Enchantment Lake: A Northwoods Mystery

by Margi Preus

  Later, Francie walked Nels out onto the dock.

  “Isn’t it kind of dark to drive a boat?” she said.

  “It’s got lights.” He jumped in and switched on the lights. “See?” he said. “Red on the port side, green on the starboard side.” He reached for the ignition.

  “Um,” she said. “Um,” she said again. Idiot! “Do you . . . would you like to talk? I mean, I could really use some help.”

  “Help?”

  “There’s so much weirdness around here. All these people dying.”

  “What?” He looked up at her.

  “Listen. Do you want some watermelon?” That was stupid!

  “Watermelon? Sure.” Nels climbed out of the boat while she retrieved a watermelon from the spring where it had been chilling. It was so cold she could barely hold it. She grabbed a big knife from the boathouse and said, “Come on. We can go sit on the roof.”

  They climbed the path that wound around to the flat roof of the little house. A railing of dubious safety ran around the perimeter of the deck, which was furnished with some rickety chairs and a table that wobbled as she sliced open the watermelon. She handed a big chunk to Nels and took one for herself, and they leaned—carefully—on the railing, spitting seeds down into the lake.

  “Didn’t I see you at that party at the Fredericksons’?” Francie asked.

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” he said.

  “Why were you there?” she asked.

  ‘Why were you there?’

  “I asked you first.”

  “Well,” he said, “there’s this girl . . .”

  Right, Francie thought. It figured. It was always this way; there was always a girl. “Oh,” she said. “Latice?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think you met her.” He cleared his throat. “She—”

  “Never mind.” Francie cut him off. “It’s none of my business.” She felt the usual disappointment and then a little wavelet of relief. Her heart would remain unthreatened inside its silver box.

  The evening was still. They sat on the rickety chairs for a while listening to the small sounds along the lakeshore. It was so quiet you could hear the clatter of dishes and the tinking of silverware being washed after dinner, the soft closing of screen doors, even voices from far down the way.

  Francie spoke quietly as she began to tell Nels about the strange deaths along the shore, about Buck’s confession, if that’s what it had been, about her aunts’ suspicions, about Warren’s death, supposedly a suicide, and now this: Buck, poisoned.

  “Tell me what happened at the funeral,” Nels said.

  “Buck arrived late,” Francie said. “I saw him drive up and take a piss in the parking lot while talking on his cell phone.” (Nels laughed at this.) “I thought he was probably going to pretend that he’d been at the funeral, but he was pretty late. He had to eat after everyone else had finished. It was a hot day. Could he have just eaten a hotdish that had gone bad in the heat? But even then he couldn’t die that fast, or at all, could he? The sheriff thinks that one of the hotdishes was poisoned. But where did the hotdish go? And why wasn’t everyone poisoned? Do you think it’s possible the ladies were—?” She stopped herself. “A number of them have a motive,” she murmured.

  “What?” Nels said.

  “It could be almost anybody along this side of the lake. Mrs. Smattering, whose son was killed by the tree branch. Mrs. Hansen, whose husband drowned. And what about Mrs. Simonsen, whose husband died of snakebite? She doesn’t live here anymore, but that doesn’t mean she might not murder someone. Or, heck, maybe it was all of them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Francie explained that maybe the elderly ladies had come up with a devious plan to knock Buck off. She had seen two of them chattering and clucking over a casserole dish together.

  Nels stroked his chin in mock seriousness and said, “Iocane powder. They’ve been eating it for years to build up an immunity, like the Dread Pirate Roberts, so they could partake in the poisoned hotdish.”

  “Yes,” Francie said. It was a little uncanny how she and Nels seemed to think alike. She’d been thinking of that exact thing from one of her favorite movies, The Princess Bride. He would like the same movies she did.

  “Okay, but seriously,” she said. “How was it that only Buck keeled over dead after the funeral lunch? I mean, if there was a poisoned hotdish, wouldn’t there be a lot of dead people now?”

  “You’d have to think so,” Nels agreed.

  Francie squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember what and who she’d seen. Sandy had left in a hurry. Potter had been in a rush, but he had paused to stroke Ginger’s arm. Ginger had seemed nervous, but she often did. Then Francie had gotten so distracted with the Fredericksons she probably missed seeing the murderer, missed all the clues. She really was a lousy detective.

  “You’re mulling pretty hard over there,” Nels said.

  She laughed ruefully. “There was one point when I thought I had it all figured out and thought maybe I should be a detective—that I was so good at it!”

  “You’re doing all right,” Nels said, laying a hand on her arm, which caused a little electricity to pulse through her.

  “Did you say Buck took a call on his cell?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much.” She thought back. “Let’s see. He said something like, ‘You and I don’t see what the big deal is, but believe me, this is exactly the kind of thing people get all worked up about.”

  “What was he talking about?”

  “Beats me.”

  “It should be easy enough to find out who called him. I’ll see what I can do tomorrow.”

  “Do you think the sheriff will arrest Astrid?” she asked.

  “Pretty skimpy evidence—poison on a spatula. Could have been anyone’s spatula. Anyone could have tampered with a hotdish or, for that matter, the food on a spatula.”

  Francie leaped up. “Come on!” she said, grabbing Nels’s hands and pulling him out of his chair.

  “What? Where are we going?”

  Francie pulled a flashlight out of her jacket pocket and flicked it on. “Let’s see if we can find this hotdish. The last place it was seen was the church. Let’s start there and see if we can either find it or find a clue or something.”

  “Even if we find it, I’m not sure it’ll be worth much as evidence anymore. Anyway, won’t the church be locked at this hour?” he asked.

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.” Francie chewed her lip. “I know! Ginger. She teaches Sunday school. Maybe she has a key. Let’s go find her.”

  20

  T.J.

  “Uh . . . key?” Ginger said.

  “To the church,” Francie repeated.

  “Uh . . .” Ginger said.

  “Ginger!” Francie snapped. “Are you drunk?”

  “No.” She slumped into a chair. “It’s T.J.”

  “What?” Francie asked. “What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Ginger said. “He’s gone. He hasn’t come home.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I’ve been out looking. I just came in now to get a different flashlight. The batteries are going on this one.”

  “When is the last time you saw him?”

  “He was home for dinner, and I thought he went to bed.”

  “Did he?”

  “You can see for yourself.” Ginger led them to a modest room at the back of the cabin. The single bed had been tidily made, just one corner of the covers turned back with a small (and dirty) indent on the pillow. Next to the bed stood a small side table on which teetered a baseball-themed lamp and a tall stack of old National Geographics. T.J.’s clothes hung neatly in the closet.

  “Tidy kid,” Nels remarked.

  “Yes, he’s kind of organized,” Ginger said.

  “Isn’t it odd that he’s such a dirtball?” Francie mused.
/>
  “How is this helping us?” Ginger wailed. “We should be looking for him.”

  “You’re right,” Francie said, “but I’m just trying to think where he might be.” Her eyes landed on a door, which she crossed to and opened. “There’s a door to the outside in his room,” she noted.

  “Yeah,” Ginger said. “I suppose he just pretended to go to bed and then got up and left. But why?”

  “Ginger,” Francie said. “He could go out often without you noticing, couldn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he does, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Ginger mumbled.

  “You were out looking for him the other day when I came by this way from that party at the Fredericksons’.” Francie stole a quick glance at Nels who was thumbing through the stack of magazines.

  “Yes.” Ginger sank onto the bed and buried her face in the pillow. “But this is the latest he’s ever stayed out.”

  “What time is it?” Francie asked Nels.

  He looked at his phone. “After one. Where does he go?”

  Ginger shook her head and sobbed into the pillow. “I don’t know! I don’t press him. I just figured he needed time to sort everything out. Plus, he wasn’t bugging me, so I didn’t really care what he did. Oh, I’m a terrible sister!”

  “You’re doing fine, Ginger,” Francie comforted her. “Hey, I ran around like a wild banshee when I was a kid. It was glorious to have so much freedom. Every kid should have a place like this.”

  “Yeah, but when we were kids it was safe. People weren’t getting killed left and right.”

  “So you don’t think these deaths have been accidental, either?” Nels asked.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know!” Ginger wailed. “What’s happened to him? Oh, it’s all my fault.”

  “Should we call the police?” Nels asked.

  Ginger bit her lip. “Not yet.”

  Francie tried to convey in a glance to Nels that the whole police thing was complicated for Ginger. Francie could only imagine how hard it would be, given that the sheriff was convinced Ginger’s mom had killed her husband.

  “All they can do is look—just like us,” Ginger added.

  “They might not do anything until daylight, anyway,” Nels said. He spun the flashlight in his hand like a gunslinger with a six-shooter. “Let’s go, partner,” he said.

  How had it gotten so dark? Francie wondered. Their flashlight beams cast yellow splotches on tree trunks, brush, leaves, branches. It was hard to tell what things were.

  “Maybe we should split up,” Francie said. “We can cover more ground. Ginger, go down by the lake, along the shore. Nels, you can follow along the path again, and I’ll take a trail back into the woods.”

  “Stay within earshot,” Nels said.

  When Francie was a kid, there’d been paths leading behind the cabins into the woods: trails to blueberry patches and beaver dams and deer stands and tree forts. If there were any trails now, they were very hard to find in the dark with just a flashlight. She crashed around in the woods for a bit and somehow stumbled onto something, maybe just a deer trail, but enough of a path to follow. She kept expecting it to end at a compost heap or a brush pile, but the path just kept going and going and she became so absorbed that she forgot to call out or to listen for Nels’s shouts. All she heard was the wind in the trees: a whoosh, fading into silence, then another whoosh.

  But overlaid on this was a different sound. Not soft. Harsh. Metallic. That same strange sound she had heard the first night. A rhythmic ka-chink. It seemed like a familiar noise that she should be able to identify, but she couldn’t place it. She moved toward the sound, stopped, listened, moved again. It grew louder; she drew closer, creeping so cautiously she was almost tiptoeing. If she’d been watching herself in a movie, she knew she’d have been yelling, “Turn around, you idiot!” but she couldn’t keep herself from moving toward the sound. As she got near to the source, she turned her flashlight off and crept very quietly up the rise of a hill.

  Below her was a clearing, awash in moonlight, but in the middle of the open space there was a pool of much brighter light. It took Francie a moment to realize the light came from a headlamp worn by a person working with a shovel. Of course! she thought, a shovel! Now the sound made sense. But what was this person doing? Burying something? Or digging something up? Was he carving out chunks of peat to sell to Home Depot, like Jeannette suggested? Or was it something more sinister?

  Francie sneaked closer, keeping her eyes on the now kneeling figure. She hardly dared to breathe, because it certainly felt like whatever was happening here was a secret. There was little other explanation for middle-of-the-night shoveling.

  A shout behind her caused her to jump. It was Nels, yelling her name. At the sound, the shoveler looked up, and the headlamp beam swung in her direction and swept over her before she dove into the woods.

  She ran, or tried to, crashing through brush, clambering over fallen trees, pushing aside branches. Was the shoveler following her?

  Glancing over her shoulder, she could see a bobbling light, and then nothing. It was as if the forest had closed in, almost protectively, behind her. She stopped for a moment and stared into the dark woods. How was it that the woods that had so frightened her before now seemed to be actually helping her?

  Turning, she saw the faint, bobbing light of Nels’s flashlight far down the path. She raced toward it.

  “We found him!” he called. “We’ve got T.J.!”

  By the time they got back to Ginger’s, T.J. was tucked into bed, with Ginger standing guard by the door.

  “Where was he?” Francie asked.

  “Don’t know,” Ginger said. “When I asked him, he just shrugged. Maybe he’ll talk tomorrow. No more questions now. It’s two thirty, and he needs to sleep.”

  Francie and Nels walked away from Ginger’s in silence. Once out of earshot, Francie said, “Nels, somebody’s back there. With a shovel. Either burying something or digging something up, I don’t know, but whoever it was saw me, I’m pretty sure.”

  “You think he got a good look at you?” Nels asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That, and you called out my name.”

  “Sorry,” Nels said. “Should we go see if we can find whoever it is?”

  “Really? Are you serious? You want to?” Francie asked.

  “Come on.” Nels took her hand in his own. She could let that big, warm hand lead her anywhere.

  They retraced their steps to Ginger’s cabin, then crunched into the woods. Francie looked for the path she’d found the first time, but even with two flashlights, she couldn’t seem to find it again.

  “There was a path,” she said, crashing through the brush. “Maybe over here?” More crashing around. “Maybe the other direction.” Francie was so turned around, she didn’t know what direction they were going. “I think he’s gone,” she said. “I don’t hear that shoveling noise anymore.”

  “You’re probably right,” Nels agreed.

  They crashed out of the brush into a blessedly open grove of pines and finally back into Ginger’s yard. “I’m sorry about all this,” Francie said.

  “Don’t apologize. Seriously. This has definitely been the most unusual evening, or night, or,” he yawned, “early morning I’ve spent in a long time. The yawn means nothing. Really.”

  Francie walked Nels onto the dock and helped untie the boat. The first hint of sunrise spread across the lake like a pink satin sheet, with small, pale clouds tossed on the water like throw pillows.

  “Are you sure you have to go?” she asked. “You could catch some sleep here if you want. I could sleep in the cabin and you can have the boathouse.”

  “I gotta be at work pretty early,” Nels said, climbing aboard. “I better go. You got a lock on that door?” he asked, nodding at the boathouse.

  “Yeah,” she answered.

  “Use it,” he said.

  21

  Gone to Jail

  Francie woke
with a plan. She would take a swim, cool her scratches from the previous night, scrub with Fels-Naptha soap to remove any poison ivy oil, apply aloe to her bites, and brood. She planned to brood on the following issues: Who might have killed Buck Thorne? Whom had she seen back in the peat bog last night? What had he or she been doing? Where had T.J. been? What was she going to do about her grandfather? And where had Aunt Astrid’s hotdish gone?

  But before she started thinking about anything, she needed a cup of coffee.

  She climbed the stairs to the cabin and opened the screen door. “Aunt Astrid?” she said. “Jeannette?”

  No answer. But she’d known they wouldn’t answer as soon as she stepped in; she’d sensed the emptiness of the place.

  Then she saw the note: “Gone to Jail. Coffee cake in kitchen. Help yourself.”

  Oh, for the love of Mike! She had slept through the whole thing: the sheriff coming, arresting them, taking them away in a boat. How had she not heard the boat motor? Ridiculous!

  Francie grabbed the car keys from off the kitchen table, crammed a piece of coffee cake into her mouth, and ran down the stairs to the boathouse. There she stuffed her wallet into her bag and dashed down the dock to the boat.

  The motor roared to life, and Francie drove the boat across the lake, docked it at Sandy’s, hurried past the surprised Sandy to her aunts’ car, and finally on the drive to town had time to review what she had meant to be thinking about, which had taken on a special urgency. She would have to find the killer if she wanted to get her aunts out of jail, because for sure Rydell wasn’t going to do much about it, especially since he thought he had caught the killers already.

  Who might have wanted to kill Buck? Considering his personality, probably lots of people. She recollected that his ex-wife, Rose, had thrown a glass of wine on him at the party. Who would know what Rose might have been mad about? Who else might have ill will toward Buck? Buck Jr., maybe? Maybe that receptionist at Paradise Realty knew something. She probably knew everything. Francie would go see her today.