The Clue in the Trees: An Enchantment Lake Mystery Page 12

  “Probably.” Sandy started the motor. “But just before he died, my dad said it wasn’t just a story.”

  “What? Really?” Francie couldn’t help but sit up and turn toward him.

  “Yeah, just before his heart attack he told me that.”

  “The heart attack you don’t really believe was a heart attack,” Francie remembered. “You told me that last summer. He died at the hunting shack a few years ago.”

  “Yeah,” Sandy started the motor and pulled the boat away from the dock. “Heart attack or no, whatever it was, it killed him.”

  “Do you think there’s a connection?” Francie had to shout to be heard over the motor as they sped across the lake.

  “A connection?”

  “I mean, do you think maybe he really discovered something and somebody killed him for it?”

  “Oh, gosh!” Sandy said. “No! I never thought that. You really do think like a detective, don’t you?”

  Francie zipped her jacket up as much as she could. Did she think like a detective? She doubted it.

  “Well, listen,” Sandy went on, “if it stays cold like this, the shallow bays—like where you are—could freeze up pretty good. Might make it hard to get in or out.”

  “All right, Sandy. I’m just going for a day or two! I’ll be fine.”

  “Is Theo out there already? I haven’t seen him lately.”

  “What is with all the questions?” Francie couldn’t keep the exasperation out of her voice.

  “Sorry!” Sandy said. “This time of year everything gets a little dicey. You just have to be careful, you know? It’s cold. There’s ice. I’ve seen people with hypothermia and it isn’t pretty. See? There’s ice over here.”

  He pointed to a thin line of white where the water left off and the translucent sheet of ice began. It crackled as the boat broke through. “See what I mean? It’s freezing up already over here.”

  He gently steered the boat to the shore where the ice was even thicker. “I can’t even get up to the shore,” he said. “Are you sure you want to do this? Everyone over here has left.”

  “Yes!” Francie yelped. “I know!”

  Sandy helped her step out of the boat onto the shore ice, holding on to her hand a little longer than was necessary, Francie thought. He handed her the overnight bag and her two three-gallon jugs of water—at least she’d thought of that—with obvious reluctance. “Can I help you get a fire going or anything?” he finally said.

  “I’ll be fine!” Francie said. “I won’t do anything stupid. I’m just going to hang out and sleep and rest. It’s been a busy fall.”

  “Okay,” Sandy said. “Call if you need anything. Although if the lake freezes up, it’ll be hard to get out here for a while. I hope your aunts left you some food!” he called as he pulled away from shore.

  Francie nodded and waved as she began the steep ascent to the cabin.

  After she’d set her bags down inside and opened the drapes, she carried in some firewood and got a fire going. After heaping blankets on the couch, she climbed under them intending to read for a bit and then go straight to sleep. There was a lot to do the next day. She had a wetsuit, snorkel, mask, and a plan. The next day she would begin looking for that silver box in earnest.

  Once she had made herself a little pocket of warmth, sleep came. And with it, dreams of patterned frost, spreading its white fingers over the grass, the cold white lace creeping from the grass onto her feet, spreading up her legs and over her whole body, slowly seeping into her skin and freezing her from the outside in . . .

  She woke shivering, the blankets having slipped off during the night. Frozen and forlorn, she thought. No heavenly smell of cinnamon rolls, no cheery “Good morning!” from the kitchen. It was really quiet. Unusually quiet. Even considering the lack of aunts.

  What was it she wasn’t hearing?

  She climbed out of bed and quickly pulled on her wool socks and her parka, flipping the hood up. Once she got the fire going again, she looked out the picture window at the lake. It was very still. Still, as they say, as glass.

  The thing she had not been hearing, she realized, was water. No waves lapping against the shore, no ducks beating their wings on the surface of the lake. Nothing. The lake was no longer composed of moving water; it was covered over by a skin of ice. All except way out in the middle, where there was the shimmer of water.

  Her phone rang. She’d have to remember to turn it off after this call to save the battery.

  “Are you at the cabin?” Jeannette asked.

  “Yep,” Francie answered. “There’s ice on the lake!”

  “Oh my!” Astrid chirped, adding, “We have you on speakerphone!”

  “Is Theo there?” Jeannette asked.

  “Nope,” Francie said. She wondered again, Where was he? Why wasn’t he here?

  “How did you get there?”

  “Sandy gave me a ride over in his boat yesterday. There wasn’t so much ice then. He said to call when I want to get back, and he’d come and get me.”

  “You might not get out of there for a while. Until it either breaks up or freezes hard enough to walk on,” Jeannette said. “Don’t you dare try walking on it! If you need to get back, call Sandy.”

  “Uh-huh.” Francie strolled into the kitchen. She opened a cupboard to find it mostly, like Mother Hubbard’s, bare.

  “Did you bring any food with you?” Astrid asked.

  “Sure . . . ,” Francie said. She hadn’t, but neither she nor they could do anything about that now, so she didn’t see any point in bringing it up.

  “Are you going to be all right by yourself?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  There was a pause, and then Jeannette said, “Don’t walk anywhere on the ice! There are springs and currents and things, and even when the ice seems safe, it isn’t necessarily so.”

  “Right-o.” Francie opened another mostly bare cupboard. “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry!”

  After scrounging up a breakfast of stale crackers and instant coffee in not quite hot enough water (due to impatience), Francie put on her jacket, boots, hat, and mittens and walked through the woods to the Fredericksons’ house.

  Except for the crunch of frosty leaves underfoot, it was quiet. All the cabins were closed up, their windows shuttered, the curtains drawn. Lawn furniture had been put away; docks were stacked along the shore. Far out on the lake, Francie could hear the comical tooting of a flock of trumpeter swans, honking away like the eighth-grade cornet band.

  At last she arrived at the Fredericksons’, about the most forlorn of all of the places in spite of its elegance, because it had been so neglected since last July. She followed a silvery path of flattened grass, she supposed made by some animal, down to the shore. “How could you do this?” she accused the lake. “How could you freeze now, when I finally had a chance to really look?”

  As if in response, the ice let loose a long, shivery crackle.

  The ice was not thick enough to walk on, but it certainly presented an obstacle to swimming. She shivered thinking about that. How did she think she was going to do this? Did she really think a wetsuit was going to do the trick? That water temperature was somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-two degrees. She wasn’t going in there—it was insane. It really was an impossible thing, and maybe Ismene was right: impossible things should not be attempted at all. Lest you freeze to death!

  Maybe by tomorrow the wind would come up and push the ice away, and she could take the canoe out there. That seemed like a rational plan, and she would have been pleased if only she didn’t have the disconcerting feeling that she was not alone. As she walked back toward the cabin, she couldn’t keep herself from glancing over her shoulder every now and then. When from behind her she heard the distinct crack of a twig, she spun around, heart thumping, and peered into the forest. Don’t get all hysterical, she told herself. If someone was following me, I would be able to see that person, because the branches are bare of leaves. Wouldn’t I?

 
But there—had she seen something just now, something ducking behind that cabin?

  Francie ran the rest of the way to the cabin, flung open the door, rushed inside, closed the door behind her, and threw the deadbolt.

  “A restorative cup of tea is what I need,” she said out loud, remembering a line from some British show she’d seen. She found a stash of tea and put a pot of water on the stove. “And something to eat.” That might be more difficult.

  A thorough scouring of the cupboards turned up a box of Minute Rice, some pasta, a small tin of sardines forgotten in the back of a cupboard—generally canned goods weren’t left behind as their contents expanded and sometimes burst when frozen. And—oh, goodie!—a cookie jar full of forgotten Oreos. Perhaps forgotten since the 1980s, but she was not going to be fussy at a time like this.

  Once the water boiled and the tea was made, Francie sat down to her Thanksgiving dinner: sardines, Oreos, and tea. And tried not to feel sorry for herself. This was her own doing, after all. She had refused invitations from Nels and from Raven. The aunts had gone to Arizona. Theo . . . who knew? And she had wanted to be alone.

  Or so she’d thought.

  Now she regretted it. It would be nice to be with Nels, maybe to meet his family, although that was a little scary. I mean, she thought, are Nels and I that serious? He was in college, but she was still only in high school. It’s not like they were going to get married or anything!

  At least she felt better now with a little something in her stomach and the tea, which had indeed been restorative. She laughed at herself for being spooked, but residual fear clung to her like frost.

  At the fireplace, Francie poked at the coals, then piled on the last of the wood—she’d have to get more before bed—then decided to look around the place for anything that might reveal something about her mother. Without her aunts around, she could really do some earnest snooping.

  The photo albums were first: here was a picture of herself with Theo in a canoe. Here, wearing funny hats, picking raspberries. They had been close when they were younger, she remembered. She had looked up to him.

  Why were there no photos of her mother? That’s what she wanted to know. Had her mother been so terrible that every trace of her had been destroyed? What had she done? Wouldn’t her aunts have kept at least one photo of her?

  Yes. Francie was sure they would, and it was somewhere in this house. She felt like a detective as she hunted through drawers and cupboards and ran her hands under folded clothing. Or maybe, she thought, as she pawed through boxes and bins and flung open closet doors, she was behaving more like a burglar.

  Finally, she opened an old trunk of Astrid’s. The scent of mustiness, old wool, and a little wisp of mystery rose from the box. Beneath some moth-eaten sweaters and an old tennis racket (she tried and failed to picture Astrid on a tennis court), she came upon an ancient yellowed newspaper lining the bottom of the trunk. Really old! she thought, taking a closer look. The story, dated June 1930, was about a gangster bootlegger who ran a liquor-smuggling operation in the area. “Invisible Bill,” they called him, because he seemed to disappear into thin air whenever the Feds came around. The liquor had been smuggled into the U.S. from Canada, the story said, but so far the operators remained at large.

  Francie gently pried the newspaper off the bottom of the trunk and flipped it over. A photograph of the man in question made her rock back on her heels. He had a white streak in his hair, exactly like hers! And like her mother’s.

  That was creepy. And it was uncanny. And there was only one explanation: she was related to this gangster. So her ancestors had been bootleggers? In other words, criminals. This did not surprise her. It just confirmed what she had long suspected. But did that mean she herself was doomed to a life of crime? She thought of all the lying she had done lately and felt pretty darned doomed.

  Francie was about to shut the trunk when she noticed something else, something that had been hidden under the newspaper: a small, locket-sized photograph. She picked it up and squinted at it—daylight was fading and she had yet to light the kerosene lamps. Still, she knew it was her mother the minute she looked at it. There was an eerie similarity to herself, made more distinct by the white streak in her mother’s hair—just like her own. And just like the gangster’s in the newspaper.

  Taking the small photograph, Francie walked into the living room, set the photo on the coffee table, and lit the kerosene lamps and a few candles for good measure. Then she sat down on the couch and stared at the photo. Stared and stared. There was her mother. Francie tried to call her to mind, but she had been too little when her mama had . . . what? The official story was that she died, and Francie had the story memorized for anyone who asked her.

  But she had never believed it. Why? Her father had died in a car accident, and she never had trouble believing that—although she didn’t believe it was an accident as they said. But her mother, according to Theo, was still alive . . . somewhere.

  She turned her gaze away from the photo and toward the window. Night had fallen and what she saw instead of the lake was her reflection in the glass, looking very much like the photo in her hand. It was almost as if she might be seeing her own mother on the other side of the window. Then the visage changed somehow, eerily, into a ghostly face quite unlike her own that hovered just outside the window before moving away.

  What had she just seen? Had that been some trick of reflection? Of imagination? Of darkness? Of hunger? The ghost of Invisible Bill? Or was there an actual person out there?

  Francie cupped her hands against the window glass to shut out the background light and peered into the darkness.

  Nothing.

  She shivered, then glancing at the dying embers in the fireplace, thought of the empty woodbin.

  “Oh, crap!” she cried. The fire would die soon and she’d neglected to carry in any split wood or logs from the woodpile. She couldn’t spend all night in the cabin without a fire—she’d be as frozen as a polar bear’s toenails!

  She threw on her jacket and a headlamp and went outside, pausing for a moment on the stoop to listen, before switching on the headlamp. As she strained to hear any little sound, her eyes scanned the dark woods and she slowly made her way to the woodpile.

  Once there, she piled on as much wood as she could carry and hoped like heck it would be enough to last through the night. She sure wasn’t coming out here again in the dark.

  Inside, she dumped the load of kindling and logs in the woodbin, then reached for a few smaller sticks to get the fire going. But just before she put the kindling on the fire, she stopped and stared at the stick in her hand. The “stick” was not a stick. It was, it slowly dawned on her, a bone. A human bone.

  22

  Under Enchantment

  FAINT LIGHT GLIMMERED in the sky when she woke. The fire was out and it was so cold that Francie’s breath made puffs of white steam at every exhale. She got up, dragging the coverlet with her as she went to the fireplace and got the fire going again.

  The bone she’d found lay somewhere outside where she’d tossed it the night before. Now, in the daylight, she just laughed. Of course it was an animal bone! Why had she ever thought it was from a human? Only because she’d been so spooked. How would she even know a human bone from an animal bone? She wouldn’t!

  “What a baby,” she scolded herself. “Somebody’s dog probably dragged that thing out of the woods and left it on our woodpile. A dog with a morbid sense of humor.”

  After a breakfast of instant coffee—sadly, no cream, milk, or anything white to put in it—and the last of the sardines, she bundled up, took a handful of Oreos, and went out to check the ice. She barely glanced at the bone that lay among the fallen leaves outside the cabin.

  By the time she got to the Fredericksons’, the Oreos were gone. The ice was not. In fact, if anything, it looked thicker, more solid. Francie picked up a stone and tossed it, watching it ping and bounce along the ice. She tried it with a bigger stone, then a fist-size roc
k, then a two-hander. All the rocks remained securely on top, which seemed encouraging, so she took a tentative step onto it, then another, then another—far enough to realize that the ice had frozen perfectly clear. It was like an enormous picture window with a spectacular view of the bottom of the lake.

  It seemed pretty solid. If she fell through, she’d only get her feet wet, so she might as well give it a try. So far, so good. A few more steps. Still solid! She could tell by the cracks in the ice how thick it was, and she remembered that to support a person you only need, like, what, a couple of inches? Francie minced along, mostly because it was so eerie to walk on such clear ice.

  The cracks and fissures in the ice were black, but sunlight illuminated the bottom so that it was like looking down on the ruins of an underwater city: pale rocks strewn like the toppled remains of a wall, waterlogged driftwood scattered like animal bones, and here and there the glint of clamshells, bright as china plates. And under her feet, darting fish.

  Entranced, she paid little attention to where she was going, just staring through the ice at the bottom below.

  Her phone rang. It was Raven. She needed to remember to turn it off to save the battery.

  “The lake froze,” she said.

  “No way!” Raven said.

  “But Raven,” Francie’s voice was hushed, “it’s like glass. It’s completely translucent.”

  There was a pause. “Frenchy? Are you out on it?”

  “Not very far,” Francie said. “Just a few steps.”

  “Listen to me. Don’t go out on it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Francie said. “The aunts have already given me the lecture. But remember how shallow it is here, and for quite a ways? So even if I did bust through, I’d be able to stand up. How bad could that be?”

  “Bad,” Raven said. “Really bad.” When Francie didn’t respond, Raven said, “Frenchy?”

  “I’ll call you back.” Francie hung up and put the phone in her pocket. She had seen something at the bottom of the lake. It was as if she were looking through a window at it: some silver thing half buried in sand—a silver square that almost seemed to emit a pulsing glow. She stared at it for a long moment, thinking, I didn’t imagine it. I’m not going bonkers. That must be it—what else could it be? She howled like a coyote, first with happiness, then with frustration.