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

by Ann Yost

  He pulled open a drawer of the desk and withdrew a three-ring, loose-leaf notebook.

  "This is everything we've given the county board about the lighthouse. Just put it back when you're finished. And, don't forget, Riitta and I will pick you up later this afternoon for the big break-in." He made it sound like another of Arvo's over-the-top festivals.

  I sat in the swivel chair at the desk and leafed through the pages of boundary descriptions and dimensions and history. I noticed a paragraph that showed the small island I'd visited did indeed belong to the lighthouse property and that it was registered with the state under the name of Agate Island III because there were two other islands with the same name in Lake Superior.

  There was a section on what the property was worth and proposed renovations, an application for it to become a licensed retirement home and finally, on the last pages, a reference to Mrs. Marttinen's five-million-dollar trust fund that was to go to the Copper County Board of Commissioners along with the lighthouse.

  The Fund was located at Keweenaw Bank and handled by a trust officer named Rodney Q. Wheeler. There was a number attached and, on impulse, I punched that number into my phone. No one answered and I started to hang up when, at the last minute, I decided to leave a message. There was only enough time to say my name and number. And then I glanced at the last page in the notebook. I looked at it for a long minute while I listened to voices from downstairs. It was almost time for tea and I needed to get down there PDQ as Pops would say, but something had caught my eye and I picked up my phone and punched in the number of the Leaping Deer Bed and Breakfast.

  During the past three years, while she's been renovating the inn, Elli has had to deal with plenty of red tape. I figured she'd know about county protocols.

  Her voice sounded harassed.

  "Hey, El. What's going on?"

  "Noah's flood and there's not a dove in sight. This two-year-old kid has been here less than an hour and he's managed to flush various stuffed animals down various toilets. The resulting tributaries have come together on the landing where they have effectively drowned my Aubusson carpet."

  "Oh, no!"

  "It'll dry out or I'll know the reason why. I'm not sure the kid will survive. Anything I can do for you?"

  "I was reading the prospectus the lighthouse committee presented to the county board and I was curious about something. It was approved and signed on September third of last year by board chairman William Alanen. He died on Labor Day, just a couple of days later and I thought I'd heard that he was in hospice for several months. So my question is, how could he have signed it?"

  "Simple. Clara Kingsbury, the county clerk, has a machine that does what's called ghostwriting or automatic signing of a person's signature. It's done with a real pen and is used by institutions and sports figures, stuff like that. Mister Alanen was still the board chairman even though he was on medical leave so Clara used the machine to sign his name to all documents until he died. It's outdated technology, though. In more enlightened areas than the Keweenaw, people just use a computer application."

  "So anybody can sign anybody else's name if they've got an app?"

  "Well, you have to obtain the signature and probably get permission but, otherwise, sure."

  "Elli, does that mean that Alex Martin's signature on the letter that was delivered to Riitta _ that it might not have been signed by him?"

  "You're asking if it could have been signed with an app?"

  "Yep."

  "I don't know. Maybe. Aren't you supposed to be at a tea party?"

  "Geez Louise! I'll talk to you later."

  I hung up and started to stuff the notebook back into the desk drawer when I noticed another notebook in the same drawer. I pulled it out, opened it up, and discovered it was an electronic notebook. The screensaver was a breathtaking photo of what looked like a fifty-foot sailboat tacking into the wind. The sailor at the helm grinned at the photographer and it occurred to me that while I'd seen Erik Sundback smile, I'd never seen such unmitigated joy in his face. There was no question he was in his element.

  "Hatti?" At the sound of Riitta's voice at the top of the stairs I closed the notebook and slid it back into the drawer under the report.

  Chapter 31

  The oval dining room table was set with a blush-hued tablecloth of fine linen along with matching napkins. The china, fluted with little blue rosebuds, looked like Wedgewood and reminded me, oddly, of Mrs. Ollanketo's blue mitten. Luckily, it wasn't a sad reminder. The teacups were banded with the same roses and the centerpiece picked up the color with iris, white daisies and pink roses. A highly polished sterling silver tiered-dish held tiny sandwiches, raspberry scones, delicately tinted macarons, crumpets and shortbread. There were bowls of fruit cut into bite-sized pieces or, in the case of the melons, scooped into balls and at each place there was an individual fresh pink rose and a miniature trifle glass filled with something that looked like peppermint stick ice cream.

  My first thought was how much all the church ladies would love it and I was right.

  Diane Hakala was on one side of Riitta, with Edna Moilanen on the other. Aunt Ianthe sat next to Ronja Laplander and Mrs. Sorensen and Miss Irene was between the pastor's wife and me. The chair on my other side was empty.

  "Where's Miss Thyra," I asked Riitta.

  "Ssh," she said, folding her hands in front of her and closing her eyes. "Come Lord Jesus be our guest," she said, "and let these gifts to us be blest. Amen."

  No one joined in. Lutherans have a strong tradition of decorum that doesn't include touching. We don't hold hands to pray. We don't indulge in group prayers. We seldom dance and we never, ever speak in tongues or roll on the floor. The hostess is the unspoken, designated lead in praying and the rest of us fold our hands and follow along with a silent Amen.

  The blessing given, Riitta stood to pour tea.

  "Miss Thyra is still in bed," she said. "Erik checked on her just before he left for the office. He said she was awake but wanted to rest a little more before joining us for the knitting."

  That seemed odd. "I thought this party was for her."

  "You can lead a horse to water, Henrikki," Mrs. Moilanen said, overhearing us.

  "She hasn't felt well for a number of days now," Riitta said, vaguely.

  "Well, well, of course not," Mrs. Moilanen put in. "Good gracious, two murders at the lighthouse. It's enough to put anybody off their feed." She helped herself to a scone which she then drowned in heaping spoonfuls of lingonberry jam and clotted cream.

  "Riitta, my dear, this tea party is simply spectacular," Aunt Ianthe said. "And this house. Well!"

  "I know," Riitta said. "It is nice, isn't it? Do you know Erik came up with most of the ideas himself? He's understandably proud of it." She sent me a glance of appeal and I knew she wanted me to change the subject before someone launched into speculation about her relationship with Erik and I searched my mind for something to say. In the end, though, it was Edna Moilanen who rescued her.

  "You know what would complement these watercress sandwiches? My vinegar cabbage."

  "I thought you were going to say sauerkraut soup," Ronja Laplander said. "Or, maybe, lutefisk."

  Everyone laughed.

  "Of course Joulutorttu would go well with this meal, too," Ronja went on. "Before you know it, it will be Christmas." She was beginning to sound ominously like Arvo.

  "Christmas," Ronja repeated, determined to make her point, "means St. Lucy's Day. This one will be the best one yet. I am planning to make a new crown of candles for Astrid. The old one is getting shabby. I think I'll use a grapevine wreath as a base and I'll wire in the candles and cover the whole thing with evergreens, then." She sounded almost exactly like Arvo, except she was backing a different horse.

  "You intend to use real candles?" Diane Hakala sounded impressed but concerned.

  "Oh, I don't know how the reverend will feel about that," Mrs. Sorensen said. "Real candles pose such a danger in the church."

&n
bsp; "And I don't know how Arvo will feel about Astrid," Mrs. Moilanen said, pointing out that Ronja could not shape events merely by talking about them. "You know he has his heart set on that little songbird of his."

  "That would be completely unfair," Ronja pointed out. Her plump cheeks flamed and her dark eyes snapped. "It is Astrid's turn."

  "Liisa does look a lot like St. Lucy," Aunt Ianthe said, trying to be fair.

  "No one knows what the real St. Lucy looked like," Ronja snapped. "If she was from Italy, she probably was dark, then."

  "She's always blond in the pictures," Mrs. Sorensen said, doubtfully.

  "So is Jesus," Ronja retorted. "But how many times have we been told that since he was from the Middle East he was most likely of a swarthy complexion?"

  "Well, I don't know about that," Aunt Ianthe said. "Could all those illustrators be wrong? Why there's a picture of the Lord in our KJV where he looks just like that Finnish movie star, Viggo Mortensen."

  "Viggo Mortensen is not Finnish, Ianthe," Mrs. Moilanen said. "Swedish, probably, or Danish."

  "Well, the point is," Ronja said, not wanting to lose this chance of driving home her point, "this is Astrid's year to be St. Lucy."

  No one took up the gauntlet, immediately but, after a moment, Mrs. Moilanen's words brought a ray of hope to Ronja's heavy bosom.

  "It isn't healthy the way Arvo and Pauline are fawning over that girl."

  "They are treating her like visiting royalty." The comment from Mrs. Sorensen was completely out of character. Arvo must really be making a spectacle of himself.

  "It's worse than that," Diane Hakala said. "They are behaving as if she were their long, lost child. They're getting too attached to someone else's daughter."

  "Mark my words," Mrs. Moilanen said, darkly, "this isn't going to end well."

  "Nonsense," Riitta said. She had gotten close to Arvo as well as Erik over the past year and she clearly thought it was time to step in and defend him. "Liisa will be petted and spoiled for a year and then she'll go off to college and the Makis will return to normal. It's just an adventure for them."

  No one argued because Riitta was the hostess and it wouldn't be polite. Diane Hakala changed the subject.

  "I can't wait to try one of Miss Thyra's mitten patterns," she said. "The one from the work house. I want to make a pair for my cousin's husband, Hugo, who is half Swedish."

  The reference reminded me that I was just sitting at a tea party when a double-murder was waiting for me to solve it. Here was a chance to see if anyone else understood the mitten.

  "Do you know," I said, impulsively, "that Mrs. Ollanketo asked me to give a blue Arjeplog mitten to Miss Thyra."

  "Well, dear, she used the green one in the seminar," Aunt Ianthe said. "Perhaps she wanted Thyra to have both in her collection."

  "It was the last thing she said before she died."

  A collective gasp rose from the women.

  "Her dying words," Mrs. Moilanen said, her voice shaking, "it was a sign. Flossie was giving you a clue."

  My pulse rate picked up. Could one of these ladies decipher the clue that had baffled me?

  "Not necessarily," Ronja said. She was naturally oppositional. "Mrs. Ollanketo probably didn't know they were her dying words."

  "Anyway," Aunt Ianthe said. "Why should she give Henrikki a clue? If knew anything about the murder, why not just tell her?" She looked at Riitta for an answer.

  "Well, of course, I don't know what she was thinking," Riitta said, flustered, "but Flossie was self-conscious about her volume."

  "If she had information about the murderer she couldn't have just shouted it out," Mrs. Moilanen said. "My gracious, the murderer may have overheard it."

  "The thing is," I said, hoping to prime the pump, "I don't know what she was trying to say. I don't know how to interpret the mitten."

  "Of course not," Mrs. Moilanen said, promptly, revealing how she'd held onto the Ladies Aid leadership for so long. "That is why she asked you to give it to Thyra. Oh, and by the way, the service for Flossie Ollanketo is scheduled for next Saturday. I spoke with Arvo this morning and the Reverend Sorensen and we agreed that would be the perfect time."

  "I have a new recipe for bars," Diane Hakala said, taking the conversation in a completely new direction. "My sister-in-law, the one up in Duluth, heard about it at her Kaleva meeting. It calls for caramels and a German chocolate cake mix."

  "Turtle bars," Mrs. Moilanen said, complacently. "Pecans, chocolate chips, evaporated milk. I had them at that sisterhood meeting down in Ontonagon."

  "When I lived in Champagne-Urbana, we called them Illini Bars," Mrs. Sorensen said. "Scrumptious."

  "If they're so delicious why haven't any of you made them for the potlucks?" Diane sounded a little resentful. There's nothing that offends members of the church kitchen ladies as much as being one-upped on food.

  "I can't speak for anyone else," Mrs. Moilanen said, in a statement that was blatantly untrue, "but I have never yet returned home with any of my raspberry ribbon bars. My late husband, Arne, used to swipe half a dozen of them before we went over to the church. Folks would be sorely disappointed if I switched to turtles."

  The conversation about the mitten clue was clearly over and so was the tea party. Riitta got to her feet and invited us to take a walk out into the garden and we exited out the sliding glass door that led from the dining room to the yard enclosed by a privacy fence. Because we were on the crescent, the yard belled out behind the house and it was heavily planted with white pines, pin cherries, honeysuckle, holly and bottlebrush grass at the back and several symmetrically placed beds of daisies, brown-eyed Susans, jack-in-the-pulpit, pansies and petunias in the foreground.

  In the center of the yard was an ornate white bench that faced a bronze sundial.

  Mrs. Moilanen asked Riitta whether the sundial, which had a kind of patina, had been there a long time.

  "No. Not at all. It's brand new. See how it sits above the ground? Erik bought it to cover an old well. He said that even with the fence, the well would pose a danger to the neighborhood's children. He is always so considerate." She looked up at the sky which had morphed from cloudless to gray and changed the subject. "Looks like a storm is coming in."

  "I suppose the well provided the house with water back in the day," Aunt Ianthe said. "Just like the well at the lighthouse."

  "Oh, that isn't really a well," Riitta said. "It's a cistern. It was used to collect rainwater for the lightkeepers and their families."

  "I've never liked wells," Mrs. Sorensen said, with a shiver. "There was one on my grandfather's dairy farm down by Newberry. When I was about six years old, my cousin Antti told me he'd dropped the cat into it."

  "Ding, dong, bell," recited Miss Irene. "Pussy's in the well."

  "Did the cat die?" Ronja Laplander asked, blunt, as always.

  "No. But I almost did. I climbed in to get Puss and then I realized how deep it was. I hung on, crying and whimpering until Antti got his sister Beatrice and they pulled me out."

  "What happened to the cat," Mrs. Moilanen asked.

  "She was in the barn the whole time. Antti just wanted to scare me. But he could have drowned the cat. And I could have drowned, too. Wells are dangerous."

  "Riitta, dear, maybe you should cover the cistern at the lighthouse. The same sort of thing could happen."

  "I've considered it," she said, "but it isn't really that deep. Probably about five feet. And there's no water in it these days."

  I stared at my cousin.

  "Hatti?" Aunt Ianthe was eyeing me with concern. "You look strange."

  "Do I? Must be the barometric pressure. I think Riitta's right about the storm. We should be on our way."

  "Oh, but I was hoping to see Thyra," Aunt Ianthe said.

  "I'll tell you what," Riitta suggested, as we trooped back into the house to retrieve our purses and knitting bags, "come over tomorrow. Or, better yet, I'll bring her to see you. She could use an outing."

  Ri
itta offered to drive us home then realized Erik had gone off with the only car at the house. I assured her everyone would be fine and we went off in our different directions.

  "That was a lovely tea party," Miss Irene said. "Everything so pretty and tasty."

  "A moment out of time," Aunt Ianthe said. "It was nice but we still have a much bigger problem. We have to find out who killed that handsome Mr. Martin and dear Flossie." I said nothing and she peered at me. "Henrikki? What are you thinking? Do you know something?"

  "I don't know who killed Alex Martin and Mrs. O.," I said, with perfect truth, "but I don't think it will be too long before we find out."

  "Why? What do you mean, dearie? How will we find out? When? Can you give us a clue?"

  "No clue. It's just that, certain things are starting to come together in my mind, you know? Like Sherlock Holmes once said, or was it Miss Marple? 'I'm beginning to see his taillights'."

  "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not," Miss Irene said. "John 1:5."

  I stopped and stared at the little woman, forgetting all about the gathering thunderheads and the spatters of rain.

  "Exactly."

  A few more plops of rain encouraged me to hurry my elderly ladies along at a heart-attack inducing pace. Well, in all honesty, it wasn't the rain. I was wild to get out to the lighthouse. I was anxious to find out whether I could comprehend the flicker of light that I saw.

  I left the ladies at their front door then sprinted across the street and entered the house from the front. The dogs were more restive than usual and I hurried to let them out in the backyard. That's when I discovered there was a figure standing on my back porch. Silent, still and ominous. I know it's a cliché but my heart seemed to jump into my mouth.

  Chapter 32

  "Geez Louise," she said. "I thought you'd never get back."

  "Chakra! What are you doing here?"