Twisted Summer

by Willo Davis Roberts

  In desperation, I decided to work on my list of names, motives, and alibis. I hadn’t gotten very far, but I didn’t have anything else to do.

  I’d left the paper on the Judge’s desk.

  It wasn’t there.

  He must have come in, some time before we ate, and looked at the mail, because he’d thrown some stuff in the wastebasket; there was still a pile of letters left, though. He hadn’t spent a lot of time at his desk.

  Even so, he might have thrown out my paper, or Mrs. Graden had cleaned in there. I pawed through the wastebasket, and sure enough there it was, on the very bottom. It was slightly crumpled, so I smoothed it out and took it with me. I needed to borrow a pencil again, and in the same container with the one I chose was a compass.

  Impulsively, I took that, too. I remembered the seventy-three miles Zoe had put on Fergus’s car, and Mom had a map of Michigan in the glove compartment. I decided to find out just where she could have driven in that many miles.

  It was still daylight. I got out the map and spread it on the hood of the car, then figured out where we were, on the shores of Crystal Lake. I set the point of the compass there, and made a circle with a radius of the thirty-six miles that would have been possible for Zoe to reach and allow enough miles to return Fergus’s car.

  The line made by the pencil in the compass encircled Timbers and two other small towns. Lacey was just outside the circle, Greenway was just inside it.

  Greenway. That was the postmark on the letter the Judge got, and I was sure I’d been there a couple of times. A little place, not much bigger than Timbers.

  Had Zoe gone to either Greenway or Lacey? Why? Especially late at night. It would have to be to see a person, wouldn’t it? Who? For what purpose?

  The logical answer to the last question was that she was meeting some guy. But how could I determine who? I didn’t know a soul in either town. I wondered if Jack did. His school probably played ball games against the kids in those places; he might know if Zoe had been interested in some hunk in a neighboring village.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  I jumped and turned to see Ilona looking over my shoulder.

  “Oh, just . . . figuring something out.” I folded the compass and stuck it in my pocket, refolding the map as well. My heart was beating as if I’d been caught at something I shouldn’t have been doing. “You weren’t looking for me, were you?”

  “Yes, and Ginny. Mother wants to know if we’d all like to go to the mortuary for the viewing this evening.”

  I shuddered. “No thanks. And Ginny’s gone to town with Randy’s family.”

  “Your folks are going,” Ilona pressed. “To be supportive for the Judge.”

  “Well, I’m not, unless somebody insists,” I told her firmly.

  She regarded me critically. “I’d have thought you were grown-up enough by now, Cici, to do the right thing.”

  Something inside me flared up, uncontrollable. “Sure. Like you were grown-up enough to go see Brody when he was in trouble.”

  She flushed deep pink and then went so white it sort of scared me, as if she might pass out. “That was different.”

  “Was it? If I’d been going with a guy, planning to marry him someday, I’d consider it my responsibility to at least give him a chance to explain.”

  “There’s no explaining away murder,” Ilona said faintly.

  “Maybe not, but there are some of us who don’t think Brody did it. He’d probably have told you that if you’d given him a chance. He must have waited and wondered why you didn’t come. You didn’t even send him a note, did you?”

  Ilona was recovering. “You’re talking about things you don’t know anything about, Cici. And it’s none of your business, anyway.”

  “And it’s none of your business when, or if, I go to see Grandma Molly in a casket. She’s dead, but Brody’s still alive, and he’s hurting. So are Lina and Jack. And they aren’t the only ones who think Brody’s innocent.”

  She stared at me for long seconds, her blue eyes blazing so fiercely I thought she might slap me. Then she turned and stalked into the house.

  I took the compass back to the Judge’s den and then hesitated, looking at the stacks of mail. Hadn’t I left the envelope with no return address right on top of the nearest pile? The one that had come from Greenway?

  It wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere in the stack.

  I glanced over my shoulder toward the hallway, but I didn’t see or hear anyone. On impulse, I dumped out the stuff in the wastebasket and sorted through it, but there was no envelope addressed in that distinctive handwriting.

  Had the Judge already picked it up and disposed of it? Without looking at the rest of his mail?

  And if so, what had he done with it?

  Knowing I shouldn’t, yet compelled by the pressure inside me, I opened the wide drawer to see if he’d put it in there. He hadn’t. So where the heck was it?

  I had no reason to think that particular envelope was important or significant. Yet it bothered me that someone had taken pains to remove it from the desk.

  From a distance I heard Ilona’s voice, and then my dad’s.

  I decided the best thing for me to do, before the others tried to scoop me up for their trip to the mortuary, was to disappear.

  If Jack wasn’t home yet, I’d talk to his mother.

  Anything to get away from Ilona’s ideas about responsibility, and anyone else’s views on visiting the funeral home.

  chapter eleven

  Jack came in just as I got there. He lifted a hand in greeting, then peered earnestly into my face as he came closer. “I heard about your grandma. You doing okay?”

  “Yes. As well as anybody does when their grandmother dies, I guess. Most of the rest of them were going to town for a viewing.” I couldn’t help shivering again. “What a gruesome custom it is.”

  “Yeah,” Jack agreed, opening the screen door to let me precede him into the cottage. “It strikes me that way, too. But Ma says a lot of people need to say good-bye by looking at a person for the last time. She’s planning to go in. Molly was a good friend.”

  The Shurik kitchen smelled like chicken, maybe, in the Crock-Pot. Lina came in, carrying her purse and her car keys.

  She gave me a hug, murmuring her sympathy. “She was a lovely lady.”

  “Yes,” I agreed softly. “Lina, am I terrible because I can’t go and look at her there?”

  “No, honey, of course not. Each of us says good-bye in our own way. When you’re ready, you’ll go. Until then, don’t worry about it.” She released me and glanced at her son. “Clean up when you’re finished, okay? I’m too tired to do it tonight.”

  “Sure, Ma.” Jack spoke with his head in the refrigerator. He hauled out a bowl of salad, then lifted the lid off the Crock-Pot and forked chicken and potatoes onto a plate. “I guess you didn’t bake anything today, huh?”

  Lina sighed. “No, Jack. But I brought home some goodies from the bakery in town. Special treat. Don’t get used to the expensive stuff, though.”

  Jack looked at me over his shoulder. “You want some of this, Cici? There’s plenty for two. Ma obviously thinks I’m still a growing boy.”

  “No thanks.” I slumped into a chair and watched glumly as he brought his food to the table. “I need conversation more than I need food. With somebody more . . . understanding . . . than my cousin Ilona.”

  He dragged his chair noisily up to the Formica-topped table. “She giving you a bad time?”

  “She was provoked that I wouldn’t go look at Grandma Molly with everybody else. I don’t want to remember her that way, Jack. Not in a coffin.”

  “You won’t. Oh, maybe for a little while, but it’ll pass. You’ll start remembering her the way she was, the things she did. Remember that time Sunny got squirted by the skunk, and you kids were just about hysterical, and she brought out all the tomato juice she had to wash the dog in, and we wondered if it had to be pure tomato, or if we could use V-8 to kill
the stench.”

  I remembered. It even coaxed a hint of a smile for a few seconds. “There are lots of good memories.”

  “Sure. I’m that way about my dad. I hardly ever think about him at the funeral, just the fun things we did together before he died.”

  I was silent for a moment, then confessed, “I snapped at Ilona. I told her what I thought about her not going to see Brody after he was arrested, not even sending him a note.”

  Jack paused with a bite of chicken halfway to his mouth. “Oh? How’d she react to that?”

  “It made her blush bright pink and then get so white I was afraid she’d faint or something. She was angry and walked away from me.”

  He put the chicken in his mouth and chewed. “That’s about how she acted when I asked her about going to see him. He really needed her, you know. He needed somebody besides me and Ma to believe him. But she wouldn’t go.”

  “I think there are other people who have doubts about his guilt. I’ve been talking to everybody around the lake, trying to figure out what might really have happened.”

  I pulled the crumpled paper out of my pocket and smoothed it on the tabletop. “You were here when it happened. Maybe you can help me fill in some of the blanks. This is a list of possible suspects, alibis where there were some, motives. Things like that.”

  He glanced down the page. “You even have me and Ma on there.”

  “Well, I felt like I had to put everyone possible on there that could have done it. I felt silly writing a lot of those names, like Grandma Molly and the kids who were only about my age when it happened. But to do it right, I couldn’t overlook anyone. Not even you.”

  “Yeah. Well, neither Ma nor I had alibis. We were both sleeping, I guess, or maybe she was still up, reading. I went to bed right after Brody left to take a walk. So we had opportunity. No motives I can think of. There were a couple of times before that I felt like smacking Zoe’s face—or her butt—but the way we were brought up, a guy doesn’t hit a girl, even if she deserves it. She had kind of a nasty mouth sometimes, but you don’t kill somebody for that.”

  “Tell me again what you know about the murder,” I asked softly. “Brody—did they come here after him? I mean, the boys found Zoe shortly after midnight.”

  “The police got here just as we were getting up in the morning,” Jack said.

  “How come Chet and Nathan went looking for her when they did? I mean, she was always sneaking out at night, wasn’t she?”

  “Mrs. Cyrek had been asleep but got up to go to the bathroom,” Jack said, as if he were talking about something perfectly ordinary. “She realized Zoe wasn’t home yet and woke up the rest of the family. The boys argued that she’d be home before the time when she thought her mother would wake up, but she insisted they go look for her.”

  “Why did they look at the Wades’ cabin?”

  Jack’s gaze was level. “Good question, eh? My guess is that they knew she’d met guys there before. They could even have met girls there themselves; everybody knew it was empty, and isolated. They said it was just a fluke they found her, checking with everybody around the lake to see if anybody’d seen her.”

  “But they knew nobody was at the Wades’ to tell them anything.” I considered it while Jack buttered a slice of bread. “Anyway, what led them to Brody so fast?”

  “Zoe had lied about him taking her to town; they thought he was the last one to see her. And then later on, they found his wallet in the Wades’ living room, kicked under the edge of the couch.”

  “How much later did the police find it?”

  “I’m not sure. Sometime that afternoon, when they had everybody from the crime lab out here.”

  “What did Brody say about the wallet?”

  “He’d discovered he didn’t have it right before the sheriff’s car drove into the yard. He hadn’t known it was missing. He admitted he’d been walking on the beach, but said he didn’t think he had the wallet with him. He’d changed clothes before he went for a walk that night, put on jeans when he came home from work, and he didn’t need the wallet so he didn’t put it back in his pocket. He thought he’d left it lying on his dresser, but it wasn’t there in the morning, naturally.”

  “His dresser,” I mused. “Is that where anybody could get at it? Is his dresser near a window?”

  “No. And our windows are screened. But we never bothered to lock our doors. Anybody could have walked in and swiped it if we weren’t here. Or if we were, if they were careful.”

  As far back as I could remember, nobody had locked up their cabins and cottages except when they left for the winter. They never needed to.

  I remembered the night I’d stood outside this house and looked in on Lina, rocking and reading, and then into Jack’s darkened bedroom. The radio had been on, there was no dog. I could probably have gone in the back door and taken anything from the rear of the house without being caught, if I’d had the nerve.

  If you’d just strangled someone, and wanted to frame someone else for it, it could give you the nerve, couldn’t it?

  I exhaled noisily. “So somebody else could have planted the wallet.”

  “The killer,” Jack confirmed. “I figured that’s what happened, but the cops didn’t buy it. I told them Brody wasn’t stupid enough to leave something that incriminating behind him if he committed a crime. He wouldn’t have carried away her scarf and kept it, either. All he’d have had to do was throw it in the lake, and he’d have been rid of it.”

  He opened up the sack from the bakery and took out a maple bar, then offered the bag to me. “Here. Have one while I look over your list.”

  I ate one, watching him. He made a couple of marks on my paper. “The Powells weren’t here the night Zoe died. We can scratch opportunity for them. They were all in Bay City for a few days because Sonja’s mom was in the hospital there. And Ed Kraski was gone, too, over at Traverse, having oral surgery. I think everybody else was here at the lake.”

  “How about strength? Can we eliminate anyone who wouldn’t have been physically able to strangle Zoe?”

  His thoughts were similar to mine. “I suppose a woman could have done it, especially if she were athletic like Anna Atterbom or Carol Cyrek.”

  I stared at him, forgetting to chew. “You don’t think Carol Cyrek could have . . . ?”

  “No, no. I just meant that both those women play tennis at the high school courts in Timbers. They swim several times a week. They’re strong. Zoe was strong, too. She’d have fought back. Unless someone took her by surprise, from behind. I figure that’s how it happened. They didn’t need to look for a weapon, or if they planned it, to take one with them. She always wore all that junk jewelry around her neck. The killer grabbed all those strands and twisted them until she stopped struggling.”

  It made me feel sick to hear Jack echoing my suppositions. I said then what I had guessed.

  “She was more than just a pest. She must have been a threat to somebody.”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah. The trouble is that we don’t know whatever Zoe knew. It must have been serious if she was killed to shut her up, and then Brody was framed to keep the secret.”

  I finally said the word that had been floating between us. “Blackmail?”

  “Possibly. Zoe was the kind of girl who might take advantage of a person who didn’t want people to know something about them.”

  I sounded faint. “And that leaves every adult on the list with a possible motive. Something awful we have no way of knowing about.”

  It set off another terrible possibility in my mind, too. I couldn’t say it to Jack, though, not without more evidence. I had to be mistaken about it, I thought desperately. I had to.

  Jack folded up the paper with my list on it and passed it back to me. “I wouldn’t show this to anyone else, Cici. Or talk about it, about Zoe maybe being a blackmailer. Because you’re right, the killer almost has to be someone who lives here at the lake. It could be anybody. If they knew you were poking around, stirring up
trouble, it might be dangerous.”

  The kitchen was very still. A mosquito buzzed around my head, but I didn’t even swat at it.

  “Dangerous. You mean they might . . . try to shut me up, too.”

  His eyes were bright. “Be careful, Cici.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, sticking the paper into my jeans’ pocket.

  He went for his second maple bar, offering me the bag, but I no longer felt I could eat anything. I’d be lucky if I didn’t throw up what I’d just swallowed.

  I pushed back my chair and stood up. “I haven’t told anyone but you.”

  “Let’s keep it that way,” Jack said.

  It was a measure of how shaken I was when I realized that even Jack was still on the list of suspects, more or less, and that if he were the killer, he could be dangerous. A person who had murdered once, and sent an innocent young man to prison for most of the rest of his life, wouldn’t hesitate to eliminate anyone else who got in his way.

  It hadn’t been Jack. I knew it couldn’t have been Jack. Even if he’d strangled Zoe in a moment of fury, he’d never have framed his brother. But I was shaking, anyway.

  I got halfway to the door when I remembered. “Oh, do you know anybody in Lacey or Greenway? Young guys, I mean?”

  “Lacey and Greenway? Sure, I know a few of the athletes. We go to games over in those towns, and they come here. I don’t know any of them well. Why?”

  “Did you ever see any of them with Zoe? Did she ever mention any of them?”

  “Not that I remember. She never openly dated any of them. And even if she did, it’s not very likely they would have set up a meeting with her at Wades’ cabin.”

  I told him about the circle I’d drawn on the Michigan map. How Lacey and Greenway were the only towns close enough for her to have driven to when she “borrowed” Fergus’s car. “She must have met someone inside that circle, unless she was just driving around doing nothing, and why would she do that? It would take something important to make me steal someone else’s car.”