The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (21 page)

‘Well, I guess I should go. Maybe I can still get some sleep,’ she said, and headed for her apartment, relieved.

She wasn’t interested in what kind of damage the fire had caused or how Erkki Hiukkanen would recover from the shock of the experience; the important thing was getting Irma out of the
closed unit. That had been the objective of their Plan, but it hadn’t quite gone the way they’d expected.

There were all kinds of wild rumours going around Sunset Grove about what had happened the night of the fire. Some claimed that Siiri Kettunen lit the fire, but the Hat Lady
was sure that Erkki Hiukkanen was the culprit. The Ambassador, on the other hand, thought that it was a white-collar crime. According to him, it was a Finnish custom to arrange a fire when there
were irregularities in the bookkeeping.

The fire was even in the newspaper. Anna-Liisa read the article aloud to Siiri. It contained an interview with Virpi Hiukkanen, who told it all wrong and claimed she was the first person to
arrive on the scene.

‘I smelled smoke at two a.m.,’ she lied in the paper. Then the article said how quickly and efficiently Virpi and Erkki Hiukkanen had taken rescue measures. ‘All of the
residents of the retirement home were rescued before any harm could come to them.’

‘Balderdash. Trash media,’ Anna-Liisa snorted. ‘They don’t even say how the fire started. Do you have an opinion about it? After all, you were there, unlike all these
other people walking around explaining how it started as if they knew all the details.’

Siiri didn’t know what to think, although she’d thought about it a great deal. She was just going to say something about the sauna storeroom when Virpi Hiukkanen walked into her
apartment without knocking, using her own key. Siiri got a terrible fright and even Anna-Liisa looked shocked.

‘How are things going in here? How are you getting along?’

Virpi was cheerful, walking busily back and forth and glancing vigilantly around her. She patted Siiri on the top of her head, didn’t even look at Anna-Liisa, then noticed the newspaper,
which was open to the story about the fire, passed it by, and turned to go into the kitchen.

‘How did the fire start?’

Anna-Liisa tossed her question out without any warning into the middle of Virpi’s bustle with a fearlessness that only an interrogator experienced in surprise quizzes on the infinitive
forms of Finnish verbs can have.

Virpi stopped and answered without turning to look at them: ‘It started in the sauna. The police figured it out. And that’s actually not part of my job anyway; it’s Sinikka
Sundström’s responsibility.’

‘What are you looking for in my apartment?’ Siiri asked, and Virpi said she’d come to see how Siiri was doing. This was probably rubbish.

‘Once you’ve recovered a little, I’d like to have a chat with you. Before the police do – so you don’t blather on about who knows what,’ she called, on her
way out. ‘You have been taking your pills, I hope. Your pill counter is on the table, filled.’

Virpi Hiukkanen closed the door behind her with a slam. Siiri tried to shout that if she was going to drop in uninvited, she could at least ring the bell, but there was no point, Virpi was
already gone.

‘She’s nervous about you,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘You’re a very dangerous person to her now.’

The idea obviously thrilled Anna-Liisa, but Siiri had an uneasy feeling. How could she explain to Virpi Hiukkanen why she had been in the Group Home in the middle of the night? And what about
the police? Would they want to question her too? Would some surveillance video turn up on the Internet showing her entering the dementia ward with her own key?

She asked Anna-Liisa if they could talk about something else. The fire had taken a significant toll on her strength, and she’d spent the days since then mostly in bed. Anna-Liisa had taken
care of her diligently every day, brought her food, helped her to the toilet and kept her company.

‘I never thought I’d be the last oak,’ Anna-Liisa said, when they’d sat a little while in silence after Virpi’s inspection visit. ‘I thought of myself as
basically weak, thought I would die before the others. And here I am, the last one standing. It’s very strange.’

Siiri was a little surprised at this. If anyone was a strong person, it was Anna-Liisa. She was so unyielding; if you were to compare her to a tree, it would be an oak.

‘My last name is Petäjä. The Eastern Finnish word for a pine tree. It’s a pretty name, but it doesn’t suit me at all.’

Petäjä was Anna-Liisa’s second husband’s name. They had divorced after the war because he had proved to be a violent, unpredictable man. The war had jumbled his brain, and
when Anna-Liisa didn’t have any children, he started to blame her for everything bad in his life. A lawyer she knew arranged the divorce without any scandal, but in the 1950s it was difficult
to be a divorced woman. People said all kinds of awful things wherever you went, and especially in a small town.

‘As you must know, a divorced woman is almost the same as a whore.’

When Anna-Liisa said that horrible word she lowered her voice almost to a whisper and articulated it dramatically, as if it had three Rs on the end. She talked about going to work as a young
teacher in trousers, how after that there was no end to the gossip, because a woman should only wear trousers when skiing. Finally, she’d had enough and she moved to Helsinki to escape the
slander.

Siiri looked at her friend and realized for the first time how tall and thin Anna-Liisa was, simultaneously delicate and imposing. She had never thought of Anna-Liisa as fragile before; she was
so vigorous and knowledgeable. Even her voice was expressive and strong, not at all like a frail old woman’s. And now she’d learned that Anna-Liisa wasn’t even an old maid –
she’d been married at least twice!

‘Did you say that Petäjä was your second husband’s name?’

‘Yes. My first husband was studying to be a doctor when the Winter War started. We rushed to get married before he was sent to the front – it seemed safer somehow,’ she said,
then smiled wryly and sighed. ‘He fell right at the beginning of the war. A bullet in the knee. How’s that for a cause of death? There wasn’t any chance to help anyone there,
because there were so many wounded and in such terrible conditions. But of course you know about that. Weren’t you in the Lottas during the Continuation War?’

Anna-Liisa seemed to be quite a pacifist. When Siiri made the mistake of saying something about a heroic death, she was almost angry, her eyes smouldering as she demanded to know what was heroic
about dying over some trivial offence, drowning in blood out in the woods somewhere. She thought the worst thing about heroism was that it didn’t let you grieve for the fallen. Even she had
walked around bravely with her head held high, as if it were some great honour to be a twenty-one-year-old widow. She hadn’t cried once, not even when she was alone, although she’d felt
like she had nothing left to hope for in her life.

‘And then, when I was ninety, I started to have a dream about my first husband, and I realized that I was still grieving for him, and I couldn’t even remember what he looked like.
Does that happen to you? Far-off memories come back to you all of a sudden now you’re old? So strongly that even though you don’t want to think about them, you have to?’

Siiri thought about her little brother Voitto, who’d died in the last summer of the Continuation War. She couldn’t grieve for him, either. Nobody talked about Voitto, but a portrait
of him in his army uniform was framed and placed on the piano to remind them of their silenced grief. Siiri didn’t have very many memories of her brother. She remembered how Voitto would
tease her and how he had broken her beautiful doll on purpose, the only one she had; he’d kicked it in the head and broken it and looked her in the eye and laughed. He’d done it on
purpose, impudently. She didn’t dream about Voitto, but she had started thinking about her mother, who had been a very difficult person. Siiri had thought she was over it until, when she was
ninety-four, her mother started haunting her dreams and thoughts.

‘Isn’t it sort of peculiar?’

‘People must not be meant to live this long,’ Anna-Liisa said after a thoughtful pause. ‘But here we are, victims of retirement home aerobics. I’ve never once in my life
exercised until now. It’s a pastime, so we’ll have something to do during these pointless years, waiting for everything finally to end. What I mean is, life hands you surprises, right
up to the end, even us old ladies over ninety. Who could have guessed that you and I would end up being each other’s only friends? We didn’t know a thing about each other ten years ago.
Or that Irma would end up in the dementia ward? Or that your heart would give out before its time?’

‘Before its time? Anna-Liisa, I’m ninety-four years old. And my heart hasn’t given out.’

‘But you’ve been lying in bed for almost a week. I think we have to get to work if we’re going to get Irma home from wherever she happens to be at the moment.’ Anna-Liisa
was right again. But for now she cut short her flood of talk, gathered up her things, and dutifully set off downstairs for the singalong, although she’d always got low marks for singing in
school and considered singing a primitive behaviour.

Left alone, Siiri got out of bed and got properly dressed for the first time in a long time. She went to the kitchen to look for something to eat and found the pill counter full of tablets. She
looked at it, perplexed, and turned the box over in her hands. This is what Virpi was talking about when she’d told her to take her medicine. But she’d never had a pill counter, she was
sure she hadn’t. She got such a frightened feeling that her hands started to shake and she dropped the pills on the work surface with a clunk. What if she were the next resident lined up for
transfer to the dementia ward?

Irma’s doctor daughter was suddenly standing in the hallway on the top floor of A wing, looking lost. Siiri didn’t recognize her at first because the last time
they’d seen each other was years ago. Tuula had greyed and plumped up quite a bit. She still had a few flaming red streaks in her hair and heavy, plastic-rimmed glasses with frames the same
colour as the strands in her hair.

‘Siiri darling! How nice to see you! Am I in the right place?’

Tuula squeezed Siiri so hard that for a moment she thought the woman really missed her mother. But that was probably wishful thinking.

‘I don’t really remember where Mother’s apartment is. But hey, have you heard what happened to her after that horrible fire?’

Siiri hadn’t heard. She’d thought about Irma every day and had been more worried about her friend than she had ever been about anyone. All kinds of things had happened in
Siiri’s life, but never anything as difficult to comprehend as this.

‘You have to hear about it!’

Irma’s daughter stood uncomfortably close to her as she spoke. Siiri tried to move aside, but Tuula moved along with her until she had her against the wall. ‘The patients from the
Group Home were first taken to Haartman for treatment, and most of them were supposed to come back the next day, but since the Group Home was badly damaged and there was no other space at Sunset
Grove, they had to find them work-around accommodation,’ Tuula began, as if she were reading a report she’d written. ‘Work-around’ accommodation was what they called various
short-term lodgings, dorm rooms and other places to house students or patients until their building could be repaired to a usable state.

‘The problem is complicated by the fact that these severe-dementia sufferers aren’t Sunset Grove’s concern in the first place. They’re actually the responsibility of
medical services. Director Sundström was quite relieved when she realized that.’

‘If you ask me, she’s seemed anything but relieved lately.’

‘Yes, well, she told me that she lay awake for two nights before she realized a crucial aspect of her job description – the fact that it’s not hers but the city’s
responsibility to find a place to put these fourteen dementia patients for the next few months. Her responsibility is to take care of insurance matters, and, of course, to get the Group Home
repaired as soon as possible. Has the work started yet?’

Siiri didn’t know. She hadn’t been downstairs for several days. She couldn’t stop staring at a large mole under Tuula’s right eye with a black hair growing from it.

‘But what happened to the flock of dementia patients from Sunset Grove is that they were swept out of the Haartman acute care and into Suursuo Hospital, except for one woman who died at
Meilahti Hospital from injuries she suffered in the fire. She was quite a young person, too. My age. They didn’t mention any of that in the newspaper article. So now there are thirteen left
to place.’

‘She died?’

Siiri slid onto the chair next to the lift. She felt like she was in a play. Irma’s daughter had surprisingly similar intonations and high notes to her mother and she waved her hands
around as she spoke, too. And yet she was a very different person, a complete stranger.

‘This is such an unbelievable story, you can’t imagine.’ Tuula paused dramatically and sat down in the chair next to Siiri’s. ‘Well, Suursuo Hospital is where they
usually keep patients suffering from self-inflicted dementia – you know, homeless alcoholics who you can’t just leave out on the street, because they have severe memory and behavioural
problems. I happen to know this very well, although I’ve never been there, at least not for work. Being an ear specialist, I’m safe from all that, thank goodness!’

She laughed musically, like her mother, and when she slapped Siiri on the thigh, Siiri noticed that she was wearing Irma’s gold bracelets. She was sure she ‘d seen the very same
bracelets still on Irma’s arm in the closed unit.

‘I hope you don’t take everything I say too seriously? This is so absurd! So listen, there they were, lying in Suursuo Hospital, my mother and the rest of them waiting there among
the winos for the city to find them a permanent place to stay. At that point I was in shock, because I’d heard that the waits in a place like that can take years.’