A Pattern for Murder (The Bait & Stitch Cozy Mystery Series, Book 1)

by Ann Yost

  On the south side of the street, mid-level mine supervisors had built smaller homes and duplexes, including the one now owned by Aunt Ianthe and Miss Irene, which, since her divorce, they have shared with Sofi and her daughter, Charlie. Frilled curtains fill the matching bay windows, each of the front doors is embellished with a surround of paned glass and each house has a stoop, three steps off the ground.

  I carried in the luggage and helped the ladies unpack, refusing a cup of tea but listening to several minutes of raptures including Aunt Ianthe quoting Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz ("There's no place like home") and Miss Irene quoting Judges ("When the men of Israel saw that Abimelech was dead, each departed to his home.") After that, the dogs and I drove around the corner to the service alley that runs behind our side of Calumet Street. The alley had been built originally to provide access to the detached garages so that the expansive front lawns wouldn't have to be disrupted by driveways. I parked on the alley's narrow shoulder and let the dogs into the back garden through the white picket fence. When we'd reached the back door and the kitchen, I felt a sense of comfort and familiarity but, to my surprise and sorrow, I did not feel as if I were coming home. It was my childhood home, my past, not my present. My gut was telling me it was time to get back to adult life. I told myself I would as soon as the murders were solved. But would they get solved? How many murderers, like the ones in the Agatha Christie novel, got away with their crimes? What if we never found out what had happened to Alex Martin and Flossie Ollanketo and Captain Jack? Doc's reputation would be ruined at the very least, and maybe Danny's, too. People would think the lighthouse was haunted and no one would want to live there.

  It didn't bear thinking about. It couldn't happen. We had to find out. I had to find out.

  Fired with a new resolve, I decided to ignore the obvious obligation of dusting, vacuuming, running some laundry and cutting the grass in favor of making a pot of coffee to help me think.

  I carried a mug into the room my mother still calls the parlor. The early afternoon sun filtered through mom's Priscilla-style curtains and dappled the chintz-covered sofa and chairs and the boards of the wooden floor, in the latter case, revealing a layer of dust that would send my mother into hysterics. The rays of the sun hit the jewel-colored panes of the Tiffany-style lamp at one end of the sofa and gleamed off the old, upright piano that some misguided soul had painted white decades earlier. While the dogs stretched out on the floor, I burrowed into a corner of the sofa, held my coffee mug in both hands, closed my eyes and thought about something I'd read about detective work. Was it Conan Doyle? Anyway, the advice was to work backwards. What was the bottom line? What had actually happened? And who was affected by it? I made a mental list.

  Two people were dead. Alex and Mrs. Ollanketo.

  Captain Jack had disappeared.

  Tom Kukka was in jail. So far, I couldn't see that anyone benefited much from these facts, in light of Alex's promise to relinquish his ownership of the lighthouse.

  But there was another result here.

  The lighthouse itself had been shut down. Was that to someone's benefit? If so, whose? A shadowy thought crossed my mind. Erik Sundback wanted to marry Riitta. If the lighthouse retirement home plan fizzled, she would be without a home and without a mission. And, according to Alex's letter, she did not inherit a penny, so she would be without means, too. Erik could afford to support Riitta and Danny, too. So the closing of the lighthouse was good for the lawyer if no one else. But, not only did I like Erik Sundback, I respected the stellar reputation he'd earned practicing law on the Keweenaw and I knew that reputation was important to him. He wouldn't have risked his career by committing murder, not even for the woman he wanted.

  And speaking of woman, what about Chakra? I didn't want to suspect her. She was not only a friend, she'd been a mentor, an unofficial counselor during the worst months of my life. She said she'd achieved closure from her sixty minutes or so with Alex on Saturday night and I'd believed her. And then she'd turned around and lied to me about sleeping at the oil house. Why? What was she covering up?

  On the other hand, unless she owned an invisible cloaking device, I didn't see how she could have been involved with Flossie Ollanketo's death. Chakra had not been in the lighthouse on Sunday afternoon. She hadn't killed Flossie and I was finding it almost impossible there was more than one murderer. Of course I was finding it equally impossible to believe that any of the rest of us had committed a murder, either. I listed the names out loud, picturing each person as I did so: Riitta, Danny, Tom, Aunt Ianthe, Miss Irene, Miss Thyra, Erik, Arvo.

  All right. I knew Riitta, Danny, the ladies and I had been in the lighthouse when Alex was murdered. Chakra and Sebastian had been nearby. The next logical step was to figure out who, from that group, had been in the house on Sunday afternoon, when Mrs. Ollanketo received the dose of Verapamil that canceled out her Digitalin and allowed her heart to stop.

  All that thinking led me to the person who had already confessed. It led me to Tom. I needed to speak with him and there was no time like the present.

  The decision of whether to take my canine assistants with me was wrenched from my hands when the two dogs bolted out the back door, down the garden path and waited, impatiently, for me to unlatch the gate and open the doors to the Jeep.

  "Fine," I said, "but you can't come into the jail, okay? You have to wait in the car."

  Larry regarded me with eloquent eyes and Lydia licked my fingers.

  We drove the five miles to Frog Creek in companionable silence and parallel parked in front of the sheriff's office on First Street. I found Mrs. Touleheto spraying Windex onto the buttons on her rotary phone. She wore a pink tee shirt with short sleeves and an attached lace collar and a pair of white cropped summer pants on her pear-shaped body. As I came through the door, she paused in mid-squirt.

  "Henrikki.You've picked up a little tan out at the lighthouse. It's good, you know? Helps your freckles blend. And I see you're growing out your hair." She peered out the window. "You shouldn't leave the dogs in the car, is the thing. Why don't you bring them inside? We can give them water and the leftover sausage from the prisoner's lunch."

  I agreed to her proposal and soon Larry and Lydia were curled up on the cool floorboards of the sheriff's office.

  "Have you called Waino yet," Mrs. Too asked me. "This is the time, Hatti. All he does is play video games, according to his mother."

  "As tempting as that sounds," I said, apologetically, "I'm a little busy at the moment. In fact, I'm here to see the, er, prisoner."

  "No can do, dear." She pointed at the plate that the dogs had just cleaned off. "He refused to finish his lunch and the sheriff simply had to punish him. The perp's in solitary."

  I considered asking how a jail with only one cell could create a 'solitary' designation but decided that, as entertaining as the answer would be, it wasn't relevant. Instead, I craned my head around the corner and caught Tom's eye. He held up a hand in a kind of half-hearted wave.

  "Mrs. Too, I hate to have to remind you of this, but a suspect, even an incarcerated suspect, has rights. For one thing, he's allowed to talk to his lawyer."

  "Henrikki, you are not his lawyer."

  "I'm nearly his lawyer. I'm in law school."

  She stared at me. "I heard you quit your schooling when you got married."

  "I took a break. That's pretty standard, you know. Law school is expensive. I needed to earn enough money to take the second year."

  "Is that why you were working at the bait shop?"

  "Yes." I'd been reared on the idea that lightning would strike a liar and, for the first time in many years, I wondered whether there was anything behind it.

  "Also," I continued, thinking I had her on the ropes, "Tom is a suspect, not a perp. He is innocent until proven guilty. That's a right that's guaranteed by the Constitution."

  Mrs. Touleheto straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. She transformed from the dithering dispatcher into the fully-i
n-charge Sunday school teacher.

  "The Constitution is all very well and good, Henrikki, but it is not the final word on anything. It is not," she intoned, "the Bible."

  I suddenly saw my opening.

  "How blessed," I quoted, "are those who keep justice."

  She eyed me, suspiciously. "That's not a Beatitude."

  "No. It's from Psalms." If there was one thing I'd learned from Miss Irene's years of quoting the KJV (King James Version), it was that nearly everything could be found in Psalms.

  "What number?"

  She was testing me. I smiled.

  "Three hundred."

  "Hmm," she said. There was a distinct gleam in her pale blue eyes. "Go on, then. Talk to the doc. But make it fast."

  "Thanks. Could I have the key to the cell?"

  "It's not locked. We use the honor system. I'm running out on an errand. Could you answer the phone it if rings, then?"

  I nodded and headed down to the cell.

  Tom Kukka had been sitting on the thin, uncovered mattress, but when I approached the door he stood, like the gentleman he is, to open the door for me. He hadn't shaved or changed his rumpled button-down shirt and trousers from the day before and his eyelids drooped as if he'd been stricken with Bell's Palsy. He smiled at me, though, and offered me the only chair in the room before dropping back onto the mattress. He sat on the edge of it, knees apart, hands on his thighs, his head leaning back against the gray cinderblock wall.

  "Nice work pulling that verse out of your back pocket, Hatti. For future reference, the Psalms only go up to one hundred and fifty."

  "It seems like there are more. How do you know, anyway?"

  One straw-colored eyebrow lifted.

  "I was in the confirmation class two years ahead of you, Hatti. You were too busy making out with Waino Aho to notice me."

  I was pleased that he could make a joke, even if it was at my expense. However, it was time to get serious.

  "You know this faux confession is only causing problems, Tom. You didn't kill Alex Martin or Mrs. Ollanketo but by saying you did, Clump gets to give himself permission to stop investigating. You know he's a proponent of the bird-in-the-hand school of thought."

  Tom shook his head.

  "I can't change my story. Clump's got a short list and the second name on it is Danny's."

  "All right," I said, giving in on that. "Let's look a little further. Who else have we got swimming around the suspect pool?"

  "Riitta." The name sounded stark and hollow.

  "Let's stick to realistic possibilities." He shrugged again.

  "It has to be someone young. Someone strong and vigorous. Someone Martin trusted enough to invite to step out onto the gallery as the storm was blowing up. That doesn't leave many folks. Me, Danny, Riitta. You, I guess, although there doesn't seem to be any motive in your case."

  "Thanks. I think."

  "On the other hand there are plenty of motives for the rest of us. First of all the threat of losing the lighthouse and the trust fund. In my case, the threat of losing Riitta herself. In Danny's case, fury at the father who abandoned him and his mom. In Riitta's case, the same anger, along with the belief that she'd get the lighthouse if he died."

  "But he told her she'd get it anyway."

  "That's what she said. You believe her and I believe her. What about Clump? What about a jury? There's no proof that he gave her the lighthouse. In fact, there's proof that he gave it to the county." He shook his head. "I have to stick to my story. I have no choice."

  We sat in silence for a minute.

  "Tom," I said, "we've got to figure out what happened with Mrs. Ollanketo. Is there any chance there was a mistake on the autopsy?"

  "There's always a chance but that idea is unlikely to grow legs. You know how it works around here. The coroner du jour does the cutting, Jean Lasker from the Frog Creek Pharmacy runs tests on the stomach contents and a report is written. It's the no-frills version of autopsy. Something could easily be missed or misunderstood but we just don't have the set up for anything but the most rudimentary approach. Besides, this was a rather simple situation. There were two syringes and my patient, Mrs. O., got both of them."

  "The question is, how?"

  He thrust his fingers through his rumpled brown hair.

  "I don't know. I've been over and over it. I filled one syringe with Digitalin, and the other with Verapamil. I took the latter into Miss Thyra's room and spent several minutes discussing her headache with her. I made a pretty bad mistake in filling the syringe before getting her permission–I'm guilty of that if nothing else."

  "Why did you do it that way?"

  "Efficiency. Or, what I thought was efficiency. I needed to get back down to the hospital to check on a patient there and so I got the syringes ready at the same time."

  "So what happened when Miss Thyra turned it down?"

  He eyed me. "I've told you that, already."

  "Tell me again."

  "Erik Sundback was out on the landing. He asked if there was anything he could do to help and I handed him the Verapamil. I asked him to wash it down the bathroom sink. I picked up the Digitalin and headed for Flossie's room. You know how small the landing is. I could see Erik go into the bathroom. I heard him turn on the water and I watched him get rid of the medicine."

  "You couldn't see that, surely," I pointed out. "I mean, his back was to you."

  "That's right. But after I injected Flossie, I went into the bathroom to wash out the Digitalin syringe and the other one was sitting there, drying out, on the surround of the sink. It was empty and I could see traces of the medicine around the drain. He emptied it, Hatti. I'd stake my life on it."

  I nodded. "Who else was in the vicinity?"

  "Besides you?" I nodded, again. "Riitta, Danny, Arvo, Ianthe and Irene. Thyra was in her room and Flossie in hers."

  "What about a third syringe?"

  "What're you talking about?"

  "The arrest came right after that, didn't it? When you left the house, was your bag still out on the table on the landing?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh my gosh," I said, excitement building. How was it I hadn't thought of this before? I was brilliant! "What if, after you left, someone came back upstairs and filled a third syringe with a fresh dose of Verapamil? By that time, Mrs. O. would have been asleep. It would have been as easy as pie to inject her without anyone knowing."

  "It's a good idea, Hatti," Tom said. "Shows excellent deductive skills. But it won't fly."

  "Why not?"

  "That dose that Erik flushed down the sink was the last of it."

  I didn't want to let go of my beautiful theory.

  "Unless someone brought in a new batch."

  Tom smiled at me.

  "You can't buy it over the counter. You can only get it if you're a doctor."

  "Well, shoot."

  "What else is going on out at the lighthouse?" I had the feeling he was trying to humor me.

  "Actually, no one's there. Clump evacuated us this morning. He says he's bringing in a crime scene investigative team and we were sent packing. Riitta and Miss Thyra have gone to stay at Erik's home in Red Jacket."

  "I thought he lived in a condo down in Houghton on the water."

  "He bought the old Eilola place last year. How he managed to keep that quiet I'll never know. It's an epic fail for the grapevine."

  "I suppose he's had it renovated."

  "To the teeth. He's even got a housekeeper and a cook."

  A curse escaped the doctor's lips.

  "He wants to marry Riitta," I said, trying to get a response from him.

  "She could do worse."

  "She could also do better. She could marry someone who shares her interest in creating an old folks home. She could marry someone who loves her."

  "He does love her. I've heard him say so. And, he's a good man, Hatti. He can give her things that I can't."

  "Like what?"

  "Financial peace of mind. Stability. Age.
" He smiled, briefly. "That's been a big wedge. She doesn't want to marry someone my age. She's convinced I'll be unhappy without kids."

  "You'd be getting a kid. Danny."

  "Yeah. I've tried that argument. She's a stubborn woman, your cousin."

  "She's never struck me that way," I said. "Too bad you can't convince her."

  "I could convince her if she loved me." His voice was very quiet, very resigned. "Don't bug her about Sundback, Hatti. If he's what she wants, let her have him."

  "Can I ask you a question?" He nodded. "If Riitta marries Erik and the county has to find someone else to run the lighthouse would you continue to provide medical services for the residents?"

  "You mean assuming I'm not convicted of pushing Alex Martin off the tower and of poisoning one of my patients?"

  "Yep."

  His attempt at a smile did not reach his eyes but he answered me.

  "Sure," he said.

  I shook my head. "You're a saint. In your shoes, I'd abandon the whole bunch of them. Speaking of shoes, I found Alex Martin's shoes in the sauna woodchips at the oil house."

  Tom didn't know what to make of that and I wanted to leave him on a high note, so I told him the story of the contraband syrup. It cheered him up.

  At least, he said it did.

  Chapter 27

  The two-lane road between Frog Creek and Red Jacket makes for a pleasant drive on a late summer afternoon. For one thing, the entire length is paved. Visitors to the U.P. sometimes complain that they start driving on nice, normal hard-topped roads only to have them morph into cow paths and drift off into the woods. That wasn't true for Rural Route 2, aka the Red Jacket-Frog Creek to the people in Red Jacket and the Frog Creek-Red Jacket Road to the people in Frog creek.

  And then there are the trees. We have plenty of pine trees on the Keweenaw but, in the heart of summer, we also have sugar maple, birch, quaking aspen, choke cherry, hemlock, cedar and black ash. The deciduous trees on either side of Rural Route 2 meet overhead and form a lacy canopy that makes the driver feel like she's inside a kaleidoscope.

  On the outskirts of Red Jacket the dogs and I heard childish laughter and someone yelling, "alle, alle, in come free!" I smiled thinking of the kids playing tag but my heart was heavy. What was the future for those kids? Would they, like so many before them, have to leave home and family to find work? (I forgot, for the moment, that I had wanted to leave home). Our tax base was low and our population, circling the drain. Schools were consolidating or closing and so were department stores and smaller shops. Tourism was our best hope for the future. What effect would our two horrific murders have on that industry? Would it bring people here or repel them? I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that. Unsolved murders would discourage most from making the ten-hour drive from Detroit or the seven-hour trip from Chicago.