Snow Angels

28

Dad and I never fish together, but we fish in the same spot, and I’m pretty sure for the same reason. It’s where my sister Suvi died. It’s a way of being with her. Sometimes I talk to her when I sit there on a crate, dangling a fishing line through a hole in the ice.

The starry night casts the frozen lake slate-gray. A half moon silhouettes a thin column of smoke rising into the sky. Antti stands near the source, not fifty feet from where Suvi fell through the ice and drowned. It makes me shudder. I get my fishing-tackle boxes out of the trunk, head down the bank and onto the lake.

Walking toward the body with a flashlight, I can’t quite take in what I’m seeing. The smoking figure in the beam doesn’t look like a person, more like a blackened candle that’s burned halfway down and been snuffed out. Antti and I nod at each other but don’t speak. I look at the victim, blink, look again. Part of me just won’t accept that it’s true.

A tire was hung around the child’s chest and arms and set ablaze. The smell of petroleum and scorched flesh is overwhelming, sickening. Someone filled the ring inside the tire with gasoline, lit it and watched the child burn. A rumpled fire blanket lies on the ice a few yards away from the body. Antti extinguished the flame, but the rubber is still smoldering.

The victim sat cross-legged while the killer attended to the details of his or her murder. Somehow, the body stayed upright while it burned. Because the tire was draped around the top half of the body, flame shot up and burned nearly all the skin away from the chest and head. Only fragments of charred and desiccated muscle and ligament remain attached to bone and a blackened skull.

From the waist upward, the body is shriveled by heat. Soot and ash cover the body from the waist downward, but in relative terms, the lower portion remains unscathed. Antti assumed the victim is a child because heat and flame caused a diminutive appearance, steamed out liquid, removed hair and flesh, in effect shrank the upper body. He was wrong.

I kneel down with my weight on the balls of my feet and examine the lower body. Under the filth from the burned tire, I see jeans and worn boots. Understanding knocks me backward. I fall on my ass and drop my flashlight. I try to breathe, can’t, clench and unclench my fists. I close my eyes, stop looking at the corpse so I can relax enough to speak. When I open them, Antti is standing over me.

“It’s not a child,” I say. “It’s a small adult woman. My ex-wife Heli.”

Antti’s mouth opens and closes, opens and closes again. “Fuck. Kari. I’m sorry.”

He offers his hand, helps me to my feet. We stand side by side on the ice. He picks up the flashlight and shines it on Heli. We stare at her for what seems a long time.

“What do we do?” Antti asks.

I consider the question, can’t think, sit down on a fishing-tackle box. “I saw Heli earlier tonight. I might have been the last one to see her alive. I can’t do anything, it might contaminate the investigation. You have to process the crime scene. Wait on Esko, he’ll help you.”

What I said is true, but also, I’m incapable of working and I know it.

He sits down on the other tackle box. “Okay,” he says.

Esko arrives, and Antti explains the situation to him. Esko hunches down beside me. “I’m sorry,” he says, “we’ll take care of it.”

Antti needs my crime kit. I stand up, walk a few yards away, chain-smoke and watch them examine Heli’s corpse, the husk that remains of her. I should feel something, remember moments from my life with Heli. Her life should pass before my eyes, but my mind is blank, I feel nothing. The cold seeps through me. It feels like ice water flows in my veins. I stare across the lake into the forest’s impenetrable shadows, then watch the stars.

After a while, Esko comes over. “You don’t need to stay here.”

It takes me a second to realize he spoke to me and another to understand what he said. “What if Antti needs something?”

“He won’t. Can you drive yourself home?”

I nod.

“Go on then,” he says.

I stumble off the lake and wade through the snow up the bank to my car.

I shut the front door behind me. Kate is sitting on the couch with her broken leg propped up on a stool. She’s watching an American sitcom with a canned laugh track. I sit down beside her.

“I thought you’d be gone all night,” she says.

I stare at the TV, shake my head.

She comes close, looks in my eyes. “What happened?”

“It was Heli,” I say.

“What are you talking about?”

Maybe she thinks I’m talking about Sufia’s murder or Heikki’s suicide. “Heli. My ex-wife. It wasn’t a child. Somebody put a tire around Heli’s chest and arms, filled it with gasoline and set her on fire. She’s dead.”

Kate’s eyes open wide. She reaches over and takes my hands. “Kari

… ”

I keep staring at the television. I laugh at a stupid joke, look down at my feet. I forgot to take off my boots. I watch snow melt all over the carpet.

I almost never cry. Sometimes I go years without crying. When I was a boy, if I cried, Dad beat me. He must have beaten the tears out of me. I start to cry, just a little, and it surprises me. In a way, it terrifies me. “Suvi,” I say.

Kate keeps my hands clasped between hers. “What?”

“Suvi. Heli died where Suvi died.”

She turns off the TV. Her voice goes gentle, like she’s talking to a child. “Kari, would you like a drink?”

I nod.

She hobbles to the kitchen on her crutches and returns with a bottle of scotch and a water glass. I pour a triple and think of Dad, sitting in his armchair, drinking vodka out of a water glass, getting drunk, yelling at Mom and us kids, hitting us. I down the scotch and pour another just like it.

Kate wraps an arm around me. “Suvi died where Heli died?”

I take another drink. “Yeah.”

“Who is Suvi?”

I haven’t said Suvi’s name out loud in thirty years. Tears shoot out of me. I can’t see. I try to talk through the snot choking me. “Suvi died because I didn’t take good enough care of her. Heli died because I didn’t solve the murder. They’re dead and it’s my fault.”

After I finish off the second drink, Kate takes the glass away from me. “Kari, you still haven’t told me who Suvi is.”

“Suvi was my sister.”

I’m crying and choking and choking and crying and through it all I’m spitting out the story of how Suvi fell through the ice and drowned and how Dad and I did nothing and how they dragged the lake under the ice and pulled her body out. In between broken sentences, I’m taking swigs out of the scotch bottle. I’ve drunk most of it.

Kate pulls me close. I try to push her away but don’t have the strength. “Why didn’t you tell me about Suvi before?” she asks.

Crying embarrasses me. I wipe snot on my sleeve and sob. “Because I didn’t want you to blame me.”

She pulls my face next to hers, cradles me in her arms. “Kari, you were nine years old.”

I start crying harder again, spread tears and snot on her shoulder. “Do you blame me?” I ask.

“No Kari, I don’t blame you.”

She rocks me back and forth. I pass out drunk, don’t remember anything after that.