by Ann Yost
I found Mrs. Moilanen, along with the pastor’s wife, Sirpa Sorensen, laying out the food on Elli’s long table. I spotted my favorite, a fresh oven pancake pannukakku, next to a jug of lingonberry syrup and a plate of sausages as well as freshly baked bread pulla, and fish cakes, a tray of squeaky cheese, herring salad, blueberry strata, made with the berries Mrs. Sorensen had frozen last summer and Edna’s party dish, vinegar cabbage. The scent of coffee hovered above the rest and served to blend the other strong scents together. I heard the blue-ribbon committee guests from Lansing making appreciative sounds as they descended the walnut staircase and I didn’t blame them. For once, though, I wasn’t hungry.
“So, Henrikki,” Mrs. Moilanen said, looking up at me over her granny glasses, “heirloom lace, hmm?”
I smiled at the short, stout woman with blue-rinsed curls and a habit of sewing fussy collars on her sweatshirts. It occurred to me that if Mrs. M. did not want to venture into heirloom lace, we might get out of it. With the exception of Arvo, the lady had more clout than anyone in town, including the mild-mannered Reverend Sorensen.
It’s impossible to exaggerate the extent of Mrs. Moilanen’s influence. It was due, not to the fact that she was the widow of a longtime assemblyman who was also a church deacon, but to her position as president of the Ladies Aid. No one seemed to remember how she had acquired the title, only that it was for life, like the Supreme Court, and it gave her decision-making power in choosing who would work set up and clean up for church potlucks, funeral suppers and so forth. She chose who would dust the piano, who would fold up the best (funeral) tablecloths, who would arrange flowers and who would get to wear the fancy, organdy half-aprons as opposed to the flour-sack coverings.
Mrs. M. was a tartar but, as my mother said, she was conscientious and held to high standards and the pick could have been worse.
“She means well,” my mother said, “and she is efficient. Also, Henrikki, Edna is the kind of person who can be counted on to bring at least two dishes to every smorgasbord. And not just a Jell-O mold. Two hot dishes.”
“Do you have a problem with the wedding ring shawl project,” I asked, hopefully.
Mrs. Moilanen straightened her spine which resulted in a lift of several inches to her massive bosom.
“I feel it is my responsibility to make certain we are not embarking on it for the wrong reason.”
I gazed at her, not understanding. “Wrong reason?”
Mrs. Moilanen sighed as if she despaired of my little gray cells.
“Pauline Maki is pushing this, then?”
“It’s her idea. Yes.”
“For the guest, Liisa Pelonen?”
“I believe she said she’d like to make a shawl for Liisa.” A spasm of regret hit me as I remembered why Liisa would never get to use the wedding ring shawl and I missed Mrs. Moilanen’s next words. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“Ah, Henrikki,” she said, not critically but with a certain air of disappointment. “You are always gathering wool. Can you not put together the dots? If Liisa Pelonen is about to be married it can be for only one reason.”
I finally got it. Mrs. M. was suggesting that Liisa was pregnant and facing a shotgun wedding. Nothing, I thought, could be further from the truth.
“There has been some hanky panky going on,” Mrs. M. continued. “And, no wonder, then. That girl is too pretty for her own good.”
The guests were filtering into the dining room and I knew it was time to cut off the topic of conversation.
“Nonsense,” I said, trying to maintain respect in my denial. She was, after all, the Ladies Aid Czar. “I plan to make a shawl for Charlie for her hope chest. (FYI: Charlie would die to hear me use an old-fashioned term like that on top of which she was a raging feminist and had no intention of ever getting married.) Anyway, I doubt whether any of us will finish up the shawls. They are very difficult to knit, you know.”
Mrs. Moilanen’s faded blue eyes narrowed on me and I remembered, too late, that she prided herself on her competence in all domestic matters.
“You may not finish your shawl, Henrikki,” she said, “but I will finish mine.” She turned to one of the men from Lansing and gave him a bright, welcoming smile. “Good morning! Did you sleep well? Won’t you try our eye-opener?” She pointed to the dish in front of her. “It’s my very own vinegar cabbage.”
I was so busy admiring the way she shifted gears on a dime, as Pops would say, that I didn’t get out of earshot quickly enough and after the guest had moved on, Mrs. Moilanen lobbed a parting shot.
“You should be making a wedding ring shawl for yourself, girl. You are not a spring chicken any longer, then.”
Technically, I am still married, but, all things considered, I decided not to point it out.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, meekly.
“By the way,” Mrs. Moilanen added, “whatever is wrong with that Liisa Pelonen, anyway? I understand Astrid Laplander is to take her place. She sings like a frog, you know.”
Four
I managed to make my escape from the smorgasbord a short time later. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about what the Ladies Aid president had said about Liisa Pelonen.
“She’s too pretty for her own good.”
Was her exceptional beauty behind her death? If so, how? Was she killed out of jealousy? Did that mean I had to seriously consider Astrid and Ronja Laplander or Barb and Diane Hakala as suspects? Just thinking about the possibility started a surge of panic that had me gasping for breath. No. Never. If Liisa’s death was, in fact, a homicide, the perp had to be an outsider.
Normally I like to take my time and enjoy the pristine look of my town after a snowfall.
Unlike other UP towns that resemble old-west outposts, Red Jacket has a historic downtown with several blocks of two-story buildings that include cupolas and pillars and little balconies on the second floor. Our library was a former union hall and it is large and spacious and built with rose-colored stone from the Jacobsville quarry. We have a gold-domed opera house, too. Most of all, we have a cathedral. The building that houses St. Heikki’s Finnish Lutheran Church is tall and medieval-looking with flying buttresses and gargoyles. Sofi refers to it as Quasimodo’s winter home. If this architecture looks out of place in the otherwise very rural Keweenaw Peninsula it is because it was built at a time the town’s coffers were overflowing with the profits from mining and selling ninety-five percent of the world’s pure copper.
When the copper gave out, so did the gravy train, and what we have left is a group of buildings that look a lot better with a cover of snow than without it.
But, like I said, I wasn’t thinking about the weather. I found myself wishing I had someone to talk to about Liisa Pelonen. The idea of calling Jace and asking for his help flitted into my mind just long enough to practically give me a seizure. I was still breathing heavily when my cell phone sounded.
“Hey, Hatti,” Sonya Stillwater said. “Did I wake you?”
That drew a choked laugh.
“No. I can safely say I’ve been up for eons, am fully caffeinated and parked in front of Bait and Stitch. Geez Louise I’m glad to talk to you.”
Sonya, who is probably the only Navajo living on the Keweenaw Peninsula, arrived like Glinda, the Good Witch, several years ago. She is about my height with long, gleaming black hair usually worn in a thick braid that brushes against the denim overalls she wears all-year-round. In addition to taking care of pregnant women and delivering babies, she is an all-purpose healer and is always willing to help in any medical situation, whether it is an emergency or not. She has been a godsend to mothers who need to know whether their offspring are suffering from strep or a virus and she can take X-rays to determine whether a fall has resulted in a broken bone. She’s always willing to listen to the story of a stubbed toe or a tummy ache, she is an expert at applying Paw Patrol Band-Aids and she administers injections for insulin and flu shots. Despite her avowed ignorance of needle arts, she’s become a mem
ber of our knitting circle and a close friend.
“Me too, you. Have you talked to Einar? Did he tell you I was in yesterday?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I had a few minutes and I wanted to get some reassurance on this lace project.”
I groaned, knowing what would come next.
“Einar looked at you as if you’d just flown in from outer space and were speaking Klingon.”
She laughed. “Pretty much.”
“Well, listen, Sonya, there is no pressure on you to make the wedding ring shawl, okay? It’s going to be tedious and time-consuming and stressful because once you’ve knitted the stitches, you can’t tear them out. The threads of a fine yarn just shred when you do that. I’d advise calling in sick for the duration.”
“Nonsense,” she said, lightly. “Like I’ve told you before, H, I’m here for the whole Yooper experience and that includes learning to love pasties and gloggi (Finnish eggnog), rice pudding, snow, and ridiculously complex knitting projects.”
“You forgot monosyllabic men.”
“Oh, that’s my favorite part. Nothing like a man who knows his place.”
I laughed. “Well, don’t worry about the project. Lace is just yarn-overs and knit two together. It’s basically a series of holes. And, anyway, Pauline Maki is in charge of it and she won’t let anyone fall behind. I believe she intends to run the circle like a bingo game where she calls out the next stitch, then waits until everyone has done it before moving on.”
“Very thorough, our Pauline,” Sonya said.
“Yes. Perfection wouldn’t be too exalted a description.”
“How’s she doing with the guest? I imagine having a teenager in the house is quite an adjustment for a childless woman.”
OMG. I’d forgotten about Liisa. A black cloud of anxiety seemed to envelop me like a winter fog on the Great Lake.
I found I was holding my breath.
“Hatti? There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”
In the split second that it took to decide to confide in her, I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea.
“Liisa Pelonen is dead. Last night. The Makis found her in their sauna about nine-fifteen when they got home from the smorgasbord at the B and B. They want to keep it quiet until the end of the weekend and they want me to figure out what happened to her.”
Sonya absorbed my rapid-fire delivery of the shocking news with her usual quickness.
“Where’s the body?”
“Arvo has it. Probably in the embalming room.”
“You want me to take a look?”
I exhaled as the weight of being the only one responsible slipped off my shoulders.
“Would you?”
“Unofficially, of course. I can’t do a full autopsy but I can look her over, see what I can tell you.”
“That would be wonderful. She seemed to have sustained a wound near her right temple but it didn’t look that deep and we couldn’t see any other reason for death.”
She cut me off.
“Let me get my own first impressions, okay? I’ll head over there as soon as I’ve delivered Mrs. Kaukola’s baby.”
“That shouldn’t take long,” I said, all keyed up now. “It’s like her thirteenth, isn’t it?”
“Ninth. And every baby is different. Besides, Mrs. Kaukola’s getting a little long in the tooth. I’d have liked her to have this one in the hospital but she doesn’t hold with that. Or so she told me.”
“Mrs. K is old school. You’re lucky she’s not insisting on having it in the sauna.”
“Didn’t I tell you? She is. It’s the only place she can get away from the hordes, she says, including her husband.”
“Evidently.”
Sonya chuckled. “Will the Makis mind if I stop by?”
“I’m sure not. They may be out though. Today’s the Pikkujoulu Festival and St. Lucy pageant.”
“I’d forgotten. Key in the milk chute?”
One of the things I loved about Sonya was that she’d taken the time to learn our traditions, including the custom of keeping an extra house key in the chutes that were as ubiquitous as saunas in our community. The story we told was that we were less afraid of theft than we were of freezing to death in our endless winter. The reality, though, was probably that our language of love was the giving and receiving of food and nobody wanted to miss a fresh huckleberry pie or a pot of fish-and-potato soup.
“Yep.”
“Hatti, do you happen to know whether the girl had an arrhythmia?”
“You’re talking about syncope, aren’t you? I asked Pauline about that. She said Liisa did have a history of fainting.”
There was a brief silence.
I grimaced. “Pauline decided on the heirloom lace because she wanted to make a shawl for Liisa.”
“Kind of breaks your heart. What do you think we’re looking at here? Some kind of an accident?”
I shivered. “I hope so.”
“In other words, there’s a chance it could be, what? Murder?”
I shivered, again, even though it wasn’t a fresh thought.
“Is there any motive?”
My mind flashed to Ronja Laplander and I shook my head.
“Not really.”
“Listen, if you need help in figuring this out, you might consider talking to Max Guthrie. I understand he was some kind of a cop in his former life.”
“How do you know that? I didn’t think you knew him at all?”
Max Guthrie, a man’s man with a wicked sense of humor and the easy swagger of a man who knew everything there was to know about women and liked it, had arrived in Red Jacket a year earlier. He’d bought Namagok, an abandoned fishing camp and had revived its small cabins and lodge house. He and I had bonded on the subject of fish. Both of us, it seemed, preferred eating them to catching them.
“I guess I heard it somewhere. Never mind. Listen, I’m here. It’s baby time.”
“Thanks for the impromptu autopsy,” I said, “and good luck with the sauna thing.”
“Better to be born in one than to die there,” she said, and rang off.
It seemed to me that as far as Finnish proverbs went, that was as good as it gets.
Five
It occurred to me as I climbed out of the Jeep that I didn’t have a quarter for the parking meter but that was all right. I could just add a quarter when I emptied the meter at the end of the week. Just a perk of my job as top cop.
I found it mildly reassuring to find my assistant in his usual spot behind the cash register, perched on a high stool and working on one of his intricate fishing flies.
I’d inherited Einar Eino, a short, rounded, bald-headed man who was a dead-ringer for a tonttu, which is a Finnish household gnome, when Pops let me take over the bait shop. He (Einar, that is) probably disapproved of my plan to stock yarn and knitting needles, but, if so, he never said and he even, on occasion, deigned to ring up a set of circular Addi-Turbos or several skeins of Cascade Superwash. Best of all, he knew everything there was to know about fishing in local lakes and rivers and he, uncomplainingly, handled all the live bait from red wigglers to mealworms.
Like many Finnish-American men of his generation, Einar normally economized on his words. Not today.
He’d looked up at the sound of the bell I’d attached to the door and his normally stolid face exploded into a scowl.
“Henrikki. You shouldn’t wear box.”
“Box?”
“For costume. Fellas want curve. You never get no husband.”
I’d forgotten there was one theme that could jolt Einar into language and that was my deplorable love life. And Sofi’s. I realized he was referring to the St. Lucy’s Day parade the previous afternoon. Arvo had instructed all the shopkeepers to wear costumes depicting characters from the Kalevala, which is the Finnish creation myth. I used gold spray paint to turn an old Hotpoint box into the Magic Sampo, a mill that could turn grain into gold.
“Luckily,” I reminded him, “I alrea
dy have a husband.”
Einar ignored that and continued his criticism.
“Sofi, too. Man don’t want witch.”
My sister had worn a bathrobe and a long purple wig intended to identify her as Louhi, a pivotal figure in the Kalevala. Louhi is sometimes good, sometimes bad, but she’s always a witch.
“Duly noted,” I said, eager to move on. “Did you go to the parade?”
I was ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure that he’d say no, he’d gone home to sauna. I was wrong. He nodded.
“Girl cold,” he said, which I interpreted as his observation about Liisa Pelonen in her role as St. Lucy.
“She was cold. She got a sore throat and a fever.”
I stopped, abruptly, suddenly realizing I was speaking about Liisa as if she were still alive.
“Scared, too,” Einar said.
My heart jumped. It took a lot for Einar to offer an opinion. What had he noticed that I’d missed?
“You thought the St. Lucy girl looked scared?”
He didn’t respond and I knew he wouldn’t. Einar, as I kept forgetting, did not approve of repetition.
“Any phone calls?”
“Joo,” he said, which means yes.
I waited for a minute then prompted him.
“Who called?”
He shrugged. It was really and truly time to get an answering machine.
“Okay. Thanks. I’m going over to the high school now, for the festival. You’ll be okay here?”
This time Einar didn’t even look up but we understood one another and it occurred to me that the world might be better off with fewer words.
Sofi was ready and we loaded her trays of fresh, uncut fudge into the back of my Jeep and drove the block-and-a-half to the parking lot of Copper County High School. It just happened to be most of the parade route and jogged my sister’s memory.
“It’s too bad it didn’t happen in reverse,” she said.
“What?”
