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

why did this horrible vision come to her so powerfully, so realistically? Even his familiar red checked shirt was vivid in her mind. She closed her eyes to get rid of the sight, but the image
didn’t go away, the buzz in her head only grew louder. She started to feel dizzy, her cane fell out of her hand, and she had to hold on to the tram stop railing for support. She hoped her
feeling of nausea wouldn’t make her vomit, and she realized she was crying.

Chapter 10
    ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ rang brightly across the lobby of Meilahti Hospital. ‘Where have you been?’
    Irma had begun to get nervous waiting for Siiri and Anna-Liisa. She had arrived on time, contrary to habit, and ended up having to wait at the reception desk for nearly four minutes. The
neighbourhood around the hospital had changed completely since the last time Siiri had been there, to see her husband, around the turn of the millennium. Without Anna-Liisa she never would have
found the place, now called Meilahti Hospital, its entrance painted a ghastly orange.
    ‘It’s like walking into a metro station,’ Irma said.
    Irma found some art photographs of Helsinki on the wall and looked at them more closely to see if a tenth-generation Helsinkian would recognize anything in them. Anna-Liisa and Siiri
weren’t interested in this game and went to find out what ward Olavi Raudanheimo was in. Siiri asked the attendant to write down the floor and room number on a slip of paper and with this
they wandered down the hallway, following a white line painted on the floor, as they had been instructed.
    They walked along the line single file and felt like children holding a rope on a preschool outing to the zoo or the museum. Siiri had the idea that it might be a sobriety test, to see if they
could walk in a straight line, like the tests police give to drivers. Maybe the hospital had painted the line on the floor so they could tell exactly how drunk their visitors were. Irma thought it
was like walking a tightrope in the circus, but she had a hard time staying on the line and started to get so dizzy that she had to step off it.
    They continued onwards in this manner and didn’t notice where the line was taking them. When eventually they stopped to clear Irma’s head, they realized they were in the basement,
although Olavi’s room was on the twelfth floor. They had to ask directions several times before they found him. Anna-Liisa found it hard to believe that they really needed to go down two
floors before they could go up, and Irma wanted to ask a real doctor, preferably a medical professor, whether it mattered if they didn’t get there via the white line.
    ‘The staff are very friendly,’ Irma said, pleased. ‘Much nicer than at Sunset Grove. They stop and talk to you and look you in the eye.’
    Anna-Liisa was impressed, too. ‘They even speak Finnish. Did you notice that the last person we talked to used the formal
you
correctly? That’s unusual. I would have been
impressed at the attempt even if he’d got it wrong.’
    When finally they reached Olavi, they found he had been given a good room with only four beds and a private toilet. It was quiet, too – no television blaring trivial chatter in a corner.
And you could see a long way from the window, at least as far as Lauttasaari, if not all the way to Espoo. Siiri, Irma and Anna-Liisa admired the view and soon got into a quarrel over where the
proper boundary of Töölö began, but then Olavi’s room-mate, who said he was a townie, intervened.
    ‘Stenbäckinkatu,’ he said, coughing loudly. ‘That’s the boundary of Töölö.’
    Anna-Liisa was obviously of a different opinion, and Irma was curious to know if the man was a drunk, since it seemed that the only people who called themselves townies were chronic alcoholics.
But neither woman said anything because they remembered that they had come to see Olavi Raudanheimo, who was sitting in his bed looking very thin but perfectly