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

always took care of unpleasant tasks sooner rather than
later. It was easier than letting things pile up. Her son who died of alcoholism had always suffered less for what he’d done than for what he’d left undone. It was hard to understand
how she could have raised him so badly. All her children, really, because it wasn’t quite healthy the way her daughter had taken up teaching yoga and then become a nun.
    Siiri didn’t really need her cane, but it was an expensive model and a gallant companion, as Irma put it.
    ‘My Carl the Cane always finds his way home,’ Irma said the next morning at coffee, as Siiri was getting ready to go and pick hers up.
    Siiri asked about her cane at the hospital reception desk but the girl there didn’t know how to help her. Siiri thought she’d left the cane in Olavi’s room with a view, so she
decided to check there, if she could remember the way. She had some memory of it, but it was a vague kind of memory that she couldn’t swear to as fact. That must be what Irma was talking
about when she said she’d ‘finessed’ something.
    Olavi Raudanheimo was happy when Siiri surprised him at his lunch. They served lunch very early in hospitals, which was probably good, since they woke the patients up so early in the morning.
They had, in fact, poked Olavi awake an hour before breakfast that morning at half past five to take his temperature. He didn’t know why they did it since he couldn’t remember the last
time he’d had a fever. But it was a compulsory procedure and there was no getting out of it. There was a white plate on his tray and on the plate was one potato and something grey.
    ‘Pork gravy, I think,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t see any meat in it.’
    ‘Maybe it’s to give you something to hope for,’ Siiri said, and Olavi laughed in his normal voice, but didn’t touch his food.
    They had such a pleasant time sitting and chatting that Siiri forgot why she had come and thought that she must have come to ask about Reino, since she’d forgotten to ask the day before.
Olavi said that Reino had been sent to the closed unit’s severe dementia ward – Olavi’s son had found that out, too.
    ‘A healthy man, not even that old,’ Olavi said soberly. ‘Reino’s only eighty-seven, isn’t he?’
    Olavi was well-informed about everything. Siiri couldn’t understand how such a person could be mistaken for a halfwit. Even Alzheimer’s wouldn’t strike someone like a bolt of
lightning. But Olavi said that anyone would seem demented if they were given enough medication.
    ‘That’s what my son said. There Reino sat tied to a wheelchair, unable to even remember his own name, a Russian nurse changing his nappy once a day and feeding him gruel with a
spoon. What a fate for a veteran of the war.’
    Olavi’s son had rescued him from the closed unit by telling them that his father needed to go to the hospital for some tests, and once Olavi was out he’d recovered from his
‘dementia’ immediately.
    ‘It was a truly miraculous recovery! They won’t do anything here until they’ve peeled you off your medication. But Reino doesn’t have any children to help him. His only
son died a couple of years ago from a heart attack while jogging. He’d suddenly taken up exercise, the lunatic.’
    When Olavi’s gravy had cooled and solidified, he moved it aside and picked up the newspaper. It was fun reading the news together. There was an article about an integrated retirement home
built in combination with a children’s nursery. It sounded like a good idea to Siiri and Olavi. The children would brighten up the retirement home and the old people could help the overworked
nursery staff with the babysitting. They could eat together, draw, sing, read, and they wouldn’t need to make up any activity busywork. But the paper said that they’d had to give up the
experiment because there had been so many complaints from the children’s parents that the old people