I’ve never figured out why my father is such an argumentative, aggressive jerk. He has four sons, and we all left home as soon as we were old enough. He drove us away with his drunken rages and beatings. My three brothers did pretty well for themselves though.

When Finland’s economy collapsed in 1989, my oldest brother, Juha, went to Norway to look for work and got a job in a fish canning factory. Now he’s married and makes good money working in the Norwegian oil fields. After Timo’s short stint in jail for bootlegging, he settled in Pietarsaari, on the West Coast, and works in a paper factory. Jari got into medical school, and now he’s a neurologist in Helsinki.

Dad is always putting Jari down, says he thinks he’s better than everybody else. Dad is just jealous of him. Jari is one of the nicest people I know. My brothers are all nice guys, but we’re not close. Maybe because we shared so many bad experiences, it’s easier to limit contact so we don’t have to think about our childhoods.

Mom has put up with Dad going on fifty years. I don’t know how she’s managed it. Then again, she had no money, no education. I suppose after she got married and figured out what she’d gotten herself into, she didn’t have many options. Still, I wish she had tried to do more to defend us kids from him.

“I know you weren’t at work,” I say. “If I don’t know where you were and somebody asks later, it’ll look like I’m hiding something. I’m trying to protect you.”

“It’s not your business where I was.”

“If you were drunk somewhere, I don’t care.” It occurs to me that maybe he’s having an affair. “If it’s something you don’t want Mom to find out about, I won’t tell her.”

He finishes the piimä in a long gulp. “I was fishing,” he says.

Now I get it. It was the anniversary of my sister Suvi’s death. He spent the afternoon sitting on the frozen lake, visiting the spot where she died. Dad and I look at each other. I feel embarrassed because I intruded on something so private to him, and the sadness I always feel when I think of Suvi wells up.

I stand and put a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for telling me.”

I head toward the front door.

“You gonna come by on Christmas?” he asks.

“Yeah. Kate and I will come over.”

I realize I haven’t told him Kate broke her leg or that she’s pregnant. “Kate took a bad fall skiing,” I say. “She fractured her femur.”

“Her thigh bone?”

“Yeah.”

“She gonna be okay?”

“The cast is awkward for her, but she’s okay. And she’s pregnant. We’re going to have twins.”

He laughs to himself. “Twins huh?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re gonna have your hands full.”

He doesn’t seem to have anything more to add, so I leave.

20

I SHOW THE PHOTOS of Seppo and Peter around the neighborhood. No one recognizes them. I visit Eero and Martta. Eero invites me in and I accept. The scents of cardamom, melted butter and sugar waft out of the kitchen. The Christmas tree is lit. A fire burns in the hearth. Martta comes out from the kitchen and greets me, then brings coffee and warm pulla, sweet coffee rolls, for all of us. I sit in a recliner, while they sit together on a love seat and hold hands. I ask Eero if the car he saw pulling out from Aslak’s reindeer farm was graphite or black.

“Too dark, too dark,” he says. “Besides, I was busy talking on the phone, so I wasn’t paying attention.”

I lay pictures of star-spoked and double-spoked wheels on the coffee table between us. “Do you happen to remember,” I ask, “what kind of wheels were mounted on the car?”

He points at the star-spoked wheels. “This kind.”

“It must have been hard to tell,” I say. “Wasn’t the car moving?”

“It stopped at the top of Aslak’s driveway,” he says, “before it pulled out onto the road. Even in the dark, they were shiny.”

Martta’s pulla is delicious. I help myself to another. Sulo, their Jack Russell terrier, hops into my lap. I pet him, and we gossip about the neighbors.

ON THE WAY HOME, I stop at the video store and rent Sufia’s movies, then go to the grocery and pick up potatoes and a couple steaks. I catch Kate up on events while I cook. She sits at the kitchen table, her broken leg propped up on a chair.

“Eero sounds like a real character,” she says, “but if he’s schizophrenic and talks to imaginary people, he’s probably not medicated. Isn’t he a danger to himself?”

“Martta keeps him out of trouble, and besides, we’re a small community. Everybody is used to him. People tend to think of him as more eccentric than sick.”

She laughs a little. “In the States, they have TV commercials for Viagra, cosmetic surgery, antidepressants. They ask, ‘Are you tired in the morning, stressed at work, have trouble sleeping at night?’ By the time they run through the list of symptoms, they’ve included everybody. People believe they’re depressed and go running to the doctor begging for drugs. Here, you’ve got a guy talking to imaginary friends on a pay phone, and they not only don’t treat him, they disconnect the line but leave the phone booth so he can be happy. That’s real community and I like it.”

“Northern Finland has its good points,” I say.

“About the case,” she says, “what do you think about this Peter Eklund guy?”

“I think I hate him,” I say. “His family has been rich for centuries, since Finland was a province of Sweden, and it gives him a feeling of entitlement he’s done nothing to earn. It’s because of the same mind-set that I had to learn Swedish in school, even though only five percent of Finns are part of the Swedish-speaking minority. I’ve got nothing against Swedish-speaking Finns in general, but a lot of the rich Helsinki ones in particular believe the rest of us are supposed to cater to their whims. As they say in Swedish, Peter thinks he’s bättre folk, and he can do anything he wants without regard for others.”

“You’re right about Heli,” Kate says. “She had a motive, but do you really think she could have committed such a brutal murder?”

“I can’t imagine anyone doing it, but like I told Valtteri, somebody did. Let’s see what he turns up. Besides motive, she needed opportunity. It would have been hard for her without an accomplice.”

“Valtteri is right too,” she says. “If investigating Seppo caused you so much trouble, investigating Heli might get you fired.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to. You could hand over the evidence to another detective. Like the chief said, cite conflict of interest.”

The steaks sizzle and I flip them. “If it goes far enough, I’ll consider it.”

I put in Unexpected, the first movie of Sufia’s trilogy, in the DVD player. We eat in front of the TV and watch it.

Sufia plays a sexy but innocent young woman, adrift in Helsinki’s nightlife. She becomes involved in an affair with a young, successful and attractive-but morally arid-man who uses her. Ultimately, she ends up with a young, successful and attractive man who values her. In addition to love, she finds herself and happiness. Sufia’s acting is good. She’s a bright spot in a bad film.

Kate falls asleep before the end of the movie. I carry her to bed and put in Unexpected II. It’s much the same as the first one. It poses as a multiplot story that exposes the social mores of young, single professionals in Helsinki. This thin veneer masks a soft-core porn flick in which seven people have a revolving sexual relationship. Some of them find happiness, some don’t.

In Unexpected III, Sufia’s romantic and sexual desires conflict with her studies. She intends to become a Lutheran minister. I fast-forward through it and watch only the scenes in which Sufia appears. In the majority of them, her flawless dark skin is set off by see-through white lingerie. Her great love from the second film winds up in prison, but in the final scene, Sufia marries yet another suitor and finds even greater love and deeper self-fulfillment. The happy couple drives away in a BMW 330i.