Copper Heart Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 1994 by Leena Lehtolainen

  English translation copyright © 2013 Owen F. Witesman

  Published by agreement with Tammi Publishers and Elina Ahlbäck Literary Agency, Helsinki, Finland.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonCrossing

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477848425

  ISBN-10: 1477848428

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909662

  CONTENTS

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  LOCAL COPS

  Maria Kallio..........Acting Sheriff

  Jussi Rantanen.......... Sheriff

  Järvi ..........Senior Detective

  “Timppa” Antikainen ..........Detective

  Lasarov ..........Senior Patrol Officer

  Hopponen ..........Patrol Officer

  Timonen ..........Patrol Officer

  COUNTY COPS

  Arvo Järvisalo .......... Detective Sergeant

  Pekka Koivu..........Maria’s old partner, Detective

  Dr. Turunen..........Medical Examiner

  TOWNIES

  Aniliina Flöjt .......... Meritta’s daughter

  Meritta Flöjt, née Korhonen ..........Artist, City Councilor

  Pentti “Pena” Kallio ..........Maria’s uncle, City Council Chairman

  Toivo and Eini Kallio ..........Maria’s parents

  Barbro Kivinen ..........Seppo Kivinen’s wife

  Seppo Kivinen .......... Real estate developer

  Jaana Korhonen .......... Jaska’s sister

  Jari “Jaska” Korhonen .......... Guitarist, Maria’s old bandmate

  Meeri Korhonen ..........Jaska’s mother

  Jarmo “Johnny” Miettinen .......... Personal trainer, Maria’s old crush

  Kaisa Miettinen .......... Professional athlete

  Tuija Miettinen .......... Johnny’s estranged wife

  Mikko .......... Uncle Pena’s cat

  Ella Virtanen ..........City Arts Administrator

  Matti Virtanen ..........Artist, Ella’s husband

  SUPPORTING CAST

  Mårten Flöjt .......... Aniliina’s father, Meritta’s ex-husband

  Eeva and Jarmo .......... Maria’s eldest sister and her husband

  Saku .......... Eeva’s son, Maria’s nephew

  Helena and Petri.......... Maria’s sister and her husband

  Antti Sarkela ..........Maria’s boyfriend

  Einstein .......... Antti’s cat

  1

  I’ve always had a good memory for smells. Sometimes, even years later, I’ll recall the scent of some person or place. When I think of spring, I remember the inviting smell of wet earth. Autumn I know by the heavy, plaintive perfume of wet leaves.

  When the wind came from the east, spreading the acrid stench of copper and sulfuric acid from the mine’s tailing ponds we called the Sump, I knew I was home. Ten years ago, before I escaped the rural town of Arpikylä, I barely noticed the smell. Back then I also never noticed the sheer majesty of the Tower, the gray rock of which dominated Arpikylä’s silhouette.

  As I walked down Main Street, the Tower hovered over the buildings and trees, a great gray ghost, at once ethereal and ponderous. The hill of exposed, copper-yellow bedrock below it only emphasized the Tower’s menacing darkness. I had to turn my eyes away, toward the blue of the cloudless sky and the green of the birch trees below.

  What was I doing here again?

  I was actually getting used to being back in Arpikylä. I wasn’t here to stay, after all. This was just a six-month stint, and the first two months were, mercifully, already behind me.

  I was getting used to the way life tossed me from place to place without warning. A year ago I graduated from law school and started a job with a small law firm in Espoo. At first the position seemed perfect, but the firm’s business practices gradually began to seem more than a little dubious. Over Christmas vacation, I decided to take a risk and resign, but before I could, the head partner died of a heart attack. As the executor of the estate got down to business, it quickly became clear that the firm was on the brink of bankruptcy. Complete liquidation was the only option, and the remaining partners sent me packing with just a few months severance in my pocket.

  Finding a new job seemed impossible. I even humbled myself to the point of calling my old workplace, the Helsinki Violent Crime Unit, where I worked as a police sergeant before training as a lawyer. But they didn’t have anything because the whole office was being dismantled. No one else was hiring either.

  Suddenly my life lacked any fixed point of reference, especially since my boyfriend, Antti, had just left for a yearlong postdoc in Chicago. So for a while I just bummed around Antti’s empty apartment, feeling sorry for myself, spending my time exercising and reading. And, yes, I found far too much time for sitting in bars. I was so desperate for a plan, I even thought about going back to graduate school.

  When I couldn’t come up with anything better to do, I decided to use the last of my severance to spend a month in Chicago with Antti, which meant my unemployment checks stopped coming.

  Midway through my vacation in Chicago, out of the blue, I received a call from the sheriff of my hometown. Sheriff Jussi Rantanen said he had finally decided to finish his degree in forensic science and needed a deputy to stand in for a few months. My parents and the sheriff were the driving forces behind the local chamber choir, which apparently made the Kallios’ unemployed daughter a perfect candidate for his summer replacement.

  I knew I had to start making payments on my student loans at the end of September, and playing sheriff at home for the summer didn’t seem like the worst job imaginable. I figured I could find somewhere to live for a few months. I didn’t consider moving in with my parents for even a second, and I doubted they would have liked that idea either. So I asked Jussi for two weeks to think it over. Finally I called from Chicago to accept his offer, despite Antti’s skepticism.

  “Do you know how many times you’ve told me you hate that place? Why would you want to go back there now?” Antti had asked.

  “I can handle six months anywhere. And there are good people who live there too. My best friend from school, Ella, works as an arts coordinator for the city. And Koivu is in Joensuu these days, which is only half an hour away.”

  There was something more behind me taking the job though. Turning thirty had set off a quarter-life crisis. I wanted to find my roots. Maybe that’s why I wanted to go back to Arpikylä for a while.

  Arpikylä. The name of the place—Scar Town—was absurd. People said it came from the ragged vein of copper the color of dried blood that ran under the hill at the Old Mine. One of my high school friends, who hated the place even more than I did, said it came from no one getting out without being scarred for life. Of course it was an austere place, as all small towns based around a single industry are. During my first year at the police academy, I remem
ber grimacing when some magazine chose Arpikylä as one of the ten most boring cities in Finland. I promised myself I would never go back.

  Although being able to say you were from a place with the word “scar” in the name had a certain cachet. It sounded more interesting than Hyvinkää, Loimaa, or Kokemäki, and somehow more intense: Maria Kallio from Arpikylä, straight from Finland’s Wild East. In recent years the city had been trying hard to build its image as a friendly country town. Unfortunately the campaign slogan sounded forced: “Arpikylä—the city with a heart of copper.” Of course the veins of ore that once allowed the city to flourish had dried out years ago.

  From the direction of the Tower, a loud beeping sound began, quickly speeding up. In concern, I stopped to watch. They weren’t going to blow up the Tower, were they? I knew the explosion was supposed to be small, and it was planned to take place far from the Tower. I had signed the permit for it myself, but I couldn’t help watching to make sure the old gray man would survive the jolt.

  A pathetically small cloud of dust rose into the air somewhere behind and to the left of the Tower, and a reassuring, steady whistle sounded. The new owner of the Old Mine was renovating the main entrance to run tours of the shafts for visitors. The opening ceremonies were set for the coming Friday.

  I waved at the Tower before turning toward the police station. The Tower just glared back as if insulted I could even entertain the idea it might fall over from a little blast like that. For a moment, the Tower looked downright frightening, commanding its environment by casting long, dark shadows over it.

  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 befor
e 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.