up—no matter what the truth was.

  “What has she done now?” Ritva Marttila asked again.

  “She’s mixed up in an unexplained death,” I replied.

  “So she’s moved on to murder now? One of our neighbors said he saw her working in a strip club. Is that true?”

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself? I can give you her number,” I offered.

  Ritva Marttila replied by slamming the phone down in my ear. That was motherly love for you. I remembered one of my friends who also had a difficult childhood once saying that all children hate their parents. She said there wasn’t a parent living that hadn’t screwed up something, even if they meant well. What was the little critter floating around in my belly going to think of me and Antti in twenty years? Would he or she remember parents who lived for their work and never had any time for their child? I was starting to get afraid again, so I moved on to searching the computer databases for information on everyone I thought might have any connection to Elina Rosberg’s death.

  In theory, I was thinking that Milla could be Elina’s child—the ages lined up, but Joona Kirstilä couldn’t be her father. There were other possibilities, although the whole thing could just be about money. Elina was extremely wealthy, and Aira was her only heir. What if Aira had had a child . . . ?