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

  Her attention was diverted to the posters that plastered the walls advertising openings on the debate team, a speech tournament, and auditions for the play Antigone.

  She paused. They were going to tackle Greek tragedy? Would it be awful? Or maybe the question should be, “How awful?”

  “Interested?” said a voice behind her. Francie turned to see a boy smiling at her. “Auditions are on Tuesday.”

  “I’m impressed,” Francie said. “I mean, you guys are going to do Antigone?”

  “Oh, is that how you say it? An-TIG-uh-nee? We’ve been saying ANTY-gone.”

  She laughed. “I probably would, too, but we studied it in school.”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “Brooklyn,” she said.

  “Brooklyn? As in New York?”

  “Yeah, that Brooklyn, but I grew up spending summers here, or at a lake near here.”

  “Enchantment?”

  “Yeah,” Francie said. “How did you know that?”

  “I’m guessing you’re the famous detective,” he said.

  Before Francie could protest, a head-splitting electronic blare rang out: the bell.

  The boy started walking backwards down the hall. “We’re going out to Enchantment today!” he called back to her. “The director is taking some of us theater kids out to see that archaeological site—I guess he’s friends with the guy in charge out there. Sort of a field trip. Maybe I’ll see you there?” Then he bashed into a wall of lockers. He turned to shake his fist at the lockers, smiled back at Francie, then disappeared down the hall.

  So now, Francie thought, time to face lunch, probably the most awkward time of day in a new school where you don’t know anyone. But there was no skipping it—she hadn’t had breakfast and she was starving. If she didn’t eat lunch, there was no way she’d make it through the rest of the day.

  In the lunch line, she pushed her tray along, trying not to make eye contact with any of the girls ahead of her, in case they’d been in the bathroom just now. It was hard to tell what lunch was, exactly.

  “Beans?” a gravelly voice behind the steam trays asked.

  Francie glanced up and nodded, then paused. She looked at the lady scooping green beans—had she seen her somewhere before? Weird. The lunch lady plunked a scoop of grayish green beans onto Francie’s plate while eyeing her with distaste.

  What’s she got against me? Francie wondered, continuing down the line, being served some brownish lumps that possibly had once been part of a cow, a bun, a limp pickle, and a dish of gray pudding with a dollop of none-too-white whipped cream on top. Putty-flavored pudding with a garnish of grout, anyone?

  A table full of girls went suddenly silent when Francie walked by, and as soon as she’d moved just a few steps past their table, she heard one of them whisper, “She washed her hair in the bathroom sink!”

  Then another said, “And dried it under the hand drier!”

  Just great, she thought for the hundredth time that day. Her senior year was starting out just great.

  Francie sat down at a mostly empty table—a few strays at the other end who looked like freshmen were hopefully too intimidated to say anything to her—and she started in on . . . beans and whatever else her lunch was.

  She had just stuck a forkful of it into her mouth when the girl who’d brought up the maple syrup situation slid into the seat across from her.

  “Hey, I’m sorry if I freaked you out about the Muskie Bait thing,” the girl said. “I’m not going to turn you in or anything.”

  “That’s nice of you,” Francie said, hoping her tablemate caught the irony in her voice.

  “Jay says you might try out for the play.”

  “What play?” Francie said. “Who’s Jay?”

  “The guy you met in the hall, by the audition poster. You should totally try out.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Francie said. “But thanks.”

  “It’s a good way to meet people. I just started at this school last year—used to go to school on the rez—and I didn’t like it here until I got into doing plays and stuff. It can be hard to make friends. My name’s Raven, by the way,” the girl said, holding out her hand.

  Francie shook it. Except for her dark hair, Raven didn’t seem very raven-like. She didn’t seem fierce, large, or raucous, which is what Francie thought of when she thought of the big black birds. Maybe she should have been named Sparrow. The girl was pretty enough, with her coffee-with-cream complexion, but wearing a nondescript shirt and jeans, neither in nor out of style, she seemed like the kind of person who strives to go unnoticed. Except for her earrings.

  “I like your earrings,” Francie said, hoping to keep the conversation off auditions and/or vandalism, and anyway, she did like them.

  Raven put her fingers on the earrings as if to check what she was wearing. “Yeah,” she said. “My grandma makes these out of porcupine quills. I help her pull quills sometimes.”

  “Wait. What? You pull quills out of porcupines?” Francie tried to picture it.

  Raven laughed. “Well, they’re not alive when we do it,” she said.

  “Good,” Francie said, then turned her attention to trying to figure out what to do with the food—if it was food—on her tray.

  “That’s beef stew, I’m pretty sure,” Raven said. “Want another recommendation? Bring a lunch from home.” She smiled and held up her sandwich and said, “Cheers!”

  Francie toasted her with a forkful of stew.

  “Might go out to my grandma’s this weekend, if you want the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pull quills,” Raven said.

  Francie busied herself trying to open a packet of salad dressing, then slowly squeezed out its contents. She appreciated the invitation, and she was kind of curious, but she wasn’t sure how to respond. It wasn’t that Raven was clearly not one of the “popular” girls—obvious, since she was sitting here with her, Francie the Weirdo, who washed her hair in the bathroom sink. No, what was really stopping her was that Raven’s dad was a cop. And Francie was now a criminal.

  A couple of boys went by, carrying their lunch trays. “Hey, Craven,” said one, over his shoulder, “who let you out of jail?”

  Raven rolled her eyes but otherwise ignored them as they went by, chuckling at their own attempt at wit.

  Jail? Francie wondered. The first person she meets on her first day of school just got out of jail? Francie knew she should hardly judge—she probably ought to be in jail after last night. If her granddad found out about any of this, he’d yank her out of this school and this town and away from Enchantment so fast she wouldn’t have time to blink.

  4

  At Enchantment

  THERE WAS SOMETHING beautifully melancholy about fall, Francie thought, as she and Theo motored out to the cabin later that afternoon. Leaves drifted from the trees and clustered along the shoreline or floated on the water, made suddenly so much colder by frosty nights. Some of the trees had already burst into the Walpurgis school colors: red and gold. These colors now shimmered up from the lake, reflected in the water. Farther up the hill, bare branches revealed lonely cabins, their windows shuttered. Docks had been taken in and stacked on the shore, summer residents gone south or wherever they went in the winter.

  “Cool that there’s still no road on this side of the lake,” Theo said. “And that you still have to boat over to get there.”

  Francie nodded, then tried to cut to the chase. “Are you going to explain what happened last night?” She’d already grilled him on where he’d been the past three years (“All over the place”) and what he’d been doing there (“This and that”), and now she was trying for a direct answer.

  “Yeah, I’ll explain that,” Theo said, pointing at the motor and then his ears. Speaking over a running motor meant shouting, so, okay, Francie could see why he didn’t want to talk about it now.

  Francie glanced up at a wavering line of geese honking and barking their way across the sky.

  “Pretty
crazy having an archaeological dig going on here, huh?” Theo shouted. “Was it you who discovered the mastodon bones?”

  “No, not me,” Francie said. “And it seemed cool for a while, but it’s getting old. A lot of people coming and going, for one thing, and the director of the dig is not exactly . . . popular, so everybody is grumpy. Theo, you’re evading my questions.” She pushed back the hair that blew around her face. “Just like you always did when I asked about Mom.”

  “Sometimes it’s better not to know,” Theo said.

  “No, it isn’t!” Francie wanted to shout, but she restrained herself. She felt that not knowing about her mother had been like a kind of blindness. Like some essential part of her had been stolen away.

  “How was school?” Theo asked.

  “What do you think?” Francie said.

  “I’m sorry,” Theo said. “Not enough sleep? My fault. But it’ll get better, right? Can’t get worse?”

  She shrugged.

  “Meet any nice kids?” Theo asked.

  “I met a couple people. They were okay. There’s an audition for a play,” she said.

  “You’re going to try out, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? It would be a great way to get to know some people and do something you enjoy, too. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to get you. With your experience, you’d probably get the lead.”

  “That would be terrible!”

  “Why terrible?”

  Francie groaned. “I’m sure there’s some girl who finally has a shot at the lead because the girl who always used to get the big parts has finally graduated, and then some stupid girl from New York comes and takes it away? That is not a good way to make friends.”

  “Ah,” Theo said. “But it would still be fun to be in it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Francie said. “Rehearsals will be evenings and weekends. And those are the only times I have to come out here.”

  Theo slowed the motor on their approach to the dock, and Francie jumped at the opportunity to say, “I need to know about Mom, Theo.”

  “I know,” Theo said, “and you’re old enough.” He cut the motor and eased the boat up to their aunts’ dock, one of the few still in the water, then climbed out and tied up the boat. A sudden breeze caught Theo’s long curls and billowed them around his face. He pulled the strands from his eyes and Francie unwound the scarf from her neck.

  “When did your hair get so long?” she asked, playfully tying his hair back with her scarf. Touching his hair like that made her feel a rush of tenderness for him. When she was this close, she could see that what gave his hair its peculiar sheen was that among the thick black curls were bright, silvery hairs. “Your hair is turning white!” she cried.

  “So’s yours,” he said, touching the streak of white that ran through her own dark hair.

  “Which one of us will go all white first, do you think?” she mused, squinting out at the lake at a big raft of hooting and cooing loons. They came down from Canada or somewhere and gathered, hanging out in big groups before heading south, she remembered. She wished them well, the geese, the songbirds, the loons, on their long journey, hoping they could avoid windows, cars, cell towers, wind turbines, and giant glass football stadiums erected in their flight path. They had far to go and many obstacles in their way.

  Out on the lake, beyond the loons, a pontoon full of teenagers plied the water toward the dock. Oh, brother. The field trip. Just when she was finally going to get Theo to tell her what she had waited her whole life to know. She shoved out of her mind the fact that she was the one who had gotten sidetracked on the subject of hair.

  “But, Theo,” she asked in a rush, “why were you old enough to know about Mom when you were little, but I wasn’t? You’ve always known everything, haven’t you?”

  “Everything? No. But listen, Francie. You should be glad you didn’t know. It was terrible having this secret all these years. Keeping a secret like that . . . it’s not good. You’re constantly evading questions—or just outright lying.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Look. You’re lucky to have been in the dark. For me, everything that came out of my mouth about her—about anything to do with her, our family, Dad—it began to seem like everything was a lie.” He paused, then added, “It’s not good to lie so much.”

  Francie was quiet for a moment. How could knowing be worse than not knowing? Well, she wasn’t going to fight about it now. The sound of the pontoon was growing louder, along with the noise of the passengers.

  “Having a few friends over?” Theo asked.

  “I guess the theater kids are coming out here for some kind of field trip,” Francie said.

  “Theater field trip?”

  “To see the dig.”

  “An archaeological play?”

  “Antigone.”

  “Oh . . . kay?” Theo said. “This isn’t exactly ancient Greece out here.”

  “I don’t get it either,” Francie agreed.

  As the two of them watched the boat’s approach, Theo asked, “Why did you decide to stay here instead of going back to New York?”

  “The aunts. The place. I don’t know,” Francie answered.

  “A boyfriend?” Theo said.

  “Oh, Nels?” Francie couldn’t help sigh a little, thinking of him. “He’s away at college anyway. So, no, that’s not why I stayed. I was worried about Aunt Astrid and Aunt Jeannette after what happened this summer. I told Granddad I wanted to stay and finish school in Walpurgis and he agreed to pay the rent on a small apartment in town. ‘As long as you keep those grades up,’” she added, speaking in her grandfather’s gruff voice.

  “I thought you were bound and determined to make it as an actor in New York.”

  “I was. But I’m only seventeen, and maybe I can just, you know, go to high school and be a regular, normal high school student in a normal, regular town.”

  “You, a normal, regular high school student?” Theo squinted at her.

  There was another reason she had stayed, but she didn’t know how to explain it, and anyway, there was an entire pontoon of theater kids arriving at their dock.

  “Ahoy!” the one adult on board called out. The rest of the crew, obviously making fun of him, began to talk as if it were Talk Like a Grizzled Seafarer Day.

  The boat drew up to the dock, which put an end to brother and sister conversation. Francie recognized Sandy, from the resort across the lake, as the driver of the pontoon. She smiled and nodded and he gave a nod back, blushing as usual.

  “Hi, Francie!” someone called. She looked into the group to see Jay—the guy she’d met by the audition poster—waving at her. She said hi and then noticed Raven, too, who also waved and said, “Hi, Francie!”

  “You seem to have befriended half the school already,” Theo said.

  “Those are precisely the two people I met today,” Francie explained as the students and the director filed off the boat onto the dock.

  The girls, not surprisingly, ogled Theo as they went by, and Raven went so far as to whisper to Francie, “Is that your boyfriend?”

  “Brother,” Francie explained.

  “Excellent!” Raven said, making Francie laugh. Raven laughed easily, too, and Francie felt herself warming to the girl. When Raven laughed, there was a glimpse of the raven hiding behind the sparrow’s feathers. Her face glowed; her dark eyes gleamed with mischief.

  The theater director introduced himself as Keith Redburn. “I hope it’s okay that we landed at your dock? It’s where Dr. Digby suggested we tie up. And sorry to ask, but could you show us to the site?”

  “Maybe you can take them?” Theo suggested. “I have to greet the aunts before anything else happens. And drop off my bag.” He held up his duffle.

  “Plus, you don’t know your way to the site,” Francie added.

  “Right,” Theo said. He took the stairs up the hill two at a time and was gone.

  Francie sighed and said, “Well, okay!
Follow me, I guess.”

  Everyone except Sandy, who would stay with the boat, trooped after her up the hill and proceeded onto a well-traveled path that led through the woods back to the old bog where the archaeologists had been excavating. Raven walked with Francie and filled her in on why they were there: it turned out that one of the kids in the theater program—that one, Phoebe—had volunteered at the site this summer. Phoebe, Francie thought. Phoebe, Raven, Jay. Was everyone in this school named after a bird?

  “But the main reason,” Raven explained, “is that Mr. Redburn is friends with Dr. Digby, the director of the dig.” Raven and Francie giggled over his name; then Raven went on. “They used to be college roommates or something, and I think Redburn wants to impress us with the people he knows, otherwise I have no idea what we’re doing here.”

  “Mmm,” Francie said, noncommittally. It was pretty likely they would all soon find out what kind of a jerk Digby was; he generally didn’t waste any time making enemies. In fact, as they passed by Digby’s tent—a large Boy Scout–style canvas tent on a wooden platform—Francie heard voices, Digby’s and some other guy’s, and sure enough, they were arguing. Digby hurled some kind of insult, and the other person said, “. . . if you spill the beans . . . ,” before the group moved out of earshot.

  The pit where the mastodon bones had been uncovered and mostly removed and hauled off somewhere now looked like, well, a pit.

  “Is that it?” Raven asked.

  “Yeah,” Francie said. “They got a late start, but they’ll work more on it next summer.”

  “Bo-ring,” yawned one of the girls.

  “Where are the bones? I thought we were going to see bones,” Jay said.

  “I guess they’ve been taken to . . .” Francie wasn’t actually sure where they went. “The university? Or a museum?” She was feeling spectacularly ill-informed about everything and hoped one of the interns or college workers would rescue her. Unfortunately, a lot of the workers had left to go back to college. Just a few stragglers were left.