A Yarn Over Murder

by Ann Yost

  “If we’d held the pageant first, Liisa would have been healthy enough to sing and Astrid Laplander would have gotten her chance to stand in the back of Ollie’s sleigh and help prop the candles with snowballs at the old Finnish Cemetery.”

  I said nothing and she looked at me, suspicion in her sky-blue eyes.

  “C’mon, Hatti. Let’s have it. What’s really going on with Liisa Pelonen?”

  I made a face and wished my sister didn’t know me so well.

  “It’s a little more complicated than Liisa having a sore throat,” I said.

  “Define complicated.”

  “Liisa’s not sick. She’s dead.” I stared at the giant tarp set up on the high school parking lot. “That thing is big enough to cover Lake Erie.”

  The purchase of the tarpaulin had been a no brainer. I mean, you can hardly hold an outdoor event in the Upper Peninsula during the winter without some sort of protection from the weather, but the debate that raged for two entire sessions of the Keweenaw Chamber of Commerce was based not on cost (which would have swallowed our entire budget for the year) but on color and imprint.

  Most of us wanted a generic dark gray tarpaulin that would last (we hoped) for years in the snow. One of us (Arvo Maki) wanted the tarp printed with a checkerboard of the blue-and-white Finnish flag interspersed with sprigs of holly and the larger-than-life words “WELCOME TO PIKKUJOULU!”

  Even after Arvo offered to pay for the new tarp, there was consternation about buying something so impractical. Finns, like other Nordic and Scandinavian people, believe in something called kalsarikanni, which translated means drinking at home, alone, in your underwear. Kalsarikanni or Pantsdrunk, promotes the zen-like values of relaxation, lack of pretense and appreciation of minimalism. (A popular cross-stitch sampler in many of our homes reads: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.)

  In any case, the chamber (which consisted of Arvo, Sofi, me, Mrs. Moilanen and Arnold Hakala) finally agreed it was only fair to let Arvo choose the design for the tarp and I’d forgotten the whole issue.

  I remembered it now as I gazed at the slate-gray fabric that covered the entire parking lot and noted the discreet red letters that read: The Maki Funeral Home, Red Jacket, Michigan, and knew that, once again, Pauline had prevailed on Arvo to do the sensible thing.

  “Hatti!” Sofi was pounding my shoulder to get my attention. “What do you mean Liisa is dead?”

  I turned to my sister.

  “Dead. Like a doornail. Or a Dodo bird. Or roadkill. Arvo and Pauline found her last night in their sauna and Sonya’s going to take a look at the body this afternoon. I’ve been tasked with finding out what happened and the Makis do not want everybody to know until after the festival.”

  Sofi listened to this terse recital in silence but all the color drained out of her face, her eyes were wide and when she spoke, it was in a whisper.

  “Hatti. Do you think someone killed her?”

  I sighed. “I sure as sugar hope not.”

  Six

  Inside the tent, strategically placed space heaters cut the chill of the winter morning and, of course, the much-debated tarp protected us from the falling snow.

  Music, piped in by the equipment borrowed from Arvo’s chapel, included recorded versions of several holiday favorites, including: Varpunen Joulaamuna (The Sparrow on Christmas morning, which is the tale of a dead baby brother returning to wish Christmas greetings as a sparrow, Heinilla Harkien Kaukalon, (On the Hay, in the Bull’s Trough) and the ever-popular, Hanki, Hanki, Hanki! (Snow, Snow, Snow!)

  I helped Sofi set up the fudge in her booth then strolled through the honeycomb of stalls. I looked for and didn’t see the trio of Burberry wearing dignitaries from Lansing, the ones from the Tourist Council that Arvo had invited as special guests, in the hope that they would vote to name our town as one of the stops on the proposed UP Snow Train.

  Neither Arvo nor Pauline was present, either, which was unusual enough.

  Patty Huhtasaari, owner and proprietor of Patty’s Pasties, was selling her signature product along with the jellies and jams put up by an order of monks who live and work up in the cliffs near Eagle Harbor. A jar of thimbleberry jam caught my eye and tweaked my memory. Hadn’t Pauline said she’d gone back to the funeral home shortly after six-thirty last night to gather a few jars of jam? Was it possible she’d seen someone lurking in the shadows waiting to hit Liisa on the head? Unlikely. If Pauline had seen someone she’d have mentioned it.

  Anyway, Patty is my mother’s age and looks it but then, getting up every morning at two a.m. to make fresh pasties would age anyone.

  “Looks like a good crowd,” she said to me. I nodded and it struck me that we consider a good crowd to be somewhere in the double digits. “Think we’ll be able to replace Frankenmuth as the go-to Christmas place?”

  I hoped she was joking. Frankenmuth, Michigan, (or as it calls itself, Little Bavaria), is located in the middle of the mitten and is devoted year-round to the holiday. Among its attractions are an enormous Christmas shop, an all-you-can-eat, family-style fried chicken dinner, an Octoberfest, a snow fest and a fire muster, to say nothing of a tourist-friendly brewery. And Bavarian architecture and a covered bridge. The town is advertised as far away as the Pennsylvania Turnpike and draws more than three million visitors a year.

  “I think your pasties alone would attract visitors,” I said, loyally.

  “Yeah,” Patti said. “Too bad it takes an extra eight hours to drive up here. I remember when we had a railroad and working airports and a Greyhound Bus.”

  “The good old days,” I murmured. I picked up a jar of jam. “I see you’re selling products for the monastery.”

  “Why not? The jam’s great and it’s for a good cause.”

  “What’s that?”

  Patti’s lips twisted into a half-grin. “Oh, you know. Support the monks. Something like that.”

  I laughed and looked more closely at the jam jar. It was Lingonberry, which, along with the cloudberry, grows almost exclusively in places north of the forty-seventh parallel. It is one of our signature items, along with pasties and pulla, and Trenary toast, a twice-baked rusk suitable for dunking in coffee.

  “Save me a beef-and-onions pasty, will you? I’ll be back,” I said, moving toward the Copper Kettle’s booth. I knew that Ronja and Armas Laplander, after buying Calumet Gifts and changing its name, had struggled with the erroneous perception that it was a fudge emporium. In fact, they sold everything else: Decorative rocks and chunks of copper, kitchen utensils, sweatshirts and calendars, and magnets and mugs. They even sold a tee-shirt with the word “Fudgie” printed on it, a reference to a tourist from below the Mackinac Bridge.

  I noticed that Armas and the younger daughters were manning the booth today.

  “Hei,” I said to Ronja’s husband. He looked at me and blinked but I know Finnish men and didn’t expect any actual words. I turned to Valentina. “Where’s your mom today?”

  “Mama’s at the church,” Olga piped up. “Astrid gets to be St. Lucy.”

  “Mama said it’s a miracle,” added Vesta.

  A miracle based on a murder? Didn’t that make it a curse? Of course, I didn’t say that.

  “That’s nice for Astrid,” I said, with what I hoped was a sincere-looking smile.

  Armas shocked the heck out of me with a soft-spoken, totally ironic, rejoinder.

  “And for Ronja.”

  Well, well, well, I thought as I waved goodbye and continued on my way. So Armas Laplander understood the craziness of Ronja’s obsession. Did that mean anything? Was it possible that the short, determined woman had gotten frustrated enough to take matters into her own hands? I just couldn’t believe it. Ronja was opinionated, stubborn, abrasive and a champion for her children. She was not a killer. Nobody in our community was a killer. Surely.

  “Hey, Hatti,” called out Diane Hakala. Diane, who is one of my mom’s best pals, was setting out hand-milled soap in the Hakala Pharmacy’s booth. She
is tall and solidly built with a 1960s beehive hairstyle and a large wardrobe of sweat clothes. This morning she had on a Christmas red-collared sweatshirt embellished with a fabric Christmas tree draped in blinking lights.

  “Are you plugged in somewhere,” I teased her, pointing at the tree on her chest.

  “Oh, no, dear. There’s a little battery. Have you heard about Liisa Pelonen? She was forced to drop out of the pageant because of her sore throat. Ronja gets to play St. Lucy, after all.”

  “You mean Astrid.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course.”

  It occurred to me that someone (my guess was Pauline) had done a masterful job of keeping the real news about Liisa off the grapevine.

  “Ronja says it was divine intervention,” Diane continued.

  “What do you think?”

  She looked at me for a long moment, her blue eyes guileless and direct.

  “You know, Henrikki,” she said, dropping her voice, “I don’t think God really bothers with that sort of thing. I imagine it was just chance that gave Liisa a sore throat.”

  “Hmm,” I said, noncommittally.

  “But between you and me and the fencepost, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Ronja resorted to blackmail.”

  My eyebrows shot up. That was the last thing I was expecting.

  “Blackmail?”

  Diane shrugged. “You know how it is. Everyone has secrets. I wonder if Ronja found out something Arvo doesn’t want people to know and threatened to expose him.”

  “I think,” I said, gently, “you’ve been watching too much Law and Order.”

  “Probably.” Diane smiled and I was relieved to see she didn’t really buy the blackmail supposition. “I think it’s because of the girl’s extraordinary looks. It’s almost impossible for someone that pretty not to alienate other women, you know?”

  “Liisa’s just a girl,” I pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Diane said. And a thought struck me.

  “Did Barb want to be St. Lucy, too?”

  She shot me an odd look. “Barb was St. Lucy last year, don’t you remember?”

  I didn’t remember anything about last year. I’d arrived on the Keweenaw the day before the St. Lucy parade and I’d been too shell-shocked from the abrupt end of my marriage to have noticed anything.

  “Barb was supposed to marry Matti Murso this summer.” A note of bitterness had entered Diane’s pleasant voice. “But Matti fell for Liisa, hook, line and sinker.”

  “Matti?”

  “Tauno Murso’s son. Down at the Gulp ‘N Go.”

  I knew Tauno. Like Einar and Armas Laplander, Tauno Murso seldom spoke but his bicep revealed volumes. I never thought of him without picturing him in a white wifebeater tee shirt that exposed his upper arms and the tattoo that read: Born to Lose.

  “Barb and Matti had been together since the first grade,” Barb continued. “Now the wedding’s off.”

  Teen-aged marriages are not uncommon in the UP. About half of each year’s senior class marries the summer after graduation. I would have thought, though, that Arnold Hakala’s daughter would have attended college.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Barb nodded. “Matti was a real catch,” she said, regretfully. “Captain of the Muskrats hockey team and apprentice to his dad at the gas station. He’s got a future. Barb’s been heartbroken but what can you do? It’s not really even his fault. No guy could resist that kind of beauty, you know?”

  My heartbeat quickened.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve seen her, Hatti. Barb says when she sashays down the hall at school all the men stop dead, you know, like they were playing freeze tag. Even the drama teacher, Mr. Horton.”

  “So Matti was one of the smitten?” She shook her head.

  “Matti was more than smitten. He was slain. And the shame of it is that she’s only been out with him once. Liisa went with him to the Harvest dance. The rumor is she only agreed to that because Pauline had made her dress and she didn’t want to disappoint her hostess.”

  I ignored the part about the dress.

  “So Matti and Liisa weren’t, I mean, aren’t dating?”

  “Oh, no. But he and the other boys heard she was sickly last night and none of them showed up for the dance. It was me and Ronja and Mrs. Frankfurter from the library and eleven girls. We were all home by nine p.m."

  I nodded, mentally registering the Hakalas alibi and Matti’s lack of one.

  “I guess the girls were disappointed last night,” I said, disingenuously, but the silly question got the job done.

  “Not Barb. She knew ahead of time. She stayed home with Arnold and watched re-runs of Freaks and Geeks in her room.”

  Bingo! Barb could have climbed out the window of the family home on Walnut Street without her father knowing, waded over to the mortuary, and smashed Liisa Pelonen in the head. No alibi for her then.

  We were interrupted by a customer interested in the fragrant soaps so I moseyed on over to my own booth. My spirits lifted as I gazed at the rainbow display of yarns, sample Nordic sweaters, hats, and mittens, listened to the clicking of needles and soft chatter and basked in the welcoming smiles of the ladies wedged into folding lawn chairs, my great Aunt Ianthe Lehtinen and her lifelong best friend, Miss Irene Suutula.

  Aunt Ianthe was working on a soft, sparkly, mohair scarf for Charlie, and Miss Irene appeared to be concentrating on a swatch of intricate lace. The choice of projects, I thought, went a long way to describe them. Pops’s aunt is a substantially built extrovert of more than average height with a crop of blue-rinsed curls, bright blue eyes and the warmest heart of anyone I know, with the possible exception of Pops, himself. Of course she was making a crazy, over-the-top item (no doubt requested by Charlie) for her great-grandniece.

  Miss Irene, Jeff to Ianthe’s Mutt, is small and meticulous with her white-blond hair, arranged each day in neat braids coiled around her head. She, too, has blue eyes, although hers are beginning to fade. She, too, has a warm heart, and Sofi, Elli and I spent many hours of our combined childhoods at their home across Calumet Street, a Victorian fantasy of lacy curtains, antimacassar-covered furniture and a perennially full cookie jar. We were welcomed from the time we play Candyland through canasta and Mahjong and the aunts, not our mothers, taught us to love knitting.

  The ladies always seemed so happy and serene and Elli and I had often half-joked about becoming Aunt Ianthe and Miss Irene in our dotage. They had grown up together, attended the local Finnish college together and they had chosen separate but similar careers in that Aunt Ianthe had taught primary school at Red Jacket Elementary and Miss Irene had become the community’s piano teacher. They never seemed to argue, a fact that I had always marveled at and mentioned once to my mother.

  “It hasn’t been all beer and skittles,” she’d said. “There was that time, you know.”

  “It’s forgotten now,” Pops had chimed in. “All’s well that ends well.”

  Naturally his effort to gloss over ‘the time’ made it fascinating to me.

  “What happened?”

  “It was some twenty years ago,” my mom said, not unwilling to share what must have been a juicy story. “Alma Poitsu and her husband decided to retire to Lake Worth and the church needed an organist. Both ladies wanted the position and each applied without telling the other.”

  “I don’t understand,” I interrupted. “Surely the job would go to Miss Irene. She’s the musician.”

  “Henrikki,” Pops said, in a kindly voice, “your great aunt studied the piano, too, as a child. She loved music but she loved Irene, too, and she gave up her dream of teaching the instrument and, instead, taught reading and writing.”

  I’d heard Aunt Ianthe play Christmas carols on the piano at the bed and breakfast and I found it hard to believe she’d been a serious musician but I just nodded.

  “Anyway,” my mother continued, “things were awkward in town. Everyone thinks a lot of Ianthe and it just seemed so
obvious that she would have to defer another musical dream. They were as stuck by pride and history as the board of deacons that had to make the decision. Thank the good Lord for Pastor Rinne. He was a modern-day Solomon, you know.”

  Pops, who does not approve of gossip, became impatient and finished the story himself.

  “Pastor Rinne offered a compromise. Ianthe is not fond of sharps and flats so she would be invited to play all the hymns in the key of C. Miss Irene gets all the rest of them.”

  “Which meant,” my mother interrupted, “that Irene gets Be Still My Soul.” It was our best hymn, written by Finland’s uber-hero Jean Sibelius.

  “It’s worked well for twenty years and I think it is time to forget the back story,” Pops said. He’d returned to reading the newspaper, the Daily Mining Gazette.

  “Hei, Hatti,” Aunt Ianthe called out. “Happy St. Lucy Day!”

  I grinned at the two of them and prepared to pass along a bit of good news.

  “Sonya has gone to deliver Mrs. Kaukola’s baby.”

  “Oh, land’s sakes, dearie,” Aunt Ianthe said, on a peel of laughter. “We know! Elise Sorensen visited her last night and reported that she was nesting. And we, ourselves, noticed the full moon so we knew that baby would come today. Why do you think Irene is already working on a layette?”

  I gazed at the piece of knitting on Miss Irene’s needles. It looked like a Brillo pad.

  “Don’t worry, dear. Lace is like a butterfly in a cocoon. It doesn’t reveal it’s beauty until it is blocked.”

  “Dressed,” Miss Irene said, with a sunny smile. “In lace knitting it is called dressed.”

  “Oh, yes,” Ianthe wagged her head up and down. “We looked that up on the Google, you know. And dressed is a much better term because when the butterfly emerges from the cocoon, you know, it is dressed so beautifully.”

  “Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a coat of many colors.”

  Some years earlier Miss Irene had begun to quote the Bible in the middle of a conversation. The random habit had morphed into a pattern of punctuating Aunt Ianthe’s uttered thoughts and it only seemed natural to wait for a verse. This one, though, had been easy. Joseph’s coat of many colors.