The Clue in the Trees: An Enchantment Lake Mystery

by Margi Preus

  “This was a gold mine originally, from way back,” Iris explained. “Then the bootleggers discovered it and used it to store their whiskey, and, well, here it was. I improved it and made use of it.”

  “And . . . ,” Francie said, continuing her retreat, “you had to kill Digby because he was about to reveal all this to the sheriff?”

  “The syrup was my brainchild. Digby didn’t approve—didn’t like it when he found out what I had stashed down here. ‘Silly,’ he called it—Silly!” Iris snorted derisively. “He thought his smuggling operation was serious, and mine was just silly.”

  “He had a smuggling operation, too?”

  “Lordy, you are thick,” Iris said.

  “I have to say,” Francie said, “I am disappointed. Somehow I thought it would be, I don’t know, something bigger. I mean, maple syrup? How lame is that?”

  This statement had a rage-inducing effect on Iris. “You need to learn some respect!” Iris growled, drawing back her arm once again.

  Francie knew she should run; knew that Iris intended to kill her; knew that the likelihood of successfully dodging an attack again was slim; and yet it seemed her feet did not want to move. Her boots, she realized, were stuck to the ground.

  The syrup! It had been leaking out of the torn barrel and mixing with the clay, and the floor of the tunnel had become a goopy morass. As the knife blade plunged toward her, Francie quite literally leapt out of her boots—thank goodness they were so big—and sprang, stocking-footed, away, down the tunnel the way she had come.

  She was not alone; she could hear Iris sludging along after her. The light from Iris’s headlamp illuminated the tunnel ahead, helping Francie in her flight, while also of course making her visible to her pursuer.

  Francie reached the cupboard, still open, and leapt through it, back into the underground chamber. She found the ladder and began to climb, the box still clutched under her arm, aware of the flashlight beam playing below her.

  Sticky fingers wrapped around her ankle and gave a jerk, making Francie almost tumble off the ladder. She let out a yelp, and the trapdoor overhead swung open; a hand gripped Francie’s wrist and pulled. She felt her sock being pulled off her foot while from above strong arms lifted her up and out and set her on the wood floor—solid ground.

  There followed a lot of hasty explanations mixed in with rope untangling and incoherent arguing.

  “Shut the trap!” (That was Francie.) “She’s right after me. Hurry up!”

  “Help me get these ropes untied!” (That was Theo.)

  “Shut the trap!” (Francie again.)

  The trap was slammed shut, a table shoved on top of it, the ropes untangled, and Theo pulled Francie out the door. “We’ve got to get back to the cabin and call the sheriff!” he said.

  “No!” Francie tugged on his arm. “We have to find the other end of the tunnel first, or she’ll go out that way!”

  “Sheriff!” Theo said.

  “Tunnel!” Francie shouted, then said more slowly, “Ohhh . . . Roy . . .”

  “Who’s Roy?” Theo said.

  “Jay’s dog. I know where the tunnel comes out.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Follow me!” she yelled, taking off down the path that led to the dig site.

  While the still-stocking-footed Francie stumbled over roots and rocks, Theo tried to explain that he’d been knocked out and tied up when she’d been underground.

  “Theo,” Francie said, her steps slowing, “am I hallucinating or whatever is the olfactory equivalent of hallucinating? I smell . . . turkey.”

  “And gravy,” Theo added.

  “And . . . pumpkin pie,” Francie said. “Okay, that’s it. Clearly we’ve both jumped the track.”

  Bounding down the path toward them came Roy, and then Raven and Jay, each holding a basket, as if about to embark on a lovely picnic.

  “What are you guys doing here?” Francie asked. “And how did you get here?”

  “Didn’t you hear the helicopter?” Jay asked, and pointed to two official-looking men coming around the corner of the cabin wearing blue jackets printed with the letters FBI. “Those guys have access to everything,” he said. Then, much to Francie’s surprise, Mr. Redburn rounded the corner.

  Francie looked on incredulously as Redburn and Theo greeted each other like old friends.

  “Mr. Redburn?” Francie said.

  “He works for the FBI, it turns out!” Jay said.

  “And what a great cover!” Raven added. “High school drama coach! Who would suspect!”

  Next the sheriff and two deputies appeared with Sandy.

  “Can anybody explain to me what’s going on?” Francie asked and then couldn’t help but add, “And am I smelling turkey?” It smelled so delicious she thought she might faint.

  “And gravy?” Theo added.

  “Yeah, that’s what’s in here,” Jay said, holding up his picnic basket.

  27

  Thanksgiving Dinner

  LATER, after a very sticky Iris was taken away by the FBI, and Francie’s feet had thawed out by the fire, Theo, Francie, Raven, Jay, Sandy, Mr. Redburn, and his fiancée, Sheriff Warner, plus the sheriff’s deputies, all sat down to a belated but much appreciated Thanksgiving dinner.

  “We usually put some maple syrup on the sweet potatoes,” Jay apologized, “but we didn’t have any.”

  “Oh,” Francie said, “I know where you can get syrup. All you would ever want.”

  “So,” the sheriff turned to Francie, “explain to me how you knew Iris was the killer.”

  “It wasn’t until today when I heard her say, ‘Beans,’ that I knew she had been at the dig site the night of Digby’s murder.”

  “Beans,” the sheriff repeated, squinting at Francie.

  “Beans!” Raven shouted from the kitchen. “Iris says that in the lunch line.” Raven came out carrying a casserole dish. “As in, ‘Do you want some beans?’” She handed Francie the dish and said, “Um, do you want some beans?”

  Francie helped herself to the green bean casserole and went on. “And today when I heard that same voice say, ‘Your life isn’t worth a hill of beans,’ I remembered I’d heard something similar in Digby’s tent the day of his murder.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me about this?” the sheriff asked Francie.

  Francie was silent. She knew she had been wrong to withhold information. The case might even have been solved faster had she been more forthcoming. She resolved to be honest from now on, and a kind of relief swept over her.

  “In the tent, the day of the murder, I heard someone arguing with Digby,” she said. “Same exact voice, but I thought it was a man’s, so I didn’t put two and two together.”

  “But absolutely no one saw Iris here the day of the murder.”

  “Right,” Francie said. “And she’s not a woman you don’t notice. But she had an unusual way to get to the site without being seen.”

  “How is that?”

  “That tunnel. It leads from an old shack behind the Johnsons’ cabin to the dig site.”

  “Maybe an old gold mine,” Jay said. “And then used during Prohibition to hide liquor.”

  “No kidding?” the sheriff said. She glanced out the window. “We’ll have to go take a look. So let me get this straight. Digby discovered the tunnel and the smuggled goods, then called me, intending to reveal all this, but Iris killed him before he could do that. She came and went through the tunnel, and that is why nobody saw her.”

  “Right. But . . . ,” Francie said. “I still don’t get it. All that because of some maple syrup?”

  “Might have been a lot of syrup,” the sheriff said. “Six million pounds have gone missing from the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve.”

  “The what?” Raven asked.

  “Yep. You heard me. Quebec produces something like three-quarters of the world’s maple syrup. In good years, they stockpile some in what is called the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve.
There was a really good year recently, so there was a lot of syrup stored in a warehouse in Canada. Someone figured out how to pull off a really good heist and made off with six million pounds of it.”

  “But there can’t be that much down there in the tunnels!”

  “No,” the sheriff said. “Iris was only a small wheel in a bigger machine. The masterminds were probably trying to squirrel away smaller amounts until they could get it to market. I think they were trying to get some of it out of circulation and did some distributing.”

  “Why would anyone go to the trouble of hiding it way out here in the boonies, though?” Francie asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Sandy said. “This side of the lake is a great place to hide something, summer or winter. In the winter, nobody’s here to ask questions, so things can be moved over the lake by snowmobile, and smugglers just look like ice fishermen. Great place to stash the syrup this past summer, too. Nice and cool underground, and what with all the workers from the dig coming and going, there was so much boat traffic, who would notice one more boat? Or one more barrel being loaded onto and off a boat—especially by the cook, right?”

  “Is it possible Iris may have been involved in other smuggling, too?” Francie asked. “Because, I mean, maple syrup! Come on!”

  “Yes,” the sheriff conceded, “that is of course a possibility, and we’ll be looking into it. Digby was suspected of a much bigger kind of smuggling operation.”

  “Which may still be going on,” Redburn added, “except Digby isn’t part of it anymore.”

  “Anybody for pie?” Jay asked, emerging from the kitchen with a steaming pumpkin pie.

  The deputies looked longingly at it, but the sheriff shook her head. “We need to get going,” she said, picking up her hat from the table near the door.

  Francie said, “You know . . . do you suppose it’d be possible, as you’re loading bones onto the barge, to be unloading other bones?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How many pounds of mastodon bones do you think were loaded onto the barge to be shipped to the university?” Francie asked anybody who might know.

  “Couple thousand pounds, I should guess,” Redburn said.

  “And how many pounds would a very large dinosaur skeleton be?”

  “The missing bones the FBI are looking for right now amount to three thousand pounds,” Redburn said.

  Theo added that the skeleton, when assembled, “would be about eight feet tall and twenty-four feet long.”

  “Just wondering . . . ,” Francie mused.

  “If that missing dinosaur skeleton . . . ,” Redburn continued.

  “Might be found in some crates with a lot of mastodon bones . . . ,” Theo said excitedly.

  “At the university?” Raven suggested.

  “Or even around here somewhere, I wonder,” the sheriff said. “If there are more tunnels—”

  “It’s also possible,” Theo said, bringing everybody back to earth, “that only Digby knows where that skeleton is.”

  “And he’s dead,” Jay stated the obvious.

  “Well,” the sheriff said at last, putting on her hat. “We’d better be getting back.”

  “How did you get here, anyway?” Francie asked.

  “The lake is open around the point,” Sandy explained. He stood, slipped into his jacket, and held the door for the sheriff, deputies, and Redburn.

  But the sheriff turned back and said thoughtfully, “What was Iris doing out here, anyway? I mean, why now?”

  Francie and Theo exchanged a glance, then simultaneously said, “No idea.”

  The sheriff gave them a little squint, then turned and went out.

  After they were gone, Francie turned to Raven and Jay and asked, “How did you guys know to come?”

  “Raven and I decided to combine our leftovers and bring them out to you somehow or other,” Jay answered. “We were going to cross that ice when we got to it, so to speak. But as we were putting the food together, we also got to putting two and two together.”

  “It was the food, see?” Raven chimed in. “I started thinking about that cook tent and the missing knife. It was there, then it wasn’t, yet there wasn’t any mention of anyone finding it at the dig site. Who would go into the cook tent and take a big knife, especially from Evil Iris? Would you? No. Nobody would! So Iris must have taken it herself, which meant she must have been there—at the dig site—somehow or other. Then I remembered when we were in the lunch line that we had discussed both the murder and the . . . well,” she said, stifling the word box, and saying again, “the murder, and I got worried, and I just thought, Geez, we better go out there and make sure everything’s okay.”

  “But how did you convince the sheriff and—for the love of Mike!—the FBI to come out here?”

  “Oh, we didn’t convince them,” Raven said. “That was just a lucky break for us. They got a tip that the smuggled syrup was over here and were planning to investigate. They didn’t know Iris had anything to do with it. It was a lucky break for them that she was here and so messily incriminated herself.”

  “You know what, Raven?” Francie said. “You are a much better detective than I am.”

  “What?” Raven said. “No! You solved the murder.”

  “I just stumbled onto it,” Francie protested. “You actually figured it out.”

  “Well, let’s just say we’re a good team,” Raven said.

  From across the room, Jay looked a little forlorn until Francie added, “You, too, Jay—we couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Jay smiled, his rosy cheeks glowing.

  “But if you want to be taken seriously,” Raven said, “you’re going to have to get that glob of mashed potatoes out of your hair.”

  The warm food, warm cabin, the hum of the conversation, and the sound of dishes being washed and put away—these things plus the relief that comes after a protracted trauma all conspired to make Francie very drowsy.

  She leaned her head on Theo’s shoulder and murmured, “What about that tooth, Theo?”

  “Tooth?” he said.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Francie said.

  “That was Digby that chased us the night of Muskie Bait.”

  “I know,” Francie said.

  “How?”

  “It was the trench coat that gave it away, but never mind that. Explain why you had that tooth.”

  “That dino tooth belonged to the skeleton that Digby stole. He was anxious to get it back, and he had information about Mom. That tooth was going to be my bargaining chip, so to speak. Redburn will make sure the tooth gets back with the rest of the skeleton—if and when the skeleton is found, that is.”

  Francie let her eyes close. There was something else she wanted to talk to Theo about, but she was warm and well fed, the voices in the kitchen and the soft clatter of dishes being washed were like a lullaby, and she felt her mind drifting.

  Of course she was not aware that she had fallen asleep. Nor was she aware of Theo carrying her off to her aunts’ bed and tucking her in under the warm comforter, while the others rolled out sleeping bags on the cabin floor.

  Perhaps it was the soft tapping at the window that woke her, much later, after everyone was asleep. She climbed out of bed and stepped over the sleeping bodies of Raven and Jay, curled up in their respective sleeping bags on the floor. In the light of the glowing embers of the fire, she found her way to the window and stood looking out at the snow that had begun to fall, silently accumulating on every branch and twig, covering the ice-covered bay like a woolen blanket, and turning the whole world white. A young birch, bent from the weight of the snow, arched like a dinosaur’s long neck, its crown the beast’s head, dripping icicle teeth. Among branches swollen with snow, she saw a forest transformed into the bleached bones of dinosaurs: branches became rib bones, twigs were claws and talons. Not fearful but beautiful. And somehow peaceful.

  She turned to see Theo on the couch, the silver box in his hands. She sat dow
n next to him and he gave it to her. For the first time she was able to examine the intricate engravings on its sides.

  “Trees!” she exclaimed, tracing the thickly growing trunks and delicately entwined branches that wove around all four sides and over the top of the silver box. “I’ve always thought, irrationally, I know,” Francie said, “that my heart was inside this box. But now that you’re here, and I’ve made some nice friends, and I feel at home . . . I think my heart is back where it belongs.”

  Theo took her hand and said, “I’m glad.”

  “But what is this thing, really?” she asked. “And why is it so important?”

  “This,” he said, “is a box full of secrets. We’ll try to figure it all out—tomorrow. For now, we should probably get some sleep. Soon enough, danger will be coming our way.”

  Author’s Note

  Warning: it would be better if you read this after reading the story.

  The Clue in the Trees is a work of fiction, but many of the current or historical episodes, events, and issues in the story are based on real things or true stories. Mammoths, bootlegging, gold rushes, mining, and pipelines are all things that Minnesota has experienced or is facing right now.

  Mammoths, Unktehi, Dragon Bones

  During the Mesozoic era, a period of time 252 million to 66 million years ago, mastodons and woolly mammoths roamed nearly everywhere on earth—including Minnesota.

  Ever since, people have been finding their bones and trying to make sense of them. Raven tells Francie that in early times, the Dakota (Sioux) of Minnesota attributed these bones to a water monster called Unktehi, a creature that resembled a giant buffalo. The bones were thought to have a powerful supernatural potency. Medicine men chewed on them as part of their initiation and kept pieces of the bones in their medicine bags. Now paleontologists believe that the bones they found were those of mastodons.

  Jay learns in his research that in China “dragon bones” (which are actually mammoth, mastodon, and dinosaur bones) are still consumed for a variety of ailments ranging from hypertension and stroke to “dream-disturbed sleep.”