When Lina worked in the kitchen, people could show up for breakfast any time they liked. If they really slept in late, they might have to shift for themselves, under her direction, if she was already busy with pies or cookies or something for later meals. That was no problem, because there was always lots of food.
I soon discovered this was no longer the case. Mrs. Graden, as she informed us, would have a hot breakfast at eight; cold cereal and sweet rolls and juice were to be found on the sideboard until nine, and after that time we were not welcome in “her” kitchen. She was engaged in other tasks and had no time for slugabeds, as she termed them.
I made it in time for the hot meal that first day, and so did everybody else. Pancakes and sausages. The cinnamon roll I’d shared with Jack hadn’t lessened my appetite, and I managed to put away my share.
I’d wondered what kind of an excuse I was going to give Ginny before I disappeared with Jack for what I hoped would be a long morning. As it turned out, Ginny had plans of her own, with Randy, and she didn’t even wait for me to say what I was going to do.
So much for my expectations that we’d run as a team, the way we always had before.
Aunt Mavis showed up at the very end of the hot-breakfast period, and Mrs. Graden’s mouth was rather flat when she went back to the griddle for a final stack of buckwheats. Aunt Mavis didn’t notice.
“Bad night?” Mom asked, passing her the syrup, noticing the dark smudges under her sister’s eyes. I knew, because they were plain enough to me.
“It shows, huh?” Aunt Mavis murmured. At the other end of the table, everybody else was listening to the Judge’s account of the morning’s fishing expedition, from hearing about the baits to the total poundage of bass brought in. “Yes, I had some sleepless hours before midnight. I’ll tell you about it later, Vivian.”
I wasn’t interested in the adult talk. I asked to be excused, and nobody even noticed when I left except Grandma Molly, who smiled at me in a rather tired fashion when I gave her an awkward hug.
When I was little, Molly used to wander around the lake with us, looking at tadpoles and frogs and dragonflies, explaining which trees were pines and which shrub was juniper and where the violets and Indian pipes grew in little clumps. Molly wasn’t afraid of anything. Sometimes she’d even catch snakes—blue racers—and let us hold them.
Now she was shriveling up, and she’d lost the energy to play with the younger kids the way she had with us. I hadn’t thought much about getting old, but it was impossible not to, looking at Molly.
Just in case Jack wanted to stay over on the cove, I thought I might take a lunch along, but Mrs. Graden’s formidable back was discouraging. I didn’t dare leave crumbs on her clean counters, making sandwiches, but I did get a little bit brave. I grabbed a plastic bag and dropped a handful of cookies into it from a batch cooling out of the cook’s sight and added a couple of big apples from a bowl beside them. I slipped out the back door before Mrs. Graden knew I’d been snitching.
Jack was waiting. He didn’t have a boat, he had a canoe.
“Whoa! You never allowed me in one of these before,” I said.
“Not since you dumped us both that time and we had to wade through the muck over on the south end because we couldn’t get back into the canoe. Get in, sit at the other end, and I’ll shove off.”
I deposited my meager supplies under my seat and determined not to dunk us again.
It was a perfect day. Blue skies, warm sun, no sign of mosquitoes in the gentle breeze. The lake reflected the sky, and when I trailed my fingers, the water felt just right for swimming. Only I hadn’t brought a suit, darn it.
It was possible to walk all the way around the lake, though there were no houses on most of the far side. The cove was formed by two points of land that poked out into the water, one of them curving to form a protected beach. The path around the lake was away from the water at the cove cut off by thick woods. Nobody ever walked from the path to the cove because of the trees, heavy underbrush, and a marshy area full of mosquitoes. So if you took a boat across the water, you were sure to have privacy.
I remembered the first time Ginny and I went there. We were nervous, although we hadn’t exactly been forbidden to go. It was a grown-up place, or at least a big kids’ place; we could tell by the beer cans and cigarette butts. That was the first time we swam without suits, half scared someone would catch us, though of course they didn’t. It was daring, exciting, to feel the silky water against bare skin, and afterward to stretch out in the sand and let the sun warm us all over.
Later we went with other kids and built fires and had picnics and sat around telling secrets and lies.
I’d never been there alone with Jack.
He didn’t ask me to help paddle. He was obviously used to it; he took off his shirt after the first few minutes, and I watched the sunlight play over his bronzed skin. I’d tried tanning in the front yard for a week or so before we left home, but I felt pale and unhealthy looking. Mom wouldn’t let me stay out long enough to do much good, though it seemed she wasn’t going to be unreasonable about how much time we spent outdoors while we were here.
We rounded the curved point, and the cove opened before us. Still, peaceful. There was more beach here than on the shore we’d left behind, a strip of pale sand almost as good as the beaches on Lake Michigan to the west of us.
“It’s so nice and clean,” I said as we nosed in to a stop.
Jack went over the side, reaching back to draw the slender canoe above the waterline. “That’s because I keep it that way. I pick up the junk and haul it back home to dispose of it.”
“Do other people still come here, then?”
“Not often.” He stretched out a hand to help me out so I didn’t tip the canoe, then pulled it a little farther up the beach. “Come on, I want to show you something.”
A narrow, shallow stream trickled into the lake a few yards away, and we followed it, leaving footprints along its damp banks. The trees closed in around us, a few birches among the pines, and when Jack stopped abruptly, I almost ran into him.
He touched my arm. “From here on, be really quiet.”
I noticed he avoided stepping where he might break a stick, so I did the same. And then I heard the loud smack that brought us both to a halt again.
After a moment we moved slowly forward once more, and I saw it.
A beaver dam. Though I’d never seen one before, I knew at once what the rounded pile of brush was. And there he came, old pa beaver, hauling his latest felled tree to work it into his dam and house.
I looked at Jack, and he was grinning. It was the kind of place he’d have brought me when I was eight. Grandma Molly would have liked it then, too.
We stood watching for long minutes, and another beaver appeared in the water, swimming effortlessly, diving out of sight.
Finally we turned around and made our way back to the beach, not talking until we were nearly there. I had mixed feelings. I’d enjoyed seeing it, but I wondered if he was always going to treat me as if I were eight years old.
If he looked at me, in my cutoffs and T-shirt with the picture of the bridge at Mackinac on the front of it, he could hardly help noticing that I was nearly fifteen now.
He stood looking out across the water. From here no houses or docks showed; we could have been on the moon for all the company we had.
“Let’s go swimming,” he said.
Something jumped in my stomach.
“I didn’t bring a suit,” I said, my mouth going dry.
“Neither did I. But our clothes will dry before we get home. Or we can always say, if they don’t, that we flipped the canoe.” He grinned. “Remembering your reputation, everybody will believe that.”
“What the heck, why not?” I decided and made a run for the water and a shallow dive.
It was cold at first, but within a few minutes, with Jack swimming strongly after me, it felt wonderful. I cut across the little bay toward the end of the point, and within seconds Jack passed me, then held a pace just fast enough to stay slightly ahead of me.
We emerged, dripping, and dropped onto the warm sand. I felt invigorated and alive, and I thought that Jack did, too.
We sat there not even talking for a while, and it was a comfortable silence. Somehow I’d known that it would be the same with Jack as it had always been. I didn’t have to try to think of things to say and hope I wouldn’t sound like an idiot, the way I did with the boys at school.
Finally he stirred. “Did I notice a bag of apples or something?”
“And cookies,” I said. “Do you want to swim back or walk around?”
“Better walk, maybe, and keep on drying out. What kind of cookies?”
“Just peanut butter ones. Not those fat oatmeal-chocolate-chip-raisin ones your mom used to make.”
“She still makes ’em,” Jack said as we began to trot easily around the edge of the bay toward the canoe. “She sends boxes of them to Brody. They x-ray them before he can have them.”
So we were back to Brody. Of course we’d have to be, sooner or later. I doubted that Brody was ever far from Jack’s mind. I slowed to a walk again.
“It’s been very hard on you and your mom, hasn’t it?”
“It kills us,” Jack said flatly. “Do you know he was sentenced to twenty-five years? He’ll be a middle-aged man when he gets out. And he won’t have been to college, or have any job experience, or any family except Ma and me. And he didn’t do it, Cici. He didn’t kill Zoe.”
My throat hurt. “Did . . . did they try to figure out who else could have done it?”
“Not very hard. They decided it was Brody, because Zoe had said he was driving her to the movies, and they found his footprints on the beach a little ways away. But he never went to town, nobody saw him or Zoe there, and everybody said they’d never intended to go to a show. Why would they? Brody was going with Ilona, but she had gone over to Traverse City with her mom, shopping or something, and she wasn’t home that night. But he didn’t conspire to spend time alone with Zoe. He just went for a walk along the beach, by himself. How are you going to prove you did anything by yourself?”
I didn’t have any answer for that. When we reached the canoe, I got out my plastic bag and split the apples and cookies; we sat on the ground to eat them.
It wasn’t even noon yet, but Jack gathered up our apple cores in the bag and reached down to pull me up. “Come on, got to get back.”
Disappointed, I got to my feet. “What’s our hurry?”
“My job. In town. I pump gas, afternoons, so Mr. Allen can work in the garage. It’s a wonder he gave me the job, but he caught Bobby Jensen in the till and had to fire him, and there wasn’t anybody else who didn’t already have a summer job.”
Feeling subdued, I asked, “You didn’t have one because . . . of Brody?”
“Most folks don’t want a murderer’s brother working for them. It might be contagious, you know. Even Mom has to drive over to Greenway to work for some people named Harris. After she left the Judge’s, they all had reasons why they couldn’t hire her in Timbers.”
“Did he fire her?” I blurted, wading out alongside the canoe before I stepped into it while Jack held it steady.
“The Judge? No. She quit. Said he wasn’t willing to help her, stand by Brody, or anything. I worked last summer for the Kraskis, but they made it clear they wouldn’t need me this year. They were always good friends with the Cyreks, so it wasn’t a big surprise to me.”
He stepped into the canoe with one foot and pushed off with the other, then reached for the paddle. “No, the Shuriks aren’t exactly popular around these parts. I suggested we move now, but Ma thinks I’d be better off finishing high school here. I can’t see what difference it makes.”
My heart lurched. “Move? Away from this area?”
“No reason to stay, is there, when Ma has to drive thirty miles to work, and the other kids look at me as if I’m some kind of freak, with a brother in the state prison. Ma doesn’t even shop for groceries locally since a few people deliberately avoided speaking to her when they met in the aisle.”
There was bitterness in his words, and I couldn’t blame him. “It isn’t your fault, or your mother’s.”
“No.” He dipped the paddle deeply into the placid water, propelling us forward, too fast, toward home. “But that’s the way it’s going to be, I guess. And when I’m out of school, there’s not going to be any work for me here. I asked my Uncle Doug, in Traverse, if I could go stay with him and look for work there. Maybe in a year or two I could save enough to go on to a trade school somewhere. I’m a pretty decent mechanic.”
There was a pain in my chest. Lina and Jack moving away, to where I’d never see them again? My lips were stiff. “What did your uncle say?”
“Said ‘sure.’ So I’ll go as soon as graduation next spring. If Ma can sell the place, she’ll probably come, too. Trouble is, it isn’t worth all that much, and technically, she can’t sell it to anybody the Association doesn’t approve.”
Everybody who had cottages at the lake belonged to the Association. The last I knew the Judge was president of it again, and before that it had been his close friend, Fergus. They’d never been fussy about the style of the buildings, or how often they were painted, or how the grounds were kept up—actually, we just had natural grass, beach, and trees, so there wasn’t much upkeep. The only time I could remember their turning anyone down for membership was when a snotty family from Chicago came out to look at one of the houses and to insult both Fergus and the Judge. The man was a big-time lawyer, and he made a remark about the Judge being a big frog in a little puddle, which didn’t go over too well. Plus he managed to drive over the garden Fergus and Ellen had planted, said he couldn’t tell it was anything but raw dirt.
I think the official language of the agreement everyone had signed said that anybody who bought in should be “compatible” with the current inhabitants. The people from Chicago were rejected by unanimous vote.
“Let me know your address when you go, okay?” I suggested, hoping my voice didn’t sound the way I thought it did. “So I can send you a Christmas card or something.”
He lightened up a little. “Next time write something on it, huh? Like, ‘Your loyal friend,’ instead of just your name.”
“Count on it,” I said, turning into the wind so it would dry the moisture I felt forming in my eyes.
Neither of us said anything else until we got to the dock where my sister, Freddy, was waiting with an anxious look on her face.
“It’s about time you showed up,” she shouted as soon as we got close enough. “Molly’s had a stroke, and they had to take her to the hospital!”