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

  Francie laughed and said, having a sudden thought, “I’ll tell you what—you want some Nancy Drew action? I’ve got some.”

  “Yeah?” Raven said.

  “Are you in?” Francie asked.

  Raven emitted a little squeak of excitement and breathed out the word, “Totally.”

  8

  The Silver Box

  THE POLICE TAPE had been removed and the huge summer home was empty. Francie remembered how it had been all lit up and looked like a cruise ship run aground when she’d attended a party there in the summer. Now it was empty and forlorn, leaves had collected on the many decks, and cobwebs clung to walls and drain spouts.

  The once immaculate sweep of yard now looked like a hayfield, and Francie and Raven had to wade through it to get to the front steps of the house. Beyond the house, the lake clung to the last of the daylight, emanating a soft glow.

  Francie shoved aside a layer of moldering leaves with her foot as she stepped onto the deck.

  “You’re sure there’s nobody here?” Raven whispered, following behind Francie.

  “The person who owns it is in jail,” Francie answered, jiggling the door handle. It was locked, and she moved along the deck to another door.

  “Won’t all the doors be locked?” Raven asked.

  “Yeah, probably.”

  Nonetheless, Francie checked the many doors while Raven scanned the woods that ringed the property.

  “You know there is a still-unsolved murder that happened out here, right? You know that, right?” Raven trailed Francie as she circled the house looking for an open door. “Well, all the doors are locked,” Raven said. “I guess we have to give up.”

  Francie produced a credit card and slid it between door and frame until the lock clicked open.

  “Ooh boy,” Raven said. “Where’d you learn that trick?”

  “I learned it from my brother.”

  “Theo? Where did he learn it?”

  “I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to find out.”

  The place was stuffy, with that closed-up smell and a faint scent of something sort of sweet, a strange odor Francie couldn’t quite place. Rather than switching the lights on, the girls opted for flashlights and roamed from room to room, the beams bouncing over furniture, lamps, artwork, momentarily illuminating the black eyes of a moose head on a wall and the beady eyes of a bear rug on the floor.

  “This place has more eyes than a sack of potatoes,” Raven said and shone her flashlight on Francie. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked. “You look kind of pale.”

  “I’m fine,” Francie said, although a familiar cold tremor ran through her. Her fingers were suddenly cold and stiff, and her chest throbbed.

  “Tell me what we’re looking for again,” Raven whispered.

  “A small silver box,” Francie choked out. Her throat felt thick with something. She didn’t think coming back to this house would affect her, but she had to admit that her nerves were jangled. “Um,” she continued, trying to stay focused, “I saw it here last summer. But I remember one just like it from when I was little. It belonged to my mother.”

  “Okay . . . ,” Raven said. “What does this have to do with the murder?”

  “Nothing, as far as I know.”

  “Wait. What? Why are we here?”

  “It’s something I really want to find,” Francie said. “The box disappeared at some point when I was little. And then I saw it here last summer. I’ve never seen another one like it and I . . . I don’t know, I just want to look at it, that’s all!”

  “How big is it?” Raven asked.

  “Maybe about the size of a pound of butter,” Francie said. At least that’s how she remembered it. Was it? She really couldn’t say for sure. “It’s not in here,” Francie said, moving to the next room. Think! she told herself. You saw it, then things happened and you got distracted. But you saw it.

  She stopped to picture the scene as she remembered it when she had seen it in this house. It had been so unexpected, yet there it was, exactly as she had pictured it in the years following its disappearance, ornately engraved and gleaming: the silver box. Maybe it was just a fanciful invention of her imagination. But then she had seen it—a real thing—and it had been here! Hadn’t it?

  Even now, just thinking of it brought on an almost memory of her mother—a shred, a wisp, like a nearly remembered dream . . . She strove for it, but it eluded her, dissolving like mist. Oh, if there were only something she could remember! There was so much not knowing in her life. Who was her mother? Why had she disappeared? Why would no one tell her anything about her?

  If she could lay her hands on that box, though, Francie felt certain it would answer a lot of questions. And there was something else: even though she knew it was irrational, she had always imagined that her heart was inside the box. There was a fairy tale she’d heard as a kid about a troll who had no heart in his body. Far, far away in a lake was an island, so the tale went. And on that island stood a church; in that church was a well, in that well swam a duck, in that duck was an egg, and in that egg lay the troll’s heart.

  In her story, it would go: Far, far away, there is a lake, and near the lake stands a house; in the house there is a table; on the table sits a box; in the box there lies my heart.

  “You are seriously creeping me out right now,” Raven said. “You’ve been shining your flashlight on that table for about five minutes, and anyone can see there is nothing on it!”

  Francie snapped out of her reverie and swept the beam over the room. “I’m sure that’s where it was.” She let her light come to rest once again on the same end table.

  “Maybe the police took the box as evidence,” Raven whispered.

  “Why would they?” Francie whispered back. “And why are we whispering?”

  “I don’t know,” Raven answered, “but it feels like we’re not alone.”

  As soon as Raven said it, Francie felt it. The hairs on her arms and the back of her neck prickled.

  Someone else was inside the house.

  “Come on!” Francie whispered, moving toward the sound of footsteps.

  “Are you insane?” Raven whispered back. “We should be running away. It might be the murderer!” She tugged on Francie’s arm, but Francie plunged into the hall, dragging Raven along with her.

  “There!” she whispered, catching a glimpse of someone disappearing through an open door: a leg, a foot, one arm, a hand, and clutched in the hand—had she imagined it, or had she seen just the faintest flash of silver?

  As soon as the door clicked shut, Francie turned to Raven. “I think he’s got it. We have to go after him.” She charged down the hall toward the door.

  “No!” Raven cried, running after her.

  Francie already had her hand on the doorknob when Raven reached her and yanked her away.

  “Think!” she said. “If you go out there, whoever it is will see you!”

  “If I don’t go out there, I won’t see whoever it is.” Francie tore away from Raven, flung open the door, and charged out onto the deck in time to see the fleeing figure headed toward a boat on the beach. How had she not noticed that boat earlier?

  “That’s him, getting into a boat!” Francie cried. She raced across the expanse of lawn while the mystery person started the motor and plunged away from the shore.

  Francie watched helplessly as the boat headed across the lake. Just before it receded into the gloom, the motor slowed, the driver reached down as if picking something off the bottom of the boat. Then he stood, and with an overhand motion sent the thing soaring into the air. There was a faint splash, stillness (during which Francie realized she was holding her breath), and then the motor roared back to life and the boat disappeared into the darkness.

  9

  From Play Practice to Protest

  THE NEXT DAYS were beautiful, quiet days when the water was probably like glass. Francie wouldn’t know. She was stuck in the auditorium at play practice, imagining h
ow perfect it would have been to be out on the lake in a boat looking down into the clear water, the canoe gliding over lacy weeds, stretches of sand peppered with snail shells, and here and there the forlorn skeleton of a crayfish.

  She imagined the bright sheen on the water, the changing colors of the trees reflected on its surface, and the fallen leaves bright as gold coins in the shallow water. She imagined paddling a canoe straight out to the spot where she’d seen the box splash into the lake, and imagined seeing it gleaming underwater. Imagined diving in and scooping it up in her hand and—

  “Francie?”

  Francie looked up to see Mr. Redburn staring down at her from the stage. “What do you think?” he asked.

  Francie hesitated, then cautiously asked, “About what?”

  “Was it right or wrong for Antigone to do what she did? She broke the law, but was it morally right? And, if it’s morally right, is it okay to break the law? Is it even our obligation to stand up for what we believe?”

  “Which of those questions am I supposed to answer?” Francie squeaked.

  Everybody laughed and Mr. Redburn said, “Let’s all just think about those questions for the time being.” He went on talking about the play, and Francie tried to stay focused but felt her mind drifting again. When she tuned back in, he was saying, “In theater, as in life, things are not always what they seem.” Then he announced that Jay had prepared a report on the background of the play.

  “Antigone had a totally messed-up family,” Jay said. “Her father, Oedipus, married his own mother, and when he found out what he’d done, he gouged out his own eyes. His wife-and-mother, Jocasta, killed herself.”

  “Is Jay doing this for a class or something?” Francie whispered to Raven.

  “No,” Raven said. “He just likes to do research. It’s his thing. Everybody’s got to have a ‘thing,’ right?”

  “I guess,” Francie said. Looking around, she saw that the rest of the cast and crew were dozing in their seats. Phoebe glanced up, smirked at Francie, then went back to her phone. Phoebe had volunteered at the dig site this summer. Could she have been the killer?

  Francie forced herself to turn her attention to Jay’s speech. He had already gotten through the whole story of Antigone’s brothers going to war against each other.

  “It was agreed to let the matter be decided by brother-to-brother combat,” Jay was saying. “And what happened was, the two brothers ended up killing each other. Antigone decides she’s going to bury her brother, which is when the play starts, and her punishment is to be shut up in a tomb to die. Afterwards, her sister Ismene sort of disappears, and that is the end of the house of Oedipus. The last of the royal family of Thebes was known no more. The end.”

  Messed-up family, Francie thought, like mine. Maybe Francie’s family wasn’t that messed up, but they could be. That was the thing—she didn’t really know. Her brother might be a murderer. Her mother was—what?—she didn’t know. Francie didn’t even know if her mother was alive or dead. And the only way to find out anything about her was to find a box on the bottom of a pretty big body of water, or talk to Theo, the person she most wanted to avoid.

  On Saturday, instead of going to look for the silver box, Francie drove with Raven to a protest.

  “We’re not going to get arrested, are we?” Francie gripped the steering wheel with both hands as she steered the car down the gravel road. She didn’t feel sure about her decision to go to a protest with Raven, but it was so windy that trying to find anything on the bottom of a lake would be a hopeless endeavor.

  “Arrested? No!” Raven said. “Why? Oh, those stupid boys? Did you think I really was in jail?” She laughed. “Just a bunch of us protesters were taken to the police station one time. They let us go. We were never in jail or anything.”

  “Why did they take you in?”

  “Beats me,” Raven said. “For our own safety, is what Sheriff Johnson said.”

  “Oh, yeah, him,” Francie said sourly. “Rydell. I know him.”

  “Hey, slow down.” Raven peered out the passenger-side window. “There they are!”

  “Where?”

  “On the other side of that field.”

  “How do we get there?”

  “It’s a long way around, especially since the road ahead is blocked. And turning around the other way will really take a long time. We’ll miss the speaker if we go that way. Just park here and we’ll cut through the field.”

  Francie pulled the car over and shut off the engine. The girls gathered their backpacks and the signs they’d made that morning in Francie’s apartment and got out of the car. The wind whipped their hair in their faces and tried to tear the signs out of their hands, but they forged on, holding the barbed wire fence for each other, then starting across the field of stubble.

  “One thing you might not have known about Professor Digby is that he wasn’t a total jerk,” Raven explained as they picked their way through the field. With the wind in their ears, it was hard to hear, so Raven had to shout. “The tribe has been concerned about some places that may contain ancestral remains, and Digby was standing up to the energy company about that.”

  “Yeah, I kinda heard about it.” Francie looked across the field. Quite a distance away, she could see a gathering of people. Television crews were there, too, by the look of the vans with satellites affixed to their roofs. When the wind died, she caught snatches of sound from the protest: a voice on a loudspeaker, amplified music, a strange rumbling growl coming from somewhere, and Raven’s voice, saying, “. . . something kind of interesting about those bones.”

  “What bones?” Francie shouted.

  “The bones! The bones out at Enchantment. That you found!”

  “I didn’t find them.”

  “Well, whatever. What if someone was trying to steal them? Maybe somebody was busy stealing bones when Digby confronted them and they had to kill him?”

  “Why would anybody want to steal mastodon bones?” Francie asked.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking, and it’s possible. See, my grandma is Dakota—”

  “You mean she’s from North Dakota?”

  Raven let out a little exasperated sigh, then put on her patient voice and said, “No. She is Dakota. It’s a tribe. Like Ojibwe.”

  “Okay.”

  The field of stubble had given way to dirt that looked like it had been churned up by machines with wide tires. Francie kept her eyes down, trying not to step into mud puddles, while Raven went on. “So she told me that in Dakota stories there’s this ancient being, a kind of enormous water monster called Unktehi that lived long, long ago. Huge, you know. With big horns that went to the sky. Its body could swell to cause floods. But it died out long, long ago. Still, sometimes its bones were found and were prized for their wakan. The people collected the pieces of the bones for their medicine bags. Medicine men chewed on the bones as part of their initiation.”

  “That’s interesting,” Francie said. “But the bones they dug up at Enchantment are mastodon bones, not . . . um—”

  “Unktehi,” Raven said. “Paleontologists think the bones the medicine men found were probably mastodon or mammoth bones. It makes sense because back in those olden times, the people would have found these big bones, and they had to make sense of them, just like we do now.”

  “Okay, but I can’t see how it would have any bearing in this case.”

  “What if there are still people wanting those bones, maybe even believing that they are the bones of Unktehi— some people believe in them, you know.”

  “As far as theories go, you have to admit that is pretty far out—”

  “That’s him! That’s him!” Raven shouted.

  “That’s who?” Francie looked up to see two men in work clothes and hard hats striding toward them, each from a different direction.

  “That one guy on the right is the power company guy that Digby had it out with!” Raven said. “I don’t know who the other guy is. But he looks mad.”

&nb
sp; The man on the right waved his arms over his head; his mouth was moving as if he were shouting, but there was so much other noise between the wind, the music at the protest, and the sound of heavy machinery that Francie couldn’t hear what he said. Her eyes flicked from him to the other man who was clearly shouting and whose face grew redder and redder and his gesticulating more alarming with every moment. By the time Francie realized that he was pointing at something behind them, it was too late. The hard ground gave way to a yawning chasm. As she fell into it, Francie realized, also too late, what was making the rumbling growl.

  10

  The ER

  WHAT WAS IT, Francie wondered, as she lay on the examining table, about her and bulldozers? There had been an episode with a bulldozer the past summer, too, and that made her think of the silver box and wonder why someone had stolen it. And why had that person thrown it into the lake, of all places? And why wasn’t she at Enchantment right now looking for it instead of where she was, which was the ER, getting her head stitched up?

  Half her face felt very numb, like she’d gotten way too much novocaine at the dentist’s. When the nurse helped her stand, she felt like her legs might buckle under her. But she wobbled back to the waiting room. There was Raven, her ankle wrapped in an Ace bandage. Also waiting, unfortunately, was the sheriff.

  “Did you want to press charges?” the sheriff asked.

  “You mean we can press charges? Like for reckless endangerment or something?” Francie said.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Sheriff Warner explained. “I was talking to Mr. Waxwing.” She gestured toward the doorway, where the two men she’d seen just before she and Raven fell into the trench were standing. One of them, still red-faced and angry looking, the other one looking uncomfortable, his hard hat clenched in his hands.

  “Darn right we’re pressing charges!” the red-faced one said, while the other one said, “Now, Dale, they’re just kids . . .”

  Francie felt woozy and, just before she fainted, she caught only some of the sheriff’s words—“trespassing . . . tampering with a pipeline . . . felony offense . . .”