by Ann Yost
I opened the door very quietly, like a sneak thief, and drank in the scents of earth and peat and fertilizer and new life. Rows of potted plants lined up neatly in low tables and a soft, pleasant sound reached my ears. Mozart. Pauline’s plants were listening to Mozart. I felt a curious sense of comfort and relaxation and I realized that this was, in every sense of the word, Pauline’s sanctuary; this was where she came to get refreshed, renewed, recharged.
I wandered through the short rows of tables, each with a neat sign indicating, not their species but their age or stage of growth. “Seedling, Fledglings, Sprouts, Tweens, Mature, Late Bloomers, Silver Streakers. It was like an enormous, chlorophyll family and reminded me of the paper dolls Elli and I used to draw and clothe, families with a dozen or more children because we didn’t have to change diapers or help with homework or pay for designer jeans.
The blooming flowers were in the back and the wash of color, even in the dim light, was breathtaking. Yellow daffodils and lilies, white babies breath and statice, tulips, daisies, and roses, of course, because of the Finnish preference for yellow and white blossoms at our funerals. Another table held pink, red and orange carnations and more roses. Just beyond that, up against a wall, was a workstation composed of a wooden bench topped with open shelves that contained plastic bottles and containers. I read a few labels: Thrive Alive, Seaweed, Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium, Sulfur. Vitamins and supplements, I assumed, to contribute to healthy plants. There was even a bottle of Ibuprofen and a container of Vicks Vaporub. I picked up the later but a disembodied, none-too-happy-sounding voice behind me almost made me drop it as I (figuratively) jumped out of my skin.
“Hatti?” There was a slight edge in Pauline’s pleasant voice and the heat of embarrassment rushed through me. I had shamelessly invaded her privacy and in a time when she was grieving for the loss of her surrogate daughter.
She turned on an overhead light and thus could see me holding the jar of Vicks. As if just being in her space wasn’t enough of a violation. She was as pale as a pearl but her makeup was perfect, as always, and she wore a beige wool pantsuit with a Christmas green turtleneck and a silver modern art Christmas tree pin.
“What are you doing?”
Her tone was not accusing but it lacked the usual ring of friendliness. It seemed as if she was too tired or sad to make the effort and I realized that it was an effort. Pauline Maki, lover of plants, was undoubtedly an introvert who had made herself into a public figure to please her husband. I wondered if Arvo knew how lucky he was. I finally realized she was waiting for an explanation.
“Geez Louise,” I muttered when I could catch my breath. “Pauline, I apologize. I was walking home and, oh, it just seemed like a good time to take another look at the crime scene.”
Her faintly accusing expression didn’t change.
“You are, of course, aware that the death occurred in the sauna.”
“I know. I got sidetracked. The greenhouse just looked so magical and restful and I couldn’t resist poking my nose in. I’ve never been here before.”
The older woman drew in a deep breath as if to calm herself with the familiar scents around her.
“Would you like a tour?”
It was an olive branch and I decided to take it. Besides, I wanted to learn more about this oasis.
“Yes, please.”
“Well, you’ve seen my work station.” She waved toward a pegboard filled with tools, including different-sized trowels and little rakes, pruning shears, weeders, scoops, and dibbers for planting seeds. “And my medicine chest.” She eyed the jar in my hand.
“Speaking of that, I said, trying to sound nonchalant, as if she hadn’t just scared the breath out of me, “do plants get sore throats?”
“Not specifically. The Vicks and the Ibuprofen are for me. But they definitely feel sick and melancholy. The supplements are intended to keep them in the pink.”
“And the Mozart?”
“To lift up their moods.”
“Plants have moods?”
“Like children. Like pets. I imagine everything with a brain and a heart is subject to mood, don’t you?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
She was kind enough not to comment on that.
“The seedlings over on this side of the nursery are my hybrids. I’m of two minds about the experiments. There’s nothing quite like coming up with something unique but the downside is that they can go fatally wrong.”
I realized then, if I hadn’t before, that Pauline viewed the plants as almost human; as, in fact, her offspring.
“Was Liisa interested in the greenhouse?”
The color that had returned to the woman’s face faded a little.
“Yes. She found it interesting. At least she did when she first moved in. After school started and voice lessons and choir practice, she got busy.”
“That must have been disappointing.”
“Oh, no. To each his own, you know.”
We’d wandered over to the blooming flowers where I noticed a majestic purple-blue flower with individual blossoms that reminded me of the business end of a saxophone.
“That looks like some kind of delphinium,” I said.
“It’s called monkshood,” she said. “Because of the scoop on the end.”
A bell rang in my head.
“Is that the same as wolfsbane?” She nodded. “I think that was what was in the witch’s potion in the Harry Potter series.”
“Quite possibly,” Pauline said. “Monkshood or Wolfsbane contains the poison, aconite, which is powerful enough to stop the heart. I wouldn’t have it in the house if we had young children around but, as it is…” Her voice trailed off and, for a moment, there was a gleam of moisture in her eyes.
“What about that iris,” I asked, hastily, moving over to another flower. “It’s almost a cerulean blue. I can’t remember ever seeing that color before. Is it a hybrid?”
“Actually, that one is not. But I have done some experimenting with some of these others,” she said, leading the way to a table laden with mature blooms in colors ranging from sapphire to midnight to cobalt, cornflower and royal blue. They were exquisite.
“Arvo is partial to blue,” she said, by way of explanation. “Because of Finland.”
Of course.
I gazed with admiration at a single blossom the color of lapis lazuli.
“That’s a hybrid called Blue Mystique. Arvo calls it my robot orchid.” She swallowed, painfully.
“Pauline?”
“Forgive me,” she said, not denying the emotional reaction. “Arvo used to come up here to sit and watch me work with the plants but he has been so busy with the festival and everything else, he hasn’t been here in a while.”
“The festival’s almost over,” I said, encouragingly, “and it’s been successful. I spoke with him this morning and he said he’s certain the committee will grant us a stop on the Snow Train. What’s this violet-blue flower?”
“An iris hybrid. I did that one the old-fashioned way—with grafting. You can’t graft just anything. There are compatibility markers.”
“Next thing we know there will be plant marriage counselors.”
“That’s not as far out as it seems.” I was pleased to hear the enthusiasm return to her voice. “There are botanists who believe plants have memories. Take nightshade,” she said, pointing to a row of velvety midnight blossoms with tiny berries. “A hundred years ago, a scholar hypothesized that the reason nightshade is so deadly is because it harbors a lot of anger. Nightshade’s other name is Atropa bella donna, because centuries ago Italian women squeezed the juice out of the roots and used it to dilate their eyes which was considered a mark of beauty.”
“Beauty and anger and danger,” I said. “Are they connected?”
“Everything in life is connected,” she said.
“Pauline,” I said, impulsively, “do you think Liisa was killed because she was so beautiful?”
“We don’t
know that she was killed at all, but, no, not just because of that. Beauty in and of itself is not lethal. If she was killed it was probably because of disappointed hopes.”
“You mean like a boyfriend.”
“I’m afraid so.”
I suddenly thought of my own marital mess.
“What’s the secret to a long, successful marriage?”
Her smile was small and tight but it seemed sincere.
“This,” she said, waving her arm to include the entire greenhouse. “This sanctuary. It’s my crack in the teapot.”
I stared at her as I recognized the reference to a W. H. Auden poem I’d studied in English Lit.
“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens,
A lane to the land of the dead.”
A poem about death, the great, frightful ending, the abyss that awaits us all. We know it is coming and we construct our own defenses to fight the knowledge. In Pauline’s case, it was the peace and inspiration of the greenhouse. I felt a spurt of admiration for this woman I’d known all my life. I hated to jerk her back to the misery of the present but knew I needed to do it.
“Could you run through the events of yesterday?”
All emotion and peacefulness seemed to vanish from her eyes and she was, as always, courteous and businesslike.
“Of course. We rose at six.”
“Six a.m.?” I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Pauline Maki say she started the day that early but Liisa had been a teenager.
“Oh, yes. Always. Liisa was not a slug-a-bed.”
“All right. Then what?”
“I made her breakfast: scrambled eggs, fresh orange juice, and bacon. Oh, and korvapuustit,” she added, referring to the cinnamon rusks that taste best dunked in coffee.
“Do you cook like that in the morning?” She shook her head.
“Sometimes we just have homemade granola. Yesterday was special because of the parade. And because it was her birthday.”
I winced, inwardly, at the emotion in her voice.
“After we ate,” Pauline continued, without prompting, “Liisa and Arvo left to string more lights downtown. She was supposed to go from there to pageant rehearsal at one.”
“What happened?” I asked, even though I’d already heard versions of this story.
“She didn’t get there. Not until just before the parade. She told me she’d gone to the Frostbite Mall in Houghton,” Pauline said, slowly, so slowly that I knew she hadn’t believed the story. “She wanted to buy a new dress for the Snowball Dance last night.”
“She’d intended to go to the dance?”
“I don’t know. So she said.”
I looked at Pauline for a long moment.
“Did she keep many secrets from you?”
Pauline drew herself up as if offended but before she could issue a strong denial, she seemed to change her mind.
“Liisa was an angel,” she said, “a daughter. But she was also a teenager. I’ll admit I sometimes thought she had secrets. I tried to remind myself that everyone—even a child—is allowed some privacy within her own mind.”
I thought that over.
“It must be hard for parents, trying to figure out when to interfere and when not,” I said, examining that idea for the first time.
“You want to keep them from getting hurt, from being frightened,” Pauline said, gazing into the distance. “You want to protect them. But you can’t protect them from life.”
Or death. I kept that corollary to myself.
“Do you know whether Liisa was with someone during the time she said she went to the mall?”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought and thought about that. I conclude she must have been but, for the life of me, I can’t tell you who it was. Liisa,” she added, her voice sharpening, “as you know, was very attractive.”
“Matti Murso?”
She waved a hand. “That was just a date. One date.”
“Was she involved with any other boys?”
Her pale eyes focused on me and in them, I read a mixture of pain and what I thought was protectiveness.
“I don’t think so. She was a good girl, you know.”
“Of course, of course. Did she buy a dress?”
“What?”
“For the dance. Did she buy anything at the mall?”
“I don’t know that, either. All I could think about was how she’d missed the rehearsal and that it was too late for her to put on the longjohns. I was afraid she’d get sick.”
“Couldn’t she have worn a parka?” The question had been asked and answered the previous night but I thought there was no harm in bringing it up again.
“That was my fault.” Pauline’s voice trembled. “I didn’t want the line of the costume to be ruined. I knew it was important to Arvo.” She dipped her head for a moment and then continued. “After the children placed their candles at the cemetery, I whisked her home and into the shower, gave her some tea with honey and spread Vicks on her chest. I hoped a good night’s sleep would take care of her scratchy throat and slight fever.”
“Did you consider staying home with her?”
A flash of pure anguish crossed Pauline Maki’s face.
“Not really. She was eighteen. And she would have been asleep.”
Except she wasn’t asleep. She’d gotten up and gotten dressed and gone down to the sauna to meet her death.
“Can you think of anyone who might have wished to harm her?”
“No. She was such a lovely girl. Did you know she never even knew her own mother?”
I smiled at her. “Isn’t it wonderful that she got to have a surrogate mother at least for a few months of her life?”
This time the tears welled up in Pauline’s eyes and one slid down her cheek.
Nine
The sauna was as clean as a whistle and there was nothing at all to see there. I was about to leave when I thought of Jane Marple and all the other detectives who would scorn to leave a stone unturned.
“Pauline,” I said, “I’d like to take a look at Liisa’s bedroom.”
She hesitated for an instant and I thought I could read her mind. She didn’t want some morbid curiosity seeker poking around in the personal belongings of her beloved, dead, surrogate daughter. But Pauline Maki knew it wasn’t an idle request and her sense of duty took over. With her head high and her spine straight, she led me to the downstairs kitchen and up the backstairs.
I don’t know what I expected but I was both shocked and impressed by the second floor of the funeral home. Unobtrusive skylights had been installed in the main rooms and recessed lighting in the others provided a pleasant, warm glow. The kitchen was a symphony of pale gray with gleaming stainless steel appliances and thick white marble countertops. The white walls in the living room provided a pleasing contrast to the grass-green, cross-hatched fabric on the rattan furniture, the thick green carpet and the stands of living ornaments including seagrass, hanging baskets of ferns and pots of succulents.
I kept opening my mouth to compliment Pauline on the décor but the grim line of her mouth and her firm, relentless stride seemed to discourage any conversation. We arrived in front of a door in the center of the white-carpeted hallway and she paused, sucked in a breath, and said, “This is it.” She emphasized the last word in the subject as though announcing the Second Coming. “Liisa’s room.”
She turned the knob, opened the door and stood aside to let me enter.
The instant I stepped into the pink paradise I understood one more thing about the woman I had come to know and admire in the past hour. She had wanted the displaced girl to whom she and her husband had offered a room to be happy here. As much as Arvo, Pauline had wanted this girl to become part of their family.
I stood still for a moment drinking in the extraordinary vision. Everything was pink and ruffled from the curtains at the windows to the canopy over the four-poster bed. A fr
illy pink shade sat on a bedside lamp and even the pink carpet on the floor was overlaid with a furry area rug of a lighter shade of pink. The mirror on the pink dressing table was embellished with round, pink lightbulbs and one of the pale pink walls was covered with a large, framed quilt that depicted a family of pink elephants on green grass but each was wearing a pink crown.
A pink jewelry box sat on top of a dark pink dresser scarf on a fuschia-toned dresser. An iridescent pink backpack hung on a pink hook and there was a rose-gold laptop sitting on a powder pink desktop.
The room would have delighted a six-year-old, I thought. It reminded me of nothing so much as Pepto Bismol.
Pauline was still standing in the door. I turned to her and smiled.
“You went to a lot of trouble for Liisa,” I said, hoping to dismiss her. She nodded, but didn’t leave.
Not everything in the closet was pink. There were a few sweaters in other pastel shades and the designer jeans were denim. But there were also pink corduroy slacks, pink-and-white sweaters, a blouse with rosebuds embroidered on the collar and a warm, flannel nightgown trimmed in lace and small, pink unicorns. I checked when I spotted the garment. Was that what Liisa had worn to bed last night? Had she gotten out of her sickbed to change into jeans and a sweatshirt then made her way through the empty house to the sauna? The answer had to be yes but the question remained; why?
I forced myself to focus on the room itself and the inevitable question of how a woman with the common sense and good taste displayed by Pauline Maki could have thought a seventeen-year-old girl would appreciate this bubble gum nightmare. Or had Liisa liked it? I thought not. There was no sign of anything personal here. No posters on the wall or selfies of herself and friends. There was no teenage novel by the bedside, no cosmetics on the dressing table. Nothing to indicate that a real person lived here.
“She didn’t like it.”
I’d forgotten about the older woman’s presence and the sound made me jump. Pauline didn’t seem to notice.