“Go with the other kids,” Aunt Pat urged, but Ilona shook her head.
“I can’t, Mother. Please don’t ask me to.”
Without waiting for a reply, she headed for the beach path, choosing the opposite direction from the one the rest of us would take to get to the Powells where the party was to take place.
The grown-ups stared after her with troubled expressions.
“I’m concerned about that girl,” the Judge said. “I’d hoped she’d be getting over all that distress by now.”
“So had I,” Aunt Pat confirmed. “I thought your offer to send her to the university would pull her out of it, but so far she . . .”
Her voice trailed off, and the Judge finished the sentence.
“She’s still depressed. Well, keep trying, Patricia, to get her involved with the young people again. If she doesn’t perk up when she starts school in a couple of months, maybe we ought to consider counseling. Oh, I know,” he added, lifting a hand to ward off the protest he knew was coming, “that’s expensive. But I think I can afford it, if it comes to that.”
I was waiting for Ginny, who’d run back upstairs to change shoes after a strap broke on her sandals. Nobody was paying any attention to me, and I scrunched down in the corner of the couch, so they would go on ignoring me.
Out on the front porch I could hear Mom and Aunt Mavis talking in low tones, which probably meant they didn’t want to be overheard. I caught the phrase, “don’t know what I’d do if the Judge didn’t help” and wondered what was wrong at Ginny’s house.
The Judge wasn’t really my grandfather. He’d married Grandma Molly when Mom and her sisters were in their teens, after her first husband died. But the Judge was the only grandpa I’d known on Mom’s side of the family, and he’d always been a generous one. “Wonderful presents at Christmas and birthdays, and of course always an invitation from him and Molly to spend the summer here at Crystal Lake.
Once when Dad was bemoaning the fact that we’d be gone until the week before school started, he’d remarked, “Well, at least it’ll cut down on expenses. The Judge never wants anybody to pay for any of the groceries while you’re up there, and these kids eat like horses. It’s a good thing they’re both girls, or it’d be even worse.” The Judge was still feeding us, all these years later.
I was glad when Ginny showed up and we could escape the house and adult conversations. The younger kids had gone ahead of us; we could hear their laughter drifting through the trees that lined the lake, and somebody shrieked, and there was another wave of hilarity.
“It’s going to be hard not to think about Zoe and Brody,” I said, shoving my hands into my pockets. “All the rest of you have had a year to think about it, but it’s still new to me. I don’t know how much fun anything will be, while I’m adjusting to the whole idea of a murder right here among the people I’ve known all my life.”
“Yeah, I know. It shook everybody up when it happened. But it’ll be fun tonight, Cici. So don’t sulk or anything. All the kids will be there, except Ilona.”
And Jack, I thought.
“There’s a new family, they rented the Johansen place for the year. There’s a really good-looking boy, Randy Donner; he’s sixteen. And his sister Noreen is eighteen, I think.”
Somebody had brought a tape player, and a few of the older kids were dancing on the grass or the narrow strip of beach. Four or five of the little kids were hopping around, too, as if they knew what they were doing.
They were just setting fire to The Sound Wave when we got there. Fergus MacBean was supervising, as if he didn’t trust anyone else to do it right. It had been Fergus’s boat, one he’d used for fishing for years, but it had gotten damaged over the winter, and he’d decided it wasn’t worth fixing. The wood was old and dry, and it flamed up with hardly any encouragement.
“You’ll have to wait until it dies down,” Fergus said, “before you can roast anything. Let it get down to coals. It’ll burn for a long time.”
As if we didn’t all know that, I thought. Fergus finally nodded, as if he were satisfied that he could leave it, then turned away, passing me as he went back to his cottage set well into the trees.
I supposed it was nice of him to donate his boat for an evening of fun. His kids were all grown and lived in places like New Jersey and California; the last summer I was here he’d complained that he never got to see his grandkids.
The flames leaped against the dark sky, throwing up sparks like fireworks. Somebody had spread blankets on the grass, and there were coolers full of iced pop and packages of hot dogs and buns and bags of chips. I was beginning to feel a little bit hungry, probably because I hadn’t eaten much at supper. No, I corrected, remembering, dinner.
There were feet running on the dock, a loud splash, more laughter.
A boy not much taller than Ginny zeroed in on us, and she introduced him to me. “Hi,” Randy Donner said. He had brown hair with red highlights in it, or maybe it was only the blazing fire a few yards away. He was kind of stocky, with a pleasant face. “You mind if I steal Ginny to help me gather some wood? We want to add some fuel to the boat, keep it going longer.”
“You can help too, if you want,” Ginny said.
I knew he wanted to get her alone, though. I shook my head. “I’ll just sit here,” I told them. They disappeared before they’d gone more than a little way into the woods.
A bunch of people spoke to me, Oliver Atterbom, and Nathan Cyrek, and half a dozen others, including Hal Powell’s sister Tora. “Hi, Cici. Welcome back.” Nobody sat down with me, though.
Moodily, I watched Tora. Maybe she was going to be the next Zoe. She wasn’t as pretty, but she had that sense of the dramatic, even in jeans. They were really tight—my mom wouldn’t have let me leave the house in them—and she wore a bright printed shirt with orange and blue parrots and lots of splashy green leaves. Fifteen, almost sixteen, she must be now. Her lipstick looked like blood in the firelight, and her eye shadow was either blue or green, I couldn’t be sure. She was flirting with Chet Cyrek, who seemed to have gotten over his sister’s murder and was flirting back, reaching out to tug at her hair. She jerked away, managing to stick her chest out as she did so.
I watched them for a minute or two. Well, Zoe had been gone for a year; what did I expect, that her brothers would withdraw forever? How old was Chet now? Nineteen, I calculated. When I was here last, he wouldn’t have paid any attention to a girl three or four years younger than he was, but I had to admit Tora didn’t look—or act—like one of the little kids anymore.
After a few minutes it dawned on me that the kids, except for the younger ones, were pairing off. I sat near the edge of the blankets, feeling out of place in a way I’d never expected.
Somebody changed the tape, and now the music boomed forth in a wild jungle rhythm. It brought out the craziness in Tora and Chet, and they began to dance without inhibition. Most of the others made a circle around them, clapping their hands, stomping their feet, chanting some repetitive chorus.
Hal Powell was the only one besides me who wasn’t in the circle. He was sitting on the edge of the dock, and when I glanced toward him he grinned at me, but he didn’t move to come any closer.
Not that I wanted him to join me. I liked Hal all right, but even though he was a little older than I was, he seemed like a younger brother. I could remember too many of the silly things he’d done years ago.
Once he’d poured sand in the radiator of the Judge’s car. He was only about six, so the Judge had simply marched him home, holding him by one painfully red ear, and let his folks deal with him. He’d “borrowed” The Sound Wave once and taken it out in the middle of the lake and lost the oars, and his dad had to rescue him. And when he was about nine, he’d gone skinny-dipping with a bunch of the other boys and somehow his trunks got lost, and he had to come home naked. He’d begged the others to sneak home and get him something to wear, but nobody would; they all thought it was hilarious, and he finally had to creep through the woods to the back of their cottage. Lina had caught him without a stitch on and finally got him some pants. She took him home, and Mrs. Powell had locked him in his room for the rest of the day, after lecturing him in a voice we could hear down on the beach.
It wasn’t Hal I wanted to sit with me, it was Jack, but it felt pretty lonely by myself.
It was going to be a while before the fire died down enough to roast the wieners. Suddenly the thought of continuing to sit there any longer was intolerable. I began to scoot farther away from the writhing dancers, into the shadows. Nobody was paying any attention to me, not even Hal. When I reached the concealing darkness under the trees, I stood up and walked toward the Powell cottage. If anybody said anything, I’d say I needed to use their bathroom.
Nobody paid any attention, though, so when I reached the house I kept on going, farther back into the woods.
The Shurik place was the only one in the community that wasn’t right on the lake. It was small, the earliest cottage to be built here, and had never been intended as a year-round house. After Mr. Shurik died, though, Lina couldn’t afford to support two sons and keep both the cottage and the house they had in the village four miles away. So she sold the town house, because it was worth the most, and spent part of the proceeds insulating the cottage. From then on she and Brody and Jack had stayed there all year. No school bus came all the way out here, so the boys walked the three miles to the nearest house even through deep snowdrifts in the winter. The plow didn’t clear the road in bad weather because it was a private road to the lake, not a county responsibility.
I could see the cottage lights through the trees after a few minutes’ walking. My heart quickened its beat, though it wasn’t likely I’d meet Jack.
The cottage seemed smaller than I’d remembered, maybe shabbier. There were no shades drawn, and I could see into the living room. Lina was there, in the same old rocking chair with the lumpy cushions, reading. Though she had little formal education, she’d always been a reader. The boys used to haul bags of books for her from town. Sometimes I borrowed them when I was younger; she read everything from westerns to mysteries to biography and history.
Taking care to stay well out of the light that spilled through the windows, I maneuvered around to see the rest of the room, but there was no one else there.
I was a Peeping Tom, I thought, but I didn’t move away. I wanted to go in there, to talk to Lina, to wait for Jack to come home from wherever he was, but I didn’t dare.
Was it possible Jack was in his room? I knew where it was, a little lean-to around the back. I started to inch my way around the cottage, wincing when I stepped on a stick and it broke with a sharp crack.
I held my breath, waiting for Lina to come to the screened door and look out to see what had made the noise, but she ignored it. The radio was on, playing softly; maybe the music had covered the sound.
To my disappointment, there was no lamp on in Jack’s room, though a shaft of light slanted in from the room beyond. It didn’t show much, only a bulletin board of cork with a bunch of stuff stuck on it with thumbtacks.
Growing bolder, I took a few quick steps toward the window in order to see better. The curtains were open, and now I could make out the shape of a dresser, and I knew his bed had always been right under the window.
He wasn’t there. He must have gone to town or something. I exhaled with a ragged sound. My folks would skin me if they knew I was looking in someone else’s windows like this.
Still I lingered, eyes fixed on the bulletin board. There was a newspaper photo there, but I couldn’t make out exactly who the people in it were, but there were three figures. And a strip of paper with dark print that was big enough to decipher. Shurik Convicted, it said, in bold black letters.
Why on earth was Jack keeping that? I wondered. How could he live with that horrible headline?
I was turning away when I recognized one of the other items tacked to the board.
The Christmas card I’d sent him last winter. The one he’d never answered.
I hadn’t written anything on it. None of the things I thought of to say could be written down, not without being embarrassing even if Jack was the only one who saw it. All I’d done was sign my name, “Cici,” with no “love” or anything like that.
I’d been bitterly disappointed that he hadn’t sent me a card, as he had the previous year. Of course that one had been a little kid’s card, with a jolly Santa on it and a sucker—cherry flavor—inside. Maybe he’d figured I was too old for something so childish last year.
Why had he kept my card? There were no others on display.
I pictured him lying on that narrow bed just out of my line of vision, maybe for days at a time, trying to figure it all out after Brody was arrested. Had he cried, or was he past that kind of thing?
In the distance, down on the beach, I heard shouts go up, and when I glanced that way I could see a shower of sparks between the trees. I could no longer hear the jungle music. And if somebody came along and caught me here, peering into the Shurik cottage, what could I possibly say?
I backed away, wanting to go home—back to the Judge’s house—but knowing I couldn’t. Not until Ginny and the little kids went home. The grown-ups would want to know why, and I couldn’t tell them. I couldn’t talk to anybody about anything.
It was a good thing the fire was still blazing, or I’d have run into the trees. The smell of the pines was strong in the air, as I made my way back to the group.
Nobody had even noticed I was gone. The send-up of sparks had evidently been from the brush some of the kids had thrown onto the remains of The Sound Wave, but the boat was burning less vigorously now. Some of the boys had cut sticks, and the kids were putting wieners on them. Ginny and Randy were on their knees on one of the blankets, taking the lids off mustard and pickle relish, popping open bags of chips.
Nathan Cyrek, who at twenty-two might have considered himself too old for this kind of gathering, approached with a girl I figured out to be Randy’s sister, Noreen. Probably she accounted for Nathan’s presence. She was blonde and quite pretty. Nathan reached into an open ice chest and pulled out a dripping can, handing it to her.
Then he saw me and got one out for me, too. “Want one, Cici?” he asked.
I took it, not caring what it was. Nathan and Noreen had already turned away, picking up sticks for hot dogs. I popped the top and took a sip, then grimaced.
Beer. I’d tried it when all the other kids did, but I didn’t really like it. Somebody had told me it was an acquired taste; I’d just have to get used to it. But I didn’t see the point. My folks would have grounded me for a couple of years, and my mom belonged to MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. One of the girls at school had been killed by a drunk driver, and I’d already decided I was never going to be in the position of that driver, knowing he was responsible for something like that.
I stepped away from the group and emptied the can into the roots of a tree. I wasn’t thirsty anyway.
It seemed a long time before I could get away and walk home. Ginny and Randy were behind me, laughing quietly, and the little kids were ahead, acting silly and pushing each other into the edge of the water.
Welcome back to the lake, I told myself, and hoped nobody would be around to keep me from going straight upstairs to my own room.
I sure didn’t want to talk to anyone tonight.