by Ann Yost
"Hatti," she said, "could you do me a huge favor? When I spoke with Alex last night, I told him I'd send up some breakfast," she said. "If I fix up a tray could you take it up there? I simply don't have time at the moment."
I couldn't help noticing a hint of a blush on her smooth cheeks. "You don't have time?" I repeated her words, turning them into a question.
"Yes, you see, I have to speak to him and it isn't going to be a short conversation. I need to get through this mitten thing first."
"Sure," I said, wondering what I'd missed last night when I'd decided to put the pillow over my ears. "I have to go up, anyway, to search my room for a wool skirt."
Riita knew as well as I did there was no skirt in the room. There wasn't even a closet and, even as she gave me a faint smile in acknowledgement of the absurdity of the request, I couldn't help noticing the shadow in her eyes.
"Is there something wrong?"
"No, no. Well, I don't know. Something's weird."
At that moment, Aunt Ianthe, trailed by Miss Irene, burst into the kitchen.
"Oh, Hatti, dear, you have Lydia. My goodness, you are giving her a bath?"
I realized, belatedly, I was still holding the wet poodle.
"She got some, uh, mud on her nose," I said, changing my story to suit my audience. "I'm just cleaning her up." I put her down on four feet and she shook, vigorously, flinging drops of water in all directions, an action that sent the ladies fleeing back through the door to the hall.
"You got your sweater wet," Riitta said, eyeing the Korsnas.
"Yep. That's probably not going to make it more comfortable."
A few minutes later I knocked on the closed door of the watch room. Well, I didn't precisely knock. Since my hands were full with the tray, I just said "knock, knock." I grinned to myself, expecting him to reply, "Who's there?" When nothing happened I set the tray down and rapped on the door. Again, there was no response. This time, like Goldilocks, I opened the door and went inside. And, just as in the fairytale, no one was home.
The windows were open as was the sliding glass door onto the railed gallery that surrounds the tower and I could hear the squawking of the seagulls and the rush of the waves. Sunlight flooded the light keeper's study which made it toasty warm. It dazzled off the green-shaded banker's lamp which Alex had left on. I automatically pulled the little chain and noticed a pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses folded next to it. He must have gone downstairs to grab a nap on a vacant bed, I thought. It was a pity about his breakfast. I'd have to eat it myself.
Except I couldn't. Not until I'd checked over the edge of the railing. I forced myself to walk out onto the concrete gallery. Fear of heights was new for me but none the less intense because of that. I gripped the railing and forced myself to look down at the sand below. There was nothing there. Even so, I realized my heart was galloping a mile a minute and my whole body was shaking.
I dropped into the rocking chair just because my legs felt like rubber. At least, I thought, he hadn't plummeted off the tower. Neither had he skipped town, unless he'd done it without his glasses and the navy blue windbreaker hanging on a hook near the door. He had to be downstairs or out for a walk. I wanted to wait for him to come back, to exchange a few words, to bask in his sun-god-like beauty but it was getting late and Miss Thyra would be looking for a whipping boy. Or girl. I changed clothes and returned to the parlor wearing the closest thing I had to a wool skirt–a pair of Seersucker shorts–and smelling of mothballs and wet dog.
"Henrikki!"
I heard the outraged squeal as soon as I stepped off the walnut staircase. Miss Thyra was in the corridor, fists jammed into her waist, a furious scowl on her sharp features. Her small eyes were focused on my shorts. And her skin looked green.
"Miss Thyra, you need to go upstairs and lie down."
"Nonsense! What I need, Henrikki, is a clothespin."
I looked over at the dozens of mittens hanging from the clothesline and then at the clothespin bag on one of the sofas nearby. The bag wasn't empty.
"I've counted the clothespins and there is one missing," she said, defensively, observing my gaze. "It must be somewhere in the cellars."
In the cellars? The clothespins, along with the washer and dryer, belonged in the main basement. Since the other cellar was used only for storage I couldn't imagine how a clothespin, even one with an adventurous spirit, could have breached the connecting door and found itself marooned there.
"Would you please go down and find it? Check both cellars."
It was an odd request. Some might say idiotic. But it seemed to me that Miss Thyra was working herself into a full-blown nervous breakdown and I thought it would be better to humor her. Also, I knew it was cool in the cellars and the Korsnas sweater felt like a woolen straightjacket.
I agreed and headed down the corridor to the cellar door which is across from the kitchen in the back of the house. The cellars were large and built of concrete blocks with dirt floors. Each was lit only by a hanging lightbulb, a situation Riitta had intended to remedy as soon as she got permission to use Johanna Marttinen's trust fund.
The open wooden steps to the cellar, combined with the high window and dim light, always made me think of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart. It seemed like an excellent place to stash a body, behind the utilities or the furnace. There was a pegboard full of tools and shelves of household products, detergents, toilet paper, paper towels, and staples like peanut butter and canned fruits and vegetables. Since I had been down here several times doing bedsheets and other laundry, I was surprised at the goosebumps on my arms. At least I thought there were goosebumps. I couldn't see them under the sleeves of the abominable sweater.
I scoured the surfaces and the freshly swept floor. No clothespins. I decided to go into the second cellar, in part to be thorough, in part because I didn't like the way panic was beginning to work its way up my digestive tract. I told myself I was being ridiculous. What on earth did I expect to find down here? I pushed open the door and strode past the disused cistern in the middle of the floor and across the room to the long-abandoned coal chute that stretched from the high window into a bin below. The bin, which was usually filled with scrap woodchips, was empty because a few days earlier, Captain Jack and Danny had taken all the wood they could find out to the island for the bonfire. Nevertheless, I peered inside.
I'd been right about one thing. There was no wood in there. Unless you counted the wooden clothespin.
A chill ran up my spine underneath the heavy sweater as I stared at it.
"Geez Louise," I whispered. "How in the heck did you get there?"
By the time I returned to the parlor Miss Thyra's face was shining with sweat and she'd developed a tic in one eye. She looked like she was about to have a stroke. Was it nerves? I hurried over to her, the clothespin displayed on my outstretched palm. Maybe this would help.
She stared at the item then back at me.
"Where did you find it?"
"It was in the coal bin, of all places. Miss Thyra, let me find Doc for you. You're not well."
"I'm fine. Just a headache. A migraine, I think."
I'd had a couple of migraines since my return from the nation's capital. They were no fun.
"We should postpone the lecture," I said, "I'll go talk to Riitta."
"No!" Her voice was sharp, shrill and definitive. "No, Henrikki. The people are outside. After the lecture I will go upstairs and lie down."
I made a mental note to speak with Tom as soon as I saw him. He'd given me something called Verapamil and it had worked wonders.
The women from Red Jacket began to arrive in full force. Riitta greeted them at the door and ushered them into the parlor. Everyone was talking about the great scandal of Johanna Marttinen's son coming back to take over the lighthouse. There was one stranger, a short, snub-nosed adolescent with a lip ring who, I guessed, because of her age, her short, purple hair and her Grateful Dead tee shirt, was from the college paper.
"I'm Garcia," she
said, "just the one name." She looked over at the clothesline. "What's with the Three Little Kittens display?"
Miss Thyra frowned. "I am expecting Miss Tiffani Tutilla who has promised to write a piece about my seminar, Lapasat Historia."
"Lapa what?"
"The history of mittens," I said.
"Oh, well Tiff's got a hangover and, anyway, this story falls on my beat. We're not interested in mittens. I'm here about the body."
Chapter 7
"Body?" An ugly color rose from Miss Thyra's neck to her cheeks.
"A dead body," Garcia confirmed. "We got an anonymous tip that someone found a corpse at the foot of the lighthouse," she said. "I'm the cops reporter so I came to check it out."
A violent shudder ran through Miss Thyra's thin body. I put a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward her other guests.
"A misunderstanding," I said, soothingly. "Why don't you greet everyone and I'll take Garcia here into the kitchen for coffee."
"I'll take a white mocha macchiato with a shot of whipped cream, lactose free," the reporter said.
I looked at her. "You understand this is a lighthouse, right?"
"Sure. The lighthouse with the body. I heard it was under that balcony thing."
"It's called a gallery," I explained, "and I can assure you there's no body underneath it. I was out there just a short time ago but I'll be happy to take you out there if you'd like to take a look."
We exited through the back door and I showed her the spot with the roughed up sand. Unfortunately, there was still a little blood in evidence and she pointed it out.
"Most likely a bird or other small critter. You say you got a call this morning? Was it a man or a woman?" She shrugged.
"Tiffany got the tip and called me. In any case I can't reveal a source."
"It just seems odd that if someone had found a body, he or she wouldn't have called the sheriff's department."
Garcia finished the sip she'd taken of her black coffee. "Unless," she pointed out, "the source is the murderer."
It had to be a prank. There was no body. I stared at the disturbed sand.
"Why is the sand dry in that one area? Was there something covering it all night?"
That, of course, was the sixty-four dollar question. Why was the sand dry?
"I don't know," I admitted. "But I've got to get back inside for Miss Thyra's seminar about knitting. If a body turns up, you will be the first to know."
Garcia sent me a thoughtful look.
"If it's all right with you, I'll stay and write about the mittens, okay?"
I pushed aside the ungrateful suspicion that she just wanted to stick around longer in case a corpse happened by and thanked her.
"Miss Thyra would appreciate that," I added.
We found the would-be professor standing behind her makeshift lectern, her lecture underway.
"Mitten patterns," she said, "are artistic expressions of a culture expressed in practical terms. We study them to differentiate between the cultures of the Scandinavian and Nordic countries." She looked at Garcia who had set her cell phone to record, and then at me. I gave her a thumbs up.
"Most of the patterns celebrate the weather, nature, the seasons, Christmas and that sort of thing. Occasionally you find something more sinister." She held up a black mitten embellished with an evil-looking octopus. "This is Torsas," she said. "A creature from Finnish mythology."
Sofi and Elli and I had been brought up, not just on Lutheran tenets and the Moomins, but on the Kalevala, the book of Finnish mythology. Torsas was a creature that lurked in water waiting to devour badly behaved children. Just a mention of the creature was enough to keep us away from the lake for weeks. Especially if we had been badly behaved.
"Knitting has always been part of the Nordic culture," Miss Thyra said. Her voice sounded strong enough, although she was still abnormally pale. "For one thing, in such a cold climate it was always important to have plenty of mittens, stockings, hats and scarves. Girls were taught to knit at a young age. By the time they were married, they were supposed to have knitted enough stockings to last their lifetimes. Patterns for stockings and mittens were passed down within families and neighborhoods. Small variations in those patterns make it possible to identify their geographic roots." She moved to the clothesline and removed three mittens.
"This Norwegian snowflake is more intricate than the Icelandic snowflake. And this Latvian snowflake is the most detailed of all."
"Pass them around," Ronja Laplander said, "We want to take a closer look."
Miss Thyra frowned, torn between reprimanding the interruption and pleasure at the interest shown by the listener. I got up, took the mittens from her and began to pass them around. As I did so, I couldn't help wondering whether she'd used the wandering clothespin, after all.
Aunt Ianthe asked about a mitten featuring a brightly colored daisy-like flower.
"It's called porjus," Miss Thyra explained, "from Swedish Lapland. This one," she held up a red mitten with intertwined lattices, "is called Paivatar, after the Finnish sun goddess."
The reference made me think of the Finnish sun god I'd rowed out to the island with last night. I wondered if Alex had awakened and returned to the watch room and I had to repress a nearly overwhelming urge to go find out.
"Wildlife is another subject of many mitten patterns," Miss Thyra said. "Here is a mitten from Latvia with a soaring eagle. Flowers are another popular subject. This pattern of stylized climbing roses has an interesting history. Back around the turn of the last century, there was a famine in the old country and a number of Finnish orphans went to live in workhouses. One of those workhouses was in Arjeplog in Northern Sweden. The girls were taught knitting and other household skills, the boys, woodworking. This knitting pattern was created by the girls at Arjeplog with influence from the Swedish Laplanders who lived nearby. It is, in effect, a hybrid or Finnish-Swede mitten, an example of cross-culture knitting."
"Couldn't you call the Arjeplog pattern, Swedish-Finn," Riitta asked. I wondered if she had Erik Sundback in mind. We all knew that he was part Swedish, but as Arvo liked to say, we never held that against him.
Miss Thyra looked gratified by the question and as if she would like to answer it but I noticed the knuckles on the fingers gripping the lectern had turned white and, once again, I intervened.
"Excuse me for interrupting," I said, as Miss Thyra frowned at me, "but there is really no one more qualified to speak on this subject than our own Arvo Maki, who has just arrived. Perhaps you would allow him to explain the Finnish-Swedish overlap."
It seemed Miss Thyra would. She nodded and Arvo made his way to the front of the room. He surveyed the crowd with his customary wide, friendly smile. Everyone on the Keweenaw loved Arvo even my mother who, however, occasionally pointed out that he was unnaturally jolly for a mortician.
"The relationship between the Finnish people and their nearest neighbors, the Russians on the east and the Swedes on the west, has always been somewhat fluid," Arvo began. "Not always by choice. Russia has been aggressive toward us. There has been war with the Swedes, too, and at one time, for a long time, Sweden held dominion over Finland. As Miss Thyra mentioned, famine affected the populations of the two countries and, sometimes it resulted in permanent relocation.
"The term Swede-Finn, refers to a minority Swedish-speaking population in Finland. At present it is about five percent, but it has been higher in the past. We like to say the Swedes have come to live in the superior country." He grinned. "For the most part there is harmony but there is also rivalry. For example, there is no agreement on what name to give the minority population. The Swedes refer to themselves as Sverigefinnar, which means, Swedish-Finn while the Finns call them Ruotsinsuomalaiset, or Finnish-Swedes." He smiled at the audience.
"It cannot be so easy for the Swedes living in Finland," he added. "There has always been competition between the countries. There is an old saying that the Finn likes to win, but more than that, he likes to
beat the Swede." He stopped to chuckle at his own joke. "The Swede-Finns are not our enemies, though. Some are our friends. One such is Erik Sundback, the lawyer from Houghton, who has helped us with legal issues at the lighthouse. Erik is in a sailboat race down on Keweenaw Bay and I wish him luck. Unless, of course, his opponent is a Finn."
The lame joke got a little chuckle. Miss Thyra, refreshed by a sip of water, judged it was time to take back the podium. She cleared her throat.
"Rivalries between countries," she said, "do not extend to knitting. As you can see, there are many beautiful patterns that, taken together, tell of a rich cultural history in the Nordic countries."
I would never have pegged Miss Thyra as an ambassador for world peace and I thought her closing remark deserved applause. Apparently everyone else felt the same. She looked gratified and, for the first time that morning, she did not seem agitated. She really had been nervous about the presentation.
When the applause had ended, Aunt Ianthe got to her feet.
"Thyra, you have inspired us. We all want to do more knitting and we want to learn the patterns you have shown us here. I hereby declare that we hold a weekly knitting circle. It can meet here at the lighthouse or in town at one of our homes or the church. We'll call ourselves the Wednesday Night Knitters."
"Not Wednesday," Mrs. Edna Moilanen said, "that is choir practice and potluck. And Tuesday is Ladies Aid." She should know since she was the long time president of that esteemed organization.
"And not Monday," Mrs. Sorensen, the pastor's wife said, "that is committee night."
Diane Hakala, co-owner of the pharmacy with her husband, suggested Thursday and everyone agreed until Ronja Laplander, owner of the Copper Kettle Gift Shop, pointed out that Thursday night was for the Martha Circle at church.
I got to my feet at that point.
"We don't have to choose a night right now, but I would like to tell you about my plans. I intend to sell knitting supplies and yarn at the bait shop. If Pops is agreeable, I've even got a new name. We'll call it Bait and Stitch."