A Double-Pointed Murder

by Ann Yost

  Serena clapped her hands.

  “Oh, lovely! Mirrors, you know, are portals between this world and the one beyond. They are the natural habitat of spirits. The ghost will add so much to our show.”

  Serena grabbed Harry’s hand and went off to investigate the ghost. Vincent and Helena wandered around while Seth spoke to me about practicalities, like how to publicize the event and where to order flowers to decorate the set. The last question jolted me back to my real life. I told him my sister could handle the flowers then I excused myself leaving him with the keys to the van while I hoofed the three blocks to the duplex.

  The entrance to the half that belongs to Aunt Ianthe and Miss Irene faces Calumet Street, while Sofi’s entrance is on the side. I climbed the three steps that lead to her stoop. Someone had taped a handwritten note to the door’s window.

  Sick Bay. Keep out. This means you, Hatti.

  It was like Sofi to leave me a blunt message. It was unlike her to hide. What was this about? Didn’t she trust me to take care of her and Lars? Or did she think Lars was guilty and she was afraid that, with my intuitive brilliance, I might realize that. In any case I decided to ignore the directive which was easy to do. We on the Keweenaw are more worried about being locked out in the cold than we are about intruders and we have adopted the habit of hiding our house keys in the milk chutes that have been idle for half a century.

  I retrieved Sofi’s key and let myself in.

  All the lights were off in the kitchen and the living room and there was no line of light under the bedroom door. I felt a sudden rush of worry. Had she fainted? Gone to the hospital? Was she dead? I knocked, sharply.

  “Go away, Hatti,” she said, irritably. “Didn’t you read the sign?”

  “We have to talk.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “This can’t wait. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  “Fine,” she capitulated. “Come in then.” Even in ill health she was indulgent about my habitual hyperbole and I felt a wave of affection. Together we’d get at the truth.

  “Are you really sick?” Even as I asked the question she shot out of the bed and raced into the adjoining bathroom. Retching sounds filled the air and a moment later I was holding her long, thick, sweat-soaked hair above her head so she wouldn’t get puke on it. I felt guilty for doubting her as I helped her back to bed. She fell against the pillow, her face white, her eyes closed.

  “Is there anything I can get you?”

  “Crackers,” she whispered. “And Vernors,” she added, citing the state’s golden ginger ale. We believe there’s almost nothing that Vernors and/or VicksVapoRub can’t cure. “Then go. I want to die in peace.”

  “No dying, but I need the answer to one question. What time did you get home last night?”

  One blue eye opened.

  “You forget you’re not the police chief anymore, Hatti.”

  She was referring to last month when I’d served as acting police chief for Pops after he was injured. A young girl was found dead in the sauna of the Maki Funeral Home and, while I’d caught the murderer (with help) the whole experience had been traumatic enough for the state and county to transfer all criminal justice issues to the Copper County Sheriff. In other words, I’d almost singlehandedly stripped Red Jacket of its police department.

  “Look, you’re gonna need an alibi for Cricket Koski’s death. If not for me, for Sheriff Clump. I suggest you start thinking of one.”

  I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for her to look any paler but she looked, as we used to say, like death warmed over.

  “You’ve been to see Lars.”

  “Of course. And I’m going to clear him, too.”

  “Think so?” She shoved herself up against the pillows. “What if he did it, Hatti? Have you thought of that?”

  I sat down on the bed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Lars isn’t a killer.”

  “Just a cheat.”

  “Sofi, that was three years ago. I thought you two were on the brink of reconciling.”

  She said nothing. I tried again.

  “I’m trying to construct a timeline, okay? Lars says he was supposed to meet you at eleven but you didn’t show so he left.”

  “When, at eleven-o-one?”

  “He said he was wiped out and needed sleep, that he figured he’d try you in the morning. Anyway, it must have taken him fifteen or twenty minutes to get out to the lake where he parked his SUV and fell into bed. He didn’t know about Cricket until Waino knocked on the door and woke him up.”

  She’d turned back toward me by this time.

  “Waino went out to see him at one a.m.?”

  “Not to see Lars. To check if there was a body. He got an anonymous tip.”

  “Huh.”

  “So tell me your story.”

  “Nothing to it. I came home from the party around eleven. Saw no sign that Lars Teljo had been anywhere near the place, neither did I get any sort of message from him. I felt like crap so I went to bed and I’ve spent the last few hours throwing up. Scintillating story, huh? At any rate, I can’t give him an alibi.”

  I held her gaze for a moment.

  “You can’t give yourself one, either.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you see? You have as much motive as Lars for killing Cricket. More, probably. Hell hath no fury and all that.” I couldn’t believe I was using Waino’s allusion.

  “Well, I didn’t kill her. How could I? I was sick. And, anyway, whoever killed her must have carried her into the cabin.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  She hesitated just a little too long.

  “I just assumed she was killed somewhere else and planted in his bed.”

  “You knew he found her in his bed?” She shrugged.

  “Grapevine. Anyway, I suggest you let this go.” I stared at her.

  “You really think it was Lars, don’t you? Are you crazy?”

  My sister, her face pale and puffy, looked ten years older than her age.

  “He lied to me, Hatti. He swore up and down he hadn’t seen the Insect in three years but it wasn’t true. If he could cheat and he could lie, what’s stopping him from murder?”

  I found myself thinking about the Ten Commandments, part of Luther’s Small Catechism that we were all expected to memorize before confirmation. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, bear false witness or murder. If Lars had done any but the first he really had fallen from grace. I didn’t believe it.

  I opened my mouth to ask for evidence, but I shut it again when Sofi flew off the bed and into the bathroom.

  The questions would keep until tomorrow. I held her hair, handed her a moist washcloth and fetched the crackers and ginger ale.

  Chapter 6

  By the time I got on the interstate headed to Chassell it was four o’clock and nearly dark and the snowfall, which had taken a break in mid-afternoon, had resumed. Under any other circumstances I’d have postponed my visit for a day but my conversation with Sofi had lit a fire under me. If Lars had lied to Sofi, if he’d seen Cricket Koski recently, we had a whole new set of problems. I needed to clear him and my sister on the double and it didn’t take a genius to realize that all this show biz stuff was seriously going to get in my way.

  The parking lot of the roadhouse was packed, which didn’t surprise me. We take our hockey very seriously in Copper Country. I parked my Jeep behind a monster truck and prayed the vehicle’s owner wouldn’t try to leave before I did. My little red car would be squashed like a bug. And speaking of bugs, I glanced up to see the staring eyes of a super-sized, fiberglass replica of a black fly which hung over the roadhouse’s front door like a predator drone and I shook my head. Why would anyone would choose to immortalize the ubiquitous creatures that descend on the UP every spring like a Biblical plague of locusts? It boggled the mind.

  * * *

  Inside, some forty spectators, all of them men, all of them dressed in j
eans, flannel shirts and work boots like those I’d seen Lars wearing this morning, were focused on the big screen television over the bar. Even the short, thickset bartender with the grizzled beard and his skinny young assistant were focused on the puck. No one looked at me as I made my way through the crowd, except when I blocked their view. Then they’d yell, “down in front!” And “yah, hey!” And “move yer butt!”

  I made it to the bar.

  “Red Wings winning?”

  The older bartender nodded.

  “Great,” I said. “I’d like a Busch Lite. My name’s Hatti.”

  “Dutch,” he replied, filling a glass and setting it on the bar without taking his eyes off the television screen.

  “Dutch? Your family is from the Netherlands?”

  “Nope.”

  “Huh.” I considered further inquiry into how he’d gotten the nickname but figured that, considering the communication obstacles, it probably wasn’t worth it. I got on with the business at hand.

  “I want to know about Cricket Koski.”

  Dutch picked up a glass and started to dry it. I considered it a good sign that he didn’t immediately show me the door.

  “Does she still work here?”

  “Nope.”

  Well, duh. I knew that. “But she did work here, right?”

  “Been gone awhile. Dead now.”

  News traveled fast even among the hockey-obsessed.

  “That’s why I’m asking,” I said, deciding to lay my cards on the table. “What can you tell me? Did she have a boyfriend?”

  He finally gave me an answer but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

  “Just the one. Dat brudder-in-law of yours.”

  A cold shiver ran up my spine.

  “But that was a long time ago,” I pointed out, hoping I was right. “Three years.”

  Dutch shrugged. “Don’t know about that. He kilt her last night. In his cabin.”

  “That’s not true!” My voice was high and hysterical. A dozen TV watchers shushed me. “She was found in his cabin. Somebody set him up.”

  He continued to dry the glass without looking at me. Eventually he continued the dialogue.

  “Who?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. When did she leave the roadhouse?”

  “Coupla weeks.”

  “You know why? She get a new job?” He shrugged, his eyes back on the TV screen. An instant later a commercial for beer brought a clutch of spectators to the bar demanding Dutch’s attention and I knew my window of opportunity was closing.

  “Just one more question, Dutch. Where did she go?”

  He leaned over the bar and accepted a couple of empty pitchers while his assistant filled new ones.

  “Heard she went Copper Harbor.”

  I nodded and dropped some bills on the counter, including a hefty tip. It was a great lead even if I had to balance that against the fact that everyone (if Dutch was to be believed) thought Lars had killed her.

  The question I kept asking myself, though, as I maneuvered my Jeep through the steadily falling snow on the interstate was why? What had driven Cricket Koski to leave the (relatively speaking) thriving township of Chassell with its population of nearly 2,000 to relocate to the tiny village at the northernmost point of the Keweenaw? Copper Harbor has a year-round population of fewer than one hundred and, during our eight months of winter, there would be no job possibilities. What then? Was it because of Lars? Was she in love with him? He was technically single now. Had Cricket wanted to build a relationship with him?

  Or had she decided to build a stake by blackmailing him? My blood ran cold. How easy would it be to threaten to make up stories to tell Sofi? Cricket Koski could have been a major stumbling block to a reconciliation for my sister and her ex.

  I kept coming back to that. It was like the answer that kept turning up on a Magic 8-ball. And I knew why. I believed in Lars, all right, but the fact is, the women in our family are very bad pickers.

  My great grandmother left her husband of one year because he pulled a shotgun on her and her baby, my grandmother, mummi.

  My father, allegedly a charming rolling stone, disappeared when Sofi was six and I just a few months old.

  Sofi’s teen-age shotgun marriage ended in divorce over Lars’s one-night stand with Cricket Koski.

  I myself had been married for eighteen months and I’d spent most of that time alone. That situation, never far from my mind, loomed up like headlights in the snowstorm.

  Unlike every other girl I knew, I had not fallen madly in love during my youth. I saved that experience until I was in my mid-twenties. It happened like a lightning strike. He’d been a guest lecturer in a law school seminar on Native American rights. Tall, dark and chiseled with flinty gray eyes that had not singled me out in the room.

  Later, though, as I was carrying a soggy cardboard box of abandoned puppies through a rainstorm, the guest lecturer had stopped his car and offered me a ride. It had seemed like a fairytale, like my destiny. Right up to that fateful afternoon of the Joulutorttu.

  I hadn’t seen him for an entire year, not until his younger half-brother, Reid, was accused of murdering his girlfriend, Liisa Pelonen, the reigning St. Lucy.

  Granted, he’d finally told me what was behind his defection and we’d reached a kind of détente. But I couldn’t help asking myself whether marriage was supposed to be this difficult.

  The snow plopped on my windshield faster than my wipers could remove it. Sloppy slush covered the roadway making it slippery and I was thankful there was no traffic. It felt like the middle of the night and the clock on my dashboard indicated it was nearly ten o’clock when I pulled off the interstate onto Tamarack and headed for the alley behind Calumet Street. The Jeep’s clock was exactly three hours and forty-seven minutes fast, though, so I knew it wasn’t even seven p.m. I wanted nothing more than to slip into the Queen Anne, feed Larry and dive into bed but I knew my duty. I climbed the back steps of the B and B.

  Elli must have heard the Jeep because she met me at the back door with a picnic basket covered with a red-and-white checked napkin. I blinked at her.

  “Little Red Riding Hood, I presume?”

  “I was going to take some supper to Sofi but I think you should do it.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one thing, you look hungry and there’s plenty in the basket. For another, you look tired and Vincent Tallmaster is on a rampage. He needs a theme for the What’s in Your Attic? pilot and he expects you to come up with it.”

  “Geez Louise.”

  “Go. Eat. Check on your sister. Maybe by the time you get back we’ll have a theme.”

  “Finnish-Americans on the Keweenaw,” I said. “That’s the only possible theme. The story of sauna and Sisu and St. Lucy.” She shook her head.

  “Give Sofi my love.”

  The duplex was still dark, the door, still locked. As I collected the key from the milk chute, let myself in and knocked on Sofi’s bedroom door, I hoped she wasn’t still sick. The prayer must have worked because she called out for me to come in and, while she was still in bed, her color was better, her hair had been washed and she’d pulled on her favorite sweatshirt, a dark green number emblazoned with the outline of the Upper Peninsula above the word “yours.”

  “You look better,” I said, “except for the purple crescents under your eyes.”

  “Thanks for that,” she said, eyeing the basket. “What have you got? I’m starved.” Then, as if recollecting my cooking skills, she added, warily, “this is from Elli, right?”

  I decided not to take offense. We both feasted on kaljakeitto, a hearty beer and cheese soup and two large hunks of pulla, a cardamom-flavored bread.

  “I guess you’re over the flu.”

  “Don’t tell anyone.” She wiped her mouth, daintily, with the napkin Elli had thoughtfully provided. “I figure Clump will leave me alone as long as there’s a chance I’ll blow chunks on him.”

  I regarded her for
a minute.

  “Why are you afraid to talk to the sheriff?”

  She shrugged. “I just don’t want to get involved.”

  “You’re a really bad liar.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  I stared at her again. “Did you kill that girl?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then I don’t see what you’re worried about. Unless you think Lars did it.”

  She took another bite of food so she wouldn’t have to answer.

  Weariness swept over me and I lost what little patience I possess.

  “Come on, Sofi. You can’t stay holed up here forever. I’ve got to figure this out and you’ve got to help me. You’ve been my sister for twenty-eight years and I can tell when you’re keeping a secret. What is it? Tell me?”

  “I’m not lying about anything.”

  “You just said for me to let people think you’re still sick.”

  “I am sick. I mean, I will be sick again tomorrow.”

  “The way you were sick last night and had to go home right after casting tin?”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Hatti. I did have a headache last night but mainly I left early to talk to Lars. I must have missed him be a few minutes.”

  My eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  “You went out there, didn’t you? You followed him home.”

  “You make me sound like a lost puppy. No, of course, I didn’t.”

  “Then why don’t you want to talk to the sheriff?” She shrugged.

  “I want to stay out of the whole thing.”

  “But you can help Lars. You can assure Clump that it didn’t matter to you whether or not Lars had been in touch with Cricket, that she had nothing to blackmail him about and he had no motive to kill her.”

  “I can’t do that, Hatti.”

  “Why not?”

  She swallowed hard.

  “I told you. He lied to me. Look, I found her phone number on a piece of notepaper in the pocket of his jeans.”

  I stared at her. “What was your hand doing in the pocket of his jeans?”

  “You know we’ve been talking about reconciliation.”

  “I assumed the rules of engagement included being fully clothed.”