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

  “Not like that, you imbecile!” a familiar voice shouted. It was Digby—tall and authoritative-looking, wearing a floppy canvas hat and sunglasses. He was directing orders at a girl in shorts, a safari-style shirt, and rubber boots, her blonde hair tucked into a bandana. He stopped her, sniffed, and gave her a good looking at. “Marly, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Mallory,” she answered.

  “Well, Melody, maybe you should just look for a wealthy husband—someone to support you. Archaeology is not a glamorous field,” Digby said, rearranging the box she had been packing.

  Mallory’s jaws clenched and her nostrils flared. “Professor Digby,” she said. “You have done nothing but insult me this whole entire summer, and I don’t think I deserve it.”

  “The whole entire summer?” he repeated, clearly making fun of her. “So, shoot me,” he finished, moving away.

  “If looks could kill, Digby would be so dead right now,” Raven whispered to Francie, flicking her eyes in the direction of Mallory, who was giving Digby a daggerlike glare.

  Digby, however, had already moved on, shouting, “I’m surrounded by fashion models and incompetent fools! How am I supposed to accomplish anything here?” He flung open the flap of his big canvas tent and disappeared inside.

  One of the college students appeared, slightly out of breath, smiled, introduced himself as Jackson, then gestured to everyone to follow him.

  Now that Jackson had taken over, Francie thought, she could leave, right? She dawdled a bit so her departure wouldn’t seem so abrupt, then let the group drift on ahead of her while she turned to head back to the cabin. As she passed by the tent, she heard Digby arguing again. Nothing surprising there—sooner or later he argued with everyone. She herself had argued with him that summer when he made it clear she was not welcome in the area.

  She was headed down the path when the other voice in the tent reached her ears and made her steps slow. The voice was familiar. Theo? That was strange; he’d only just arrived. Why would he be arguing with Digby? And already? Straining to listen, she crept back toward the tent, but by the time she got close enough to hear the words, the argument was over. She did not want to get caught eavesdropping by either Theo or Digby, so she skedaddled down the path.

  Back at the cabin, her aunts were in a tizzy over Theo’s arrival. Jeannette was digging in the refrigerator to find something special to make for dinner, and Astrid was opening and closing cupboard doors, probably out of sheer excitement.

  “Frenchy, it’s you!” Astrid said, calling Francie by her lake nickname. Somebody had started calling her French Fry. (How could it be resisted with a name like Francie Frye?) The name had gotten shortened to Frenchy, and now was, as she thought of it, her lake name. “How was school?” Astrid asked.

  “Fine,” Francie said.

  Jeannette pulled her head out of the fridge to say hello and inquire after her courses and teachers.

  Francie gave condensed answers and then asked, “Where did Theo go?”

  “He went to take a look at the site. Didn’t you see him?”

  “No,” she said honestly. She hadn’t actually seen him.

  “He’ll be back soon. Isn’t it so exciting to have him here?”

  “Never a dull moment,” Francie said, also quite honestly.

  “Listen, dear, would you mind helping with dinner? We’ve invited Digby—”

  “What?” Francie said. “Digby? Why?”

  “Well, the whole crew is about to leave, aren’t they, and their cook was done for the season, and we haven’t had him yet for dinner. We’re just trying to be nice.”

  “Digby, though? He’s so horrible.”

  “Yes, he is, isn’t he?” Astrid said. “Why did we invite him, Jenny?”

  “Did Theo know you invited Digby?” Francie asked.

  “Oh, now let’s see,” Astrid said. “Jenny, did you tell Theo we’d invited Digby? Such a funny name for an archaeologist, isn’t it?”

  Jeannette handed Francie a bowl of cookie dough and said, “I don’t remember that I did. Oh, I hope he isn’t rude to Theo! But why would he be?”

  As Francie plopped dough on a cookie sheet, she wondered that very thing, but she didn’t bring up the conversation she’d overheard. Out the kitchen window she watched the theater kids file out of the woods and down to the pontoon, a few stragglers lagging behind, Raven and Jay among them.

  “Ooh!” Astrid crowed. “Should we invite the kids in for cookies?”

  “No!” Francie cried.

  “Wouldn’t you like to get to know some of your classmates?”

  “Tomorrow will be soon enough.”

  After Francie slid a sheet of cookies into the oven, she walked to the picture window that faced the lake. The pontoon was still moored there, the students either on the boat or the dock, apparently waiting for someone. She could hear their voices trailing up from the water. Laughter, a bit of a song, a few lines from a play she recognized.

  The couch beckoned and Francie lay down, intending to just rest, but she fell asleep hard. When she woke, she could tell it was dark outside, and the smell of burned cookies lingered in the air.

  “The cookies!” she cried, sitting up and throwing off the blanket that one of her aunts must have draped over her.

  “Don’t worry,” Astrid said. “I rescued them.”

  It didn’t smell like an entirely successful rescue, Francie thought, trying to get her bearings. The table was set, the pots sat atop the stove, burners off, and the aunts sat nearby, each holding a little glass of sherry. From the light still lingering on the lake, Francie could tell that the pontoon was gone.

  “Did dinner happen already?” Francie asked. “Where is Theo?”

  “No, we haven’t had dinner,” Jeannette said, paging through a magazine. “We’re still waiting for Digby and Theo.”

  Remembering the heated exchange she’d heard between the two men, Francie felt a white-hot bolt of something—fear?—rush through her, and she leapt off the couch. It was irrational, she knew—what did she think had happened? Maybe, she thought, it was just the disorienting feeling of waking in the dark, her lack of sleep, the whole strange Muskie Bait thing the night before. But she couldn’t shake the feeling.

  Theo, she thought, was in trouble. She knew it. She could feel it. Why hadn’t it dawned on her until this moment? She had been so concerned about herself and her first day of school that she had neglected to see it. And now what she was feeling was horrible, soul-shaking fear.

  “I’ll go look for Theo,” she said, lunging for the door.

  “I’m sure he’ll be here soon,” Jeannette said. “He said something about . . .”

  But Francie was out the door, flashlight in hand. She felt as if she had been struck by lightning and a fire had ignited inside her. She barely heard her aunts’ little squeaks of protest as she charged down the path to the bog.

  It was darker under the trees, and she was glad she’d brought a flashlight. The site was quiet, as would be expected. The few remaining workers must have returned to their cabins.

  So there was nobody here. That was her first thought. But her flesh prickled from her scalp practically to her toes, as if someone were watching her.

  Okay, she told herself. It’s dark, I’m in the woods. There’s nothing and nobody here. I’m just being a scaredy-cat. She forced herself toward Digby’s tent, the last place she’d heard Theo. But it’s quiet now, she told herself. There’s obviously nobody there; it would just be a waste of time. Plus, surrounded as it was by overarching trees, it looked somehow ominous.

  Oh, for cry-eye! she thought. Of course I have to look. She approached the tent, lifted the tent flap, and, aiming the flashlight, peeked inside. The small, weak beam played over a desk, spilled papers, a body—wait! What? She slowly moved the light along what was certainly a prone body, facedown, arms strangely sprawled.

  She could not force herself to even think the word Theo, but she steeled herself and stepped inside the te
nt, letting the flap fall behind her.

  Instantly, she felt trapped, almost like she couldn’t breathe. Her heart hammered so hard she could barely speak. “Hello?” she croaked out, just in case the prone body was . . . doing yoga or something?

  Half the person’s face was visible, and, fighting the urge to run away, she shone the beam on it. It took but a glance to tell that the person she was looking at could only be one thing: dead.

  5

  An Unpleasant Surprise

  THERE ON THE FLOOR lay the ghostly, grayish remains of Dr. Donald Digby. Relief that it wasn’t Theo mixed with horror that it was Digby, and that he was dead.

  Francie hurried down the path as fast as she could in the dark with a dying flashlight, stumbling over roots and pushing away branches. Still, it wasn’t until she was well down the trail that she realized it was the wrong path—a path that didn’t lead to her aunts’ but some other cabin.

  Okay, she thought. Okay . . . I’ll just get to wherever it goes and then take the path along the lake to get back to the aunts’. It’ll be all right . . . Unless I meet up with the killer! Why was she so sure Digby had been killed and hadn’t just had a heart attack? She hadn’t seen any blood or really any evidence of foul play. Well, she hadn’t seen much of anything, she’d been in such an all-fired rush to get out of there. What a crappy detective she’d be. And what a scaredy-cat! Every little rustle of leaf or creak of branch made her start. A tree trunk scraping against another made a noise like someone crying, which is what she felt like doing.

  The path took her past an old shack that leaned to one side back of the Johnsons’ cabin. And then the lake appeared, glimmering, beyond the trees.

  Francie found the trail that led to her aunts’ cabin and was just headed in that direction when she stopped. Down by the lake, on the dock, was the unmistakable outline of a person. Someone was kneeling at the end of the dock with his hands in the water. Theo.

  She had her mouth open to holler at him when she realized what he was doing. He was washing his hands.

  Blood rushed to her head and rang in her ears, loud as any school bell. After what she’d seen in Digby’s tent, it gave her the chills watching him. She ran. She ran and ran until she ran right into her aunts’ cabin.

  The new sheriff, when she arrived at the cabin, was as unlike the previous sheriff as a person could be. For one thing, she was a woman. And she was young. And she was taking this death very seriously. “Suspected foul play,” Sheriff Warner said, after she had inspected the body, but she wouldn’t say more until after the autopsy results were in.

  When Francie was escorted into the back bedroom to be interviewed, the sheriff turned a pair of sharp eyes on her and said, “You found the body?”

  Francie nodded and said that she had gone to find Digby (leaving out that she’d actually been looking for Theo) and she did find him, but he was dead.

  “Did you touch anything?”

  “No,” Francie said, peeling a leaf off the bottom of her shoe. “I came back here, told my aunts, and they called your office.”

  “When was the last time you saw Professor Digby alive?”

  “Earlier this evening.”

  Now the sheriff looked up. “Oh?” she said.

  “There was a kind of field trip from school. I guess Digby was supposed to meet them at the dock, but he didn’t show up, so I walked the group back to the site. I saw Digby then.”

  “Who was this field trip group composed of?”

  Francie resisted the impulse to correct the detective’s sentence structure and answered, “Theater students from the high school and their teacher, or director, I guess, Mr. Redburn.”

  “Do you know the other students?”

  “I only know the first names of two of the students,” Francie answered. “It was my first day of school.”

  “That’s all right. I can get the list from Keith,” the sheriff said.Hastily correcting herself, she added, “Mr. Redburn.”

  Francie couldn’t avoid raising her eyebrows. Keith? So the sheriff and the theater director were on a first-name basis. It probably didn’t mean diddly-squat, she thought. Small town, after all.

  “Did Digby say anything about finding something else out there?” the sheriff asked.

  “Something else?” Francie said. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. He sent a message just today that I should stop out at the site, that he had found something I might find interesting.”

  Francie shook her head. “He wouldn’t have told me, anyway,” she said. “That’s for sure.”

  “Okay,” the sheriff said, standing and stretching her back. “That’s all for now. If you remember anything, any little detail, even if it seems insignificant, give me a call.”

  “Sure,” Francie got up and started for the door.

  “But,” the sheriff said, her tone changing, and Francie felt her stomach flip as she turned back. “There’s one more thing,” she went on. “I know you did some sleuthing out here this summer.”

  Francie didn’t respond, except to look at Sheriff Warner, wondering where this was going.

  “I just want to remind you that Rydell Johnson is no longer the sheriff of this county,” the new sheriff said. “I am. And I’m telling you: don’t try any Nancy Drew stuff with this investigation.”

  Francie felt her blood, if not boil, at least start simmering. A comment like that just made her want to start investigating right that instant, but she tamped down her anger and tried to keep her voice light as she said, “Don’t worry! Not interested. Busy with school and everything.”

  After the sheriff and deputies left, Francie and Theo sat eating the cold dinner that had been meant to be shared with Digby. The aunts fluttered nearby, fetching the salt and pepper, a napkin, a glass of water.

  “My goodness!” Astrid said. “Digby murdered! Think of it. Isn’t it exciting?”

  Francie mumbled something noncommittal with her mouth full of stroganoff. Fatigue coupled with the drama of the past few hours had plunged her into a kind of loopy exhaustion.

  “Who do you think did it?” Jeannette posed the question to everyone. “Could have been anyone. Everyone disliked him. If I was Evelyn Smattering, I’d have stabbed him a hundred times over!”

  Theo guffawed so hard he started choking.

  “Theo?” Astrid said. “Are you quite all right? Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to laugh with your mouth full?”

  “Sorry,” Theo said. “But why would nice old Mrs. Smattering want to kill Digby?”

  “Well, Evelyn was such a thoughtful hostess and so solicitous, and then he was such a boor!” Astrid said.

  “He’d scold her if the coffee wasn’t hot enough,” Jeannette added, “or if she didn’t make it fast enough. And then, without a word, he moved out and just lived at the site in that tent of his. Honestly! Quite a horrible man. Right, Francie?”

  “Yup.” Francie glanced at Theo to see his reaction. None.

  “Maybe he wasn’t horrible to everyone,” Jeannette said. “Even though it seemed like nobody liked him!”

  “I know one person who didn’t hate him,” Francie said. “Mr. Redburn, the theater director. I guess they went to school together, and Redburn seemed to idolize the guy. I think he brought his theater club out here to impress them with his connections. At least that’s what one of the students told me.”

  “Hmm,” Theo murmured.

  “Did you know him?” Francie blurted.

  Theo glanced at her, guzzled the last of a glass of milk, and said, “Not really.” That was it.

  In that case, she knew she should ask him why he and Digby had been arguing, but she was so surprised that he didn’t offer to explain himself that she couldn’t think of what to say.

  “It must have been someone on the dig, I suppose,” Astrid mused, absently stirring the creamed onions. “The cook was done for the season, so the two girls, Mallory and Gretchen, would have been at Mrs. Hansen’s, and the two boys, Jackson and
. . . and . . . the other one, would have been at Potter’s, I suppose.”

  “Maybe it was the pipeline people,” Jeannette said. “Digby raised a ruckus with some guy with the energy company about the damage to potential archaeological sites. He was on the side of the tribe who said the bulldozers had already plowed over burial sites. I guess there was one good thing about him.”

  “Well, it’s so exciting!” Astrid said. “Another mystery to solve! Right, Francie?”

  “Nope,” Francie said firmly. “Not interested.” She noticed the aunts giving each other a look, so she knew she’d have to explain herself. “I won’t have any extra time to solve mysteries because . . .” Then realizing she’d have to give them some reason for her reluctance, she added impulsively, “I’m going to audition for the school play.”

  Theo gave her a sideways glance, eyebrows cocked at a skeptical angle.

  The aunts, however, cooed over this, happy that things were going so well at school already. Francie wasn’t so sure about that, but she didn’t want to go anywhere near this investigation. It wasn’t the sheriff warning her off—that was a challenge to which she’d willingly rise. It was the memory of Theo washing his hands in the lake. She supposed she could just ask him what he’d been doing, but he should explain himself without being asked, shouldn’t he? And anyway, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. What was it he’d said? “Sometimes it’s better not to know.”

  So now, she supposed, she’d have to audition for that play.

  6

  Auditions

  IT WASN’T UNTIL SHE WAS WAITING for her turn to audition that it really hit her. Sitting in the darkened auditorium, with the drone of students reading lines on the lighted stage, she was struck by the realization: her brother could be a murderer. Was it possible? Theo? Her own brother? But she didn’t really know him. He’d been out of her life for nearly three years, and who knew what he’d been doing all that time?

  Something was going on with him—that was obvious. She retraced what had happened the night he’d turned up. He’d shown up at her apartment late at night, peeked out the window, then dragged her through town until they ended up breaking into Muskie Bait. Where had he learned how to pick a lock, she wondered, and why were they chased by somebody in a trench coat, someone she’d knocked out with a can of maple syrup, which was, by anybody’s standards, ridiculous?