The Clue in the Trees: An Enchantment Lake Mystery

by Margi Preus

  She wandered into the kitchen and lifted the lid on the soup, breathing in the steam and heavenly aroma. When had Theo learned to cook? There was so much she didn’t know about him, and now she was sorry that she’d avoided him when she could have gotten to know him better. He might go away again anytime. And if he did, she might never finish hearing about her mother. Why, she wondered now, as she stood stirring the soup, had she not demanded to hear the rest of the story before he went out? Why was she always so willing to be distracted or to get off track when it came to her mother?

  It’s because she was afraid. Afraid to know. But what was she so afraid of? She would ask Theo, she would! It’s the first thing she would do, she decided, right after she ate some soup. She scooped out a bowlful and, careful not to slosh, carried it to the couch where she sat slurping and eating. The veggies were still pretty crunchy, but she didn’t care—it felt as if she hadn’t eaten for days. Well, she thought, she hadn’t! No wonder she was so hungry.

  “I should slow down,” she said out loud, “and not wolf this down.”

  As soon as she said the word wolf, something flashed in her mind, like a snippet of a remembered dream—the image of a wolf trailing a deer.

  She set her bowl down on the coffee table. The old fear returned. Fear for Theo. What was it?

  A wolf stalking a deer.

  Then it came to her: before she fell through the ice, she’d seen someone, someone watching her, and that person trailed her as she walked on the frozen lake. She’d felt like a wounded deer being trailed by a wolf. Or something like that.

  Someone else was here, here on this side of the lake.

  Then she remembered the face in the window. The bone on the log pile.

  Things she had forgotten to tell Theo.

  She had to go after him.

  But her clothes were still wet. Steam rose from her boots, propped up by the fireplace. Her jacket was sodden. Well, the aunts had clothes, she thought, and she went into the closet to see what she could find. Once she was more or less bundled up, she set off, lumbering along as best she could in a pair of oversized boots and a too-big jacket.

  When Francie arrived at the shore in front of the Fredericksons’ the word that popped into her head was vandalized. The ice had been crudely chopped through, broken and frayed at the edges. Bright shards and glittering bits on the shore lay scattered like broken glass. And there was a big round gaping hole in the ice right where Francie had seen the silver box.

  Something on the ground caught her eye: a full wetsuit, mask, and snorkel spread out in the grass as if the person wearing these things had lain down and then dissolved into oblivion.

  Someone else had been here, and Theo had either come upon whoever it was or had gone to find that person. Or something worse had happened.

  It didn’t take long to find him. As Francie continued down the path, she saw him lying, an inert lump, on the ground.

  Francie ran, or rather gallumphed in her big boots, to where he lay. Her breath caught somewhere it didn’t belong—neither lungs nor throat, but somewhere outside herself, and she found it hard to choke out the word, “Theo?”

  He groaned; his eyes flickered open; he said, “Oh, my head,” which made Francie laugh.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny.” Theo looked at her through pain-narrowed eyes.

  “I’m relieved, is all,” she said, trying to squash a giggle. No use—it burbled out. “I thought you were dead.”

  “That’s pretty hilarious, all right,” he said and let out a little snorting laugh, so she knew he really was okay. Still, when he sat up, he yelped in pain.

  “What happened?” Francie asked, eyeing the lump rising on his head.

  “Someone bashed me from behind. I didn’t see who it was.”

  Francie glanced up and cast her eyes in every direction, peering through the woods. The assailant had to be here somewhere. “There!” she whispered, pointing at movement glimpsed through the trees. There was something familiar about the movement, something that made her feel cold to her very hair follicles.

  That gait—that strange, uneven way of walking—the limping wolf. It came to her: the reason the analogy of the wounded deer trailed by a wolf had been wrong is that it had been the wolf who had seemed wounded—because of its limp, its strange gait.

  “Not moving real fast,” Theo whispered. “Let’s just stay back and try to stay out of sight. See where he’s going.”

  They set off, staying well behind, catching only glimpses of the fleeing figure. Near the old shack—the same place Francie had come to the night of the murder—Theo ducked behind a tree and motioned to Francie to do the same. From their hiding spot, they watched as the figure disappeared into the shack.

  “You stay here. I’m going in,” Theo whispered.

  “If you’re going in, I’m going in.” Francie crossed her arms belligerently.

  “All right, then,” Theo agreed. “Let’s go.”

  The place was empty. That was immediately apparent.

  “We saw someone come in here,” Theo said, scratching the stubble on his chin.

  “Yeah, and there’s no other door. There’s no other way out. We would have had to see him come back out, right? But creepy!” Francie eyed the box of graham crackers sitting open on the table. Candles, a flashlight. Sleeping bag on the bed. Soap in the sink. A towel. A pitcher of water. “Somebody’s been staying here!” she whispered.

  These past couple of days, she’d thought she’d been alone on this side of the lake. But this explained why she felt she’d been followed. It explained the face at the window. But it didn’t explain how whoever had come in here had gotten out without being seen.

  Theo checked the windows. “All latched from the inside,” he said. He lifted a foot and looked at the sole of his shoe. “Sticky,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Francie agreed, listening to her shoes go shkk-shkk when she walked.

  Continuing his search, Theo moved a chair, looked under the table, went to the single, doorless closet hung with a couple of flannel shirts and peeked inside.

  “No place to hide,” Francie said.

  “There’s got to be some way we don’t know about. Unless this person can just turn invisible!”

  “Like Invisible Bill,” Francie said.

  “Who?”

  “This old bootlegger who had some kind of hideout around here and was never caught. They called him Invisible Bill because he just seemed to disappear. Also, I think he was related to us.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Had one of these.” Francie pointed to the white streak in her hair. “And it happened here. On Enchantment. Federal agents would chase him, surround his hideout, and he would just—poof!—disappear.”

  “Do you think this might have been the place?”

  Francie shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we better try to be smarter than those federal agents.” Theo kicked at a throw rug on the floor. “Weird,” he said.

  “What?” Francie came up behind him.

  “This rug doesn’t move,” he said. “It’s like glued to the floor or something.” Theo lifted the edge of the rug to peek underneath. Francie retrieved the flashlight from the table and shone the beam under the rug, where there appeared to be a crack in the floor.

  “Maybe they glued the rug down to keep the mosquitoes out.”

  “Or maybe—” Theo lifted the rug and part of the floor with it.

  “The rug is covering a trapdoor!” Francie exclaimed. She aimed the light down into the dark hole. “It seems deep,” she said, peering into the gloom. “How far do you think it goes down? Is it a kind of root cellar, do you think? Or . . . is this how Invisible Bill disappeared?”

  “More to the point,” Theo said, “is this how our mystery person disappeared?” He took the flashlight from Francie and focused the light down the hole, revealing a ladder leading into the inky darkness. “Only one way to find out,” he said.

 
At the bottom of the ladder they found themselves in a kind of underground chamber with enough room to walk around. But no sign of anyone.

  The flashlight beam illuminated rows of plastic barrels lining one of the walls.

  “Whoa! What’re those?” Francie said. “Bootlegged whiskey?”

  “They didn’t have plastic barrels back in the 1920s and ’30s. These are much newer. Brand-new, I’d say.”

  “What do you suppose is in there?” Francie wondered.

  “Can’t tell,” Theo said. The beam played over a wooden cupboard that stood against another wall. The door only needed a nudge to swing open with a creak—to reveal nothing.

  “The cupboard is bare,” Theo pointed out.

  “This gets weirder and weirder,” Francie said. “We saw someone go inside and didn’t see anyone leave.”

  “Whoever it is must have gotten out of the cabin some other way,” Theo mused. “Let’s go look again.” He started up the ladder. “Maybe there’s something we missed.”

  While Theo was climbing the ladder, Francie took another look around.

  “You coming?” he said, shining the flashlight down toward her. The beam bounced off the walls and along the barrels and suddenly snagged on something. A small thing sitting on one of the barrels. Something that gave off a dull gleam.

  “Theo . . . ,” Francie said.

  But Theo didn’t answer. The door above slammed shut and Francie was plunged into complete darkness. Worse than complete darkness—underground darkness. Overhead, she could hear footsteps and what sounded like something heavy being dragged across the floor.

  “Theo?” she called. “Theo!” Francie scrambled up the ladder and pressed on the hatch. It wouldn’t budge. She put her shoulder to it and pushed as hard as she could. “The-o-dore Frye! This. Is. Not. Funny!”

  What had just happened? She felt that dizzying fear again—not for herself, for Theo. Theo would not have shut the hatch on her. That meant someone must have intercepted him.

  Francie had no way out! Not even any light because Theo had taken the flashlight. But then she remembered that before the flashlight had disappeared, it had shone its light on something they hadn’t noticed before.

  She climbed back down the ladder and groped along the barrels until her hand bumped against something different. She knew immediately what it was: a box, the box, the silver box.

  “Theo!” she cried. “Thee-ohhhh!”

  Pressing the box against her chest, she slumped against one of the damp walls of the underground room, not caring what kind of green slime she got on her clothes. The silver box was in her hands!

  Wasn’t it ironic, she thought, that she finally got what she’d been longing for all her life, the box that was going to lead her to her mother, and now Francie was going to die, succumbing to hypothermia or being buried alive, whichever came first?

  The cold from her earlier plunge in the lake had permeated her bones and now the chill from the earthen walls seeped into her from the outside, until she felt the same temperature and consistency, and possessing about as much brain matter, as the earth around her. This was really what it would have been like to be Antigone, she thought. This is what it would be like to be entombed.

  Antigone had lost hope only moments before her husband-to-be came to find her. She had hanged herself with her linen veil moments before she would have been released. “Don’t ever give up,” she whispered to herself. Don’t ever give up.

  But her bones still ached with cold, and this damp chamber did nothing to warm her. Worse, a chilly draft circled her ankles and crept up the back of her legs.

  But a draft? Where was that coming from? Overhead, the trap door was shut tight, so not from there. It felt as if it was coming from behind her.

  Following the movement of air with her hands, she came to the tall wooden cupboard that stood against one wall of the room and out of which air seemed to be seeping. It was not so much a cupboard as a kind of wooden locker—a tall closet-like piece of furniture with no shelves inside. A wardrobe, that’s what these things were called, Francie remembered.

  She opened the door and tapped the back wall of the wardrobe. Was it her imagination, or did it sound hollow, as if there was nothing but air behind it? Was it possible this wardrobe served as a portal to, if not a magical world like Narnia, perhaps a way back to the land of the living?

  Francie stepped inside the little closet and groped for a knob, a latch, a crack. Nothing. But when she tried sliding the back wall to the side, it budged, then slid open. The scent of pine and fallen leaves, lake and woods rushed in toward her: the smell of outside. But also the heavy smell of damp earth and clay. She wasn’t outside yet.

  Her first step forward did not lead into the familiar northwoods, but into more darkness, where what awaited her was seemingly nothing at all. Another step. And another. And yet another.

  This must be a tunnel, she thought, her hands groping what felt like more plastic barrels, while under her feet, it seemed as if the ground was . . . sticky?

  What was in these barrels? Why were they here? she wanted to know. But more urgently, she wanted to get the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of there! And wasn’t that a sliver of light ahead? The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel?

  I’ve made it, I’ve escaped! she thought, just before there was an ominous thud, the light disappeared, and she heard the rustling of movement coming toward her.

  “Theo?” she managed to croak out.

  The only answer was a low, throaty laugh.

  26

  The Situation Gets Sticky

  A LIGHT FLICKED ON, the beam of which was immediately directed at Francie’s face so she couldn’t see who was coming toward her.

  “Your life isn’t worth a hill of beans,” the figure behind the light said.

  Who was that? Francie recognized the voice. She’d heard that same voice before. A man’s voice.

  Or—but no. It was not a man’s voice. She’d heard the same voice in the lunch line. “Beans,” that voice had said. A woman’s voice. Evil Iris.

  Something bright flashed in the beam of light, something that Francie recognized as the blade of a very large kitchen knife.

  “I have a knife,” Iris said.

  “I see that,” Francie replied.

  “And I will use it unless you hand over that box.”

  “What do you want with it, anyway?” Francie said.

  “Oh, I know all about it,” she said. “I hear it all. When you’re a cook or a server, you’re invisible. Nobody pays any attention to you. People don’t talk to you, unless they’re asking for something. They talk to each other in front of you as if you aren’t there. And they say things as if you aren’t there. I keep my ears open and I hear things. Digby, he was like that—as if I wasn’t there. I heard him say there was more back in these woods than mastodon bones. Something big. He mentioned a box. Then I heard you and your bird friend talking about it.”

  Bird friend? Oh, she meant Raven. They had talked in the lunch line, and Francie knew that there was truth in what Iris was saying. Francie mostly didn’t think about the people behind the steam trays in the cafeteria. She didn’t think about whether they were listening to conversations or not. She didn’t think about them at all, come to think of it. She had never actually tried talking to Iris. She’d never thought Iris said more than one word at a time, and now she realized that Iris was not just a grouchy old lady—she was a dangerous old lady! And maybe not really that old either, and with forearms like Popeye’s.

  “So hand it over!” Iris said, moving closer.

  “Tell me what happened to Theo first,” Francie said, backing away.

  “Seems to me that I’m the one with the knife,” Iris said. “And I don’t feel like telling you anything.”

  Francie couldn’t swallow for a moment.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Iris laughed that low, throaty laugh again, easily mistaken for a man’s.

  Was it possible that if you d
idn’t see her when she spoke, you could think you’d heard a man? Things were not as they seemed, just as Mr. Redburn had said. Maybe Iris and the mystery man in the tent were the same person!

  Francie knew she should run, but curiosity, and possibly fear and also probably stupidity, kept her rooted to the spot. “Look,” she said, “tell me what’s so special about the box, and I’ll give it to you.”

  “You are one nosy kid,” Iris said. “But not for much longer. It’s really impossible to let you live now that you’ve been snooping around down here.”

  What happened next went so fast, Francie wouldn’t have been able to explain it. Iris drew back her hand and lunged, but just before the knife would have made contact, Francie must have ducked, because the blade plunged instead into one of the barrels.

  Again, Francie knew she should just get out of there, but now she noticed that sweet-smelling liquid was oozing from around the split in the barrel. The smell called up intense memories of breakfast, of pancakes, and of the moment in Muskie Bait when she’d bashed her assailant over the head with a can of . . . “Maple syrup?” Francie said. “Is that what’s in these barrels? You would kill me because of some containers of maple syrup?”

  “You wouldn’t be the first.” Iris grunted, tugging at the knife handle, the barrel unwilling to release its grasp of the blade.

  “What? You mean . . . it was you? You killed Digby! Just because of some lousy maple syrup?”

  Iris regained the knife and advanced as Francie retreated. “First of all,” Iris said, “it isn’t lousy. This is Grade A syrup—the very best Quebec has to offer.”

  “Why are you hiding it? It’s not, like, illegal or anything,” Francie said. “Or wait. Smuggling . . . Canada . . . it is illegal isn’t it?”

  “We needed to make some of the product ‘disappear,’ in a manner of speaking.”

  “Did you build this tunnel for that purpose?” Francie tried to imagine the undertaking.

  “No, no.” Iris chuckled again, which made Francie’s flesh creep. Just keep her talking, Francie thought. As long as she’s talking, she’s not killing me.