There was nobody around when I came downstairs next morning.
It was cool and quiet. Mrs. Graden had not even shown up to fix breakfast yet.
The Judge was always up early, and I could see that he’d made coffee and toast. He was probably out on the water with Fergus MacBean, his old fishing buddy. They always insisted the best fishing was right after dawn.
I was hungry, and it was easy to find enough to get me started. I remembered telling Molly once, when I was about ten, “Oh Grandma, you have the most wonderful refrigerator!”
This morning there were big homemade cinnamon rolls, which I spread with real butter; I carried them, along with a glass of orange juice, outside to eat.
Sure enough, there was the boat on the other side of the lake. Maybe if they caught enough, we’d have fresh fish for supper.
The only other sign of life was a figure on the dock down at the Powells, and something about it looked familiar in a way that made me forget to take another bite.
Jack? Was it Jack, sitting there with his back against one of the pilings, dangling his feet in the water?
I didn’t even take time to think. I cut across the grass and onto the trail, moving quickly.
He watched me come, and gradually details became clear. He was wearing only a faded pair of jeans, rolled up so they wouldn’t get wet. I wondered if he’d been working out with Brody’s weights, because his chest and shoulders had developed considerably since I’d seen him, and he had a golden tan over all those muscles. His hair had gone almost blond already from the sun. His hazel eyes looked me over as I walked out on the dock.
“Hi, Cici,” he said, as if we’d met yesterday.
My voice sort of stuck in my throat, though I’d never had any trouble talking to Jack before. “Hi. I missed you at the thingy last night.”
“I don’t go to those much anymore,” he said. His voice was deeper. “Kid stuff.”
“All the big kids were there.” I felt a burst of exhilaration and took a bite of the cinnamon roll, then broke off a chunk and handed it to him, the way I used to share my treats with him when I was a little kid. “I kind of felt like I was a big kid now, until I got here.”
He accepted the half roll. “Not as good as Mom’s, but not bad,” he said. He was openly inspecting me, and I wished I’d put on my new red shorts and striped shirt instead of this old outfit.
“You haven’t changed much, except to get bigger,” I said, sounding a little breathless. I hoped he’d put it down to my brisk walk over here.
He studied me for a moment longer. “You have.” His grin came as I remembered it, making my breath catch in my throat. “You aren’t flat chested anymore.”
“I’m almost fifteen,” I said. “It’s about time. I was getting worried.”
The grin widened. “All pointless, as you can see. You mean none of those guys tried to hit on you last night?”
“Nathan gave me a can of beer, which I dumped out in the grass. He was with Noreen what’s-’er-name.”
“Donner. Yeah. Well, I figured Nathan would be there. It’s one reason I wasn’t.”
I lowered myself onto the edge of the dock, fairly close to him. “Because of Brody?”
“Because of me,” he corrected. He took another bite and chewed, then reached for my glass and took a swig of orange juice before handing it back.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I don’t feel comfortable around any of them and particularly not around Nathan and Chet Cyrek.” He looked me straight in the eye. “I kind of thought I might hear from you, after it happened.”
He’d been disappointed, but was giving me a second chance.
“I didn’t know about it until we got here yesterday. Nobody in our family writes, or even calls, most of the time.”
Jack grunted. “I got your Christmas card, but it didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t answer it,” I said.
“No.” There was a small silence. “I didn’t know what to say to you, Cici.”
“Like I don’t know what to say to you now.”
“We always used to be able to talk to each other. You used to ask me the darndest questions. Like ‘What’s all this stuff about the birds and the bees?’ ”
“You always answered me. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have understood anything,” I told him.
“It’s been two years. I guess you must have figured out a lot of things during that time.”
“A few. But I’m struggling with Brody and Zoe. I can hardly believe it.”
He stared at me, then drew in a deep breath that sent interesting movement through his chest. “Do you believe it? That my brother killed her?”
I hesitated. “Everybody seems to think he did. Including Ilona.”
“Yeah. That’s what really crushed him, you know. Ilona. She never came to see him. Never talked to him. Didn’t even write him a note. So he knew she swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. She took it for granted that he was guilty. He didn’t see how she could, after all the plans they’d made together. He never looked at another girl after he and Ilona started going together. He didn’t even like Zoe. Why would he have been messing around with her?”
“That question bothers me, too. You don’t believe he did it, do you?”
“No.” He drew up one knee and clasped his hands over his shinbone, staring out across the water. “I know he didn’t. I know Brody.”
“I never thought he was a liar,” I said softly, “but Ginny says everybody lies sometimes. The way we did when we were kids and didn’t want to be punished for something. She reminded me of when we set that old barn on fire, how we denied ever being there. And our folks believed us.”
“That was stupid kid stuff,” Jack said. “Trying cigarettes. That’s a whole different thing from what happened to Zoe.” He fell silent for a moment, then added very quietly, “It just about tore my mother apart. My dad died such a long time ago, and all she ever had was the two of us. We were close, really close. We talked about everything, including sex. And there’s no way Brody was trying to talk Zoe into sex when she was killed.”
“I wasn’t old enough to think much about that stuff when I was here before,” I mused, “but I remember what Zoe was like. I doubt if she’d have resisted very much, if he had tried. Not so he’d have to strangle her to shut her up when she objected.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t think she’d have objected. Mom didn’t think so, either. Zoe flirted with guys from the time she was about twelve. Everything she said and did was a come-on for somebody. There was a time when she bugged Brody—sooner or later she bugged just about everybody who wore pants, including me—but he talked to us about it. He thought she was a pest.”
One phrase hung in my mind. “Even you?” I asked, though when I thought of it, I realized he and Zoe had been about the same age, so that wasn’t surprising. I recognized the sharp jab to my heart as jealousy, though Jack wasn’t and had never been my territory. I just wanted him to be.
“We all thought she had something going with that guy Trafton, and he must have been thirty or more. My mom even remarked that she was going to get into trouble, hanging around with a guy almost twice her age, but the Cyreks never did anything about it. They told Mrs. Powell they thought making a fuss about a relationship would just make Zoe more stubborn, and that they figured it would run its course, the way all the other crushes had. He hadn’t been around for a while by the time the murder happened, or maybe he’d have been a suspect instead of my brother.”
“I don’t know any Trafton. Who was he?”
“Just a guy who showed up last summer for a few months, had a job at the feed store in town. Kind of a drifter, I guess. Carl Trafton. He met some of the kids and came out here to swim with them. Mom commented that it was funny he couldn’t find any friends his own age, but Zoe said everybody in this part of the world was already married by that age, and he wasn’t interested in anybody stuffy enough to be married.”
“What happened to him, then?” I took my last bite of cinnamon roll, another gulp from my glass, and passed him the last of the orange juice.
“I think the local cops ran him off, finally. Somebody complained about his hanging around the coffee shop and the theater. By that time he’d been fired from the feed store because he didn’t always show up on time.”
The village cops had always been sort of a joke among us kids; there was only one police car, and I don’t think any of the four officers had ever had any kind of training. They mostly sent drunks home, broke up Saturday night fights, and talked to the fathers of kids who accidentally broke windows while they were playing work-up because there weren’t enough kids for a whole baseball team. We didn’t have much genuine crime in our county.
“Did the local cops investigate Zoe’s death?” I asked.
“Yeah, they came when her body was discovered. But then the sheriff was called in to do the real investigating, so it wasn’t a bunch of amateurs when it came to that part. Not that I think they did such a professional job.” He put the empty glass down on the dock between us and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “They arrested Brody because they couldn’t find anybody else.”
I was still back a minute or two. “Is there a chance this Carl Trafton hadn’t really left the area? He sounds like a better suspect than Brody.”
“Except for the fact that when they checked up on him after the murder—they did do that—he had witnesses that he wasn’t hanging around the lake that night. He was over in Greenway, and several people testified they saw him there. Old Toomhy, you know, the old geezer who played poker with the Judge? And the Judge was one of them, too. He was over there during the evening, had some kind of engine trouble, and both he and Toomhy said they ran into Trafton working on an old junker at a service station. So he wasn’t the one who strangled her. He looked like he could murder someone, though. The rest of us couldn’t see why Zoe was attracted to him; he wasn’t good-looking. He had pockmarks and a scar, right across here—” He ran a finger across his temple and onto his cheek. “No movie star, for sure.”
I began to figure out why they might have picked Brody for a suspect. “So there weren’t many people it could have been except the ones right here, at the lake or in the village.”
“They were pretty sure it was somebody here, at the lake. For a joke, some of the kids had closed the gate and put a padlock on it. Some people who had to wait until it could be broken open were pretty ticked about that. Fergus had a load of lumber he was bringing home to build some cupboards for Ellen, and Wally Powell’s ice cream dripped all over him before he got it home. Nobody could get the lock off until the next day when Jerry Staley came out from the garage with some heavy metal cutters or something. The Judge and Wally and Fergus all had to leave their cars on the other side of the gate until he got there.”
I felt a chill run over my bare arms. “So nobody could have driven in or out from the lake the night Zoe was killed? It happened at night, right?”
“Yeah. The Cyreks saw Zoe right after supper, and then her brothers found her shortly past midnight, after Mrs. Cyrek found out Zoe wasn’t home yet. Of course somebody could have climbed over the gate, but there was no sign that anybody had.”
It was a scary thought. I’d known practically everybody at the lake since before I could remember. How could someone I knew have killed Zoe, no matter how big a pest she was? After all, she couldn’t make anyone do what she wanted; all they had to do was ignore her.
“Who do you think it was, then, if it wasn’t Brody?”
I didn’t look at his face but at his hands, tanned and still, lying on his thighs.
“I’ve spent hours wondering about that,” Jack said, almost inaudibly. “I don’t know, Cici. All I’m sure of is that Brody never killed anybody.”
We sat there for a while in silence, listening to the lap of the water around the pilings, feeling the sun warming our skin as it rose higher into the sky.
I felt bad about Zoe, worse about Brody, sad for Ilona and Jack and Lina.
But for myself, I felt an inner excitement at being here, back at the lake—sitting next to Jack the way I had when I was eight and he’d put the wriggling worms on my hook because it made me queasy to do it myself.
I wanted with all my heart to do something to help him now, the way he’d always helped me. Only I didn’t know how.
Suddenly he got to his feet, reaching down to pull me up, too. His hand was warm and strong, and I felt as if my blood got thicker, pounding in my ears.
“I’ve got some chores to do for Ma first,” he said, letting me go. “But after that I’m going over to the cove. You want to come?”
“Sure,” I said. I could see several figures out on the Judge’s dock, meeting the boat when it came in. I could make out Fergus, holding up a string of glistening bass. “I’d better put in an appearance at breakfast.”
“Okay. Meet me in an hour and fifteen minutes.”
His grin was the same as I remembered it. I nodded, checked the time, and watched him heading into the woods before I took the path along the edge of the lake.
I had to do something to help him, I thought.
But what?