The Clue in the Trees: An Enchantment Lake Mystery Read online

  The Clue in the Trees

  Also by Margi Preus published by the University of Minnesota Press

  Enchantment Lake: A Northwoods Mystery

  The Clue in the Trees

  An Enchantment Lake Mystery

  Margi Preus

  University of Minnesota Press

  Minneapolis | London

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Lines from the poem “The Scent of Fresh Wood” by Hans Børli, translated by Robert Ferguson, are used with the permission of Aschehoug, Norway.

  Copyright 2017 by Margi Preus

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by the University of Minnesota Press

  111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

  Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

  http://www.upress.umn.edu

  ISBN 978-1-4529-5581-0 (ebook)

  A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

  Contents

  1. Something Is Not Right

  2. Muskie Bait

  3. At School

  4. At Enchantment

  5. An Unpleasant Surprise

  6. Auditions

  7. Ricing

  8. The Silver Box

  9. From Play Practice to Protest

  10. The ER

  11. Later the Same Day

  12. Wind

  13. Raven Is On to Francie

  14. Trip to Enchantment

  15. Theo Is Gone

  16. Dragon Bone

  17. Halloween

  18. The Lie Detector

  19. The Aquarium in the Wardrobe

  20. 8 A.M.

  21. Opening Night

  22. Under Enchantment

  23. Sleep at Last

  24. Warm

  25. The Situation

  26. The Situation Gets Sticky

  27. Thanksgiving Dinner

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Something Is Not Right

  A METALLIC CRASH jarred Francie out of slumber. She sat up in bed and listened. The fridge hummed; the clock ticked; the bathroom fan whirred. Rain tapped lightly against the window. Her heart thumped a little harder than usual. Something was not right. The apartment felt . . . wrong.

  Where had that crash come from? She scanned what was visible of the small apartment. From her bed she could see the tiny kitchen, where a red pinprick on the coffeemaker cast a small but eerie circle of light. An overly bright nightlight flickered in the hall. The light on her computer pulsed green. The numbers 3:03 glowed on the clock in her dark bedroom.

  Another crash. Definitely outside her bedroom window. She lifted the window shade and peered down at the alley at a couple of overturned garbage cans. A black shape pawed at one of them. A dog? A big dog? No—it was a bear!

  The beast’s head disappeared into the can and reemerged with something in its jaws, then slunk away, its wet fur glistening as it passed under the streetlight.

  Francie flopped back on the bed and laughed. In Brooklyn she’d been accustomed to noise: sirens, horns blasting, traffic, and the sound of bottles being tossed into dumpsters at 2:00 a.m., but definitely not marauding bears. Only in a little northwoods town like Walpurgis.

  “Just a bear,” she told herself. “Go back to sleep.” She needed to sleep! Tomorrow—well, technically today—would be the first day of her senior year in high school, in a brand-new school in a brand-new town. It would be preferable to start it with a decent night’s sleep.

  The numbers on the bedside clock glowed, unblinking as a tiger’s green-eyed stare—3:06. She glared at it, but the clock refused to be intimidated, taunting her by winking and flipping to 3:07. This splot of light, the nightlight, the glowing computer, the dot of light on the coffeemaker, wouldn’t have attracted her attention at all if she hadn’t spent the summer at her great-aunts’ lake cabin where there was no electricity and a whole lot of quiet—and at night, a whole lot of dark.

  She turned away from the clock and pressed her eyes shut. Immediately, they sprang open again. There was still something not right. She was, she felt suddenly certain, not alone.

  Francie slowly drew back the covers, quietly rose, slipped a bathrobe over her pajamas, tiptoed through the still unfamiliar apartment, past the bathroom with its whirring fan, into the kitchen where she picked up a frying pan, then past the nightlight, noticing the long shadow she cast on the opposite wall as she went by, and into the living room, where she could clearly see a dark shape hunkered on the couch.

  Her first thought was: the bear got in and is sitting on my couch. Her next thought was: that is not a bear.

  2

  Muskie Bait

  A FLASH OF LIGHTNING illuminated the room, and Francie saw who was really sitting there. “Ever heard of a doorbell?” she asked.

  “Sis!” The lump on the couch leaped up and hugged Francie. “Didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “Figured I’d just crash on your couch and say hi in the morning.”

  “Theo, you big lug,” Francie said and punched him. “I thought you were a bear! No wonder—look how long your hair is! Where have you been, anyway?”

  Thunder rattled the windowpane. Theo crossed the room to the window and pried open the venetian blinds. “You know that old bait store?” he asked, peeking out. “The one inside the giant muskie?”

  “Muskie Bait? That’s where you’ve been for the past three years?”

  “No, but do you remember where it is?”

  “Sure, it’s—”

  “Come on.” Theo turned and took her hand. “Show me.”

  “Now?”

  “Now, and out the back entrance of this place.”

  Francie threw a jacket over her robe and slid on a pair of sneakers while Theo pulled his long, curly hair into a ponytail. Then they ran down the back stairway and out into the rain. Thunder rolled in the distance.

  “No car,” he said. “We’ll go on foot.”

  As she led him down the wet streets of the small town, she glanced over her shoulder. A dark figure trailed them. “Is that guy following us?” she asked.

  Theo didn’t bother to look. “Yeah.” He took her arm and veered sharply off the street. “I’ll explain later.”

  They turned down an alley, sidled between a couple of houses, dashed through some backyards, ducked under a swing set, climbed over a fence, and ran across a parking lot until they stood in front of a giant plaster fish.

  Lightning crackled and pulsed, illuminating the fish’s gaping jaws with its damp, shadowy interior and huge plaster teeth.

  “Well, there it is,” Francie said. “But I’m not going in there, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She cast a distrustful eye at those jagged teeth.

  Another, much closer, heart-stopping bolt of lightning sent her and Theo scuttling into the muskie’s open mouth.

  It was weird standing around inside a fish, Francie thought, even though she knew it was just the entry to a kitschy gift shop. It was especially eerie in the middle of a stormy night with rain lashing against the fish’s scaly sides.

  She was so tired she wondered if she was actually as
leep and dreaming, dreaming she had been swallowed by a giant muskellunge and pulled underwater. She could almost feel the tugging of the current and the rolling action of the waves. Also, she was rain-soaked enough to have drowned.

  “Do you think it’s possible to survive in the belly of a whale?” Francie asked, as Theo groped around the inside of the mouth.

  When Theo didn’t answer, Francie went on. “Seriously, though, what is going on? Like, why are we being chased by a guy in a trench coat and a fedora? I mean, who dresses like that in a backwater Minnesota town like this?”

  The only reply was the sound of Theo’s shoes scraping on the concrete floor as he ran his hands along the muskie’s teeth.

  “No need to answer, Theo,” Francie said. “The answer can be summed up in one word: you. After being gone from my life for the past three years, you show up—not at any ordinary time of day, but in the middle of the night, the night before the first day of my senior year—my senior year in a brand-new high school!”

  “Which belly did you mean?” Theo asked, then disappeared down the length of the fish.

  “What?” Francie heard the sound of a door being rattled. “I’m sure the gift shop is locked,” she called to him, stumbling toward the sound.

  “Here, hold this,” Theo said. She felt his backpack being thrust into her hands. “A whale has four stomachs,” he said, jiggling the door handle.

  Francie tried to peer over his shoulder at whatever he was doing. Jimmying the door? Picking the lock is what it looked like. “You know that’s locked, right?” she said.

  “The first stomach has no digestive juices,” Theo went on, continuing with whatever he was doing to the door handle. “The stomach muscles flex and crush the food. So assuming you got swallowed only as far as the first stomach, you might actually be able to survive, as long as you could escape the muscle mastication. If you made it as far as stomach number two, you’d have to share it with undigested squid beaks. A lot of them. As many as eighteen thousand. All of which have to be vomited out.”

  “Is it even possible to be swallowed by a whale?” Francie watched Theo’s hands intently, because knowing how to open a locked door could come in extremely handy. Particularly, Francie thought, since there was a specific locked door that she really really wanted to open.

  “If a sperm whale can swallow a giant squid, which it can, it can swallow a person, if it wanted to,” Theo said. “But why would it want to?”

  The lock made a satisfying clicking sound and Theo pushed the door open. Francie wondered where and when he had learned that trick. Bells on the door jingled as Theo pulled Francie inside the store and closed the door behind them.

  “Okay, you still haven’t told me what is going on!” Francie said. “This is what you always do,” she whispered accusingly. “You just start talking about something else. Even when we were kids, if you didn’t want to talk about the subject, you’d get off on some obscure topic.”

  “You brought up the topic of whales,” Theo reminded her. He took his backpack from her and slipped it on.

  “Yes, but only you would make a whole conversational issue out of it, especially when there are more important things to discuss.”

  “Like squids, for instance,” Theo said, dragging Francie farther into the store.

  “See? That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve done that our whole lives! Like whenever I asked about Mom, you’d change the subject, detour, refuse to let go of an unrelated tack you were on, whatever!”

  “Now let’s see if there’s a back door to this place,” he said.

  “See?” Francie said. “See? You’re doing it again.”

  The bells on the door jingled, and Theo gave Francie’s arm an urgent squeeze.

  “Didn’t you lock the door behind us?” Francie whispered. A rack of key rings rattled as she backed into it.

  In answer, Theo yanked her past the mugs and plates down the aisle toward the stuffed animals.

  Francie heard the clicking of footsteps hurrying after them. As they ran, Theo grabbed things off the shelves and threw them behind him, littering the aisle with ashtrays and stuffed animals.

  Still their pursuer was gaining on them. Although in the dim light Francie could barely see the person, she could hear the nylon rustle of a trench coat. She snatched fluffy bears and soft antlered moose off the shelves and chucked them behind her.

  “You might want to throw something with sharper edges!” Theo yelped, as he lobbed what looked like bags of pancake mix at their pursuer—confirmed when on impact they exploded in puffs of powdery smoke.

  Now the man—it was a man, she could tell that—was right behind her, breathing heavily. Groping the shelves for something, anything, Francie’s hand grazed bottles maybe, or jars, then gallon-sized tins of she wasn’t sure what, but she grabbed one and, when the man ducked to avoid an oncoming bag of pancake mix, she swung at his fedora.

  There was the crunch of aluminum, a groan, the spattering of sticky liquid, the heavy smell of maple, the thud of a body slumping to the floor, then a steady glugging sound.

  Theo pulled Francie out the front door, through the fish’s throat, and, ducking a little to avoid the muskie’s teeth, the two of them shot out of its mouth, onto the street, and disappeared into the night.

  3

  At School

  FRANCIE BLINKED, trying to keep her eyes from closing in third-hour English class. She’d held it together during first hour, powered through second-hour chemistry, and was just drifting off when she heard the teacher, Ms. Broderick, telling the class how “Francesca solved several . . .” A flood of what felt like ice water raced through Francie’s veins, and she sat up and gripped the seat with her fingers. “. . . murders out at Enchantment Lake!” Ms. Broderick finished. “Our own Northwoods Nancy Drew!” she chirped and pointed at Francie. “Can you tell us about that, Francesca?”

  All the students turned to stare at her. Francie, caught off guard, stared back, thinking, Nancy Drew? Are you kidding me?

  “Um . . . ,” she said, stupidly.

  Ms. Broderick urged her along, saying, “Of course, I’m talking about the mystery that you solved last summer.”

  “I didn’t really solve anything, actually,” Francie said.

  “But you brought the murderer to justice!” the teacher exclaimed.

  “Totally by accident,” Francie said.

  “And of course there’s the exciting discovery you made of the mastodon bones!”

  “No!” Francie squawked. “I really didn’t discover—”

  “I hope we’ll hear all about it,” the teacher went on, “the end of this week when your papers are due.”

  Paper? She must have slept through that assignment. Was she really supposed to write about how she spent her summer vacation? Somehow she did not think anyone would be interested in hearing how she’d sort of pretended to be a detective—made easier by her aunts telling everyone that she was one—and going snooping in all the wrong places, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time and almost getting herself and a couple of other people killed. Well, maybe that last part would be interesting. And there had been a fire, an explosion, a poisoned hotdish, a lost kayak, a blindfolding, a couple of scary boat rides, and, of course, murder. And then those bones. That was pretty cool, too. Okay, maybe it was sort of exciting.

  The bell rang, the students rose like a flock of sparrows, closing books and notebooks in a flutter, gathering up loose items and sliding into jackets.

  “You don’t seem like the angry vandal type,” the girl sitting behind Francie said, as she rose from her desk.

  “What?” Francie spun around to look at her.

  “That Muskie Bait thing?” the girl said. “That wasn’t you?”

  Francie did not want to lie. It was not in her nature to lie and she rarely did, even though right now lying seemed like the least of her crimes. So she evaded the question. “What makes you think that?” she said.

  “You’ve got
maple syrup in your hair.”

  Francie grabbed at a hank of her hair and examined the ends—clumped with dried syrup. “That’s probably from breakfast,” she explained.

  The girl tilted her head and squinted, as if trying to imagine how one got syrup on the back of one’s head while eating breakfast, then said, “I’m too polite to ask.” She smiled, a not unkind smile. Francie was grateful for that.

  Then, as if in answer to Francie’s unasked question—which would have been “How do you know about Muskie Bait?”—the girl said, “My dad’s a cop.”

  Great, Francie thought. Today is starting off just great.

  Francie went straight to the bathroom where she stuck her head in the sink and scrubbed the syrup out of her hair. She was dimly aware of girls going in and out, but none of them said anything. When she got the sticky stuff out, she dried her hair as best she could under the hand drier.

  On the way to lunch, she walked slowly through the halls, which seemed to be buzzing with news of some kind.

  “The town is crawling with them!” someone said.

  Francie wanted to ask, “With whom?” but didn’t want to be the weird kid who barges into other people’s conversations while using archaic, if proper, grammar. So she kept her ears open as she continued down the hall past the band room where what sounded like a pep band was practicing. She stood for a moment listening: a few bars, a blatantly bad chord, music stopped, peals of laughter, back to music. It made her wish she played an instrument. Then she could play in a band and at least belong to a group.

  As she listened, a cluster of students walked by.

  “. . . the FBI!” Francie heard, and “. . . smuggling . . .”

  She also heard “maple syrup,” which she assumed was about her, and “Customs and Immigration—the Canadian ones.”

  Figures, Francie thought. It’s probably Theo causing all this trouble, being trailed by law enforcement from the entire Western Hemisphere. No, she thought, that is too ridiculous. There must be something else going on.