Read Online The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove by Minna Lindgren - Free Book Online Page A

one who ran away to China. He was a real Emil when he was little, just as sweet,
and quite impossible.’
    ‘I heard that the boy who was the cook here hung himself,’ Anna-Liisa said.
    ‘Who?’ Siiri said, but Irma was still talking.
    ‘I like the Moomin books, too,’ Irma continued. ‘They’re such clever stories!’ She thought that the older a person got, the more like a Moomin they became.
‘Until eventually it’s hard to tell whether someone’s a man or a woman – or maybe it’s not, but anyway. Just think how fun it would be if we could all grow tails. We
could hold them out at right angles and the nurses would urge us to cheer up like Moominpappa did at the Hemulens’ kindergarten.’
    ‘What are you girls lazing about for?’ Exercise Annie said, interrupting their wandering conversation. She smiled brightly, patted Siiri and Anna-Liisa, and waved her exercise stick
invitingly. They called all the young rehabilitation directors Exercise Annie.
    ‘You’re not too late for the stick exercises! And today we get to play with balls, too!’
    Anna-Liisa and Irma promised they would come to the exercise class and left to get their exercise clothes from their apartments. Siiri didn’t feel like it. There was something degrading
about messing around with sticks and balls, especially when you had to do it in front of a wall of mirrors with everyone looking so old and wrinkled that it was difficult to recognize yourself.
They did, in fact, look like Moomins in their grey exercise outfits, just as Irma had said.
    Siiri went out and caught the number 4 tram, accidentally ending up at the stop in front of Stockmann department store although she had intended to get off earlier and transfer to the number 10.
She walked through the store, past the perfume counter and the magazine racks, to the stop on Mannerheimintie. The number 10 came quickly and she took it past the old Surgery Hospital, which
wasn’t a hospital any more. She’d read in the paper that they were building new hospitals in Meilahti for hundreds of millions of euros so that they could move out of the beautiful old
buildings. The more medicine progressed, the more expensive it became because people were healthier and didn’t die when they were supposed to any more.
    When the tram came back around to the Mannerheim statue, Siiri got on the number 6 and rode it to Hietalahti market square. That was where the old brick and stucco market hall designed by Selim
A. Lindqvist was, the most beautiful market hall in Helsinki. On her way home she got off on Bulevardi and glanced in the window at Cafe Ekberg. She’d never been in, and she didn’t go
in this time, either, although Irma always talked about how nice it was. Irma liked to go to the Ekberg with her old schoolmates.
    Siiri walked through the Plague Park to Yrjönkatu and stopped to look at Wäinö Aaltonen’s relief sculpture on the Suomi building, with its heavy horses and strange, ungainly
angels. She continued to the Swimming Hall and couldn’t think of the architect’s name and wondered when she had last been swimming. But she couldn’t remember. Then she went around
the back of the ugly Forum building and looked into the courtyard of the Amos Anderson Museum, and missed her husband, and turned onto Simonkatu, and finally arrived at the tram stop for her own
number 4, in front of the Glass Palace.
    She almost fell asleep on the tram and was so tired when she got off that she stopped to catch her breath at the tram stop. She leaned on her cane and looked at Sunset Grove through the trees.
It was a repulsive, 1970s concrete building with a flat roof and little windows. It was probably impossible to build anything beautiful out of concrete. Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, an
image of Tero, beautiful, long-haired Tero, hanged, came into her mind: his face swollen and distorted, his feet swinging loose in the air. She’d seen hanged people like that on television.
But