by Ann Yost
A Pattern for Murder
The Bait & Stitch Cozy Mystery Series
Book One
by
Ann Yost
Recipe Included:
Hatti's Favorite Oven-Baked Pancake
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ISBN: 978-1-947833-37-1
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Table of Contents
Cover
Foreword
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Hatti's Favorite Oven-Baked Pancake
Meet the Author
Foreword
Now you can experience the smells and flavors of the Keweenaw Peninsula, just like Sheriff Clump! When you finish the story, page ahead to the recipe for Hatti's Favorite Oven-Baked Pancake—known as Pannukakku within the Finnish community—which are not to be missed. Enjoy!
ePublishing Works
Dedication
To Helen Emmons,
the best listener, friend and mom,
with love.
Chapter 1
When folks call the Keweenaw Peninsula a dying country, they're not talking about homicide.
Don't get me wrong. This isn't Mayberry. We get our fair share of roadkill and hunting accidents. One time in the 90s an ice fisherman fell asleep with unfortunate results. But, mostly, people die of old age and, whenever possible, in the summer when the ground is soft enough to dig a new hole at the old Finnish Cemetery on Church Road.
I'm talking about crime, you know, 'out damned spot', murder, most foul, sleeps with the fishes. Homicide.We don't get much of that. And when I say, not much, I mean none. Zip. Zilch. Zero.
So when a body turned up on the sand beneath the Painted Rock Lighthouse the morning after the Midsummer's Eve Juhannus festival, everyone else was just as shocked as the victim. Maybe more.
It was only natural that I would become involved. I'm no Jessica Fletcher wannabe. But on the northernmost sliver of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a witch's finger of land that crooks into Frigid Lake Superior, where the deer outnumber the people, we are all used to wearing multiple hats. And there's the fact of proximity. I found the body. Well, I and Larry, my stepdad's well-mannered basset hound and his acolyte, a hyperactive miniature poodle named Lydia. The three of us found the body. Eventually.
But let me start at the beginning.
My name is Hatti Lehtinen and I've spent most of my twenty-seven years on the Keweenaw Peninsula in the bosom of a close-knit (some would say suffocatingly close-knit) community composed of descendants of Finnish miners. I'm tall, a shade under five feet seven inches, with wheat-colored hair and blue eyes and when I'm with my sister, Sofi, who is several inches shorter and considerably more curvaceous, and my cousin, Elli, who is an elf, we look like a set of Finnish nesting dolls. At least we did until my marriage imploded and I chopped off my waist-length braid. Nowadays I look less like a Nordic doll and more like a chrysanthemum that's past its prime.
My marriage, which is either over or on hiatus depending upon your interpretation, occurred during my brief escape from the Keweenaw. I'd gone downstate to law school, a move my mother called "running away from home," and which was, in fact, the most out-of-the-box thing I'd ever done until, near the end of the first year, I met and married a tall, dark, intense lawyer named Jace Night Wind and relocated to Washington, D.C., a move my mother referred to as "out of the frying pan and into the fire." The "I-told-you-so's" started six months later when Jace, just returned from a business trip, strode into our Capitol Hill apartment and announced, unilaterally, that the fledgling union was over. I'd been in the middle of mixing up a batch of dough for Joulutorttut, which are prune tarts traditionally baked at Christmas time and when I departed, three days later, the dough was still in the mixing bowl. During the sixteen-hour drive home I felt like the Hebrews fleeing Egypt without the unleavened bread.
I moved back into the Queen Anne Victorian home on Calumet Street in Red Jacket with my folks. It has yellow siding, white gingerbread and there are still glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of my childhood bedroom. For a while I felt disembodied. I'd wake up not knowing where I was. My life felt like a time capsule that had been dug up too soon.
It was mostly emotional fallout but partly culture shock. After the frenzied pace of D.C., it felt strange to wake up to nothing but the sound of snow falling in the winter and black flies buzzing in the summer.
The Keweenaw is a symphony of natural beauty despite the ravaging of its natural resources. One hundred years ago, our mines provided ninety-five percent of the world's natural copper and wood from our white pine forests was in great demand. Nowadays we depend upon the tourists curious enough about our lifestyle to drive nine hours from Detroit or Chicago.
Anyway, back to me. I lived in a cocoon of numbness that worked pretty well until I started to get random panic attacks and brain freezes. My sister frog-marched me into class with the owner of Heart and Hand, a studio that offered a combination of yoga, meditation and self-defense moves. Sofi figured that one of those disciplines would knock some sense into me and I guess it did because Pops (my beloved stepdad) installed me as summer manager of his shop, Carl's Bait.
It wasn't a huge leap of faith since, in all honesty, the position was mostly honorary. Pops's longtime assistant, Einar Eino, a gnome-like octogenarian who is an expert i
n tying fishing flies, predicting the weather and in speaking as few words as possible on any given day, handled all the earthworms and red wigglers. And the cash register. All I had to do was show up and chat with the customers.
It worked out fine until the afternoon Einar had to drive an order of casters (maggots still in the chrysalis stage) to a customer in Racine and I was the only one on hand to accept a shipment of crickets. When the insects were found dead the next morning and I had apologized for failing to read the note reminding me to feed them, Pops said I had a choice. I could go with him and my mother on their long-awaited vacation to Helsinki or I could accompany my great Aunt Ianthe and her best friend, Miss Irene Suutula on a two-week visit to the Painted Rock Lighthouse Retirement Home to provide assistance to the home's proprietor, Riitta Lemppi, who happens to be my second cousin.
It wasn't a hard choice. The second to last thing I wanted to do was spend two weeks with a bunch of old people but the very last thing I wanted to do was to observe my own first anniversary on somebody else's second honeymoon.
I went to the lighthouse.
* * *
The experience turned out much better than I'd expected. Riitta (pronounced Reeta) appreciated my efforts in the kitchen, with the cleaning and laundry and I actually enjoyed spending time with the old ladies, re-learning how to knit and play canasta. I loved hearing their stories, teasing them and being teased and I loved the walks on the shoreline of the largest fresh water lake in the world, the one that Longfellow called Gitche Gumee.
It was a pivotal time for the long de-commissioned lighthouse. It had been a private residence until its owner, Mrs. Johanna Marttinen died and now, a year after that event, it was scheduled to become an endowed retirement home for low-income seniors. The official transfer of ownership of the lighthouse to the Copper County Board of Commissioners was to be the focus of our Midsummer's Eve or Juhannus Festival and Arvo Maki, our leading citizen, chief cheerleader, head of the local Chamber of Commerce and the Boosters Club, the Historical Society and a member of the county's Lighthouse Commission and all-around Grand Pooh-Bah, was pulling out all the stops for a grand and glorious celebration. As we prepared a flower-strewn maypole, food carts with pasties and lemonade and soft-serve ice cream and even that symbol of summer, a faux wedding, no one could have predicted that the only thing anyone would remember about that weekend was the swan dive off the fifty-foot lighthouse tower.
But then, as Pops says, life doesn't come with a bell around its neck.
Chapter 2
The celebration of Midsummer's Eve goes back to pagan times. After the advent of Christianity, the Finns began to call it Juhannus, because it occurs on the approximate birthday six months before Christmas, of Jesus's cousin, John the Baptist.
Usually the weather is perfect in mid-June. The black flies that swarm and choke us in May, have disappeared and the lake water is starting to warm up. The sunrises are early and beautiful and the sunsets, late, and glorious. This year was no exception and with the retirement home's grand opening, the lakeshore was the perfect place for a blow-out festival.
Certainly Arvo thought so. At the last minute, fearing that he hadn't provided enough amusement for the hordes of tourists he expected, Arvo decided we needed to stage a wedding, since Midsummer is considered a propitious time to marry and, any wedding, even a fake one, would be entertaining. Naturally, he appointed the volunteer bride and groom, which was why, at a quarter to five in ninety-degree heat on the longest day of the year, I was sweating my brains out in my tiny bedroom up in the lighthouse tower while my sister tried and failed to zip up the size zero dress our grandmother (Mummi) had worn for her wedding back in the Ice Age.
Thinking about ice just made me hotter.
"I give up." The words sounded strange coming from Sofi. She is six years my senior and she owns and operates her own shop, Main Street Floral and Fudge. She is also the single parent of a teenager. Sofi is the embodiment of sisu, a uniquely Finnish quality of tenacity and endurance the practical meaning of which is "never quit."
"Mummi was a twig," she said, with a sigh.
"What am I, a trunk?"
"Let's say a branch. There's just not enough material here to cover your back, is the thing. You'll have to wear something else."
"Hold your horses," Riitta was breathless as she rounded the top steps of the iron staircase that leads from the second floor landing up through the tower. "I can solve this. Look." She handed Sofi what looked like a wheel from a child's tractor. "Duct tape!"
"Won't that hurt the dress," I asked.
"Mummi will never know," Sofi said, exchanging a look with Riitta. The latter produced a pair of scissors as my sister unrolled a length of tape. Together they attached the stuff and smoothed it down. "It works! I just hope nobody mistakes you for a UPS package and tries to open you with a puukko." A puukko is a small, curved belt knife carried by most outdoorsmen on the Keweenaw and by outdoorsmen I mean men.
The tape pulled at the fine hair on my skin and at the skin itself.
"Is it going to hurt when it comes off?"
"Yes," Sofi said. "A lot."
Strains of accordion music drifted through the open window in the tower. It was Mendelssohn's Wedding March.
"It's time," my sister said. "Got any last minute questions about the wedding night?"
My real wedding night, the one that had happened a year earlier, flashed through my head and I felt tears prick the back of my eyes.
"The tears are good," Sofi said. "It will make you seem like a more believable bride."
I stepped carefully down the narrow circular stairs to the second floor landing where all the regular bedrooms were located and then down the wide walnut staircase that led to the ground floor. The lighthouse, a sturdy structure with a sixty-foot square tower had been constructed in 1917 using the pale red sandstone striated with lighter streaks and spots that came from the nearby Jacobsville Quarry. The shoals of Lake Superior had been considered so dangerous that round-the-clock surveillance was required, so the house had been built to accommodate two lightkeepers and their families which meant there were two front doors, two kitchens, two parlors, two cellars and so on.
After the light was decommissioned in 1939 and the structure sold to a Chicago industrialist, August Marttinen, the kitchens were combined as well as other downstairs rooms, and the electrical wiring and plumbing were modernized. The Marttinen family used the lighthouse as a summer cottage until the early 1970s when August died. After that, the widow, Johanna, and her young son, Aleksander, lived in the structure year-round.
During her last illness, Johanna and Riitta, her home health nurse, had talked of Riitta's dream of opening a retirement home on the Keweenaw and Johanna had decided to will the lighthouse to the Copper County Board of Commissioners for that purpose along with five million dollars to subsidize it. There was, however, a caveat. Johanna, who hadn't seen her son in twenty years, stipulated that he would get both the lighthouse and the money if he returned to claim it within one year. He hadn't returned and the lighthouse now belonged to the county.
A white satin runner, sprinkled with rose petals, stretched from the foot of the front porch steps all the way across the lawn to a bamboo archway decorated with birch twigs and roses. Spectators in webbed lawn chairs, put down their knitting and got to their feet to honor the bride and, stupidly, I felt those tears again.
Under the archway, Arvo beamed, his wide-shouldered, sturdy physique impressive in the purple robe and white cassock he'd filched from the choir room at St. Heikki's Finnish Lutheran Church in Red Jacket. His face was ruddier than usual, no doubt due to the heat, so that his white teeth flashed and his blue eyes twinkled. My eyes shifted to my bridegroom, short, scrawny, amusing and feckless. Captain Jack Vinirypale's blue eyes twinkled, too, and his smile lost nothing from the fact that it was toothless.
My groom had dressed to the nines for the occasion. He wore a freshly laundered wife-beater tee shirt set off with a r
ed bandana tied around his thin neck and a pair of ancient dungarees that clung precariously to his slim hips (he could have used the duct tape to keep them up). The piece de resistance was a red trucker's cap emblazoned with the word Pulsit. When I reached the altar he clutched my waist to balance himself as he lifted on tiptoe to speak into my ear.
"Hei, gal," he whispered, "can't wait for the weddin' night."
Arvo's pale eyebrows lifted and he blinked at me. His curls, once butter yellow had turned white and they gleamed in the sunshine. He opened the book in his hands and opened his mouth to speak. No words came out, as it dawned on him that he'd brought along a plain old hymnal instead of the Book of Worship that included the wedding service along with the rest of the sacraments. He flashed a panicked look at me and I mouthed the words, "dearly beloved."
The brief pause that ensued was co-opted by Mrs. Flossie Ollanketo, the oldest resident of the retirement home, who is stone deaf and an excellent lip reader. Mrs. O. never misses a chance to fill in a silence.
"My stars!" The exclamation seemed to explode in the peaceful afternoon. Mrs. O. can't hear her own voice and invariably shouts. "Doesn't Hatti look a picture in her mummi's dress?"
The remark wasn't addressed to anyone in particular but Miss Thyra Poonjola, a tall, dour woman in her seventies, took up the gauntlet. She was perpetually bitter, a result some said of her sudden drop into poverty when her brother died after gambling away their savings. Miss Thyra did not like living on charity at the lighthouse. She glared at Mrs. Ollanketo and then at me.