Enchantment Lake: A Northwoods Mystery

by Margi Preus

  Mrs. Hansen’s husband, Wally, had drowned in a fishing accident just two months earlier—in May. Right around the same time as Ginger’s dad, Francie noted.

  The two of them stared out the window at the rain that had started to fall.

  “I imagine,” Mrs. Hansen said, “that he must have stood up to reel in a really big fish and been pulled over the side of the boat. Although he usually fished with a partner, that night he was alone. Well, I think he was alone. That’s what everyone said.” Mrs. Hansen sighed. “At least he died doing what he loved. That’s what people say, anyway. I guess it’s supposed to be a comfort.”

  “It must be hard for you to be here without him,” Francie said.

  Mrs. Hansen nodded and said, “I’ve sold the place.”

  Big, fat drops of rain splatted against the picture window.

  “Really?” Francie said. “I thought you loved it here.”

  “Yes, I do, but it’s very hard to keep the place up without Wally. And now Warren’s gone, too. Poor Warren.”

  “When will you move?” Francie asked.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Hansen said, smiling. “I have a very special arrangement. I can stay here as long as I like. I can stay here until I die!”

  6

  Plantation People

  The brief rain had ended and the sun had come out, so Francie continued on, running again, hoping she’d be just a blur and unrecognizable. She jogged along the old familiar path, noticing that the trees seemed even bigger than she remembered. Well, trees never stopped growing, did they?

  Of the people she’d met so far, only the potter and Ginger seemed young and spry enough to have followed her the previous night. The potter hadn’t seemed the slightest bit interested in her, and Ginger was an old friend. As for murderers—she hadn’t seen anyone who would fit that description.

  Suddenly, the canopy opened, and Francie felt as if she had awakened sharply from a dream. Beyond the trees a lawn of lush, green grass all a-glitter from the recent rain seemed to roll on and on. A golf course? What was this place, she wondered as she stepped gingerly out of the trees onto the thick green carpet. The lawn ran down to the lake like an enormous carpet, unimpeded by trees, from an equally enormous southern-style mansion—a plantation house, but with decks instead of pillared porches.

  How on earth did it get here? she wondered.

  “The path goes around the back!” called a cheery woman’s voice from one of the many decks. Francie looked up, half expecting to see Scarlett O’Hara in a hoop skirt and bonnet, but the voice came from someone who looked more like a Ralph Lauren model (a mature one) dressed casually, but elegantly, for the country, with the perfect hair, the perfect country look, and, Francie realized with a start, the perfect face. This woman was stunningly beautiful, and this was the weirdest part: familiar. Maybe she was a model!

  “Hello, darlin’.” The woman smiled down at Francie with an intelligent face—not a vacuous model, that’s for sure. Who was she? “Out for a jog? That’s so healthy!” the woman said.

  “I don’t remember this place from my childhood,” Francie said. “Isn’t this where the Simonsens’ cabin used to be?”

  “That’s right,” the woman said. “We built right after Mr. Simonsen passed away.”

  “Mr. Simonsen died? What happened? He wasn’t that old, was he?”

  “Not terribly old. He died of snakebite.”

  “Snakebite? But there aren’t any poisonous snakes here, are there?”

  “So they say. Isn’t that the oddest thing?” She shouted suddenly, “MORTY, HONEY!”

  A man’s voice responded from a nearby outbuilding.

  “What kind of snake was it that bit Simonsen?” the woman shouted again.

  Another muffled reply.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “Water moccasin.”

  “Water moccasin! That’s not possible. There aren’t water moccasins this far north. How could that have happened?”

  “Global warming? Ha ha! Just a little joke,” the woman said, laughing a champagne-bubbly laugh. “Mmm. Not very funny, I guess. By the way, I’m Savery Frederickson, like ‘savory’ but with an ‘e.’ And you are . . . ?”

  “Francesca Frye.”

  “Oh! You’re the big detective from New York! So young to be a detective,” Mrs. Frederickson clucked.

  Francie was about to explain and then suddenly—she wasn’t sure why—decided to let it go.

  “So, my dear,” Mrs. Frederickson leaned forward, her eyes glittering, “what are you investigating?”

  “Ah.” Francie was surprised to hear herself saying, “I, um, am looking into strange accidental deaths along the lakeshore.” She seemed to feel a need to impress Mrs. Frederickson.

  “How interesting!” Mrs. Frederickson exclaimed. “Have there been strange deaths along here—other than the snakebite, of course? We haven’t heard.”

  “Yes, some,” Francie said.

  “Well!” Mrs. Frederickson said, “Do let me know how you get on, won’t you? Funny. It seemed like such a quiet little corner of the world when we bought this place. Say, darlin’, as long as you’re here,” she went on, “there is a question I’d like to ask you. There’s only that one chunk of property between us and the road, you know.” Mrs. Frederickson nodded her head toward the woods next door. And a river and a swamp, Francie thought, but didn’t say. “That piece of property that belongs to your aunts. We’ve offered to buy it from them—I mean, do you really think they have any plans for it, at their age? We could continue the road through here—there are plenty of people who would like a road farther on, too, you know. Listen, can you talk some sense to your aunts? I can’t see what they are doing with it except being stubborn. No hard feelings, I hope.” Mrs. Frederickson went on without a break, “Listen, we’re having a little gathering here tomorrow night. Our daughter Latice is also having some friends up from the Twin Cities, but it would be so nice if she could meet some young people along the lake. She’d be so delighted if you’d come to the party. Let me introduce you to her . . .”

  Mrs. Frederickson continued talking as she walked Francie around the side of the house. A teenaged girl was sprawled on a reclining lawn chair in a bikini, pink as a pig on a spit, Francie thought. Mrs. Frederickson introduced Francie to Latice, then said, “Tomorrow night, remember! Let me know if you want a ride. We’ll be picking everyone up on our pontoon, and we can pick you up, too, if you like.”

  Francie nodded, and Mrs. Frederickson wafted away, leaving her alone with Latice.

  “Do you bleach your hair to get it to do that?” was the first thing out of Latice’s mouth. She didn’t bother to sit up, but squinted at Francie from her reclining position.

  “No, it does this on its own,” Francie explained. She was used to people staring at the white streak in her hair, but most people didn’t ask outright if she dyed it. She knew it made her look older than her age. Sometimes she thought it even made her act older than her age.

  “Huh,” Latice said. She didn’t believe Francie, and Francie didn’t care.

  “How do you like the lake?” Francie asked.

  Latice growled, “Everybody goes to their lake places for a week or something, but nooo, we have to practically live here.”

  “You don’t like it, I take it,” Francie said.

  Latice made a sour face. “Would you? I mean, like, there’s nothing to do. There’s nobody cool here.”

  “Sandy’s pretty nice,” Francie ventured.

  Latice rolled her eyes. “What a hick. Everybody around here is hicks.”

  Is a hick, Francie refrained from saying.

  “Present company excluded, of course,” Latice said, unconvincingly. “Can’t even drive anywhere,” she continued to complain. “No road! I suppose I could always drive the bulldozer.”

  “You’ve got a bulldozer?” Francie said.

  “They brought it over on the ice in order to make the house and couldn’t get it back, I guess. It’s been here ev
er since.”

  “Where?” Francie asked, looking around.

  “Back there.” Latice waved her arm toward the back of the house. “At the end of the driveway.”

  “Driveway? What do you have a driveway for?”

  “For when the road goes in.” Latice rolled onto her belly, concluding the conversation. The sheen of the Coppertone oil reflecting off her back might be seen from outer space, Francie thought.

  Back at her aunts’ cabin, Francie threw off her shoes and ran into the lake with her shorts and T-shirt on.

  Jeannette looked up from tinkering with the boat motor. “My goodness, you must be hot!”

  “Hot and bothered,” Francie said. She turned and floated on her back so she could talk to her aunt.

  “Oh dear, that’s not a good way to start a vacation.” Jeannette looked concerned. “Maybe you’d like a cup of coffee and a roll?”

  Francie groaned. “I’m stuffed! I’ve eaten so many bars, cookies, slices of pie, slabs of cake, and dishes of desserts that I should sink like a stone.”

  “Oh no, you won’t sink. All that butter will help you float!”

  Shoot, Francie thought, that’s probably true. She did feel extra buoyant.

  “Now, Frenchy,” Astrid said. Where had she come from? Francie wondered. “When you talk to Buck, tell him we’re ready to pass the cabin to you, but you don’t want to keep it. You want to sell it. But you want us to live here as long as we’d like—until we die, if possible.

  Francie scrambled to remember what Astrid was talking about—oh, yes, the real estate agent. She was supposed to set up an appointment with him.

  “Am I even old enough to own property?”

  “In this state? No. But Buck doesn’t know how old you are, and that’s all that matters for now.”

  Francie began to understand why her grandfather thought her aunts were a bad influence. “But why do you want to sell this place?” she asked.

  “Oh, we don’t want to sell it!” Astrid exclaimed. “Oh my, no! Not ever!”

  “What is this about then?”

  Ignoring her question, Jeannette said, “Just tell Buck you need the money for college.”

  “College!” Astrid said, “For the love of Mike! She’s a detective! She doesn’t go to college!”

  “Well, what does she need money for then?” Jeannette asked.

  “Wait! Wait!” Francie plowed her way out of the water. “What is this about me being a detective? Why does everybody keep saying I’m a—wait a minute! It’s you! You two have been telling everyone I’m a detective. Why?”

  “You were so convincing in your role on TV,” Astrid said, handing Francie a beach towel.

  Francie pressed the towel to her face and exhaled into it. This whole thing was insane. It was just insane. “I’m not a detective! I don’t even want to be a detective! I’m an actor. That’s what I want to be.”

  “That’s nice, sweetie,” Astrid said. “Now, when you talk to Buck, just make sure you let him know you need the money now—he doesn’t need to know why you need money—but you’d like to know if there’s a way we can live here until we pass away or can no longer stay here.”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” Francie said. She didn’t, really, and was about to bring up the fact that she could maybe just call to set up an appointment, when suddenly she did get it. Sort of. She thought about the people she’d talked to that day who were selling their cabins. Ginger, Mrs. Smattering, Mrs. Hansen. They had all lost someone recently. Maybe her aunts were onto something. In any case, she wanted to talk to Sandy, so she’d go along with their scheme.

  “Now, Frenchy, get out of those wet clothes and go to town,” Jeannette said.

  As Francie waddled in her wet clothes to the boathouse, her aunt shouted after her, “And while you’re there, call your grandfather and tell him you’re okay.” She nodded her assent, but she had no intention of calling her grandfather and telling him anything.

  7

  A Headache

  Francie drove her aunts’ boat across the lake where she found Sandy in the process of inspecting a boat.

  “Inspecting it for what?” Francie asked when he was finished. “Drugs?” she joked.

  “Plant life and stuff,” he explained. “Invasives. Zebra mussels, mud snails, milfoil. Any one of those things could change this lake forever. Not in a good way.”

  Francie nodded. “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard about zebra mussels. Nasty things. So they’re in lakes around here?”

  “Yep,” he said. “We’re surrounded. Anybody wants to launch a boat here, it gets inspected.”

  “What if you find something?”

  “Then they have to get the boat decontaminated. The DNR has a unit in Walpurgis.”

  Francie followed Sandy to the store where he took two bottles of soda out of the cooler, popped the caps, handed her one, and led her outside where they sat on the edge of a trampoline.

  “I’m wondering,” Francie mused, “do you think something sinister is going on over there?” She nodded her head toward the far shore.

  Sandy took a swig of his Coke. “Don’t know,” he said. “What are you thinking?”

  “It’s my aunts,” Francie said. “They think something fishy is going on. There have been so many deaths.” She thought of telling him about the feeling of being followed but held back. She was less and less sure that had happened.

  “People are getting old,” Sandy said.

  “That’s what I said, too, but they’re not dying of old age. They’re dying in bizarre accidents. Did you hear about Warren?”

  Sandy shook his head sadly. “Who’d have thought he would commit suicide?”

  “My aunts don’t think he did.”

  Sandy looked at her sideways. Even in a sideways glance, she could see his blue eyes shifting colors: pale blue, then turquoise, a flash of cobalt.

  “What do they think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Francie hedged a little. She didn’t want to paint her aunts as any more kooky than people already thought they were, so she changed the subject. “Last night you mentioned that your dad died of a heart attack on a hunting trip.”

  Sandy stared at his Coke bottle.

  “But you sounded like you weren’t sure about that.”

  Sandy shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I did. I don’t know why. Why shouldn’t he die of a heart attack? People do. Must have had a bad heart.”

  The wind pushed the poplar branches around so that light fell on them in flickering bursts. Francie squinted against it; it seemed to aggravate the headache she felt coming on.

  “You didn’t know that he had a bad heart?” Francie asked.

  Sandy shook his head. “He hadn’t had any problems before.”

  “So, something doesn’t seem right about it, does it?”

  Sandy looked at her for a long moment, and she quickly said, “The thing is, when you said that, about your dad, I felt this twinge inside, because I’ve never believed my dad died accidentally, either.”

  “I thought it was a car accident.”

  Francie nodded. “It was. It just was never explained well enough, in my mind.”

  Sandy nodded and started to talk. “That’s the way I feel, too. My dad went to his hunting shack with a bunch of buddies. I couldn’t go—first time ever I didn’t go along, but I was on the football team. So he went with a bunch of other guys.”

  “Who?” Francie asked, taking out her notebook.

  “Just a minute,” Sandy said.

  He disappeared into a door that said “Office” and returned with a scrapbook. “Mom’s a scrapbooker,” he explained, paging through it. He pointed at a photo of two dead deer draped over the hood of a car. Standing nearby were three men in blaze orange hunting gear. Two of the men beamed wide smiles at the camera. The expression on Sandy Sr.’s face, however, looked more like one a deer throws at oncoming headlights.

  “Those two look happy,” Francie commented, “but look at your dad’s f
ace.”

  “I know,” Sandy said. “It’s not like him. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always wondered about that whole event.”

  “Could he have been feeling ill then?”

  “Yes, that’s what others, including my mom, said: that he wasn’t well. Anyway, neither of these guys would have wanted any harm to come to Dad—they were like brothers. This one here is his brother, in fact. They’d been fishing and hunting together for years, and they both wept like babies at the funeral—I’d never seen anything like it. That’s why I don’t really know why I think there was some kind of foul play, or whatever you call it. It’s just a feeling.”

  “There wasn’t an autopsy, I suppose,” Francie said.

  Sandy shook his head. “Naw. We’re not really autopsy-type people.”

  “Sandy,” Francie said, “there’s one other person you’ve not mentioned.”

  “Who?”

  “The person who took this picture. Who took it?”

  Sandy blinked at her. “I don’t know!”

  “Where was the picture taken?”

  “It was at the shack. You can see it there in the background.”

  “Was there another person along on the trip?”

  “Nobody ever mentioned another person.”

  “Look at the shadow.”

  Sandy squinted at the picture. Once you knew what you were looking at, the shadow of a photographer was clear. “That’s why you get paid the big bucks, right?” he said. “As a detective?”

  “No!” she said. “I’m not a—”

  Sandy’s attention was diverted by a truck that pulled into the parking lot. A couple of guys got out and headed toward the store. Sandy got up to follow them in.

  “Getting a load of potatoes?” Francie asked, nodding at the truck. The words “Northland Potatoes” were emblazoned on the side of it.

  “What?” Sandy asked, turning back. Then, looking at the truck, he said, “No. Those guys are scouting the area for a big corporate potato growing operation. For McDonald’s french fries, I guess.”