A Yarn Over Murder Read online

  A Yarn-Over Murder

  The Bait & Stitch Cozy Mystery Series, Book 2

  Ann Yost

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Copyright © 2019 by Ann Yost All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Cover and eBook design by eBook Prep

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  Published by ePublishing Works!

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64457-149-1

  Contents

  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

  Before You Go…

  A Double-Pointed Murder

  Also by Ann Yost

  About the Author

  For the Yosties: Adam, Cathy, Julian and Elliott

  One

  It’s easy to say I had a bad feeling about Liisa Pelonen from the first time I saw her. I mean, hindsight is twenty-twenty, right?

  The thing is I clearly remember telling my sister that someone that lovely would stir up trouble.

  “Don’t be a drama queen, Hatti,” Sofi had said. “Liisa’s just a teen-aged girl. No more, no less.”

  Which is about as ridiculous a thing as you can say, since teen-aged girls are always more and never less.

  Liisa came to Red Jacket to finish her final year of high school after her home school closed. It was too far to commute from her father’s cabin near Ahmeek and Arvo Maki, our town’s funeral director, de facto mayor and all-around Grand Pooh-Bah invited her to stay at the mortuary with himself and his wife, Pauline. It was a grand gesture and widely approved, at least at the beginning.

  Things go complicated when Arvo got a bee in his bonnet, as Pops would say and he unilaterally named Liisa Pelonen to the coveted title of St. Lucy for this year’s festival and pageant. It was like heaving a boulder into a still pond. The unfortunate decision ripped the fabric of our tradition and infuriated the mother of the current St. Lucy hopeful, which is something you can only appreciate if you know what the role means to the community.

  Think Texas cheerleader. Think prom queen. Think Miss America.

  St. Lucy is the gold standard in Red Jacket. Most of the girls enjoy dressing in the white robe tied with a blood-red sash and wearing an evergreen crown of candles on their heads. The real conflict is between the mothers, all of whom believe a stint as the thirteenth-century martyr is a status enhancer guaranteeing their offspring a successful and prosperous life, mainly because it will make them more likely to marry a high school grad, i.e. someone who is employable.

  There was no guarantee that Astrid Laplander, a younger version of her short, squat, dark-haired mother, Ronja, up to and including a faint mustache, would get the part but it was likely. There’s a pecking order and she was next in line when Liisa Pelonen turned up looking like every picture or poster of the Swedish St. Lucy and Arvo simply could not resist giving her the part.

  I consider December sixth, a week before St. Lucy Day, as the moment the trouble that had been rumbling under the surface, came to full throttle. The sky darkened, the animals howled and the waters of Lake Superior churned. And now, seven days later, Liisa Pelonen was dead.

  As I stared at the lithe body now curled into a fetal position on the wooden floor of the Maki’s sauna, a phrase from an Agatha Christie novel came to me.

  Life is hard for a woman. Men will not be nice to you if you are not good looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.

  I saw Liisa for the first time last summer at Perk Up, a student-run coffee shop across from my own shop, Bait and Stitch, on Main Street. I’d entered the shop with Arvo and another middle-aged man, and all three of us froze as the slender girl in the green polo shirt and khaki shorts looked up with a smile.

  She was just that beautiful. Her thick, silver-blond hair was caught in a loose braid and her widely spaced, long-lashed eyes were the color of the sky reflected in Lake in the Clouds, up in the Porcupine Mountains.

  Her lips were generous and her teeth white but I could not put my finger on how her smile seemed to have the full force of the summer sun behind it.

  There was, I remembered thinking, some kind of alchemical magic to make a blond-blue-eyed girl stand out like that in a community where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone of Nordic or Scandinavian descent.

  The magic, I later learned, did not affect everyone to the same extent, but Arvo was truly, madly, deeply under the spell.

  It came to me that I wasn’t surprised that such a girl was loved too much or that she’d been murdered.

  The term slashed through my thoughts. Murdered? We do not run to violent crime here on the Keweenaw, a witch’s finger of land that crooks into frigid Lake Superior. For one thing, we don’t have the weather for it. With more than two hundred inches of snowfall each year, it’s hard to make a quick getaway.

  And then there’s a diminishing population. We have more elk than moose and more moose than people. We can’t afford to kill any of them—people, I mean, not moose—off.

  Mostly, though, we are all Evangelical Lutherans which means we’ve been fed Luther’s Small Catechism almost since birth and we are all experts in the Ten Commandments.

  Liisa’s death had to have been an accident.

  A harsh sob brought me back to the moment and I glanced at Arvo who was sitting on the lower lavat or bench of the sauna, his broad back bent, his face in his big hands. My gaze lifted to meet Pauline’s eye. She stood next to him, tall, spare and strong, her narrow face pale, her lips twisted in anguish and her hand resting on his back. It was a perfect snapshot of their twenty-five year marriage.

  My heart went out to them both.

  “How? Why?” Arvo’s sobs finally turned into words.

  Pauline shook her head even though he couldn’t see her.

&
nbsp; “She must have tripped over something and hit her head.”

  It was a plausible explanation since there was an ugly glob of congealed blood near one fair temple. I forced myself to draw nearer to the body and peer at the wound. It looked deep, too deep for a collision with a wooden floor.

  Pauline Maki seemed to read my mind.

  “Maybe she hit a sauna stone when she fell,” she suggested. I scanned the area but could see no stone or any object that could have caused the wound. There was nothing in the sauna but a dry wooden bucket with a matching scoop, the electric sauna stove with a grill over the top of the stones and a fresh vihta or birch stick hanging on a hook on the wall.

  Arvo shook his head but didn’t look up.

  “There is no stone. No weapon. Someone hit her.”

  “She may have slipped on the floor,” Pauline said, in a calm, soothing voice.

  But there was no indication that the floor had been wet. And Liisa was fully clothed in a pink parka over a rhinestone-studded sweatshirt, a pair of jeans and fur-lined snow boots, which meant she had not been in the midst of taking a sauna when she died.

  “Maybe she had a heart condition,” I said, recalling an event that had happened to someone else out at the Painted Rock Lighthouse last summer. “If her heartbeat tended to be irregular, she could have suffered from syncope.”

  Two sets of eyes looked up at me. Both were filled with tears.

  “She did,” Pauline said. “She told me when she first got here. She has a history of fainting due to syncope. That’s when the heartbeat gets erratic and too far apart, blood pressure drops and the person faints.”

  “Oh, yes,” Arvo said. “Now I remember about that. You asked me to find out whether there was any way to prevent the fainting and I talked to someone down at the hospital. But there wasn’t. Ah, Pauly. You were such a good, caring mother.”

  Tears sprouted in Pauline’s eyes.

  “If only we could have kept her safe.”

  “We should have done so,” Arvo said, pulling himself together and sitting up. “We were her in loco parentis, you know. Her aiti (mother) and her isa (father).”

  I thought that was going too far but going too far characterized everything about Arvo’s relationship with the visitor. Suddenly he groaned.

  “She was only seventeen.”

  “Eighteen.” Pauline corrected him. “Today was her birthday.”

  For some reason, that revelation hit me hard. Liisa Pelonen had, presumably, awoken today ready to celebrate the start of adulthood only to find death.

  “I’ll call 911,” I said.

  “Voi kauhia!” Arvo jumped to his feet to utter the strongest curse in the Finnish-American handbook. “Over my dead body! We are not going to turn our girl over to that cretin, that butcher. Clump will throw her into the vault and go down to the diner for pannukakku. (The vault is a square brick structure that houses the bodies of those who die when the ground is too frozen for burial and pannukakku is an oven pancake, very popular in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, particularly when served with butter and lingonberry syrup.)

  Arvo finally got to his feet and announced a decision.

  “No Clump. Liisa will stay here with us, Pauly and me. Meanwhile you, Henrikki (my real name) will investigate to find out what happened here.”

  “Me?” The word emerged as a squeak.

  “Who else? You have done it before.”

  That was an exaggeration based on the fact that I fell backwards into a murder investigation last summer only because I was on the premises.

  “Besides,” Pauline put in, supporting her husband, as always, “you went to law school.”

  “One year,” I reminded her. “We only got as far as torts.”

  “But you were married to a lawyer,” Arvo reminded me, as if I’d absorbed his knowledge through some kind of married osmosis. “And, don’t forget. You are our police chief.”

  “Temporary,” I said. “Acting. I just agreed to help out while Pops is up at the Mayo.”

  “Exactly,” Arvo said.

  I glared at him. “You told me I’d have to do nothing worse than pry quarters out of the frozen parking meters on Main Street.”

  He looked at me then and I was humbled by the expression of guilt and loss in his blue eyes.

  “I would give anything for this not to have happened, Henrikki. Anything.”

  Guilt sluiced through me. The Makis, best friends of my folks and our next door neighbors all my life, had been gobsmacked by tragedy. They needed my help. And I couldn’t blame them for not turning to Sheriff Clump, with his reputation for tightfistedness and laziness and his well-known animosity to Arvo and Pops, who is Red Jacket’s sole police officer.

  “Of course, I’ll look into it,” I muttered.

  Arvo stepped closer so he could hug me.

  “Tomorrow, tytto,” he said. “Go home now and get some sleep.”

  I closed my eyes and caught a picture of Liisa as she had looked that afternoon in the parade. She’d stood on the back of Ollie Rahkunen’s rickety sleigh behind Claude, his gaseous reindeer, and held her candle high while all the children of the village, wearing cone-shaped hats, waved star-topped wands as they danced alongside.

  I remembered thinking she looked cold.

  I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud until Arvo spoke.

  “She was cold, isn’t that right, Pauline? She was late for the parade and did not have time to put on the longjohns.”

  Of course. I’d been St. Lucy once in my not-very misspent youth and now I remembered the tradition of wearing long underwear underneath the white robe.

  “Why was she late?”

  The color had still not returned to Pauline’s face. She shrugged her lean shoulders and held her hands out to the sides.

  “Liisa told me she had gone down to the Frostbite Mall to buy a dress for the Snowball Dance last night,” she said. “She went with a friend who had car trouble on the way back and they got here just before the parade began.”

  “She should have worn her parka,” Arvo said. It was as close to a criticism of Pauline as I’d ever heard and I knew she took it that way because of her quick intake of breath.

  “I know. I thought it would ruin the line of the costume.” She sniffed and Arvo patted her arm, awkwardly, as if he knew there was no point now in crying over spilled milk.

  “After the parade, when we got home, she had a sore throat,” Pauline said, in a wobbly voice. “I bundled her into the shower, then fed her some sweet tea and toast and rubbed Vicks on her chest and sent her to bed.”

  I almost smiled at that. There is a jar of Vicks Vaporub in every medicine cabinet in Red Jacket. It, along with the sauna and hot coffee, is believed to cure pretty much any ailment.

  “I should have stayed home from the smorgasbord,” Pauline said, berating herself. “But I had promised Elli I would bring a cranberry Jello mold and, well, a promise is a promise.”

  My cousin Elli owns and runs the Leaping Deer, a renovated bed and breakfast on the other side of my parents' house. Out-of-town guests always stay at Elli’s and she provides a breakfast and supper smorgasbord for them and for most of the rest of us.

  “When did you leave the house,” I asked, somehow feeling the timing was important.

  “Six fifteen. I came back a while later to get a few jars of cloudberry jam for the visitors from Lansing. I checked on her then and she was fast asleep.”

  “When was that?”

  “Oh, I didn’t look at my watch. Possibly six-forty five or so.”

  “So that was the last time either of you saw her until you came home around nine-fifteen,” I said. They nodded and Arvo closed his eyes.

  “She wasn’t in her bed. We looked all through the house, even in the embalming room. That sauna was the last place. I still don’t know why she was here.”

  Or why she was killed, I thought, but didn’t say.

  It’s time I introduced myself.

  My name is Henrikki
Hiltunen Lehtinen Night Wind, but as two of those names belong to men who are no longer in my life, I just go by Hatti Lehtinen.

  I’m about five feet, six or seven inches tall, with wheat-colored hair and blue eyes and a smattering of freckles across my nose. No one would call me fat. No one would call me thin, either. I guess I’m somewhere in between.

  I grew up with my sister Sofi, who is six years older than I, several inches shorter and considerably more curvaceous and my cousin Elli, who is six months younger than I, and an elf. Our coloring is so similar that our friend Sonya Stillwater, a Navajo midwife, claims we resemble a set of Finnish nesting dolls, a description that was more accurate before I chopped off my waist-length hair and allowed my tresses to fall in short layers like the petals of a wilting chrysanthemum.

  Our Northern Michigan town is small, insular and composed mostly of descendants of Finnish miners. Sofi married early but Elli and I spent summer evenings catching lightning bugs on the lawn and snowbound winter afternoons in my parents' attic pretending to be castaways or princesses or Anne Frank.

  In short, it was idyllic.

  But the Keweenaw Peninsula, even more than the rest of the UP is dying. There are snowmobile paths where there used to be railroad tracks and silent, solitary mineshafts where there used to be industry and ghost towns where there used to be miners and merchants and their families. There are few jobs. The only thing we have in abundance are fields that were once full of leafy trees and are now littered with poor rock.