by Ann Yost
In other words, I thought, live by the sword, die by the sword. Was Miss Irene referring to knitting patterns or was she referring to Arvo’s unfortunate decision to make Liisa Pelonen this year’s St. Lucy? I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about that question. I couldn’t seem to stop wondering whether, somehow, the St. Lucy debacle was at the heart of our murders.
An hour later, after we’d all fragmented our fragile yarn and had to splice it together numerous times I began to think that knitting lace was like trying to solve a murder. An exercise in endless frustration.
“You know,” Sofi said, in an effort to pour oil on the troubled waters of the knitting circle, “lace is a kind of a metaphor for life. It isn’t just a smooth ride. There are the spaces and the holes and the things seen and unseen. Shadows and mysteries. A challenge.”
“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; perplexed but not in despair; persecuted but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.”
“Corinthians, again?” The mild complaint came from Mrs. Moilanen.
“It just goes to show, then,” Aunt Ianthe said. “Lace is like the Bible.”
Twenty-Eight
The ring of the doorbell, followed by the appearance of Sonya Stillwater, distracted us. The glow of her smile and the crystals of snow in her midnight hair made her look like a fairy queen. My first reaction was warmth and welcome. But those feelings froze in my chest when I became aware of her companions. I was upset and distracted at seeing a smiling Jace right behind her, but not so distracted I didn’t notice Charlie’s reaction to Jace’s younger brother.
She looked, to paraphrase a line from While You Were Sleeping, ‘Like she’d just seen her first Trans Am.’ A quick glance at Sofi’s expression confirmed this impression. It was as if Charlie’s mother had gazed upon Medusa’s face and been turned to stone. My niece had been hit with the love-at-first-sight stick and my heart went out to her and to Sofi, too.
“How is Cindy Gray Squirrel,” Elli asked, apparently oblivious to the silent drama playing out in front of her.
“Healthy, happy and back home.” Sonya touched Jace’s shoulder. “Thanks, again, to Jace.”
I looked away to avoid torturing myself by watching the affectionate look they exchanged, and, when I looked back, I found the gray eyes focused on me.
Elli and Charlie took the newcomers out to the kitchen while the rest of us resumed our struggles with the lace. Just when I thought I could not bear one more twisted yarn-over or the splitting of frail wool in a knit-two-together, Pauline called it quits.
“Nothing worth doing is ever easy,” she reminded us, as we packed up our knitting bags. “You’ll thank me when you’ve produced a beautiful wedding ring shawl.”
Sofi was the first one out of the room. She dashed into the kitchen and emerged, seconds later, gripping the sleeve of Charlie’s sweater. She reminded me of a mother cat with a kitten in her mouth.
“It’s snowing hard out there,” she said to me. “I’m heading home with Charlie.”
“Aunt Elli was nice enough to invite Reid and his brother to stay at the Leaping Deer,” Charlie told me, unfazed by a poisonous glance from her mother. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“Thanks.” I wanted to ask what about Sonya. Would the snow prevent her from traveling the three blocks to her apartment? And then I realized I had a solution to that. “I’ll invite Sonya to stay here.”
“No need,” Jace said, as he came through the door. “I’ll take her home.”
Sofi took Aunt Ianthe and Miss Irene with her and I walked Mrs. Moilanen and Mrs. Sorensen down to their houses on the other end of Calumet Street. It did me (and Larry) good to get out in the cold. By the time I got home I was too cold and wet to think about Jace and Sonya. For the most part, anyway. I stripped off my parka and boots and turned the key in the lock before heading upstairs for a shower and bed. I was still inches away from the front door when something exploded against it. A fist.
“Open up,” Jace growled. “I know you’re in there. I can hear you breathing.”
It never occurred to me to refuse but I could barely speak as I wrenched the door open. My heart pounded so hard my ribs hurt.
“What do you want?”
“To go to bed,” he said. Jace, with his dark coloring, looked as magnificent as Sonya had with flecks of snow in his thick, dark hair and on his long lashes. His gray eyes gleamed in the porchlight.
“Why? Isn’t Sonya expecting you?”
“What?”
“I mean Elli. She offered you a room, right?”
“You’re my wife. I’m sleeping here.”
I just stared at him.
“The sofa will do. It was fine last night.”
So it had been Jace who’d left the note about Larry.
“Thanks for feeding the dog,” I said, automatically.
“C’mon, Umlaut. Let me in. It’s colder than Hades out here.”
I couldn’t think of any other good reason to keep him out so, with great reluctance, I stepped aside and let him in.
“What makes a couch better than a bed?” I asked.
“You,” he said, making quick work of shedding his wet outer clothes. “You’re a little pig in a house of straw and there’s a big bad wolf somewhere out there. I figure the least I can do is intercept him when he tries to blow your house down. Okay? Questions answered? Just leave me a pillow and blanket and I’ll see you in the morning.”
“I suppose you could sleep in Sofi’s old room,” I said, feeling a rush of guilt.
“Nah, I’m fine here. Goodnight sweetheart.”
I didn’t think I’d be able to fall asleep knowing Jace was downstairs but I was wrong. The only difference was that, when I awoke, it was not to the voice of Betty Ann Pritula. The room was dark except for the glowing stars on the ceiling and it was silent, too, except for the sound of a distant coyote. I checked the clock and found it was only three a.m. I lay back against the pillows and tried to relax. That’s when I heard the coyote again. Only it wasn’t a coyote.
It was Larry.
Twenty-Nine
I thrust my feet into the bunnies I’d had since freshman year, searched for a bathrobe, abandoned the effort and flung myself down the stairs. What, as Pops would say, by Jupiter, was Larry doing out in the middle of the night in a snowstorm? It is worth noting that a basset hound is not your attention deficit disorder type of dog. Larry, at ten years old, had developed into the embodiment of the term “chill.” He would never have gone out at night alone. Even if it had been an option. I felt like Miss Clavell in the book, Madeline.
Something was terribly wrong.
I twitched my still-wet parka off the hook in the foyer and sprinted through the house, pausing only to grab Pops’s LED Maglite out of one drawer and a steak knife out of another. I’d nearly reached the back door when I slammed into something large and warm. It—that is, he—smelled achingly familiar as he bound his arms around me. I could feel the timpani of his heart. Oh, no. Another catastrophe. I pulled back, desperate to get away from him; desperate to find Larry.
“I could have killed you,” I said. He responded by pressing his mouth against mine just long enough to rocket me into a state of shock, then he pulled back.
“Hush. There’s someone in the backyard.”
“I know. My dog.”
“Larry,” Jace said, “does not have opposable thumbs and thus he did not let himself out.”
“Nonsense.” I backed away and tried to go around him.
“We’ll go together,” he said, in a crisp whisper. “Me first. Get your boots.”
“Why you first? It’s my dog.”
“Exactly. Use your head. He’s been locked out on purpose to lure you into danger.”
Danger? “You exaggerate.”
“You have two choices. You can come with me to the pickup or you can stay here.”
Another mournful baying sound reached my ears and I ran back to the foyer for my boots.
“Give me the flashlight,” he said, when I returned. “And, for god’s sake, stay behind me.”
We were, I thought, going to have a little talk about this dictatorial attitude just as soon as Larry was back, safe and sound. I was, after all, the acting, temporary police chief.
As we stepped onto the back porch, the first thing I noticed was that the snowstorm had ended. A full moon peeped between drifting clouds casting the backyard into a black-and-white moonscape.
The second thing I noticed was the back gate. It was open.
Jace must have noticed, too, because he suddenly grabbed my hand and started to run toward the pickup truck parallel-parked in the alley. He ran to the passenger’s side door, opened it and shoved me inside.
“C’mon, Umlaut,” he ordered, tersely. “Buckle up.”
And then he disappeared and I heard him unlatch the driver’s side door but instead of jumping in, he let out a horrified shout.
“Hatti! Get the hell out of the truck!”
I responded to the urgency in his voice and lurched for the door, the buckled seatbelt forgotten. Fear threatened to strangle me as I clawed at the clasp. And then he was there, ripping the metal apart, lifting me by the shoulder and hip and hurling me facedown into a snow bank. A ton of male dropped onto my back and I could feel myself diving into the white stuff. It was like being buried alive. Especially when I tried to inhale air and got only snow.
The impressions must have happened in seconds because I hadn’t even panicked when the world exploded around me and Jace’s curse echoed in my ear.
I pulled the oxygen mask off my face and rejoiced at the ability to take an independent breath. How much, I thought, we take for granted. I spotted Jace on the other side of my mom’s kitchen table. A guy was dabbing ointment onto the red, puckered splotches on his torso and the back of his neck and I focused on the pain rather than the fact that he was half-naked.
“That looks like it hurts,” I said to Arne Wierikko, who is both Red Jacket’s sole paramedic and my onetime senior prom date.
Arne, in true Finnish male tradition, kept his reply short as he continued to apply salve to the blisters. “Dude’s got balls.”
“Thank the Lord he was wearing a thick, leather jacket,” said another voice. I turned to see Pauline Maki. She was wearing a long, chenille bathrobe under her wool coat and the small spit curls on the sides of her long face were secured by crisscrossed bobby pins. Otherwise, she looked as calm as ever. She was carrying a cup of tea and she handed it to me. “We’re relieved to have you back in the land of the living,” she said.
“Jace probably saved her life when he jumped on her,” said Elli, who materialized out of the kitchen, carrying a plate of sandwiches. “Or, at least her skin.”
Arne nodded. “She’d of been toast.”
Speaking of toast made me question the food.
“Why are you making sandwiches?”
“For the firefighters, dear,” Pauline explained. “The explosion burned up the truck and it caught the Ikolas sauna, too. Pops always said that sauna was too close to the roadway.”
“There was an explosion.” It wasn’t really a question because, even as I spoke, I remembered. “A bomb?”
“Got it in one,” Jace said. “I told you someone was after you, Hatti.”
“After me? Oh, no! What about Larry?”
“He’s here,” Jace said, shifting slightly, so I could see the basset hound dozing as my husband’s fingers stroked the soft skin behind his ears. “He’s fine. He wasn’t affected by the blast.”
“He was in our yard,” Pauline explained. “Heaven knows how he got there. I heard him barking and went downstairs to see what was what and I found him on our back porch. I knew you would be concerned, Hatti, if you woke up and found him missing, so I intended to use the key in the milk chute to let him back in the house. But before I could leave my yard, the truck exploded.”
“Thank goodness for the timing,” Elli said. “You and Larry could have been seriously hurt.”
I thanked Pauline for taking care of the dog then turned back to Jace.
“What do we know?”
“Max Guthrie found a bomb under the fender,” he said, telegraphing me a message with his gray eyes. Unfortunately, I couldn’t interpret it and said exactly the wrong thing.
“A sticky bomb?”
It was too specific. It immediately connected the perpetrator of this incident to Jalmer Pelonen’s accident and, by extension to Liisa Pelonen’s death. It was one more arrow in the quiver of ammunition targeted at Reid Night Wind. Now, thanks to my question, everyone in the room was silent, watching. Damn. I searched for a subtle way to change the subject.
“How did you know about the bomb?” I asked Jace. “You yelled at me to get out of the truck well ahead of the explosion.”
“It was a combination of things. I was already suspicious because of the dog being out, and then we were sitting ducks in the back yard, but no one attacked. As soon as you strapped into the truck, a kind of sixth sense kicked in and I knew that the attacker had wanted you alone in the truck.”
“But why?” The question came from Elli and it was more of a cry. “why would someone want to kill Hatti?”
Jace shook his head then winced as the skin pulled tight against his burns.
“I think it was meant as a warning to her to back off the investigation of Liisa Pelonen’s death.”
“Oh my god,” Pauline’s face, moist but extremely pale with night-cream, looked hollow. “I had no idea you were in danger, dear. It’s time to turn the whole thing over to Sheriff Clump. And I want you, and, uh, Larry, to come stay with us until this is over. You can have Liisa’s room.”
“Thank you,” I said, flashing her a grateful glance, although I had no intention of taking her up on the offer. I couldn’t imagine any place less comforting than a funeral home. “The sheriff is in charge and I imagine we’ll hear from him, shortly. He usually takes his time.”
“I can take care of Hatti and Larry,” Elli said. She knows me so well. “They’ll be safe at my place. In the meantime, someone should light a fire under the sheriff’s butt.” Jace glanced at her and she giggled. “Whoops! Bad turn of phrase.”
“Actually,” I said, “this latest attack is different from the others. Both Liisa and Jalmer’s deaths were carefully planned, so carefully they might have been ruled accidental. This time the killer panicked and was clumsy. That means he’s getting rattled.”
“I hope you’re right, dear,” Pauline said. “I can’t help but worry about you.”
The back door opened and then Max Guthrie, who, I remembered, belatedly, is our volunteer fire chief, stepped onto the mat just inside the door.
“I won’t come any farther,” he said. “I’m a human ashtray. I just wanted to make sure you were all right, Umlaut. You didn’t look so hot when Arne and Lars carried you in here on a stretcher.” He looked at Jace. “Neither did you, Sir Lancelot.” Max turned back to me. “This guy’s been in town for what, twenty-four hours, and he’s already saved your life and delivered a baby. Hats off to him.”
I felt a surge of pride in my husband.
“F.Y.I.,” Max said, looking at Jace. “You were right about the bomb. It was taped inside the pickup’s wheel arch. Just like the one in Pelonen’s truck.”
The two men exchanged a long look. It seemed to suggest a bond between them and I felt, curiously, left out.
“I’m going home to get cleaned up,” Max said, “but I have one thing to say to you, Hatti Lehtinen. Someone’s got it in for you. You need to back off this case.”
“So I’ve been told,” I said.
Thirty
I stood in the shower for a long time. I had some decisions to make, not including whether or not to continue with the investigation.
The attack on Jace was a turning point. I no longer felt any reluctance to nail someone from our community. In injuring my husband, the killer had stepped over my personal lin
e of loyalty. I pictured the wounds on Jace’s bare back and clenched my fists. No more mercy. I intended to pursue this person—whether it was Arvo, or Matti, or even Reid Night Wind—with everything in me.
By the time my skin had pruned up (and I’d used up all the hot water), I decided it was time to join forces with Sheriff Clump. I might not trust him, entirely, but he was a law enforcement officer with decades of experience and, for all that people considered him lazy, they did not consider him stupid. He could help identify the perp.
The other decision on my plate—whether to declare my marriage D.O.A. and file for divorce—could wait until everyone in Red Jacket was safe again. And, by everyone, I meant Jace.
I dried off and rubbed a towel through my hair then remembered the neglected laundry. Not that it mattered, I told myself. Clothes, and how I looked in them, should be the last item on my agenda. I pulled on a pair of rhinestone-studded bluejeans I vaguely remembered from the eighth grade and a white blouse with a peter pan collar from the same era. It, like the jeans, was too small and I decided to camouflage that fact by adding a black, boiled wool vest with embroidered hearts and frog closures. It was my outfit of last resort. Sofi called it my lonely goatherd costume.
Just as I was slapping on some lipgloss and wondering who was still in the house, my bedroom door opened and Jace stepped in. His hair was wet, as if he’d just showered, and his eyes were bloodshot from the smoke but he still strode across the room as if he owned the place.
I swallowed hard and resolved to act nonchalant.
“You borrow that red flannel shirt from Max?”
He grinned. It was the grin I remembered, quick, rare and without sarcasm or underlying anger. My heart puddled.
“I think I did better than you. You look like you’re preparing to cross the Alps to freedom.”
He dropped onto my bed, winced as his back came to rest against a bolster pillow and patted the mattress next to himself.
