Enchantment Lake: A Northwoods Mystery

by Margi Preus

  Enchantment Lake

  Enchantment Lake

  A Northwoods Mystery

  Margi Preus

  University of Minnesota Press

  Minneapolis • London

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “Sleep” from New Collected Poems, by Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 2012). Copyright 2012 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

  “The Peace of Wild Things” and “To Know the Dark” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, by Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 1999). Copyright 1999 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

  Copyright 2015 by Margi Preus

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by the University of Minnesota Press

  111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

  Minneapolis, MN 55401–2520

  http://www.upress.umn.edu

  Design and production by Mighty Media, Inc.

  Interior and text design by Chris Long

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Preus, Margi.

  Enchantment Lake : a Northwoods mystery / Margi Preus.

  ISBN 978-1-4529-4463-0

  [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Lakes—Fiction. 3. Buried treasure—Fiction.

  4. Great-aunts—Fiction. 5. Swindlers and swindling—Fiction. 6. Minnesota—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P92434Enc 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014042651

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

  To my friends and family at Kabekona, none of whom are in this story

  There is a lake

  I know the road along the shore

  the turns you take

  before it brings you to the door

  I know the silence of the snow

  the ice that cracks, the winds that blow

  I know where fish hide in the weeds

  I know where one small river leads

  the red-winged blackbird on the reeds

  There is a lake

  —from the song “C’est toi mon lac,” by Joel Preus

  Contents

  1. Drowning

  2. Walpurgis

  3. At the Cabin

  4. The Boathouse

  5. Suicide Weather

  6. Plantation People

  7. A Headache

  8. Buck Thorne

  9. Strawberry Picking

  10. Sleuthing

  11. The Party

  12. Fishing

  13. Go Dark

  14. The Puzzle

  15. The Sheriff’s Office

  16. Babysitting

  17.The Funeral

  18. The County Jail

  19. Sunnies

  20. T.J.

  21. Gone to Jail

  22. DQ

  23. A Secret

  24. Under Enchantment

  25. Under Ground

  26. Under Water

  27. The Puzzle, Revealed

  28. Freddie’s

  29. Out the Back Door

  30. The Machine

  31. The Blast

  32. The Silver Box

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Drowning

  Drowning, Francie thought. That’s what this was like. You plunged into the cool, quiet darkness of the theater from the hot, bright street and sank into the gloom of the back rows of the house. And waited. Waited for the air to be squeezed, slowly but surely, from your lungs. Waited while your nerves frayed. Waited for your turn to audition.

  From here, the voices on stage were like those on a distant shore, calmly conversing while Francie struggled, unobserved in the darkness, to keep her head above water. Her chest hurt, and something gnawed at the lining of her stomach. Everyone else got butterflies in their tummies when they were nervous, but no, she got hungry caterpillars instead, chewing holes in her stomach and . . . buzzing?

  No, that was her phone. She pulled it out of her pocket, noticed the area code, and stepped into the lobby.

  “Aunt . . . Astrid?” she whispered.

  The voice on the other end cut in and out, so Francie stepped outside into the bright sun and jarring noise of the Manhattan street. She plugged her traffic-facing ear and pressed the phone closer to her other one. “What?” she said. “It sounded like you said ‘Someone is frying two grilled auks.’”

  Car horns trilled, a siren wailed, and down the street a jackhammer beat out a mind-numbing rhythm. In between, Francie picked out words. Had her aunt said danger? And then, murmur? Or . . . murder?

  There was a sudden freakish lull in the noise, during which the voice on the other end finished by shouting, “Come quickly!”

  Come quickly? Francie was a thousand miles away! What was this about? Grilling auks? Her great-aunts were a little wacky, but they didn’t make prank telephone calls. There was only one possibility: trouble. Her temples throbbed. Maybe bad trouble.

  She dialed the number, but no one picked up. With every unanswered ring, her heart hammered harder, keeping time with the jackhammer down the street. Where had her great-aunt called from? she wondered. She didn’t think either one of her aunts had a cell phone, and there was no phone at the cabin as far as she knew.

  She glanced at the theater. It must be almost time for her audition. She could try calling back afterward, she supposed. But what if . . . ?

  She punched in 911. “I think my great-aunts might be in trouble,” she told the dispatcher, going on to explain that her elderly aunts lived on a remote lake in northern Minnesota. “I’m not sure what kind of trouble,” Francie answered the dispatcher’s question. “We had a bad connection.” Could the NYPD contact the police in Walpurgis? she asked. No, Francie didn’t know. She told the dispatcher she didn’t know that, either. No, she didn’t know! Why did they keep asking her questions instead of doing something about her aunts, whose lives might be in imminent danger?

  Next she dialed the Walpurgis police department. The phone rang and rang. How could nobody be there? Not even any voice mail? What kind of police department didn’t answer the phone?

  Finally, she called her grandfather.

  He laughed—laughed! “You know your aunts,” he drawled, dragging the words out. “Don’t you remember the summers you spent with them when you were younger? Loonie birds, the pair of them! I’m sure they’re fine.”

  “Then why would Astrid say they were in danger?” Francie shouted into the phone. “And that there was a murder?” She wasn’t positive that’s what her aunt had said, but she was pretty sure.

  “What did she actually say, Francesca?” her grandfather asked.

  “She said . . .” Francie stopped and pressed her fingers to her forehead. She could hardly tell him they were grilling auks. Had Astrid said, “Someone is frying two grilled auks?” Or had she said, as Francie now told her grandfather, “Someone is . . . Trying. To. Kill. Us.”

  “She said that?” her grandfather asked.

  “I think that’s what she said.”

  “You think that’s what she said.”

  “Well,” Francie admitted, “we had a bad connection.”

  He laughed again. “I’m sure they’re fine,” he sai
d.

  Francie sighed. How could he be so relaxed about this? What if they really were in danger? She couldn’t bear the thought of it. They were almost the only family she had left. Maybe she hadn’t seen them in a while, a long while, but she’d always known they were there for her. Perhaps it was her turn to be there for them.

  “I’m going to check up on them,” Francie said.

  “Now, don’t get any funny ideas, Francesca. Francesca?”

  But she wasn’t listening. She had already shoved the phone into her pocket and was moving steadily down the street. Where am I going? she wondered.

  Home, she thought. I’m going home. Home to the apartment she shared with three other girls? Or home to the lake?

  As she dodged pedestrians and wove through stalled traffic, she thought of frothy whitecaps on a wind-blown lake, the slam of a screen door, a sun-dappled path. She remembered swimming under bottle-green water and summer days that did not seem to end, the sun lingering in the sky as if it could not bear to leave.

  Home, she thought. I’m going home to the lake.

  2

  Walpurgis

  The trip was agony—everything was taking too long! She couldn’t help imagining the worst scenarios. All the way through security: what if something horrible had happened? During the long flight: if her aunts’ lives were in danger, what did she think she was going to be able to do about it, anyway?

  And now the interminable bus ride, every mile of which was agony—the lurching stop it made in every little town, the blast of hot air as the door clattered open, the clamor of people getting on or off—made her grit her teeth in frustration. Couldn’t this bus go any faster?

  She pressed her nose to the cool glass of the bus window and watched as first the city, then the suburbs and their crop-like rows of houses gave way to rows of corn in rolling, open farm country. Gradually, the undulating fields studded with oaks and maples were swallowed by forests of spruce and pine. Here and there a lake glinted through the trees like a sequined cocktail dress glimpsed through a crowded room. She felt her pulse race. Soon there.

  How long had it been? She hadn’t been back since the Accident. That was seven years earlier, when she’d been ten. Now she was seventeen.

  She gazed past the billboards and hand-painted signs (God Loves You Country Inn; Oops, You Just Passed Gas!) and at the birch trees flashing by, the white skin of their trunks bright in the afternoon sun. As a kid, she’d tried to imagine what this country must have looked like hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Or at least before there were billboards and cell towers.

  She glanced at her phone. Her grandfather had called. She didn’t intend to call him back. He would freak if he knew what she was up to. He didn’t know she’d ditched out of summer school, left the city completely, and was almost to the lake. If she told him, he’d probably threaten to cut off her funds.

  Her friends, on the other hand, would not be surprised that she had bought a plane ticket from New York to Minneapolis, and, too young to rent a car, hopped on a bus, and now . . .

  How was she going to get to the cabin? She hadn’t really thought through that part. She checked the map app on her phone and smiled. There was still no way to get where she was going, at least not by car—there was still no road on that side of the lake. She wondered if there was still no electricity, either. No phones. No Internet. No cell service. That’s the way it had been seven years ago. She wondered how much might have changed since then.

  Walpurgis, the sign read, Population 2,020.

  The bus unloaded its handful of passengers at a gas station and pulled away. She shouldered her pack and started her hike down the main street, a string of gift shops displaying bears and ducks and moose in all manner of unlikely poses—as wine racks, coffee tables, lamps, pillows, and cookie jars. As she craned her neck to look at one extraordinarily jam-packed display, musing that there must be more moose in that one window than in the entire northwoods, she smacked headfirst into someone.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled at his chest, then glanced up.

  Francie tried not to stare, first at his head of tousled, sun-bleached hair, then at the way he filled his shirt, and then at the big bouquet of flowers he carried, which for a moment she fantasized was for her. He gave her a little nod and smile, which, she had to admit, caused her stomach to flutter, and she couldn’t help glancing—okay, staring—at him as he continued down the street.

  The sun was hanging low in the sky by the time she reached Sandy’s Beach Resort. Francie noticed the apostrophe and final “s” had fallen off his sign, so now it read Sandy Beach Resort on Enchantment Lake. As a service to the cabin owners on the other side of the lake, where there was no road, Sandy offered delivery service, dockage, and boat rides.

  The half-log siding on the store had been replaced by half-log vinyl siding. Still, inside, the same big cast-iron sinks swarmed with minnows, leeches, and shiners. An old cooler, its light flickering, held bottles, not cans, of the soft drinks she had grown up calling “pop” but had learned to call “soda.”

  “Help you with something?” a voice asked. She turned, and there, stacking cans on a shelf was not Sandy but—what was his name?—Sandy’s son, older now, of course.

  “French Fry?” the young man said, blinking. His eyes were a curious mix of blues that shifted like the lake on a windy day.

  “Wow,” she said. “You not only remember me, you remember my nickname?”

  “How could I forget little Frenchy?”

  Francie noticed that his face, lit up from the soda machine, seemed to be glowing.

  “Sandy?” Francie asked. She couldn’t remember his name. “You know my great-aunts, right?”

  “Of course!” he said, “Everybody knows Astrid and Jeannette.”

  “Are they okay?”

  “Okay?” Sandy asked. The blue of his eyes shifted to a darker shade.

  “They said someone was trying to kill them.”

  Sandy gave a low whistle. “That’s crazy. But you do know that your aunts—”

  “Are a little nutty?” Francie finished his thought.

  “Well . . .”

  “I know, but I couldn’t help worrying.”

  He placed a few cans on the shelf and said, “I haven’t seen them for a few days.” Then, glancing at Francie, he added, “I’m sure they’re okay, though. Don’t worry.” Sandy picked up the empty box at his feet and said, “Come on. I’ll take you over there. Just give me a minute to close up. I’m the only one here.”

  Francie walked out on the dock and tapped her foot impatiently. In the evening sunlight, the lake was like . . . well, it was like a pool of molten gold, she supposed. The word “luminescent” came to mind, as if it were lit from beneath. Almost as if, Francie thought, there was a dragon’s lair of gold under the lake, and the light was its reflected luster.

  She wished she could be awed by it, but knowing that her aunts were across the lake, somehow relying on her to help them, she couldn’t keep her thoughts on anything except getting there. She caught a whiff of the smells she remembered from her childhood: pine and lake and fresh air—and gasoline, probably from the gas can Sandy was hoisting into a big, fancy powerboat.

  The boat reminded Francie of the ones the bad guys used in James Bond movies. She wondered what had happened to the old aluminum fishing boats with the ten-horse Johnson motors on the back.

  “This is a fishing boat?” she asked Sandy as he lowered the boat from the lift.

  He nodded.

  “Are the fish faster nowadays?”

  He laughed. “Naw, just gotta get to ’em before anybody else does.” He winked. He had a cute dimple in one cheek, she noticed.

  “What about that one?” She pointed to an enormous speedboat on a lift nearby.

  “Buck’s,” he said, his smile fading.

  Sandy helped her into the boat, offering his hand in a sweetly old-fashioned way. “I hear you’re a big detective in New York,” he said.

 
; She laughed and started to say no, whatever gave him that idea, but he’d started the motor, and Francie didn’t want to shout over the noise, so she let it go. Sandy expertly spun the boat around, faced it toward the far shore, and, with motor roaring, sped out across the lake.

  The boat went so fast it squeezed tears from Francie’s eyes and whipped them behind her. Light from the setting sun flashed on the edge of the boat’s wake, bright and hard as knife blades. Francie glanced back at the receding shore and was surprised to see so many imposing houses, with picture windows big enough to flatten flocks of geese. When did those get built? Along with the houses came the requisite jumble of boat launches, docks, pontoon boats, Jet Skis, and rafts. Also new: a huge, blinking cell phone tower. Ugly was her first thought. Hey, maybe there’s cell service here now was her second. She checked her phone. Dead. She should have thought about that.

  On the other hand, the approaching shore was just as she remembered it. From here it looked like a thick ruff of trees, with a few tiny cabin windows winking in the sun.

  “Is this shore really enchanted like they say?” she asked as the boat slowed. “Why hasn’t it changed the way the other side has?”

  “It’s probably because there’s no road on this side of the lake—yet. But there’s some kind of a fight over it. Some folks are pretty riled.” Sandy made an expert landing at her aunts’ dock.

  “What do I owe you for the ride?”

  “Ah, forget it, Frenchy,” he said, blushing. “Do you want me to come with you to check on your aunts?”

  “No.” Francie stepped out onto the dock. “You need to get back to the store. I’m sure everything is fine. Sorry I called you Sandy,” she added. Scott, that was his name.

  “No, it’s okay. That’s what everybody calls me since I’ve taken over.”

  “Did your dad retire?”

  “He died,” Sandy said. “Deer hunting trip.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Was he . . . did he . . . ?”