Enchantment Lake: A Northwoods Mystery

by Margi Preus

  There was a rush of excited explanations: Mastodon bones in the bog! Mrs. Frederickson the murderer! The three of them barely escaping with their lives! And questions: How did you get out of jail? Does the sheriff know you’re here? And so on.

  Finally, Jeannette called out over the din, “Sit down! Sit down! Have something to eat.”

  Soon they were sipping hot cocoa and munching sandwiches that appeared mysteriously from the kitchen. Ginger was there, hugging T.J. as if she’d never let go. Even Potter was still around, which surprised Francie. She had expected him to bolt.

  Francie curled up on the couch under a blanket. Nels came out of the kitchen with his third sandwich in as many minutes and sat next to her, tugging away some of the blanket to cover his bare feet. His wet socks, along with hers, dangled in front of the fire. He slid his hand under the blanket and Francie felt his warm hand on her cold feet. He rubbed her feet into warmth, then left his hand wrapped around a foot.

  “Would your girlfriend be okay with this?” Francie mumbled into her mug of cocoa.

  “My girlfriend?” Nels said.

  “Your date? The party?” Francie whispered.

  “Oh!” Nels said, between bites of sandwich. “You never let me finish explaining. The receptionist at work wanted to go to the party. She needed a ride; I have a boat; I owed her a favor.”

  “Oh,” Francie said, keenly aware of Nels’s fingers playing with her toes. “So you don’t have a girlfriend?”

  “Well . . .” Nels smiled at her.

  She would have liked to savor that moment, but Astrid plunked down a tray of cake and cookies on the coffee table and demanded, “Now tell us everything. Every detail. Don’t leave anything out!”

  Francie took a deep breath and told them about the kayak, the island, Buck, the logs under the lake, meeting up with Potter, then skipped to the fire, the sinking boat, the rescue by Nels, who got cooed at so much he started blushing. She told about rushing off to see Mrs. Frederickson, otherwise known as Frederica Ricard, or Freddie, who Francie thought might be able to help her get an acting gig. But everything turned very creepy. Francie skipped over the part about finding the silver box—she doubted now that she’d ever even seen it—to when she realized that Mrs. Frederickson (“the wicked witch,” T.J. piped up) was responsible for everything.

  “Buck was her—what would you call him—her sidekick? Her henchman?” Francie said. “I didn’t put it together, really, until too late. Way too late. Like, I-should-be-dead late, so it’s not like I’m a genius detective; don’t get that idea into your head, Auntie Astrid. I see you over there looking smug. I recognized the initials on a glass and on her lighter and I suddenly remembered seeing the same letters, FIR, in Buck’s office the first day I went to town: FIR Forest Development Enterprises. I thought it was ironic that a development that would take down 99 percent of the trees would call itself FIR Forest. In retrospect, I think the FIR stood for Frederica something Ricard. Ingrid maybe?”

  “Ingrate,” Nels offered.

  “Inmate!” Astrid suggested, chortling.

  “Go on,” Jeannette said. “Then what happened?”

  Francie told about what happened next and how the sheriff showed up and tried to arrest her for breaking her aunts out of jail. “And speaking of that—” Francie began.

  “We’ll explain that later,” Astrid said. “Go on.”

  “Then just as he was trying to put the handcuffs on, sprinklers and yard lights started turning on and off. It was crazy!” Francie watched as Astrid and Jeannette exchanged little smiles.

  “It was you!” Francie said. “You did that!”

  “Well,” Jeannette said, “Arthur helped us.”

  “Arthur?” Francie asked.

  Francie’s grandfather appeared out of the kitchen carrying a tray of sandwiches. “It was fun!” he said.

  Francie’s jaw dropped.

  “You were terribly clever getting us out of the slammer,” Astrid said.

  “You busted them out of jail?” Francie stared at her grandfather. Who was this person?

  “It wasn’t hard, thanks to the performance you and I put on for the sheriff earlier today.”

  That was a performance? Francie wondered.

  “He never suspected me for an instant!” Granddad crowed.

  “Well, go on dear,” Astrid said to Francie. “Tell us everything.”

  But Francie was struck dumb. Had her grandfather just admitted to breaking his sisters out of jail?

  Nels continued instead, explaining that Frederica had Buck doing her dirty work: discouraging the old folks from hanging onto their property.

  “So why did she poison Buck if he was such a dupe?” Jeannette asked. “And how?”

  Ginger piped up. “Here’s what I think: I think Mrs. Frederickson stole Astrid’s casserole dish and spatula at that potluck we had not long ago. Everyone from this side of the lake was there. I bet she thought she could poison Astrid and Jeannette with their own crockery. Which would be brilliant since she knew Astrid’s reputation for,” Ginger paused, “for her delicious hotdishes!”

  Francie jumped in. “Ah! But then an opportunity arose to frame Astrid and get rid of Buck at the same time, and she couldn’t resist. Remember how you couldn’t find your spatula the other night when T.J. was here for dinner?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Astrid said. “But why? Why did she kill Buck?”

  “I think Potter can answer that,” Francie said.

  They all turned to Potter who sat sullenly sipping his cocoa. “I’m not going to say anything without a lawyer present,” he said.

  “Nels is a lawyer,” Francie offered.

  “No, I’m not!” Nels protested. “It’s just a summer job.”

  “Well, you work at a law firm, so close enough,” Francie said, giving him a kick. She turned to Potter and growled, “Talk.”

  Potter sighed and said, “Fine. I knew Buck was trying to work some big real estate deal that involved getting a road through. Everybody knew about the road, but nobody quite realized how close it was to reality. Nobody at all knew what it meant. It meant the end of us! The end of this.” He swept his arms in a wide circle. “Buck had bought up almost every property along the shore, except yours,” he nodded to Astrid and Jeannette, who looked alarmed, “and mine. He was pestering me about it; he knew I hadn’t paid the property taxes, things like that. I was broke! But I desperately wanted to keep our place. Been in my family—well, you know how it is,” he pleaded.

  “But your pottery?” Francie said. “I thought you did well with it.”

  “Gah!” Potter said. “I make crappy pottery. Nobody wants that stuff!”

  Astrid let out a guffaw. “Sorry, Potter,” she said, then added kindly, “some of it isn’t so terrible. You made a nice casserole dish.”

  “I made a dozen of them, exactly alike, before I couldn’t stand the sight of them anymore,” he said.

  That would explain why Francie had seen that same dish in different places: with the ladies and on the island with Potter.

  “So, since the pottery wasn’t working out, you found another source of income, didn’t you?” Francie asked. “Involving ancient stone tools, maybe?”

  Potter nodded. “I stumbled on a patch of overturned earth back in the bog when I was looking for clay. I found some arrowheads in there, and I started to get interested.”

  T.J. started up, overturning his plate. He would have had his fingernails in Potter’s eye sockets if Ginger hadn’t grabbed him and held him back.

  “So you were stealing stuff! That’s disgusting!” T.J. said. “It was bad enough that you were such a pig about it. Couldn’t you at least have read up on dig protocol?”

  Dig protocol? Nels mouthed to Francie, one eyebrow raised. She raised one back.

  T.J. wasn’t finished. “But no! You just rooted around in the dirt like a pig looking for bonbons!”

  “Truffles?” Nels suggested.

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean,” T.J. sa
id.

  “And that’s what you were mailing when I bumped into you at the post office earlier?” Francie said. “Some artifacts?”

  “Well, it was what I had planned to mail. If you remember, I left with the packages, the packages I had intended to send but never did.”

  “Second thoughts?” Nels asked.

  “Yeah,” Potter said. “I could have made a lot of money, but in the end, I just couldn’t do it. So after that I motored out to the island, determined to get some clay (for free—I can’t even afford to buy clay) and make something decent for a change. Something I can sell.”

  “So what about Buck?”

  “When I first started digging, I was finding small stone tools, spearheads and the like. I figured they were arrowheads from a couple hundred years ago maybe. So I tried to make a deal with Buck. He said they were going to just drive a bulldozer over everything and destroy them. I said to let me get rid of the artifacts first, because if they discover anything, it’ll put the road on hold until they figure out whether it’s significant or not. He was all right with that idea, but then the bones turned up, and it was obvious that this was going to be a much bigger deal than we thought. He got really nervous. I think he was between a rock and a hard place. He’d invested in all these properties for something that required a road, and now the road would be stalled or have to be redesigned, which would be time-consuming. He had all his money tied into this thing—”

  “And a boss who was going to be worse than grumpy about it,” Francie offered.

  “Buck was fretting about you, too,” Potter said, pointing at Francie. “He told me later he thought he’d seen you outside late that first night you were here, as he was headed back to his boat. Everyone knew you were a detective. He was nervous about it.”

  Francie remembered getting up to silence the wind chimes that night. So she had seen a boat tied to the Olson’s dock. And there had been someone watching her—Buck.

  “But I also think he’d thought about coming clean to you,” Potter went on. “I think he was feeling in over his head, but he didn’t want to talk to Rydell about it. They were buddies, you know.”

  Maybe that’s what Buck had been trying to do out in the boat the night of the party; maybe he’d been trying to explain something. “So,” Francie said, “Mrs. Frederickson must have suspected he was getting cold feet, and he became more of a danger to her plan than an asset. That’s why she got rid of him.”

  “How did she think she could get away with all this?” Jeannette asked.

  “At first it was just Warren she needed to dispose of, but it snowballed: then it was Buck, Potter, and me, although she gave me credit for knowing more than I did. And also T.J. She thought if she could just get rid of all the troublemakers, she’d have clear sailing. Obviously, she didn’t have much to worry about with the sheriff, since he seemed unlikely to—” She broke off when the screen door squeaked open and Sheriff Johnson walked in.

  In her television series, this would be the moment the sheriff would say, “The FBI has been working on this case for months, and you almost blew it!” Or something along those lines. But Rydell didn’t say anything like that. “I stopped in to say that Mrs. Frederickson has been apprehended,” he said. “I also wanted to,” he looked at his feet and shuffled a bit, then continued, “apologize. I’m embarrassed to say it, but you, young lady, were right—”

  “No, I wasn’t!” Francie interrupted him. “I told you that Buck was responsible for the deaths. And he was, in a manner of speaking, at least in some of the cases. But I was on the wrong trail.”

  “If I had listened to you,” the sheriff went on, “and investigated, if I had confronted Buck, well, he might have confided in me and be alive today. I guess everyone knows that I’ve been looking forward to retirement quite a bit. Apparently some people have been taking advantage of it. Thanks, Detective Frye—”

  “Oh, I’m not a detective,” Francie said. “I’m really not.”

  “I wondered. But you know,” the sheriff said, shaking his head to an offered cup of cocoa, “you could be.” He gave her a little salute and went out, closing the screen door carefully behind him.

  “Mystery solved!” Astrid said.

  Francie watched through a fog as her aunts and her grandfather, Ginger, T.J., Potter, and Nels all clinked mugs in a toast. Mystery solved? Francie wondered. She felt an enormous mystery looming, and so many other questions were yet unanswered. The silver box. Her mother. Her father’s accident. What had Freddie meant about “smoke and mirrors”?

  In her TV show, all the loose ends would have been wrapped up; there’d be no mystery left unsolved. In real life, as Francie well knew, there were always unanswered questions. Perhaps there always would be.

  Francie excused herself and stepped outside. The clouds had been swept away; stars shimmered in the black sky. As she made her way down to the lake, the sounds of conversation faded and silence surrounded her. She looked out at the water and the dark fringe of forest that ran around the shore, dotted with porch lights and yard lights and, of course, the ubiquitous blinking cell tower. It was no longer a wild place, but she could still sense the wilderness that stretched for miles behind her.

  What must this land have been like thousands and thousands of years ago, she wondered, when the mastodons roamed here? Or even hundreds of years ago, before Europeans came and wanted so much from it: furs, timber, minerals, crops, a place to build cabins, houses, towns, roads.

  A distant wail startled her; she held her breath as the moaning cry built and rose and wavered. It took a moment to realize the eerie wail came from a wolf, howling some miles distant. Then another voice and another, twining together and separating, then knitting into a chord of sound that echoed in the stillness, so mournful, as if keening for that lost world.

  It made her chest ache. Everything about being here, about this place, made her heart ache with sadness yet swell with joy. Everything made it strain against its little silver box.

  She turned to see Nels walking down the hill toward her, his head down. She watched him for a moment and, when he looked up at her and smiled, she felt the little box unlatch.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank kind readers and advisors Joe Ellig, Catherine Preus, Ann Treacy, members of my writing group, and others who offered assistance, especially Kathleen Busche for her idea and advice about the crooked real estate agent.

  The poems Francie reads from her bedside book are those of Wendell Berry, one of my favorite poets. Many thanks to Counterpoint for permission to reprint these excerpts.

  Thanks to all the good people at the University of Minnesota Press who made this book possible, especially Erik Anderson, and to Mighty Media for the cool, clue-filled cover design.

  Most important, thank you, dear reader, for reading!

  Margi Preus is the author of several books for young readers, including Shadow on the Mountain, West of the Moon, and the Newbery Honor–winning and New York Times–best-selling Heart of a Samurai. Enchantment Lake is her first mystery.