Twisted Summer

by Willo Davis Roberts

  The Judge kept everything in neat compartments: paper clips, mail stickers and labels, business cards, several ledgers with leather bindings. No paper.

  The last drawer stuck. This was the last place I could think to try, so I jerked as hard as I could.

  The drawer came loose and I went backward, dumping the contents onto the floor. Great. I’d have to hope I could get it back in decent order, so His Honor—we used to call him that when we were smaller, because he seemed to get a kick out of it—wouldn’t know I’d been poking around.

  The paper was on the bottom of the drawer, and I took out a couple of sheets, then got on my knees to pick up the rest of the stuff. It was mostly old check registers, neatly boxed except for one stack that spilled open.

  In proper order, no doubt, so I’d better get them back in the same sequence, by dates.

  I don’t know why I looked beyond the dates in the front of each register. Maybe it was because when a few pages flipped I caught a glimpse of the running balance.

  Wow! I knew Mom and Dad would like to have that much in a checking account.

  I paused with the register open in my hand, eyes scanning some of the other figures. I guessed he needed that much in there because he occasionally wrote some pretty big checks.

  There was the entry for Ilona’s tuition at the University of Michigan. And one for his newest car, paid in full, apparently. My folks had commented on that. He had turned in an almost new car for an even newer one. “Wish I had that kind of money,” my father had said.

  The Judge’s checkbooks were none of my business, and I knew it. But it was like I was on automatic, looking at this one, though I had every intention of closing it and putting it away.

  And then something caught and held my attention. A check for a thousand dollars, made out to cash.

  What did anybody do with a thousand dollars in cash?

  It had been written on the first of the month, six months ago. Without conscious thought, I flipped a page. First of the month, five months ago.

  Another thousand-dollar check, made out to cash.

  I forgot I was looking at someone else’s private papers. I moved ahead to the next first of the month. Another thousand dollars. To cash.

  I went both forward and backward in the check registers. There was a total of fourteen months’ worth of similar checks. Fourteen thousand dollars, all in cash.

  No explanation came to mind. I shuffled the registers into a stack and put them away again. But I was curious.

  The desk was as good a place as any to work, I decided. I sat down and began to write a list of names, beginning at the north end of the lake, working around the length of it, putting in everybody over the age of fifteen. It didn’t seem likely that anybody younger than that had murdered Zoe.

  I felt silly writing most of the names. Boys my age, Zoe’s brothers and her mother and father, Lina and Jack, Fergus and Ellen. Mentally I was rejecting most people as soon as I wrote their names. But I couldn’t overlook any possible suspect.

  I wrote our family’s names last, starting with the Judge and Aunt Pat and Aunt Mavis. Mom and Dad and Freddy and I hadn’t been there last summer, so I didn’t put us down. I wasn’t sure about some of the newcomers, but as of last year they might not have known Zoe yet.

  I finished up with Mrs. Graden, though she lived in town and I doubted she’d known either Zoe or Brody.

  When the list was complete, I got a ruler out of the top center drawer and used it to draw vertical lines down the page, adding headings to each column: motive, opportunity, alibi, and a couple of blanks for things I might think of later.

  Then I took the easiest things first and made check marks in red pen in those columns.

  Zoe’s brothers had found her a little after midnight, so the crime had taken place before that. That meant practically anybody could have done it. As early as most people at the lake went to bed, even a married person could conceivably have slipped out after his or her spouse was asleep, without anyone knowing about it.

  Probably Zoe had agreed to meet someone at the cottage where she was killed. Otherwise, why would she have been there? Or maybe there had been a third party who followed her—or the second party—to see who was meeting whom.

  How could I find out where everybody was that night? Nobody would admit to being anywhere but where they were supposed to be.

  I decided to go on to motive.

  If I counted throwing herself at every male as a reason for getting rid of her, practically everybody at the lake would qualify. If I counted jealous wives or girlfriends, all the females would earn check marks.

  Even Grandma Molly, whose name I had forgotten to write down. I added it in, feeling disloyal and stupid, but I’d set out to cover all bases, and Molly had been here. I couldn’t imagine Zoe coming on to the Judge, nor him having the slightest interest in her, but if that had happened, Molly could have been a jealous wife.

  I added another category at the top of the column: strength?

  My frail little grandmother couldn’t have strangled a kitten, let alone a healthy, athletic sixteen-year-old girl. I wrote no after Molly’s name.

  I slapped down my pen in frustration. If the only motives I could think of were jealousy or an angry male, either a harassed or a rejected one, I was getting nowhere. It just wasn’t a strong enough reason to kill somebody. All anyone would have had to do was walk away and ignore her.

  The phone rang alongside of me.

  I jumped, then waited for Mrs. Graden to answer it.

  In the kitchen, I heard the TV. She was watching a morning soap opera.

  When the phone rang again, I picked it up, hoping it wasn’t more bad news. I hadn’t even said anything yet when a man’s voice spoke in my ear.

  “I think you forgot something, Judge. I won’t wait.”

  Was there a threat in his tone? I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry, the Judge isn’t here. May I take a message?”

  That startled him. After a few seconds, he said, “When’ll he be home?”

  “I don’t know for sure. His . . . his wife died this morning. I guess he’ll be home later today. Can I tell him who called?”

  He muttered a curse and hung up.

  I stared at the phone. What was that all about?

  “Cici! Cici!”

  Ginny’s little sister, Misty, came running through the house, screaming at the top of her lungs.

  I got up and went to the doorway just in time to have her crash into me. “What’s the matter?”

  “Freddy got stung by a whole bunch of bees!”

  Oh, crum, I thought. I hoped this wouldn’t mean a trip to the Emergency Room. There were several cars around here, but I didn’t know if any of the keys were around, and Ilona was the only one who could drive legally.

  As it turned out, there were only two stings, though the girls had poked a nest with a stick and stirred up the entire hive, so Freddy was lucky. After we got that situation under control, and I’d explained to them in detail how stupid they had been, Freddy stopped crying except for an occasional sniffle, and I persuaded them that cool lake water might make it feel better, so they went back outside.

  I was debating whether or not it would be worth my life to invade the kitchen to get something to make up for the breakfast I hadn’t eaten, when I heard my cousins Arnie and Errol tromping up the steps to the house.

  They looked just alike—blond hair and gray eyes, on the skinny side—except that Errol wore horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Hi, Cici. Is anybody fixing anything for lunch yet?” Arnie wanted to know.

  “It’s only ten-thirty,” I told him. “But we got up so early this morning that I’m getting hungry, too. Maybe if all three of us go in at once, she’ll let us have something to eat.”

  “I hope Mrs. Graden made cinnamon rolls again,” Errol said.

  She hadn’t, but she’d stocked up on big bran muffins with raisins in them, and she even let us sit at the kitchen table and put butter on them
and drink orange juice.

  Errol wiped his mouth on his sleeve and pushed back his chair when we’d finished. “You want to come with us, Cici, over to that cabin where Zoe was murdered?”

  A chill ran quick fingers down my spine. “What for?” I asked.

  “Aren’t you curious about it?” Arnie asked, taking another muffin to eat on the way. “I mean, we never saw a place where anybody was murdered before. We might find something interesting.”

  “Like what?” I wondered aloud. “It happened almost a year ago, and the police were all over it. I doubt if they left any clues or anything.”

  Errol’s eyes were magnified through his lenses. “You believe Brody did it? We like Brody. I caught a baby rabbit once, and he made us put it back where it was, said it would die if we tried to keep it. And remember when Arnie sprained his ankle jumping into old Fergus’s boat, and Brody carried him home? We don’t think he’d kill anybody. Anyway, we’re going to look around. You want to come with us? When it happened, the Judge told us to stay away from there, but that was a long time ago, and they’re all finished investigating.”

  They didn’t usually include me in their activities, and generally I wasn’t interested in what they did. But it might be a good idea to go, and I didn’t have much else to do.

  “Okay, sure,” I agreed. “Let’s go.”

  We set out through the woods, our feet almost silent on the pine needles, and I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the murderer. Also silent, slipping between the trees, maybe following Zoe. Hating her, possibly.

  But why? Why had he hated her enough to kill her?

  chapter ten

  I knew it was foolish, but I couldn’t help feeling creepy going into the cabin where Zoe had died.

  My cousins felt it, too.

  Arnie stopped on the threshold, looking around as if expecting a mad killer to leap out of the shadows.

  It was actually pretty ordinary, a small two-bedroom cabin furnished with castoffs from the Wades’ house in Milwaukee. A sagging couch, a worn easy chair, some scarred tables.

  The Wades were an older couple who had come here summers for years until about three years ago. Then Mrs. Wade had fractured her hip, and though we’d heard she was fine now, they had never come back.

  I suspected that after what had happened here last year, they never would. They’d sell it to someone who hadn’t known Zoe or Brody, who wouldn’t feel as if the cabin were filled with ghosts.

  “Spooky, isn’t it?” Errol asked.

  The spookiness was all in our imaginations, and I said so. If we hadn’t known Zoe had died here, we wouldn’t have thought there was anything unusual about it at all.

  “No blood stains anywhere,” Arnie commented, stepping inside so Errol and I could follow him into the small living room.

  “Why would there be?” I scoffed. “She wasn’t stabbed, she was strangled.”

  A spider had spun a huge web in one of the windows and it sat there, dark and puffy, waiting for a victim. A fly, following us through the open doorway, unwisely headed toward the motionless creature in the center of the silken strands, and a moment later it was trapped. It struggled as we watched, then grew more feeble, until finally the fat spider bound it fast, to eat later.

  Was that how Zoe felt? I wondered. Had she come here looking for adventure and romance, only to be surprised from behind, the life choked out of her the way it had been squeezed out of the fly?

  All of a sudden I didn’t want to be here. I hadn’t liked Zoe particularly, and neither had anyone else, but she’d been a person, a bright and bubbly girl not much older than I was, and she’d been savagely strangled.

  It must have taken a lot of anger to make someone kill her that way.

  Anger, or fear.

  The thought came to me as I turned to leave.

  Fear? Had someone had something to fear from Zoe?

  Maybe Zoe had known something about one of the people at the lake, something she’d taunted them with, something they didn’t want known.

  It would have to have been pretty serious if they’d taken such a terrible risk to silence her.

  “Hey,” Errol said behind me, “you’re not leaving already, are you? We didn’t even look around yet.

  “There’s nothing to see,” I told him. “How come the place is wide open? Didn’t they lock it up after they’d done their investigating?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Arnie said. “But kids have broken in. Curious, you know. The lock’s broken.”

  He hadn’t inspected the lock when we arrived. I wondered if he was one of the kids who had broken in, curious. I didn’t care enough to ask.

  “Leave things the way they are,” I advised, and headed for the beach to walk home along the shore. It felt better out in the open, rather than imagining someone skulking behind one of the trees in the woods.

  Brody had walked this way that fatal night. Sooner or later practically everybody who lived out here walked around the edge of the lake, thinking their own thoughts. At least they used to, before Zoe was killed. Even at night nobody would have been afraid. The community at Crystal Lake was a family, it would have been like walking around your own house in the dark.

  That feeling of security was gone now. For me, and probably for everyone else as well.

  The Judge’s cottage was much the same as I’d left it. The soap operas were still on on the kitchen TV, but something smelled good. Homemade soup, maybe.

  Mrs. Graden looked around when I passed the kitchen door. “Mr. Kraski picked up the mail,” she said. “It’s there on the little table. Maybe you could put it in on the Judge’s desk. He’ll want to see it when he gets home.”

  Judging by the size of the stack, it had been accumulating for a while. The housekeeper had separated it into two piles: first-class letters, and everything else.

  I picked up the stacks and carried them into the study. It looked like ordinary stuff, mostly bills. Well, at least the Judge didn’t have to worry about having enough money to pay for them, the way we occasionally did at our house.

  When I put the stacks on the desk, two of the envelopes fell onto the floor. I picked them up, noticing that one of them was from the hospital. Grandma Molly had just died that morning; they hadn’t wasted any time getting their bill out.

  The other letter was addressed to the Judge in a big, sprawling hand, written with a broad stub in black ink. There was no return address, but it was postmarked in Greenway. That was a town north of Timbers. Another bill, probably.

  I dropped it on top of the rest of the stuff, and wandered outside onto the veranda facing the drive. I wanted Mom to come home, even though I knew everybody would be depressed and there’d be a discussion about things that had to be done over the next few days. I hoped Dad showed up soon to make things easier.

  Old Sunny, the dog Molly and the Judge had had for years, wandered out from under the porch, trailed by half a dozen puppies. I sat on the steps and rubbed Sunny’s ears and let the pups nibble on my shoestrings and lick at my hand.

  There was something comforting about the dogs. Sunny leaned into me, and I knew she’d be missing Molly; the dog used to sleep at Molly’s feet when she was rocking or knitting or reading.

  “I’m going to miss her, too,” I whispered to the gentle old dog, and I sat there for a long time with the sun on my face, eventually drying my tears.

  * * *

  Dad got there about the time we were sitting down to a dinner nobody wanted. The Judge had come home with Mom and her sisters, all of them looking tired and sad. Mom hugged me, and then Freddy and Dad, and cried just a little bit while he hugged me back.

  Ginny looked at her mom and made a defiant statement. “My dad’s coming, too, for the funeral. I called him myself. He is still my father.”

  “Yes, of course he is,” Aunt Mavis said quietly. “It’s all right, Ginny, you were right to call him. He was fond of Grandma Molly, too.”

  They had been to the funeral parlor in
Timbers already, and the funeral was set for the following Monday morning. There would be private viewing before that.

  Ginny, beside me at the table, jabbed me with a finger. “Private viewing? Does that mean we all have to go and look at her? In a coffin?”

  On the other side of me, Mom heard. “There will be friends from the church and in town who will want to pay their last respects. You girls needn’t go if you don’t want to.”

  “But we’ll have to go to the funeral itself,” I offered reluctantly, knowing she would say yes to that.

  “When Dad’s Aunt Clara died, she didn’t even have a funeral,” Ginny muttered. “She didn’t want any services. It was a lot easier for everybody.”

  “Some families have only a memorial service,” Mom told us. “Some have a funeral. It’s whatever each family feels they need. In this case, it’s the Judge’s decision to make. He wants a nice funeral service.”

  “Nice,” Ginny echoed. “Boy, talk about a contradiction in terms!”

  I agreed with her, but I knew my opinion didn’t count for anything.

  Ginny and I escaped as soon as we could. They were talking about flowers and music and who was going to ride to the cemetery in the limousine and what clothes to deliver to the mortuary.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I suggested, thinking we’d flop on my bed and talk about something else.

  But Ginny looked guilty. “I can’t, Cici. Randy’s coming over to get me, we’re going into town. I asked Mom if it would be disrespectful to go with him to this ball game we’d planned on. The local softball league, you know. She said okay.”

  So there I was again, on my own. I couldn’t stand listening to the grown-ups, and Errol and Arnie disappeared as soon as they’d finished their pie. Even Sunny had gone back under the porch with her puppies. I could hear them squealing there and didn’t bother to call them out.

  I wished Jack would come over after work but knew he probably wouldn’t. His father’s funeral had been a long time ago, when Jack was a little kid, but I knew he remembered it.

  Zoe had had a funeral, too, no doubt. I didn’t want to think about that one. A natural death was horrible enough, but it was too easy to imagine how the Cyreks had struggled to deal with their daughter’s murder.