As White as Snow Read Online Free PDF Page B

over. When she took a quick glance back, no one seemed to be following them. Lenka ran ahead surprisingly fast, and Lumikki had to struggle to keep up. Lenka ran as if she were used to escaping.
    At the church, Lenka finally stopped. Lenka panted heavily. Her eyes shone with panic.
    “It must not have been him,” Lenka said. “He would have come after us. Maybe it was someone else. The sunglasses and everything made it hard to tell.”
    Lumikki was lost.
    “Before our next wind sprint, it would be nice to know what’s going on,” she said.
    Lenka wiped the sweat from her brow.
    “We’re not in any danger. I just didn’t want him to find out this way. It would be hard for him to understand. But it wasn’t him, so . . .”
    Lenka was talking to herself as if Lumikki wasn’t even there, and Lumikki was getting frustrated. Lenka swung between moods so fast it was hard to keep up.
    “What are you talking about?” Lumikki demanded loudly to get her attention.
    It worked. Lenka straightened up and came back to the present moment.
    “I should probably just take you to meet the family. Openness is the best solution. They’ll know what to do.”
    Lumikki wasn’t at all sure she liked the sound of Lenka’s words.

The house rose dark and drowsy even in the brightest sunshine of a summer day. It was an old, three-story wooden house with a tower. Actually, it looked a lot like Tuulikki Pietilä’s model Moomin house. Not the simple, cone-shaped building from the Japanese cartoon versions of the Moomin stories or from the Moominworld amusement park. This was more like the rambling, angular model with all the windows and balconies that Lumikki had loved studying as a child when she went to the Moomin Museum at the Tampere City Library.
    But where the mysterious passageways and unexpected nooks in the Moomin house excited the imagination, Lenka’s family’s house seemed strangely melancholy. That was probably because of what awful shape it was in: peeling paint, rusted gutters, collapsing balconies, and unwashed windows,some of which were cracked. The house was so far gone it would have been condemned in Finland. Overgrown ivy crept across the walls, climbing all the way to the roof. The exterior must have been ivory once, but now it was more splotchy gray.
    The yard didn’t seem like anyone paid much attention to it either. The grass was short, but it was yellow and dead in places. The only decorative element was the row of white rosebushes along the front walk. And even some of the roses were discolored, their heads hanging down in sorrow. At the back of the yard was a small, strange stone building whose purpose Lumikki couldn’t imagine. It was too narrow to be a toolshed, but didn’t look like an outhouse either.
    Nothing about the house or the yard was welcoming. Even less so was the massive, black iron fence that surrounded the property, tall and threatening. The sharp spikes sent a clear message: Don’t even try getting over. The gate was big and heavy and locked.
    The house definitely wasn’t in the center of town. Lenka had led Lumikki first by metro, then by bus, and finally, a long way on foot. They were off the beaten path to say the least. There were no residential buildings on the neighboring lots.
    Lenka looked at Lumikki hesitantly.
    “Do you believe you’re my sister?” she asked.
    Lumikki was uncomfortable.
    “I don’t know,” she replied honestly. “Everything you said sounds possible, and it would explain a lot, but—”
    “You can’t come meet the family if you don’t believe,” Lenka said, interrupting Lumikki brusquely.
    What the hell was this? Had she brought Lumikki all this way for nothing?
    “We have a rule that only relatives can pass these gates,” Lenka explained. “And that rule is absolute.”
    Lenka’s gaze was steadfast, as if she had suddenly found the inner certainty she’d been missing. As if the proximity of her home gave her the strength to stand a little