This time he will remember.
The girl stops and reaches her light, cool arms around the back of his neck. Olli’s fingers travel up her spine and feel her vertebrae, her shoulder blades, the hollow at the nape of her neck. Joy ignites on her lips and spreads to her eyes. She presses her mouth against his throat. Olli closes his eyes. Her tongue is hot and wet. She presses tighter against him. Olli breathes through her hair. This is what gold smells like, he thinks.
Then someone begins to shriek like a seagull.
Olli.
Greta is biting him.
He struggles.
Her teeth sink deep into his throat. The darkness sways. Blood floods over his skin. Olli grabs the girl by the hair and tears her away from him. Her green eyes are full of tears, her mouth dark with blood.
“Did I hurt you?” she whispers. She has turned cold and sardonic. “Forgive me, my love, but the pain you feel is but a hint of what I feel. Oh, yes, and give my regards to St Anthony.”
The girl steps forward and pushes Olli. He topples onto his back.
The floor gives way.
He falls.
Olli sat up in bed. It felt like an angry gorilla was pounding at the inside of his ribcage. He felt his neck and stared at the bedroom wall.
No bite.
And no painting. Just the mirror.
He pressed his head into his pillow and tried to go back to sleep. It was no use. Something wasn’t right. He’d had an uneasy feeling for days. Now the feeling was stronger. There was something he wasn’t noticing.
He was in bed alone.
He turned towards Aino’s side of the bed, scrambled across and looked over the edge of the bed at the floor. There was nothing there but a pair of striped ankle socks.
He got up and went through the house, looking into every room at least three times.
Aino and the boy were clearly gone.
19
OLLI TRIED CALLING Aino’s number, of course.
When he did, the Turkish March started to play in the kitchen. He followed the sound, puzzled.
He thought he was reacting to the situation with calm rationality—there was no cause for panic, after all—but the pale, pyjamaed man he glimpsed in the mirrors told him otherwise.
Olli found Aino’s phone on top of the refrigerator. It was a phone she’d bought around the time their son was born. Olli had offered to buy her a new phone but she didn’t want one, since the old one still worked. The phone kept ringing. That confused Olli, as did the message on the screen: Olli calling.
It took a moment for him to figure out how to make the Mozart stop.
He walked around the kitchen thinking that he should do something sensible. Clear this up.
No need to panic. At any moment Aino and the boy would come clomping in and she would explain what happened and Olli would wonder why he hadn’t immediately realized what was going on.
It would be best to wait in the kitchen. Olli made some cocoa and sat at the table sipping it, staring at the empty chairs. He tried not to worry, but worried anyway.
Give my regards to St Anthony.
Eventually the sun rose and reflected from the side of the toaster. In all the houses in Mäki-Matti coffee was being made, papers fetched, breakfast cooked. Dogs were tugging at their masters’ leashes, eager to get out to the street and take a crap. Children were waking up and running to wolf down their morning porridge. From somewhere nearby he heard the sound of a trampoline.
Olli’s head hurt. It had fallen onto the table sometime during the night. Also on the table was an empty package of honey cereal. Olli hated that cereal, his son’s favourite, but it had tasted good during the night, bowl after bowl. He took an aspirin, made some coffee and thought. It seemed his family was not here. His family was gone. But where? Why?
Maybe Aino’s aunt or one of her sisters was seriously ill, had been in an accident or had actually died.
Olli considered this theory. Maybe news of it had come during the evening when he went out to meet Greta Kara. Then Aino had frantically called a taxi, taken the boy with her and gone to Joensuu, Helsinki or Lahti, depending on who it was who had come to harm. She had intended to call Olli from the taxi, but she had left her phone at home and didn’t know his number from memory.
Olli called four numbers, without revealing the situation to Aino’s family members. They were all fine.
Maybe she had left him a note. He searched the house for a message. He didn’t find any.
He thought about the matter while he dressed and cleaned himself up. As he brushed his teeth he examined Aino’s phone. He didn’t find anything of interest in the numbers she had called. Her last call had been made several days earlier, to Olli. He remembered the calclass="underline" she had asked him to buy the boy some new swimming trunks and a rubber ring, but Olli had forgotten.
He went through her saved numbers looking for clues. Acquaintances. Relatives. Fellow teachers. Most of the contacts were listed only by their first names, which meant nothing to him. Anna; Anna-Liisa; Anne; Anu; Eeva; Eila; Emma; Emmi; Hair Salon; Hanna; Health Clinic; Irja; Jaana K; Jaana L; Kaisa K; Kaisa R; Kira; Kirsi; Liisa; Laura H; Laura N; Laura S; Mom; Noora E; Noora K; Olli; Paula; Principal; Riitta; Raili; Roosa; Secretary; Taxi; Teacher’s Lounge.
It occurred to Olli that he ought to have listened more closely when Aino talked about people.
He hesitated before reading her text messages, but decided that in an emergency like this it was all right to infringe on her privacy.
There was nothing in her messages that shed any light on the situation.
The next thing that occurred to him was that Aino might have left him. It didn’t seem probable, or even possible, but on the other hand that sort of thing happened all the time. One person just got fed up and left, and the person who was left behind cried to everybody that they hadn’t guessed a thing.
Olli didn’t think Aino was the type of person who would leave her husband. But maybe he just didn’t know his wife. After all, she didn’t know him.
Aino and the boy’s wardrobe didn’t seem to have been emptied. One of the suitcases was missing. He didn’t see her handbag around. The only toothbrush on the bathroom shelf was Olli’s blue one. The red toothbrush and the dinosaur toothbrush were gone. Olli wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
He walked out to the yard.
It was going to be a beautiful day. The sky was dotted with fluffy clouds, some of them in weird shapes. The lawn was positively dripping with green. Bumblebees buzzed around him like fuzzy helicopters.
He looked at Aino’s flower beds. He was surprised how many there were, and wondered if he should water them if it didn’t rain within the next few days.
He went back in the house and watched television for twenty-four hours. The next morning he wondered if he should contact the police, and decided that he would eventually, but not now. Because at any moment the phone might ring or a taxi might pull up in front of the house, and everything would go back to normal again.
Olli called the publishing house and said he had started his summer holiday. Then he went into his home office and opened Facebook. Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life, the sign-in page said.