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

  “Okay, smarty-pants,” Raven said, “why would he need to wash his hands if he’d just strangled someone?”

  “Oh,” Francie said. “Yeah. Why? I don’t know. It just seems like you’d wash your hands if you killed somebody.”

  “Have you ever asked him?”

  “No,” Francie said. “I kept waiting for him to explain himself. Why did he argue with Digby? Why was he gone at the same time Digby was murdered? Why was he washing his hands in the lake? I wanted him to tell me, but I didn’t want to have to ask him.”

  “Well, I think you should ask.”

  “What if he lies?”

  “Why do you think he’ll lie?”

  How could she answer without telling Raven everything—everything she’d been taught never to talk about to anyone?

  “Where’s Roy?” Jay asked, coming up behind them.

  Raven looked around. “He was . . . I don’t know!”

  “Should we be worried?” Francie asked.

  “Roy!” Jay called and crashed off into the brush.

  Raven and Francie shouted Roy’s name a few times, then Raven said, “He’ll turn up. He’s a dog, right?”

  “I suppose,” Francie agreed.

  “So, back to the suspects!” Raven said cheerily. “There was a cook here, right?”

  “She was done for the year,” Francie said.

  Raven squinted off in the distance so intently that Francie turned around to look behind her. “What?” Francie’s heart raced. “Do you see Roy?”

  “Are you sure the cook wasn’t here?” Raven asked.

  “What? Why?”

  “When we were here that day, the flap on the cook tent was open. I know it was the cook tent because I remember seeing pots and pans and utensils hanging from a kind of pegboard. But when we came by again, there was something missing.”

  Francie stared at Raven. “Whoa. You really remember that?”

  “I just remember things like that. Details. I don’t know why,” Raven said.

  “What was missing?”

  “Each item on the pegboard had an outline. I suppose so the item would go back where it belonged. When we passed by the tent the second time, the big knife was no longer there. But you could see its outline.”

  Francie stared at Raven for a long time. “Wow,” she said, shaking her head. “Wow.”

  “Roy!” Raven cried. “There you are!”

  They could just see the top of the dog’s head some distance away.

  “What’s the deal? Is he in a hole or something?” Francie said. Then, with some wiggling, the rest of the very filthy dog appeared and, tongue hanging out, bounded over to them.

  “Jay! Your dog is here!” Raven yelled.

  Roy shook, flinging damp dirt from his fur while Jay staggered out of the woods, covered with stickers and burrs. “Where you been, boy?” he cooed, kneeling and throwing his arms around the dog. “He never does that! Well, not very often anyway,” Jay said to the girls. Then, yanking his hand away, said, “Ick! He’s sticky!”

  “He was in a hole or something,” Raven said, walking to where the dog had appeared. “Hey!” she shouted back to the others, “this is no ordinary hole.”

  Jay and Francie had started toward Raven when they were stopped by a voice behind them, saying, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  15

  Theo Is Gone

  SHERIFF WARNER stood with hands on hips. “What are you kids doing here?” she said.

  What is she doing here? Francie wondered.

  “This is still off-limits,” the sheriff continued. “Didn’t you notice the tape? Come on out of there.”

  The threesome climbed back under the yellow tape and started toward the cabin, the dog bounding on ahead.

  “I’ll talk to you later!” the sheriff called after them.

  “Something to look forward to,” Raven muttered.

  Seated in the cabin living room, with the sky growing dark outside, the aunts plied the three sleuths with cocoa and cookies—and questions.

  “Well, Frenchy,” Astrid leaned toward her, her eyes bright with interest, “what have you learned?”

  “Learned? You mean at school?”

  “For the love of Mike!” Astrid said. “No! What have you learned about the murder?”

  Obviously, Francie’s aunts weren’t buying the ruse that she wasn’t interested. She gnawed at the edge of a cookie. Murder weapon—cookie? popped into her head. “Well, one thing Raven noticed was that a butcher knife went missing from the cook tent.”

  “Ooh, a butcher knife!” Astrid exclaimed. “How thrilling! But it wasn’t the murder weapon. The victim was strangled, not stabbed.”

  Francie swallowed and wondered how her aunts knew that, but she went on. “We also know that anybody could have picked up the presumed murder weapon, aka the scarf.”

  “So, who took the knife and why?” Raven asked. “And where did it go?”

  Francie reached down and pretended to pet Roy, who was lying at her feet. He readily accepted the offered cookie. When her hand brushed his still sticky fur, she wondered again where he’d gone and what he’d gotten into. He smelled strange. Not doggish or gross, just . . . strange.

  “That knife is a puzzler,” Jeannette agreed. “So far as we know, it didn’t turn up at the dig site or in the investigative report.”

  “You’ve seen the report?” Francie was a little incredulous.

  “Well, not officially,” Jeannette said, glancing at Astrid. “But we had the opportunity to glance at it.”

  Francie had to remember not to underestimate her aunts. They had broken out of jail the previous summer and seemed to have talents most people would not expect. Adding to the mystery of her already strange family, Francie thought.

  “Who do you think could have done it?” Astrid asked, passing the cookie plate once again. Only Jay was brave enough to take another.

  “My dad’s a dentist,” he explained in response to Francie’s and Raven’s raised eyebrows, then mumbled, his mouth still full of cookie. “Maybe it was one of the interns.”

  “Oh, they were all such nice young people,” Astrid said. “Do you really think any of them would actually kill someone?” She seemed to relish the word kill, Francie thought, something that would have been alarming if Aunt Astrid weren’t so cute!

  “Mallory?” Francie said. “Or Mallory’s dad? The pipeline guy.”

  “He was actually kind of nice, though,” Raven said. “He probably did save our lives when we fell in that trench.”

  “And he didn’t press charges,” Francie added. She pictured the man worriedly clutching his hard hat at the ER. Didn’t seem like the murderous type at all.

  “Well, what about—” Francie stopped in midsentence as the door opened.

  Five heads swiveled to regard the sheriff who stepped in, followed by two deputies.

  Sheriff Warner’s eyes drifted over the others and settled on Francie.

  “Care for a cookie?” Francie held the plate out to the sheriff, desperately hoping she would take one.

  She declined.

  “Sure?” Francie said. “They’re very . . . substantial.”

  The sheriff ignored her. “We were hoping to find your brother,” she said. “Is he around?”

  “No,” Francie said. Her aunts shook their heads.

  “Any idea where he might be? We are trying to locate his whereabouts.”

  “Why?” Francie said.

  Ignoring Francie’s question, the sheriff asked, “Do you know how we can reach him?”

  “No,” Francie said, and repeated, “why?”

  “If you hear from him, let my office know, all right?” Sheriff Warner handed her a card and pointed to the phone number.

  As soon as the sheriff and the deputies left, the aunts looked at Francie. Astrid rose, toddled over to Francie, put her hands on her shoulders, and said, “This does not look good. That report we mentioned earlier? It suggests that Theo is the pri
me suspect. I think the sheriff plans to arrest him. It’s up to you, Francie—you have to prove he didn’t do it!”

  16

  Dragon Bone

  IN THE LUNCH LINE the next day, Francie pushed her tray along absentmindedly, thinking about Theo. No one had heard from him for days. Where had he gone? Had he just disappeared like he did sometimes? Had he run away because he knew he was a suspected murderer? Or because he was a murderer? Or had something terrible happened to him? And how could she find out?

  A gravelly sounding voice interrupted her thoughts. “Beans?” the voice said.

  Francie looked up to see the lunch lady standing behind a steaming pan, wearing a hairnet and a scowl. But this time, Francie realized how it was she knew her: that lunch lady had been the cook at the dig site that summer.

  Francie couldn’t help it; she flinched, whether it was from surprise or the scowl, she didn’t know.

  The woman narrowed her eyes and aimed her green-eyed stare at Francie. “Beans?” she growled again.

  Francie looked at the grayish-green beans, shook her head, and said, “No, thank you.” She quickly pushed her tray as far away from the woman as she could go, foregoing the mac and cheese, then picked up a dish of apple crisp, only to have it suddenly yanked away from her. The formidable-looking lunch lady clung to one edge of Francie’s dish of apple crisp.

  “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that if you don’t eat your vegetables you can’t have dessert?” the woman growled.

  “You call that a lunch?” Raven asked when Francie sat down across from her with nothing but a carton of milk on her tray.

  “Raven!” Francie gasped. “That lunch lady gave me a really nasty look just now when I didn’t want the beans. It was like she was giving me the evil eye. Then she wouldn’t let me have the apple crisp!”

  “Oh, Evil Iris?” Jay said, sliding in next to Francie.

  “That’s what everybody calls her,” Raven added.

  “She does that to everyone,” Jay put in. “It’s like she doesn’t want you to eat or something.” He plopped some of his mac and cheese on Francie’s tray. “If you want it,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Francie poked at it. “I guess. But, you guys! I remember something. The lunch lady—Iris—was the cook at the dig site.”

  “No way!” Jay and Raven said together, both looking over their shoulders at the lunch line.

  Their heads snapped back around in unison. “She’s staring at us!” Raven said.

  “Well?” Francie said. “You were staring at her!”

  “Think she could be the killer?” Jay stabbed at his mac and cheese with his spoon as if he were trying to kill it. “She’s definitely trying to kill us off with this food.”

  “Maybe you should start bringing lunch from home,” Raven said, “like I said.”

  “She couldn’t have been the killer, though,” Francie mused. “She wasn’t working there anymore. And nobody saw her there, either.”

  “Maybe she was there and nobody noticed her,” Jay suggested.

  They all turned to look at Iris, whose wide body was just then darkening the door to the kitchen. She clomped over to the plastic garbage can and loudly scraped something from a dish into the bin. They could hear the sticky shlikk-shlikk of her shoes from where they were sitting.

  “Nope,” they said in unison, then turned back to their lunches.

  Francie’s thoughts wandered back to Theo and where he might be. When she tuned back in, Jay was saying, “. . . a lot of illegal poaching of rhinos and tigers. It’s an especially big problem because, like, the bones are used in medicines sometimes, especially in Asia. Killing rhinos just for their horns. It’s seriously really sad.”

  “Yeah,” Raven said. “I’ve seen some gruesome pictures of dead rhinos with just their horns cut off. It’s disgusting.”

  “There’s a long tradition of using bones and other weird stuff in medicine.” Jay pulled out a bunch of papers from his backpack. “In the official Pharmacopoeia of the College of Physicians of London of 1678 and 1724 they list as medicines—” Jay found what he was looking for and read, “Unicorn’s horn, human fat and skulls, dog’s dung, toads, vipers, and worms.”

  “Gawd,” Raven said. “That is gross. But—”

  “I’m getting to it,” Jay said. “It turns out that in China, they’re still using bone. Tiger bone and rhino horn as previously mentioned. But also something called Long Gu.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Dragon bone.”

  “Dragon bone,” Francie repeated.

  “Yeah, but it’s not really dragon bones.”

  “Really?” Raven said sarcastically.

  “Obviously, it’s not dragon bone,” Jay said. “But guess what it is.”

  “Unicorn horn,” said Raven.

  “Griffin femurs,” Francie offered.

  “No. It is actually mammoth and mastodon bones. See, when the people of ancient times found these huge and strange bones, they tried to imagine what kind of giant creatures there were that had roamed the earth. Maybe dragons, right? How else do you explain them? But now, even though they know they are mammoth or mastodon bones, they are still prized as a treatment for . . . ,” Jay read from a printout, “insomnia, palpitation, irritability, mania, or neurotic disorders. Dragon bone powder is regularly prescribed as a sedative.”

  “You know what?” Raven said. “That is very interesting because Dakotas collected pieces of mastodon bones for their medicine bags. That was here, in Minnesota.”

  “So maybe that’s what’s being smuggled,” Jay said. “The mastodon bones.”

  “That’s just what I said!” Raven said. “Right, Frenchy? Frenchy?”

  Francie stared back at them, speechless.

  “Frenchy?” Raven and Jay said together.

  “After school,” Francie said, “meet me at Muskie Bait.”

  17

  Halloween

  “YOU REALIZE WE HAVE A PARTY to get ready for, right?” Jay said, as the three friends walked past cobweb-festooned shrubs and trees hung with little plastic ghosts. Jack-o’-lanterns leered at them from front porches. “Costumes? Makeup?”

  “I know, I know,” Francie said. “This shouldn’t take long. You’ll still have time to get to the party.”

  “Dance,” Raven put in.

  “Whatever it is.”

  “What do you mean, ‘You’ll still have time’?” Jay squawked. “Aren’t you going?”

  “Sure,” Francie said, unconvincingly.

  “What’s your costume?”

  “Costume? I have to have a costume?”

  “Uh, hello?” Jay said. “It’s Halloween!”

  “Are you going?” Francie asked Raven.

  Raven shook her head.

  “If you’re not, then I’m not,” Francie said.

  “You gu-uys!” Jay said. “You have to!”

  The giant muskie that served as the entrance to the closed-for-the-season Muskie Bait shop loomed. The peeling green and white exterior gave the impression of a half-scaled fish. Its faded pink gums and once white but now yellow-brown teeth were so convincingly decayed you could practically smell bad fish breath.

  “So,” Raven said. “What are we doing here?”

  Francie sighed. “The first day of school, if you remember, everybody thought Muskie Bait was vandalized. It wasn’t.”

  “And you would know this because . . . ?” Jay said.

  “You cannot—cannot—tell anyone this. Not anyone,” Francie said.

  “Sworn to secrecy,” Raven and Jay crossed their hearts and did an impromptu secret handshake.

  “That night, I was with Theo. Here. We were chased into this place.”

  “Chased!”

  “By I don’t know who—some wing nut in a trench coat. I don’t know why, either.”

  “Was this guy chasing you or Theo?”

  “Why would anyone be chasing me? I’ve been thinking about it, and I think Theo had something with him, so
mething he may have hidden inside here somewhere,” she said. “He gave me his backpack,” Francie handed Raven her schoolbag, “and he groped around along the muskie’s teeth for a while . . .” Francie ran her hands along the teeth, not knowing what she expected to find. “With everything that was going on, I didn’t really stop to wonder why he was doing that. And it was dark, so I couldn’t see much.”

  “What does your brother do, Francie?” Raven asked.

  “Do?” Francie said.

  “Like, for work?” Raven said. “Is he a student, or what?”

  “I don’t know,” Francie said. “He travels a lot. Something with archaeology.”

  “He’s an archaeologist?”

  “Sort of? Not really? I guess I don’t really know.”

  “Did he come back because of the dig?”

  Francie paused midtooth and turned to Raven. Had he? She had been trying to force herself not to think of his argument with Digby. Now she forced herself to think of it. How did he know Digby? And why had they argued?

  Francie took Raven by the shoulders, staring at her. “Something’s going on. Something we have no idea about.”

  “Obviously,” Raven said.

  “No, Raven. I mean something big. Bigger than mastodon bones—it has to be.” A familiar fear—the fear that Theo was in trouble—seized her again. “Theo is tangled up in it somehow. Oh, if only I knew what was going on!” she cried.

  “He’s your brother, by the way,” Raven said. “Why don’t you just ask him?”

  “He won’t tell me. He’s a master of not telling me things.” Francie went back to feeling along the muskie’s dirty brown teeth, wiggling each one along the line. “This fish is in need of some dental work,” she said. “Oh, I know it’s here somewhere, I know it.” And then, “Ah ha!” she said, holding up a lump of something, about as big as her hand, but heavier, bulkier—in fact, about the size and shape of one of the muskie’s teeth.

  “Did you just pull one of the teeth out?” Raven asked.

  “Oh crap. I did.” Francie tried to fit it back where it had been. But it just didn’t fit. “It seems like it was just stuck there,” she said.