by Ann Yost
I stared out the window again. The snowflakes were the large, lacy, drifting kind that permitted the observer to see some of their detail. I couldn’t tell whether each was unique, only that each was beautiful.
Beauty, especially beauty like Liisa’s, must have made life more challenging. You couldn’t go unnoticed. People wanted to get near you or, in some cases, wanted to stay away just because of your looks. Matti Murso had fallen under the spell of that beauty and he’d disappointed the others in his life.
What about the other side of it? What was it like to be worshipped because of the way you looked and not because of your essential self? I wondered how Liisa Pelonen had viewed her own physical attractions and suspected she’d have traded the adulation for some real friendship. Maybe that oasis was what she’d found in Reid, why she’d trusted him and married him.
But Reid hadn’t been able to keep her safe any more than Jalmer Pelonen had or Arvo. Instead of studying music in Marquette, Liisa would spend the winter in the holding facility at the Old Finnish Cemetery, waiting until the spring thaw would allow her to be buried.
I finally poured myself a second cup of coffee then wandered down the corridor to Pops’s study which still smelled faintly of pipe tobacco although he’d given up smoking several years earlier. I felt the familiar warmth of being in his place and the added little thrill of seeing my own books on his shelves. He had introduced me to the Golden Age mystery detectives including Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion, Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver, Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn and, of course, Lord Peter Wimsey, the creation of Dorothy L. Sayers.
I flopped in Pops’s cracked leather chair, closed my eyes and wished I had the necessary little gray cells to figure out who was behind our murders. When I heard the door open, I expected to see Scotland Yard’s Inspector Alan Grant but I would have been just as happy with Ellery Queen. I opened my eyes to see my cousin. She looked different.
“What’s up, buttercup?”
“I cannot believe you are lounging around in a pair of bluejeans and that ancient old shirt,” she said, pointing to the raggedy garment with the outline of the UP and the words, “Will UP Mine?”
“Don’t you remember? You asked me to take you to see Mr. Jussi.”
Geez Louise. I’d completely forgotten.
“I made an appointment with him. We’re due there in two hours and it’s snowing. You’ve got negative fifteen minutes to get cleaned up.”
The best I could do, considering the laundry situation, was a pair of green corduroy jeans and a butter-yellow sweater. At least it was a step up from a sweatshirt. I raked a comb through the haystack on top of my head and swiped my lips with gloss then raced out the back door to join Elli in the aging, oversized SUV she bought used for the Leaping Deer and that Lars always referred to as the Queen Mary.
She pulled out of the alley onto Tamarack Road then headed south on M-26.
“I’m a little worried about your memory,” she said, as she sped down the highway. “You forgot to pick up the yellow roses for Pauline and Sofi asked me to do it.”
“Why didn’t she just call me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Lars was staying at your house.”
“On the sofa,” I said. “What is all this?”
“Oh, just a short fuse because people all around us keep dying.”
“It’s nothing to do with us, El,” I said, patting her arm even though I knew it was a lie. “A girl staying at the funeral home and her father.”
“What about Pops?” Elli and I had grown up as close as twins and had, more than once, noticed that our minds operated the same way. Here it was again.
“What if the snowmobile crash wasn’t an accident? What if somebody deliberately hurt him?” Her voice was getting louder and higher. “What if this is some kind of conspiracy?”
“I know,” I said, deliberately calm. “I thought of that, too. It seems to me that we’re doing everything we can do. We’re going to see Mr. Jussi to find out who will inherit the trust fund.”
Elli was silent for a moment.
“Do you think that’s who it is? That Mr. Jussi will just hand us the answer?”
I thought about my earlier swirling thoughts and my sense that there was more to these murders than money.
“It’s possible,” I said, trying to stay upbeat.
“Hatti,” she said, taking her eyes off the road and gazing at me for longer than was healthy. “What if it’s Arvo?”
Twenty-Five
Elli shifted and navigated through the thickening snowfall with the ease of someone who has been driving in difficult conditions all her life. We can all drive in snow because we have to. Elli enjoys it.
“It’s not Arvo,” I said, unconvincingly. “It can’t be Arvo. You know that as well as I do. Geez Louise, Elli. Arvo is our Joulupukki. There’s no way he’s a killer. But, listen. Before you came over I was thinking about Lord Peter Wimsey and that case where the killer used a syringe to get arsenic into an egg.”
“But Liisa wasn’t poisoned.”
“Wasn’t she?”
“No! You know as well as I that she was hit on the head and fainted from the shock and then her heartbeats spaced out so far that she died.”
“That’s one possible explanation. But this killer seems too organized for that. I mean, would he—or she—leave it to chance that the heart problem would kick in? I don’t think so. I think he would make sure.”
“By poisoning her? But didn’t Doc do a tox screen?”
I smiled, despite the grisly topic. I loved it that Elli used a term she’d heard on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
“There are lots of kinds of poison and Doc wouldn’t have known to run any that were out of the ordinary. The trouble is, I wouldn’t know which poison to suggest. It’s probably something arcane.”
“Speaking of arcane,” Elli said, “what was going on at your house last night?”
“What do you mean?”
“Jace. I spotted him letting Larry out this morning and I thought maybe the two of you had reconciled.”
My heart beat a little faster.
“That wasn’t Jace. It was Lars. He needed to talk to Sofi about something and then he was going to come back and sleep on the sofa.”
“You sure he came back?”
“I didn’t see him,” I admitted, “but somebody slept down there. The blanket was neatly folded. And whoever it was fed Larry. It had to be Lars.”
She shook her head.
“I’ll admit those guys you married have some superficial likenesses to each other but you’d better check your guest register. You may have spent the night in the same house alone with—gasp—your husband!”
“Very funny,” I said, but secretly, I was pleased. If true, it meant that Jace had not stayed out all night with Sonya.
“And, if that weren’t enough,” Elli continued, “I saw Lars outside the duplex at zero dark hundred.”
“Geez Louise.”
“It would be weird if a murder was the catalyst to restoring both of these marriages,” Elli said, thoughtfully. “Weird, but good.”
The offices of Jussi & Jussi were nestled into a two-story house-turned-office on Quincy Street in Hancock.
Except for the discreet sign, the Jussi office house was indistinguishable from all the other homes on the street with their steeply pitched rooflines, their covered front porches and, as always, the bump in the back that was, or had been, a sauna.
Hancock was constructed on a hill so the houses on the east side (like the Jussis’) were fronted by terraced front yards while those on the west hunkered close to the earth. As Elli and I climbed the concrete steps that constituted a front walk, I wondered why the attorneys didn’t have a ramp. Or an escalator.
“What do they do about their elderly clients?” I asked, trying not to huff and puff.
“They make house call
s, of course.”
I laughed. “This is probably the last place in the civilized world where lawyers provide that kind of service,” I said, thinking of the high-powered, charge-by-the-minute lawyers I’d met in D.C. Elli paused and looked at me.
“At least you’re calling us ‘civilized.’ Remember how badly you wanted to get away from here and, I quote, have an adventure?”
Though spoken in a spirit of lightness, Elli’s comment reminded me (as if I needed reminding) that my time away from home had created a string of problems I had yet to solve.
The office reception area had obviously started life as someone’s parlor. There was an arched brick fireplace behind the solid, walnut desk and imposing, leather-covered desk chair, and frilly curtains framed the windows. The room was unoccupied, but, almost as soon as we arrived, a dapper elderly man opened the glass doors that led to the rest of the house. He was small and wiry with a full head of wavy white hair. He wore a forest-green plaid shirt, a barn-red tie, a chocolate corduroy sports jacket and a pair of designer jeans. The blue eyes set in the wrinkled face revealed humor, intelligence and a touch of friskiness.
“Hatti, this is Jaakonpoika Jussi,” Elli said, as he captured her hand, lifted it to his lips and kissed it. “Jake, this is Hatti Lehtinen.” He turned to me and took my hand in his, pressing it, rather than kissing it. Very proper.
“The reigning Red Jacket police chief,” he murmured, revealing that he knew the purpose of the visit. “I hope you don’t mind walking to lunch.”
The shoveled part of the sidewalk was a narrow path between three-foot piles of packed snow. Even so, Jake Jussi managed to keep us together by gripping Elli’s arm with his left hand and mine with his right. I got the impression he’d had plenty of practice squiring ladies. We reached the Kalevala Café in about ten minutes.
“Jake’s home away from home,” Elli explained, as he deftly held the door for both of us.
“You eat at the same place every day?”
“Not only the same place, the same lunch,” Elli said, with a laugh. “Pannukkaku with thimbleberry sauce. And coffee.”
Jake Jussi winked at me. “Sometimes I order maple syrup just to shake things up.”
We were warmly welcomed and assigned the pride of place, a square table near the front window from which we commanded an excellent view of the Christmas wreath on the front of the Miner’s Bank across the street and of the business lunch crowd and Christmas shoppers on the sidewalk. Compared with Red Jacket, downtown Hancock was Times Square.
The pancakes were as good as Elli’s and I found myself wolfing them down.
Elli smiled at Jake Jussi. “She skipped supper last night and, I suspect, breakfast this morning.”
I realized to my astonishment that it was true. It was most unlike me to miss a meal. I was letting the murder case get to me. Or, maybe, I thought, being honest with myself, it had to do with the presence in town of my soon-to-be-ex. My heart sank a little as it occurred to me that Mr. Jake Jussi would be an excellent divorce lawyer. I told myself the timing was wrong. Murder, first, marriage, after.
“I imagine you want to know everything there is to know about Liisa Pelonen and her trust fund.”
I nodded, grateful for his ready understanding.
“Liisa and her father were both clients and, naturally, whatever they told me was confidential while they were alive. Normally, I would be wary of revealing any of it to the police but Elli trusts you and that’s good enough for me.”
Tears pricked the backs of my eyes. It was just another example of the importance of being with your own tribe, the folks who will have your back.
“Liisa’s mother came from Turko,” he said, naming a Finnish city, “and a family with a lucrative furniture-making shop. The money in the trust fund comes from her. Liisa was still very young when Katia, her mother, died, and the family wanted to ensure the child would ultimately benefit from her inheritance. They didn’t know Jalmer, you see. They didn’t know he was a man of honor.”
A slight wobble on the last word of the sentence reminded me that Jake Jussi had sustained the loss of two clients and, perhaps, an old friend.
“I’m sorry,” I said and he nodded, seeming to understand.
“I worked with the family and their lawyer via telephone and interpreter,” he went on. “They were willing to make Jalmer a trustee as long as I was one, too. And they wanted a provision stating that Liisa was to gain access to her inheritance when she turned twenty-one or when she married, whichever came first.”
“So Jalmer Pelonen—and you—had access to the money, for what, fifteen years?”
“Fourteen. And, yes. Either of us could have withdrawn sums. There was no other oversight.” He bent his head so his blue eyes stared very directly into mine. “I should probably point out, before you ask, that neither of us did. Withdraw any money, that is. Jalmer paid me for my services for him and his daughter out of his own fortune.”
“Fortune?” Elli looked at the lawyer. “Jalmer Pelonen had a fortune?”
“A portfolio,” Jussi amended. “Not as big as the trust fund but healthy enough to call him a millionaire.”
“Mr. Pelonen was a millionaire?” The question came from Elli and I remembered she hadn’t seen the high tech set up at his cabin.
“Oh, yes. He traded on the stock market. Not every day, just enough to keep solvent. His real interest was investigating conspiracy theories.”
I stared at the man. “You mean like terrorism?”
Jake Jussi nodded. “And plots to overthrow the government.”
“Did he find any?” Elli asked.
Jussi held his hands to the side, palms up, as if to say, he didn’t know.
“I imagine he thought he did.”
“Geez Louise,” I said, as something struck me. “Is it possible that father and daughter were killed because of Jalmer’s hobby?”
“He spent time in underground chatrooms and researching what he called the deep state. I suppose he could have uncovered secrets but I think it unlikely he ever blew the whistle on anybody. He didn’t trust the government, you know. Not federal or state. He was one of those who wanted the UP to secede from Michigan and form a separate state called Superior.”
“Hatti,” Elli said, excitedly, “think how great it would be if some undercover revolutionary was responsible for both deaths!”
“It would be great,” I said, without enthusiasm. “The sticky bomb points to a terrorist group and I can see some guy tracking Jalmer to Lake Gogebic but how would someone from outside the community know when Liisa would be home alone at the funeral home? And, we still don’t even know how she died. Surely a terrorist would have used a bomb, or a gun or a knife.”
“Jake,” Elli said, “I hate to ask but I think we need to be clear. Can you think of anyone, including her father, who would have wanted to kill Liisa Pelonen?”
Jussi shook his head. “From what I heard, everybody considered her an angel.”
We were all silent for a moment, until the waitress came to re-fill the coffee cups.
“I guess,” I said, “the last question is the most important. Who benefits from Liisa’s and Jalmer’s estates now that they’re both dead?”
“A very interesting point,” Jussi said. “If Liisa had died first, her trust fund would have reverted to her father and, according to his will, the residual beneficiary was a loosely-organized group called the Minuteman Militia.”
“Vigilantes,” I said. Jussi nodded.
“Even with Liisa dying second, the Minutemen could have made a case for the whole kit and caboodle.” He paused. “At least they could have except for one thing.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a single piece of paper and unfolded it. I could see the state seal imprinted at the top of it.
“As you probably already know, Liisa Pelonen got married on December twelfth, the day she died. Her husband is now the sole beneficiary of her estate and that of her father, a total of so
me three million dollars.”
It was what I’d been expecting, so I couldn’t account for the pit in my stomach.
“I’d say,” Jussi said, reading from the certificate, “Reid Night Wind is one very lucky young man.”
“Unless,” I said, “he’s convicted of murder.”
I stared out the passenger-side window of the vehicle as we retraced our steps to the interstate. The snowfall had stopped while we were in Hancock but now the skies opened up again. with a vengeance, and by the time we reached Chassell, golf-ball-sized pellets of hail were pounding the SUV. It felt like driving in a piñata.
“They say the first settlers of this area were the Paleo-Indians, who walked here from Northern Asia,” Elli commented. “On days like this I wonder why they didn’t just keep heading south.”
“Want me to drive for awhile?”
She shook her head. We both knew our odds were better with her at the wheel.
“Thanks for setting up the meeting with Mr. Jussi.”
She glanced at me. “Things look bad for Reid Night Wind.”
“Yep, they do.”
“Hatti, has it occurred to you he might have killed her?”
“No.” I spoke in a low voice. “I’ve met him. I like him. I can’t imagine he would ever kill a girl like that.”
“You couldn’t imagine that his brother would ever walk out on his marriage, though, could you?” I didn’t answer. “You just never know what people will do when there’s so much at stake. With three million dollars, Reid could go anywhere in the world to start his adult life. And then, there’s the baby. Hatti, somebody fathered that child.”
She was right, of course. Add to that the fact that Reid had no alibi at all for Liisa’s murder and, in fact, he admitted to being at the murder scene within minutes of the attack.
“You’re thinking he has no alibi,” Elli said, reading my mind. “What about Arvo? He could have gone home to check on Liisa, found her waiting in the sauna, ready to run away, and struck her in a fit of rage.”
“He could have,” I said, “but I can’t believe he did it anymore than I believe Reid Night Wind did it.”
