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

  The first thing she saw when she came to was the sheriff’s face, a few inches away from her own. “Are you able to answer a few questions?”

  Francie nodded. Looking around, she saw she was in some kind of conference room, and she and the sheriff were the only ones in it. She had no recollection of how she’d gotten there.

  “You seem to have a knack for being at the wrong place at the wrong time,” the sheriff said.

  Francie noticed a glass of water in front of her and took a long drink. Other than defending herself against charges of trespassing or whatever else she might be charged with, she planned to keep her mouth as firmly closed as possible.

  “You girls were lucky that Mr. Waxwing was there, or you might have gotten hurt.”

  “Waxwing?”

  “He may have saved your lives, or at least saved you from worse injuries.”

  “That’s nice of him,” Francie said. “On the other hand, if he hadn’t been yelling at us, we probably would have seen that trench before we fell in it. Anyway, we weren’t trying to do anything illegal. We were just trying to cut through that field to get to the rally.”

  “I get that,” the sheriff said, surprising Francie. “You’re also lucky that Mr. Waxwing didn’t press charges. But just . . . be more careful, okay? And pay attention. And don’t do that anymore.”

  Francie nodded. She was a little puzzled. She’d expected more trouble. Maybe the sheriff would just let her go and there wouldn’t be anything on her record.

  “Now,” Sheriff Warner began, “about the investigation.” It seemed the sheriff wasn’t quite finished. “You seem to be avoiding anything having to do with it—Enchantment, your aunts, your brother . . .”

  Francie’s jaw dropped. “You told me not to get involved!”

  “Sure,” the sheriff said. “I guess I did. I didn’t think you’d pay any attention to that, though.” She looked down at a clipboard on the desk, so Francie couldn’t tell what her expression was. Was she smiling? Or what?

  Francie was wary. Maybe the sheriff was cagier than she let on. Francie would have to watch her step, she thought.

  “Is there anything else you remember from the day of the murder? From the scene? Anything?”

  Francie felt a little fuzzy. The anesthetic hadn’t worn off, and she had a feeling she was slurring her words. Still, there was something. Francie remembered hearing someone arguing with Digby in his tent. She didn’t know who it could have been because everyone except Digby was outside at the time. If she brought it up, though, the sheriff might assume it had been Theo, and since Francie couldn’t identify who it was, she decided to keep that tidbit to herself.

  “I didn’t see anybody,” Francie said, honestly.

  The sheriff leaned back and plucked a large manila envelope out of her satchel. Then, as if performing a magic trick, she slowly pulled something out of a plastic bag. “Does this look familiar?” she asked, holding up a scarf.

  “It’s mine. Or very like one that I had.”

  “Had?”

  Francie shrugged. “I guess I lost it.”

  “And when was that?”

  The sheriff’s pale blue eyes bored into Francie, who was remembering that she had tied Theo’s hair back with that scarf the day of the murder. However, she did not intend to say so.

  “Why do you ask?” Francie said, trying to go on the offensive.

  “Any recollection of when you might have ‘lost’ the scarf?” the sheriff asked. Francie didn’t like the way she said lost.

  “I don’t know,” Francie said slowly. “Maybe I dropped it when I found the body.” She hadn’t, and she knew she hadn’t, and she knew she was lying. It felt worse than a pinprick to her conscience—more like a little stab with a steak knife. “I had it that day—the day of the murder—but then I must have misplaced it. There were a lot of people around. Anybody could have picked it up.” Stab stab stab.

  “I suppose that’s so,” Sheriff Warner said. “You don’t remember when you lost it?”

  “I had it on the boat ride over . . .” Francie began, then paused. Would anyone remember that it had been in Theo’s hair? “I suppose it might have blown into the lake.” She remembered how Theo had said keeping a secret required constant lying—until it seemed like you were lying about everything. She was starting to understand what he meant. “Or maybe it fell off on the path,” she added, weakly.

  “This is not what your brother says.”

  “Oh?” Was she getting boxed into a corner?

  “Your brother says that you gave it to him.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Francie said, guardedly.

  “Would he be saying that to protect you?” the sheriff asked.

  Francie’s head jerked up. With a jolt, she realized what was going on here. She had been concentrating so hard on not pointing a finger at Theo that she hadn’t realized that she herself was a suspect. Now she had to tread very carefully to extricate herself from suspicion while not implicating her brother.

  “So, wait,” she said. “Are you accusing me of murder?”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything,” Sheriff Warner said. “I am just following a line of inquiry. But, as I like to say, ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’”

  “Sometimes there’s just smoke,” Francie muttered.

  “What?”

  “Things are not always what they seem,” Francie said, repeating Mr. Redburn’s words, “in life as in theater.”

  The sheriff squinted at Francie as if trying to discern what that meant and then went on. “So,” she continued, “at the time of the murder, you had opportunity, you had—” Here she held up the scarf. “—means . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” Francie said. “Are you saying my scarf is the murder weapon?”

  “Strangulation seems to be the cause of death.”

  With my scarf, Francie thought, the scarf I gave Theo. She scrambled to think. “Motive?” she asked. “What possible motive do I have?”

  The sheriff paged through her notebook, then paused on one of the pages. “A witness says you were seen arguing with the victim.”

  “Everybody argued with him!” Francie protested. “Or I should say he argued with everyone. It’s almost the only way he ever communicated.” Francie bet that pretty much everyone on the site had argued with or been scolded by Digby, so why would someone single out her petty argument among all the others? Who would do that?

  She described the argument to the sheriff, explaining that earlier that summer Digby had chased her away from the site, saying she didn’t belong there. Francie had been so irritated that she’d lost her temper—Digby had that effect on people, she noted—and she had told him that if it hadn’t been for her, there’d be no site and he wouldn’t be there, which might, she had mused aloud with a raised voice, be better for everyone. Then she’d stalked off. “It was hardly a threat,” Francie finished. At least she hadn’t meant it as a threat, but now she could see how it could be perceived that way. “So am I your prime suspect?” Francie asked. “Or whatever they call it.”

  “We’re not ruling anything out at the moment,” the sheriff said.

  Great, thought Francie, so now both Theo and I are suspects.

  11

  Later the Same Day

  FRANCIE STOOD in front of the picture window, staring out at the foaming whitecaps on the lake. Big clouds, white as clean sheets, raced across the otherwise blue sky. Beautiful weather if you weren’t hoping to find something on the bottom of a lake.

  She and Raven had planned to spend the day out in the canoe looking for the box, but it had been windy, so they’d gone to the protest instead. And, now, here she was at the cabin anyway, with Raven and a headache—although the headache wasn’t Raven’s fault. Her aunts had fussed over all three of them, Francie, Raven, and even Theo, even though all he’d done was pick up the two girls from the hospital.

  Now, their very late lunch was over and Raven was helping wash the dishes. Theo
had gone outside to chop wood, and Francie stood by the window trying to get up the nerve to confront him. Well, she thought, if I can stare down a bulldozer, I can confront Theo. She would lay it on the line. She’d go out there and say, “Theo, did you murder Digby? Just tell me: yes or no. No beating around the bush.” Then she’d stand with her arms folded across her chest until he answered her. Once he had, she would demand to know about their mother.

  Raven was still in the kitchen, drying dishes and chatting with the aunts, so Francie stalked out of the house and stood in front of Theo, hands on hips.

  “Here,” Theo said. “Hold this.” He nodded toward the log balanced on the chopping block as he hefted the ax over his shoulder.

  Francie reached toward the log, then jerked her arm away. “Wait a minute. You want me to hold that log while you split it? You’ll probably chop my arm off!”

  “Well, you’re not supposed to hang onto it that long!” Theo protested. “Just hold it so it doesn’t fall off the block before I can take a swing at it.”

  “No!” Francie said.

  Theo set a different log on its edge, one that balanced unaided, while reciting from a poem. “The scent of fresh wood / is among the last things you will forget / when the veil falls.” He brought the ax down on the log and, with a crisp whack, split it in two. Scooping up one of the halves, he put it to his nose and inhaled. “The scent of fresh white wood / in the spring sap time / as though life itself walked by you, / with dew in its hair.”

  “Theo . . . ,” Francie began.

  “Hans Børli,” Theo said.

  “What?”

  “That’s whose poem that is.”

  “Ah.” Francie felt her resolve dissipating, but she rallied. “Theo, would it be possible to have an actual conversation?”

  Theo leaned on the ax handle and, regarding her, said, “Yes, sorry. I was just feeling so much wordless joy right then that I got carried away.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s another Hans Børli line about cutting wood,” he explained. “The smell of resin and fresh wood . . . such things can fill a man with wordless joy.”

  Francie crammed her sigh as full of exasperation as she could muster.

  “Listen,” Theo lowered his voice to a near whisper, “I know you want to know about Mom.”

  Francie was a little thrown. She had meant to confront him about the murder, but it was as if . . . as if . . . it didn’t even occur to him that she would want to know his involvement! What did that mean? It could mean that he had nothing to do with it, so it wouldn’t occur to him. Or he could be throwing her off on purpose.

  Francie’s desire to know about her mother was like a red-hot ember that never seemed to cool. She burned with the desire to know. And yet . . . and yet . . . sometimes it felt like the ember was too hot to touch. She sat down on the chopping block.

  “First of all,” Theo said. “If I tell you this, you have to know that you cannot give this information to anyone. Anyone! Including your friend in there.” He pointed his chin at the cabin.

  Francie glanced in that direction. She could see the top of Raven’s head through the window and her arm reaching up to stack plates in the cupboard above the sink.

  “All right,” Theo said. “Sit down; you’re going to need to sit down.”

  “I am sitting, Theo,” Francie reminded him.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Just seemed like the thing to say.”

  Francie thought she was prepared for anything: her mother was a criminal, a murderer, maybe she was dead. Still, her legs trembled so much that she had to stand up and shake them one at a time.

  “Mom is . . . she’s not dead,” Theo said. “I’m pretty sure.”

  Francie felt like a box emptied of its contents. Like a body devoid of bones and veins. “If she’s alive,” Francie said, “why—I mean, why did she leave us? What was all that stuff about her being dead?”

  “You didn’t buy it anyway.”

  “True.”

  “Mom worked for a government agency that investigates antiquity theft. Her specialty was stolen artifacts,” Theo explained. “Things stolen from archaeological sites or museums, and so on. She was involved in watching an international smuggling ring and was investigating when she disappeared. Well, what happened is she went underground.”

  “Now you are just making stuff up!” Francie watched Theo’s green-flecked eyes for the wink she thought sure was coming. But no wink came. “And so . . . what happened?” she asked.

  “As near as I can figure, she came by something extremely valuable,” he said. “It fell into her possession somehow.”

  “Somehow?”

  “She probably stole it,” Theo explained, then brought the ax down on a log, splitting it cleanly in two. He bent over, picked up one of the pieces, and when he looked up, his gaze shifted over Francie’s shoulder. “Oh, hi, Raven,” he said.

  Francie turned to see Raven limping out of the cabin.

  “I better get going pretty soon or my mom is going to worry,” Raven said.

  Francie nodded. While Raven and Theo chatted, Francie turned her gaze to the tumultuous lake. She sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a mom who worried about her. In fact, she’d lived years of her life longing for that. And then more years, after her father had died, longing for a dad to worry about her. Now she was over it. Or at least that’s what she told herself.

  Anyway, her granddad worried about her—maybe too much—and her great-aunts, too. But her granddad was still living out east and her aunts would soon leave the lake for Arizona, and she’d be on her own until spring. Of course there was her brother—her brother the possible murderer, she thought.

  She glanced back at him, still talking to Raven. They both looked at her, then Theo scribbled something on a piece of paper and gave it to Raven. His phone number? Maybe Francie should have joined the conversation, but she turned her attention back to the lake, watching as it turned blue to jade green, then gray as the sun passed under a cloud. It was a turbulence she felt inside, as if whitecaps churned within her. Wind roared in her head and she could think of little else but wind, waves, and under the waves, somewhere, the silver box, rolling, turning, tumbling.

  12

  Wind

  THE WIND WOULD NOT STOP BLOWING. It blew with such ferocity it tore the leaves off trees and sent them scraping across the school parking lot. Loose papers were snatched out of hands and swirled away in the wind. Plastic bags billowed, sailed through the air, snagged in trees, and rattled there, as if shaking their fists at people. Francie wouldn’t have been surprised to see small children go sailing by.

  It hardly mattered. She didn’t have time to go hunting for silver boxes or anything else, for that matter. Between school and the play, every square inch of her life was taken.

  Right now it was homework. She was about to sit down at the little table in her kitchen and get started when the phone rang.

  It was Theo. “We didn’t quite finish that conversation out at the cabin,” he said. “How about I take you out for dinner?”

  Francie opened the fridge. Except for a jar of olives, some sour milk, and a couple of withered apples, it was empty. “I have leftovers,” she said, shutting the door. “And I have to study for a test.” She didn’t want to talk to Theo, didn’t want to know any more about her mother. Her mother was a thief who abandoned her family, and for all she knew, her brother was a murderer. That was enough bad news, thank you very much.

  “You have to eat something,” he said.

  “I really need to study.”

  “How about Saturday?”

  “I’m doing something with Raven.”

  “All day?”

  “Yeah.”

  None of this was strictly true or even pretty true. In fact, Francie found herself stretching the truth a lot. And she was relieved when Theo finally ended the conversation and hung up.

  She opened the fridge again, hoping some leftovers had somehow magically
appeared. Maybe she should have accepted Theo’s invitation, she thought as she stared at the emptiness. She shifted her search to the cupboard and took out a box of Cap’n Crunch. After shaking some cereal into a bowl, she stood leaning up against the counter, eating it with her fingers.

  The phone rang again. It was her grandfather.

  She set the bowl down, squeezed her eyes shut, and answered.

  “I hear you nearly got arrested,” was the first thing out of his mouth.

  “Did not get arrested,” she said. “It was all a misunderstanding.”

  “How’s your head?”

  Man! He heard everything! She touched the stitches on her forehead. Fortunately, it was mostly covered by the hank of hair that she never got around to cutting. “It’s okay,” she said.

  Francie imagined her grandfather thoughtfully twirling his white mustache while gazing at Central Park from his Manhattan apartment.

  “I hear you’re in a play.”

  “Yep,” she said.

  She pictured him straightening his already straight back when he said, “Don’t let it interfere with your studies. I expect you to keep your grades up.”

  “Yep.”

  “Is this the way they talk in Minnesota? ‘Yep’? Have you forgotten how to say yes?”

  “Yep,” Francie said. She couldn’t help it.

  “I hope you’re joking,” her granddad said, but she thought she heard a little chuckle. Then he went on. “Why aren’t you spending time with your brother? He’s come all that way to spend time with you.”

  “I’m busy! If he wanted to see me, he should have come in the summer when I didn’t have school.”

  “He was busy.”

  “Well?” Francie said. “Now I’m busy.” This was sort of true, actually, but even if it hadn’t been, she would have tried to avoid Theo.

  “Are you investigating the murder?”

  “What? No!” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “My grades? Etcetera?” Francie said. “All that stuff you just said?”