Enchantment Lake: A Northwoods Mystery

by Margi Preus

  She strained to listen, but a movement, caught out of the corner of her eye, distracted her. Something seemed to have stepped into a shadow . . . deliberately? It was big enough to be a bear—or a man. A sudden chill cut through her thin summer nightgown.

  Which would be better, she wondered, bear or man? She remembered that the bears around here were black and “small” and weren’t supposed to be dangerous, compared to, say, a grizzly. That knowledge didn’t seem to have a calming effect on the goose bumps that had risen all over her arms.

  All the way back to the boathouse she told herself it was nothing. The strange sound could have been frogs. Frogs made all kinds of bizarre racket: chirping, croaking, quacking, peeping, and for all she knew, ka-chinking.

  And the crunching of pine needles behind her? Her imagination for sure.

  Even so, she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her, and the back of her neck prickled. Some detective I make, she thought, scared of the dark.

  Back in the boathouse, she settled into her creaky bunk and waited for her breathing to resume its normal pattern. Now the wind chime was silent, but the fireworks continued. There were distant pops, bangs, and occasional fizzes as the fireworks wound down.

  A couple of big speedboats went by—one of them was Sandy’s. She smiled because she hadn’t lost her talent identifying boats by their sound. It was a skill she’d developed as a kid. Her dad used to tease her that she couldn’t tell the difference between the call of a chickadee and the chirr of a red squirrel, but she could identify any motor on their side of the lake.

  There was one loud pop, like a truck backfiring. I hope that’s the last of the fireworks, she thought. Then, blessed silence.

  5

  Suicide Weather

  “They’ll call it suicide, but it isn’t,” Astrid said the next morning, taking a sip of coffee.

  Francie choked on her bite of toast. “What isn’t suicide?”

  “The shooting down the way. What do you think that loud bang was in the middle of the night?”

  “Fireworks,” Francie said.

  Astrid set her cup in its saucer and pursed her lips in the same disappointed way she had when as a kid Francie sat on the nice furniture in her wet swimsuit. “All those other bangs were fireworks, but that one bang, in the very early morning hours, was a shotgun,” Astrid said. “Cream?” she asked, pouring an impressive dollop of heavy cream in her own coffee.

  “How do you know that?” Francie asked. She shook her head to the offered cream pitcher.

  “I heard it. I guess I know a single shot from a .20 gauge when I hear one.”

  Francie wondered how her aunt was so well versed in the reports of firearms. She also wondered if her aunt was correct. If she was . . . Francie felt the now-familiar prickle at the back of her neck. Her feeling of unease was not soothed by the sight of a dark bank of clouds massing up on the western horizon.

  “By the way,” Francie said. “Where’s Aunt Jen?”

  “She’s gone to find out what she can about the situation. As for you,” Astrid said, “here’s your assignment for today: go into town to Paradise Realty and set up an appointment.”

  “What kind of appointment?” Francie asked.

  “An appointment with a real estate agent, a specific one. His name is Buck. Buck Thorne.”

  “Buck Thorne? That’s a real name?” Francie said. “Like that invasive plant, buckthorn?”

  Astrid nodded. “Tell him that your aunts—that’s us—are going to leave the cabin to you, and you want to sell it as soon as we have passed away.”

  “Auntie! What is this about?”

  The screen door banged and Jeannette walked in.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, wiping tears away, “it was Warren.”

  “Warren!” Astrid exclaimed. “Oh, how terrible!”

  The sisters hugged each other, and Francie could see that a box of tissues would be needed. She retrieved one.

  “Who would ever think he would commit suicide?” Jeannette said, reaching for a tissue.

  “You know very well he didn’t!” Astrid snapped.

  Jeannette’s mouth tightened.

  “Should we call the police?” Francie asked.

  Jeannette and Astrid exchanged looks.

  “What?” Francie asked.

  “Very funny!” Astrid said, blowing her nose.

  “Can’t you just hear Sheriff Rydell now?” Jeannette pulled more tissues from the box.

  “What?” Francie asked more insistently. She couldn’t tell if her aunts were crying or laughing at this point. It sounded like snuffling with an occasional guffaw thrown in.

  “Rydell won’t do anything,” Jeannette said. “He never does. Everything is always an ‘accident.’”

  “Are you sure Warren didn’t commit suicide?” Francie asked.

  “Of course he didn’t. He was perfectly happy,” Astrid said.

  “How do you know that?” Francie said. “Sometimes people suffer from depression and nobody even—”

  “Not Warren. You didn’t know him so you wouldn’t know, but he was perfectly happy. Plus he was going to come over here on Wednesday and fix our drain. He wouldn’t have killed himself before he took care of that,” Astrid said.

  “If you’re that desperate, I think you cease caring about those sorts of things.”

  “Not Warren,” Jeannette said. “He would have found a time that wouldn’t have inconvenienced anyone. So, let’s say he was murdered.” She turned to Astrid. “Miss Smarty-Pants, if he was murdered, who did it?”

  Astrid pursed her lips. “Yes . . . it doesn’t quite make sense. If someone is trying to get rid of cabin owners, then why get rid of Warren? He doesn’t even own a cabin!” Then she brightened. “Isn’t it lucky that we have Frenchy here?” she turned to Francie. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’ll go make some inquiries.” Francie really just wanted to go for a run and clear her head.

  “Don’t worry!” both aunts chirped. “You’re perfectly safe!”

  “I’m not worried,” Francie said, and went out.

  What was there to be worried about? Her aunts had some crazy paranoia going, right? So even people who committed suicide were part of some big murder plot. There was nothing to worry about! But as she jogged along the path, the ominous feeling she’d had the previous night seemed to roll over her the way the dark clouds were rolling across the lake.

  As she ran on the path along the lakeshore, she tried to concentrate on the scent of pine needles underfoot and the charming sight of the cozy little cabins nestled in among the pines, all of them familiar to her from her childhood. In fact, most of them had been built decades ago and had remained in the same families through generations. There were a few first-generation owners still holding down their forts, watching their great-grandchildren who, lacking computers and TVs, played with the same dog-eared decks of cards and read the same comic books their parents had when they’d been young.

  She would do a little snooping, she thought. Why not? Who along here might have been out in the middle of the night, she wondered. Who might have followed her? That is, if she had been followed. And as long as she was sleuthing, maybe she could learn a little about Warren. She might even try to find out something about these strange accidents her aunts talked about. And what was up with this road?

  At the Angells’, a young woman with impossibly long, lean, and tan legs was in the yard, standing over a patch of petunias with a watering can. Could it be the same gangly kid Francie had known as a girl, the one with braces and freckles who had always reminded her of a giraffe?

  “Ginger?” Francie asked.

  “Frenchy?” The girl turned and smiled; the braces were gone, replaced by perfect white teeth. “Hi! Wow! You’re here! That’s crazy! I hear you’re a big detective in New York!”

  Francie began to explain that she was not a detec—

  “Something in my hair!” Ginger shrieked.

  “S
tand still,” Francie told her, having spied the buzzing wasp caught in Ginger’s thick curls. She carefully pulled strands of Ginger’s hair apart, allowing the wasp to escape, both Ginger and insect unscathed.

  “Wow,” the relieved Ginger said. “Is wasp extraction a service of the NYPD? You did that like a pro.”

  “No,” Francie laughed. She was about to explain once again that she had no connection with the NYPD, when a filthy little boy, about eight years old, appeared.

  “Remember my brother?” Ginger asked. “Pigpen?”

  The little brother frowned. “That’s not my name. My name is Timothy James.”

  “Nice to meet you, Timothy James,” Francie said.

  “Just call him T.J.,” Ginger said.

  Next, a big, shaggy black mutt trotted up. “This is Rusty,” she added. “Guess which one likes to dig in the dirt.”

  “Not the dog?” Francie guessed.

  “Correct,” Ginger said, and then to her brother, “Find any elephant bones lately?”

  T.J. scowled at her and shimmied up a tree.

  “I didn’t think I’d be here this summer; I thought I’d get a job, but my mom had to work. T.J. begged and begged to spend the summer at the cabin, and mom said yes, as long as I’d stay with him.”

  “So you’re up with your dad?”

  Ginger shook her head and looked down.

  “You’re here by yourself? Your parents aren’t here?” As she said it, Francie realized how funny it sounded. After all, she lived without parents, too. But in the city, not way out here in the woods.

  “My mom has to work this summer,” Ginger said, “on account of my dad.”

  “Your dad . . . ?” Francie asked.

  “He died this spring,” Ginger said.

  “Gosh!” Francie said. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know.”

  “It was a shock to everyone. He came up earlier this spring to open the cabin and get the pump working and hook up the gas and all that, and the well had gone bad.”

  “Gone bad? What does that mean?”

  “Poisoned!” she said.

  “Someone poisoned the well?”

  “No. I guess it just happens sometimes. A well goes bad, gets poisoned somehow. You can die from it. That’s what happened to my dad. Since then everybody has had their water tested, but all the other wells are fine.”

  “That’s strange.”

  “Yeah,” Ginger agreed and sighed. “So my mom’s selling. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing here. Mom is paying me to babysit but also to paint and fix up. I’m spending the summer all by myself, a regular Pippi Longstocking. Just me and my monkey, Mr. Nilsson,” Ginger added, pointing to T.J., who stuck his tongue out at her. “And Warren to help with the cabin stuff, thank goodness. He’s coming over to fix a bunch of stuff this afternoon.”

  “Oh, Ginger,” Francie said. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but Warren is, um . . .” Francie had never had to be the bearer of this kind of bad news before. How were you supposed to break this sort of thing gently?

  Ginger stopped and looked at her, her dark eyes glowing somehow darker.

  “Warren is . . . dead,” Francie said finally.

  “What?” Ginger said. “How? How do you know that?”

  “My aunt Jeannette went snooping this morning.” She explained the little she knew about the situation.

  “But suicide?” Ginger shook her head. “That seems almost unbelievable. He said he’d be over today to fix my pump! It’s so unlike him to say he’ll do something and then not do it.”

  “That’s just what my aunts said. And they don’t think it was suicide, either,” Francie added.

  Ginger looked up at her. “What’s the alternative?”

  “The alternative is that somebody killed him.”

  “That’s horrible! Who would do that? Everybody loved Warren. Well, everybody needed Warren. I don’t know if everybody loved him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just mean that he was so aloof. Norwegian bachelor handyman. Who knew what he thought or felt about anything.”

  “Can I ask you something else?” Francie said. She cleared her throat. “Are you sure that your well just went bad—that it didn’t have a little help?”

  “Oh, you too?” Ginger cried. “Just like everybody around here, including the sheriff. You think my mom killed Dad.”

  “What? No!”

  Ginger wasn’t listening. She charged on: “The sheriff came out and made all kinds of insinuating remarks—as if she murdered Dad! Now everybody thinks she killed him, and that’s part of the reason why she won’t come up here.”

  “That’s not what I—” Francie started again.

  “Yes, they fought, but she wouldn’t—didn’t—kill him! That’s just ludicrous.”

  “I didn’t mean your mom,” Francie explained. “What about someone else?”

  “Someone else?” Ginger looked up, and for a moment their eyes met, in concern, worry, and maybe fear. Ginger shivered. “You’re kinda creeping me out right now.”

  “Sorry,” Francie said. “I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

  A sudden gust of wind blew some clothes off the line, and Ginger went to retrieve them. Francie waved good-bye and continued down the path.

  Could Ginger’s dad have been murdered? Francie wondered. And Warren? Was there a murderer on the loose, like her aunts seemed to think?

  But if she had hoped to find a murderous type along the shore, she was disappointed. White-haired folks all along the lakeshore hailed her as she jogged by, and she was inevitably invited in. Pleasantries were exchanged, bars and cookies were consumed, Francie was assumed to be a detective, and everyone was devastated about poor Warren, until eventually conversation got around to the road and who was for or against it.

  As far as she could tell, everyone was against it. Whose idea was it, anyway? Nobody seemed to know. Her curiosity about this, and about possibly finding a murder suspect, propelled her down the path, even after consuming five cups of coffee and one each of lemon bars, chocolate-chip cookies, fudge, powdered sugar donuts, and seven-layer bars. And a wedge of rhubarb dessert.

  Evelyn Smattering crowed, “You’re awfully young to be a detective!”

  “No, Mrs. Smattering, I’m not a detective,” Francie said, relieved that finally there was no interruption and she could explain. “I only played one on a TV show.”

  Mrs. Smattering stood back to regard her critically. “No. I watched that show and that wasn’t you. You don’t look anything like that girl.”

  “Of course, my hair was a different color and style, and people do look different on TV. Also, I was younger then.”

  Mrs. Smattering laughed. “Nope! You’re nothing like her at all. Now, honey, would you like a slice of graham cracker pie?”

  Francie ate a small wedge of pie—Mrs. Smattering was just as adamant about the eating of pie as she was about Francie’s mistake in thinking she had ever been an actor on TV. She was so certain of it, in fact, that even Francie began doubting she had ever been on the show. It had been a bit of a dream, a short-lived but lovely dream. She had been on only a few episodes before the show was canceled. Still, for that little while, it had been wonderful to be able to tell people she was an actor and have it be true.

  “Are you living all alone, Mrs. Smattering?” Francie asked. “Or does your son help out?”

  “Kevin?” Suddenly her eyes looked enormous and frightened behind her thick glasses. “Kevin used to help out a lot. He was retired, you know. But this spring a tree limb fell during a storm—right there, where the little extra bedroom used to be. Crashed right through the roof. Killed him while he slept.” She sighed. “Warren’s been helping me now. Oh, dear . . .” she trailed off. “I’m not sure how much longer I can stay here. Don’t tell anybody this, sweetheart, because I’m not supposed to tell anybody, but you being a detective and all, I’m sure you can keep secrets—”

  “I’m not a d
etec—” Francie interrupted to say, but Mrs. Smattering just kept going.

  “—I’ve already sold it,” she finished.

  “Sold it! When do you have to move out?”

  “That’s the best part!” Mrs. Smattering said triumphantly. “I don’t! The fellow I sold it to said I could live here as long as I like.”

  “Who bought it? A friend or relative?”

  “Oh, no!” Mrs. Smattering said. “I can’t possibly tell you. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone!”

  At the next cabin, a man, much younger than the usual crowd, stood sizing up a large dead tree in his yard.

  “I used to be a tree hugger,” he said after she greeted him. “Now it’s me against the trees. Gotta figure out a way to get this one down without having it land on my shack.”

  “Are you a Potter?” she asked, remembering that this was the Potters’ cabin.

  “Yes,” he said. “That is, I am a Potter and I am a potter. And everyone calls me ‘Potter.’ Ha!” He gestured to the side of the house where pots of all shapes and sizes were stacked—well, piled—in a jumbled heap.

  “Those are rejects,” he said, by way of explanation.

  She could just make out a kiln in the backyard.

  “Wow. You make your pots over here and have to take them by boat over there?” She pointed across the expanse of lake. “That must be tricky.”

  “I wait for a calm day.”

  He went back to cutting his tree, and Francie continued, glad that at least he hadn’t invited her in for coffee.

  “Delicate!” snorted Mrs. Hansen over tea and sandbakkels, when Francie mentioned the pottery. “Did you see any of them?”

  “I just saw his reject pile.”

  Mrs. Hansen shook her head. “How Potter can make a living selling those clunky things, I’ll never know.”

  Francie smiled and looked down into her dainty china cup. Compared to this china, his pottery would naturally look really primitive she supposed. It was probably a matter of taste.