The Clue in the Trees: An Enchantment Lake Mystery Page 13

  “The box is under the ice,” she cried and, kneeling, pounded her fists on the ice. “Under!” (Pound!) “The!” (Pound!) “Ice!” (Pound pound pound!)

  She lay down, cupped her hands around her eyes, and stared down at it. “Far, far away there is a lake,” she said. “On the lake there is a sheet of ice. Under the ice there is water. Under the water there is the bottom. On the bottom there is a box. In the box there lies my heart.”

  The sand sloped down into inky darkness, and she realized she was looking at the edge of the drop-off. There were deep spots in this lake, she remembered, 180 feet at the deepest. If the box had landed just a few inches farther out, she’d never have spotted it. It might have been impossible to ever find it.

  Her chest felt tight when she realized how easily the box could slip over that edge, pushed by currents or wind. Or it could easily become completely buried under the sand. She’d have to retrieve it as soon as possible. “Okay, think,” she muttered to herself, “mark the spot.” She slid a mitten off her hand, laid it on the ice, then stood and looked back toward the shore, noticing how the shadows lay from this angle and marking where she was between those two pines. That’s when she noticed something else. There was someone—a person—standing mostly behind a tree but not quite entirely. Watching her.

  How long had that person been there, following her movements? Where had he come from? How long had he been there, watching her?

  Now she was out here, exposed and vulnerable, while he was in the shadows of the trees. Did he know she’d seen him?

  Francie started walking away, not toward shore where the person was watching, but on the ice toward her aunts’ cabin. She sensed the shadowy figure following her, but along the shore. If she glanced landward, she could just discern movement in and out of the trees. He was lagging a little behind, like a wolf, Francie thought, following a wounded deer. No, she thought, not quite that. There was something wrong with that metaphor . . .

  This is what she was thinking when the ice gave way under her.

  23

  Sleep at Last

  IT WAS NOT LIKE FALLING INTO WATER. It was beyond cold, beyond wet. It was like plunging into mercury or being seared by liquid nitrogen or some other completely unfamiliar element.

  The thing to do, her mind screamed while her arms and legs churned the water, was . . . get out! She tried to obey, tried to fling herself up on the sheet of ice, but she barely got her arms on top of it when it gave way under her, only widening the hole. She tried getting a grip on the ice with her fingernails, but the ice was too slick and her fingernails too short.

  Get out! her mind ordered again.

  But she could make no effort to do it. Her limbs were so numb they wouldn’t obey. Then yell for help, she told herself, but when she tried, the sound strangled in her throat like a scream in a nightmare.

  The sun had burnished the ice into something metallic looking—a stainless steel countertop, like the kind in a morgue. Good-bye to the sun that shines for me no longer, she thought. Or perhaps she said it. Lines from the play darted in and out of her mind like minnows: Now sleepy Death summons me down . . . down . . . water dragged her down. Water, thick and black as oil, oil from fossils, fossils from bones, bones from dragons, dragons from underground. Soon I shall be with my own again. . . . And I shall see my father again, and you, mother . . . passing to that chamber where all find sleep at last.

  24

  Warm

  THE FACT THAT SHE FELT WARM probably meant she was nearly dead. Wasn’t that how it was? You started to feel warm and that was the beginning of the end. Did she dare open her eyes? It was too frightening to think about, to imagine the darkness, the emptiness, the impossibility of escape. But she had to know, so she opened them . . . and found herself in a room, on a bed, under a blanket. No, under about ten blankets. Blankets she recognized, a bed she recognized, in a cabin she recognized.

  “Hello, you’re awake,” said Theo, stepping into the room.

  Francie tried to sit up but felt herself dragged down by the weight of the blankets and something heavy in her head. Her mind seemed to be like a bad TV channel, mostly static and white fuzz. In there somewhere something was trying to come into focus.

  “Theo!” she said. “When did you get here?”

  “Just in the nick of time, apparently,” he said.

  “Did you pull me out of the lake?”

  He looked around as if to say, Do you see anyone else around here? “What you were doing in the lake, anyway?” he asked. “Just going for a dip?”

  How had Theo gotten here? Francie wondered. He hadn’t been at the cabin, so where had he come from? He couldn’t have come across the ice—as was demonstrated, it really wasn’t safe—so where had he come from and why had he been there and found her at that precise moment? It was all so odd and kind of creepy, and she felt so woozy and dizzy, she couldn’t seem to formulate the words to ask.

  Something had come to her while she’d been unconscious—or whatever she’d been. She’d had a flash—or flashes—of insight. But trying to find them again . . . it was as slippery as trying to remember a dream.

  “Francie!” Theo waved his hand in front of her face. “Hello?”

  “I just went out on the ice a ways to look at the bottom—it was so clear! And then a little farther and a little farther—I didn’t realize I’d gone out so far.”

  “When I saw you, you seemed to be hurrying right along.”

  “How did you happen to be . . . why were you around to save me?”

  “Raven called and told me you were out here and she was a little worried about you. No, a lot worried.” He turned, glanced back, and then rushed out, calling over his shoulder, “I’ve got something on the stove.”

  Francie could smell something cooking in the kitchen. Something good.

  “What did she say?” she called after Theo. She heaved off the blankets, lunged out of bed, and staggered into the living room. Her boots were propped up near the fireplace where a cheery fire was burning, and her jacket and other clothes hung from the rafters.

  “Planning on going somewhere?” Theo leaned against the door frame holding a mug of something steaming. He put the mug into her hands and said, “Drink this.”

  Francie sank down on the couch, sipped on the warm cocoa, and tried to sort through what had been a dream and what had happened in the moments after she’d fallen through the ice. “How long do you think I was in the water before you pulled me out?”

  “You’re welcome, by the way,” Theo said, sitting down next to her.

  “Oh, Theo,” Francie said. “I’m sorry. Didn’t I say thank you?” She flung her arms around him. “Thank you for saving my life, you big, frilly, apron-wearing lug.” She slugged him, but not very hard. “You smell like Aunt Jeannette.”

  “We use the same aftershave,” Theo said, getting up and going back into the kitchen.

  Francie laughed a little and looked back out the window, squinting at the brightness. “What did Raven say to you?”

  “She just said that if I had a way to get out here, maybe I should come. Good thing I did, huh?”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Canoe—stick a foot out and scoot the canoe along on the ice until you hit open water, then paddle. Etcetera. What are you doing out here? Trying to solve the murder?”

  “No!” Francie said. “I—no. I’m not trying to solve any murders. I don’t want to be some sort of stupid northwoods Nancy Drew.”

  “All right, then, Nancy. I mean, Francie,” he said.

  She threw a pillow at him; he caught it midair and said, “Now I know why they call these things throw pillows,” then threw it back at her. “So, are you going to tell me what you were doing on the ice?”

  “What about you?” Francie said. “You haven’t explained anything. Like where you’ve been. Or how you knew Digby and what you two were arguing about. Or tell me why you came here. Or explain what you know about—”

  “O
kay, okay,” he said. “What do you want to know first?”

  For a moment the static cleared and it seemed as if the plunge under the ice had scoured Francie’s mind into a kind of shiny silver platter, ready to receive anything in a cool, detached way. All other queries paled next to the one brightly polished question on that platter: “Mom?” she asked.

  “Okay,” Theo said. “But remember, once you know something, you can’t unknow it, and in this case, it is a secret you have to keep from everyone. Everyone. You can’t even tell Raven,” he said. “You should also know that once you know a big secret, a secret you can’t share with anyone, you can’t avoid lying. In fact, in a way, your whole life becomes a lie.”

  “You’ve said that,” she said. She didn’t add that she had also come to understand what he’d meant by it.

  Theo walked back into the kitchen. Francie could hear him chopping something, and she followed him in.

  “You are stalling,” she said. “And where did you get vegetables? Did you bring groceries?”

  “I was just leaving the grocery store when Raven called.”

  “You said that Mom had stolen something. Were you telling me that our mother is a thief?”

  “That’s one possibility.”

  “So the other possibility is that she isn’t?”

  “Right. She may very well have been saving a priceless antiquity from falling into nefarious hands. She was most likely keeping it from the smugglers. But what happened was that everyone went after her: the smugglers, yes, but also the agency that she worked for and the CIA as well as international intelligence agencies.”

  “Geez!” Francie said. “So she’s like Jason Bourne.”

  “Who?” Theo said.

  “You are so out of it! Where have you been?”

  “This is what I’ve been doing with my life. Looking for Mom. For the past two years I’ve devoted every waking minute to finding her.”

  A lump formed in Francie’s throat. She had been so convinced that Theo had just been throwing away his trust money by gallivanting around the world having adventures . . . and all this time, he’d been looking for their mother. Francie rubbed her forehead, shielding her eyes with her hand. She didn’t want him to see that she was crying.

  “But this is why she had to disappear—completely disappear. And why it was important that none of us in the family knew anything. If we didn’t know where she was, we couldn’t say. It was a form of protection for all of us. Otherwise, we would be in danger, too.”

  A little thrill poured through Francie, a thrill mixed with a kind of carbonated excitement, with a squeeze of lime. Maybe their mother was not a criminal. “Things are not as they seem,” she said, remembering Redburn’s words.

  “What?” Theo said.

  “Nothing,” Francie answered. “But . . . so you’re saying that nobody can find her: not the organization she worked for, not the CIA, not the smugglers . . . but you’re going to find her?”

  “Well, not me alone,” Theo said.

  “Who are you working with?”

  “I’m hoping to work with you,” Theo said. “That is, if you can keep yourself alive long enough.”

  Francie kind of laughed. Really, she didn’t know what else to do.

  “The thing is,” he went on. “I’ve been all over the world: South America, the Middle East, Asia, Mongolia, learning things little by little, and you know where my investigation led me?”

  “Here,” Francie offered.

  “Yeah,” Theo said. “Right here.”

  Time seemed to stop for a moment. Had there been the ticking of a clock, the hum of a refrigerator, the buzz of a fan, this would have been the moment when Francie would have been aware of those sounds. But there was nothing. Silence.

  Then Theo said, “You tell me what you were doing out on the ice, and I’ll tell you everything else.” He turned back to his vegetables.

  Francie whined and pleaded, then hemmed and hawed, but finally got out about the silver box, where it had been, how she had seen it disappear into the lake, and that she’d gone out on the ice to find it. “I remember it from when I was little,” she told him, “but then it disappeared at some point. Still, I kind of always remembered it and started thinking of it as the place where I kept my heart. I know it doesn’t make any sense, and is weird and everything, but it was a kid thing.”

  Theo, she realized, had stopped chopping. He stood with his hands on the countertop, his back to her. He was very still.

  “Theo? I know it was weird, but—”

  “Go on,” he said.

  She told him about seeing it at the Fredericksons’ and finally going with Raven to look for it, but how it wasn’t there. Instead, someone else was there, and she thought that person had also been looking for the box and had taken it and for some reason had thrown it in the lake. She knew she was right about that because she had seen it—had seen the box under the ice right before she fell in.

  “Frenchy, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “About the box.”

  “You would have just told me to leave it alone, to forget about it, it was in my imagination, to stop obsessing about Mom—I don’t know! All the things you’ve always said when I bring up anything having to do with her. There’s another reason, too,” Francie said softly. “You have a secret. You have a lot of secrets, it seems to me, and I didn’t see any reason to confide in you when I don’t, I can’t, trust you.”

  “You can’t trust me? Why not?”

  “For all I know you’re a murderer!” she blurted out.

  As soon as she said it, she regretted it. What if he was a murderer? And if he wasn’t, what a terrible thing to say to your own brother!

  He had turned and now he looked at her, his face a study in disbelief. “Why would you think that?” he said.

  “I heard you arguing with Digby. You were gone during the time he was murdered. I saw you washing your hands in the lake.”

  Theo laughed. “I’d been gathering mushrooms for dinner, you goof.”

  “Mushrooms? I don’t remember any mushrooms.”

  “They were overlooked in all the excitement. When I got back to the cabin, you and the aunts were on the phone to the sheriff’s office, and I just set the mushrooms in the kitchen. I think they were forgotten.”

  “Oh,” Francie said. How stupid she’d been. Why hadn’t she just asked?

  “As for Digby, yes, I did argue with him. I didn’t really know him. I just knew who he was.”

  “I guess he was kind of famous,” Francie said, “as archaeologists go. So if he was such a hotshot, why was he here digging up dime-a-dozen mastodon bones?”

  “Exactly,” Theo agreed. “I think he was trying to get out of the limelight, because he was the director of a dig—a big one, potentially very big—when something major went missing from the site. What’s not clear is whether he was involved or not.”

  “Was it the world’s biggest dinosaur?” Francie guessed.

  Theo squinted at her out of one eye. “You figured that out?”

  “Well, not so much me as Jay,” Francie admitted. “But, anyway, you came here to talk to Digby. You didn’t come here to see me or to tell me about Mom, or any of that.” Francie’s gut felt like a garbage disposal full of emotions, all grinding away in there.

  “Well, it’s complicated,” Theo protested. “But, see, it’s all tied together somehow.”

  “So why were you arguing with Digby?”

  “I asked him what he was doing here. He flew off the handle, just lost it. He was so defensive about it, I figured the rumors must be true.”

  “What rumors?”

  “That there is something else around here that he was really looking for. Something bigger.”

  “Bigger than mastodon bones?”

  “Not literally bigger, but more important. A big find. Possibly huge.”

  “Like what? Wait a minute,” Francie lowered herself onto the couch. “You
’re talking about the treasure, aren’t you? That old legend?”

  “It might not be just a legend,” Theo said.

  “Funny,” Francie mused. “Sandy said the same thing just the other day. He said that his dad told him that it wasn’t just a legend. That was just before he . . . died.”

  Theo and Francie looked at each other.

  “But, Theo,” Francie said, “what is it? What is the treasure? And where is it?”

  Theo swallowed. “The answer,” he said, “is in that silver box.”

  25

  The Situation

  “I’M GOING TO GO check out the situation,” Theo said, pulling on his boots. “You stay here.”

  “NO! I have to show you where it is,” Francie insisted. But as soon as she had pulled on her dry socks—nice and warm from the fire—she felt a pang of worry. She stared into the fire for a moment, trying to think.

  “Sure you’re okay?” Theo asked, his brows knit with concern.

  “Yeah,” she rubbed her forehead. “Fine.”

  “Look,” Theo said. “I’m just checking on the thickness of the ice over there, that’s all. You stay here. You’re not recovered yet. And you don’t want to get pneumonia.”

  There was something about the plan Francie didn’t like, but she was still so foggy that she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. “I wish you wouldn’t,” was all she could think to say.

  “Stir the soup,” Theo commanded as he threw on his jacket. “I’m not going to do anything dangerous.” Then he added, just before going out the door, “Don’t worry.”

  But Francie was worried. Why? He’s just going over to assess the situation, she told herself. Still, there was something niggling at her, something that felt just out of reach—like trying to remember a dream after waking.