On Saturday morning I heard the phone ringing very early.
My heart racing, I roused out of a dream about being strangled by a shadowy, faceless man.
Downstairs, the phone went on ringing. I sat up, twisting my watch to see the time in the dim light. It was only a quarter after five.
Nobody made normal phone calls at 5 A.M.
An ache grew in my chest, and I slid out of bed. I heard doors opening in the hallway, followed by bare feet thudding on the stairs.
Ginny and I bumped into each other on the top step, then raced down. Mom was behind us, struggling into a robe.
Aunt Pat dashed into the Judge’s den off the lower hallway and the ringing stopped. I heard her say “Hello?” and then nothing.
I didn’t want to follow her into the den, but Mom was behind me and so were Ilona and Aunt Mavis. I got pushed along to stand in front of the big desk.
I could hear a voice on the other end of the telephone line, but couldn’t make out the words. I stared down at the matched desk set in jet black, with the Judge’s initials in gold, and the desk calendar that was way behind because the Judge hadn’t been home to work here for days. Everything was very neat, except that the rose in the bud vase had dried up and dropped a few withered petals on the polished desktop.
I glanced up and saw Aunt Pat’s knuckles go white on the telephone receiver, so I looked down again, to the pencils and other gadgets in the container that matched everything else on the desk.
It didn’t help, though. Aunt Pat made a sort of a choked sound, said, “We’ll be there as soon as we can,” and hung up the phone.
For a moment we all just stood there, waiting, and I watched the tears spill over onto Aunt Pat’s cheeks. She swallowed, then reached for Mom as she said, “Mama just died. She never regained consciousness.”
It was a horrible day.
Nobody went back to bed. Mrs. Graden didn’t come until seven, and Ilona had put on a pot of coffee, but nobody was hungry, not even the little kids who woke up, too, and came to investigate.
There was a quiet discussion about who would go over to the hospital, and which funeral home was to be contacted. Everybody was worried about the Judge. There wasn’t as much crying as I’d expected, at least not sobbing out loud, though all of Grandma Molly’s daughters let the tears flow freely and kept wiping them away.
“I hope they don’t make us go,” Ginny muttered under her breath. “Have you ever seen a dead person, Cici?”
“No. Mom said—” My throat closed momentarily and I had to hesitate to get my voice back. “She said dying is just the end part of life, and it’s something we all have to deal with.”
Nobody wanted to deal with it, though. It was a relief when it was decided that only Mom and her two sisters would go to help the Judge make arrangements and bring him home, though I felt guilty about wanting to escape the whole business. I had really liked Grandma Molly.
Ilona heard Ginny and me talking about it, and said, “We’ll all have to go to the funeral, you know.”
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Ginny decided, but I knew I couldn’t pretend to be sick. Mom would need all the support she could get.
Before she left the house, she called Dad. When she’d relayed the news, she handed the phone to me. “He wants to talk to you, Cici.”
“Hi, Daddy.” My voice was husky. “Are you going to come up?”
“Hi, punkin.” He hadn’t called me that in years. “Yeah, I’ll wind up a few things here and be on the road as soon as I can. You doing all right?”
“Well, hang on, and hold Mom up the best you can, honey. This is a rough time for her. How’s Freddy?”
“Okay, I guess. I don’t know if it’s really hit her yet, that Grandma Molly is gone.”
“I know. Keep an eye on her. If she needs to talk, be there for her if you can. Some people need to talk about the person who’s died, and others find it hard to listen, but it’s important.”
“Okay, Daddy. I’ll try,” I assured him. “We need you here, so come as soon as you can.”
“I will. I love you all, Cici. ’Bye.”
My face was wet when I hung up. Ginny followed me back out into the big living room and kicked at a chair before she flopped into it.
“I wish my dad would come, but Mom didn’t call him. I’m not sure they’re even speaking to each other.”
“He’s speaking to you, isn’t he? Why don’t you call him?”
She stared at me. “Yeah. He’s my dad, isn’t he? Yeah, I think I will call him after they’re gone. Do you think we’ll really all have to go to the funeral? The little kids and all?”
“I don’t know about Freddy and Misty, but I’m pretty sure the rest of us will. Arnie and Errol, and you and me.”
“I don’t want to see Grandma Molly dead,” Ginny said, and I dug for a Kleenex.
“I don’t guess anybody does,” I said softly.
I thought maybe under the circumstances she’d hang around the cottage today, but when Randy showed up, they went into a huddle at one end of the porch. Then Ginny came over to me and announced with a touch of defiance, “There’s nothing for me to do around here, so I’m going over to Randy’s, the way we’d planned. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No, go ahead,” I told her, though I kind of wished she’d hang around and talk. About Molly, about Zoe’s murder, about anything.
The house was quiet after that. If Freddy needed to talk, she was doing it with Misty and some of the other little kids from down the lake. Inside, they’d been subdued, but once they were out on the beach and the dock, I could hear them laughing and splashing water on each other.
I almost wished I were still seven or eight years old. Nobody expects much of you when you’re that age.
And then I thought of Jack, and I knew I didn’t want to be a little kid again, even if being older could be pretty painful sometimes.
In the kitchen I could hear the mixer running. The boys had gone off somewhere, too. As far as I knew I was the only one left in the house except for the housekeeper, unless Ilona was in her room upstairs. I didn’t have any urge to visit with either one of them.
My thoughts drifted back to Zoe and Brody. Who? Why? Why hadn’t the Judge made more of an effort to help Brody, especially after Lina asked him to? Did he know something that Lina and Jack didn’t know?
I had to go about this more methodically, I decided, if I were going to learn anything. Maybe it was hopeless, when the police hadn’t discovered any suspect besides Brody, but I didn’t see how it could hurt to try. And after all, I didn’t have anything else to do, nor anybody else to do it with.
I went into the den to find some paper and a pencil, and had to look through the desk drawers for the paper.
The Judge kept everything in neat compartments: paper clips, mail stickers and labels, business cards, several ledgers with leather bindings. No paper.
The last drawer stuck. This was the last place I could think to try, so I jerked as hard as I could.
The drawer came loose and I went backward, dumping the contents onto the floor. Great. I’d have to hope I could get it back in decent order, so His Honor—we used to call him that when we were smaller, because he seemed to get a kick out of it—wouldn’t know I’d been poking around.
The paper was on the bottom of the drawer, and I took out a couple of sheets, then got on my knees to pick up the rest of the stuff. It was mostly old check registers, neatly boxed except for one stack that spilled open.
In proper order, no doubt, so I’d better get them back in the same sequence, by dates.
I don’t know why I looked beyond the dates in the front of each register. Maybe it was because when a few pages flipped I caught a glimpse of the running balance.
Wow! I knew Mom and Dad would like to have that much in a checking account.
I paused with the register open in my hand, eyes scanning some of the other figures. I guessed he needed that much in there because he occasionally wrote some pretty big checks.
There was the entry for Ilona’s tuition at the University of Michigan. And one for his newest car, paid in full, apparently. My folks had commented on that. He had turned in an almost new car for an even newer one. “Wish I had that kind of money,” my father had said.
The Judge’s checkbooks were none of my business, and I knew it. But it was like I was on automatic, looking at this one, though I had every intention of closing it and putting it away.
And then something caught and held my attention. A check for a thousand dollars, made out to cash.
What did anybody do with a thousand dollars in cash?
It had been written on the first of the month, six months ago. Without conscious thought, I flipped a page. First of the month, five months ago.
Another thousand-dollar check, made out to cash.
I forgot I was looking at someone else’s private papers. I moved ahead to the next first of the month. Another thousand dollars. To cash.
I went both forward and backward in the check registers. There was a total of fourteen months’ worth of similar checks. Fourteen thousand dollars, all in cash.
No explanation came to mind. I shuffled the registers into a stack and put them away again. But I was curious.
The desk was as good a place as any to work, I decided. I sat down and began to write a list of names, beginning at the north end of the lake, working around the length of it, putting in everybody over the age of fifteen. It didn’t seem likely that anybody younger than that had murdered Zoe.
I felt silly writing most of the names. Boys my age, Zoe’s brothers and her mother and father, Lina and Jack, Fergus and Ellen. Mentally I was rejecting most people as soon as I wrote their names. But I couldn’t overlook any possible suspect.
I wrote our family’s names last, starting with the Judge and Aunt Pat and Aunt Mavis. Mom and Dad and Freddy and I hadn’t been there last summer, so I didn’t put us down. I wasn’t sure about some of the newcomers, but as of last year they might not have known Zoe yet.
I finished up with Mrs. Graden, though she lived in town and I doubted she’d known either Zoe or Brody.
When the list was complete, I got a ruler out of the top center drawer and used it to draw vertical lines down the page, adding headings to each column: motive, opportunity, alibi, and a couple of blanks for things I might think of later.
Then I took the easiest things first and made check marks in red pen in those columns.
Zoe’s brothers had found her a little after midnight, so the crime had taken place before that. That meant practically anybody could have done it. As early as most people at the lake went to bed, even a married person could conceivably have slipped out after his or her spouse was asleep, without anyone knowing about it.
Probably Zoe had agreed to meet someone at the cottage where she was killed. Otherwise, why would she have been there? Or maybe there had been a third party who followed her—or the second party—to see who was meeting whom.
How could I find out where everybody was that night? Nobody would admit to being anywhere but where they were supposed to be.
I decided to go on to motive.
If I counted throwing herself at every male as a reason for getting rid of her, practically everybody at the lake would qualify. If I counted jealous wives or girlfriends, all the females would earn check marks.
Even Grandma Molly, whose name I had forgotten to write down. I added it in, feeling disloyal and stupid, but I’d set out to cover all bases, and Molly had been here. I couldn’t imagine Zoe coming on to the Judge, nor him having the slightest interest in her, but if that had happened, Molly could have been a jealous wife.
I added another category at the top of the column: strength?
My frail little grandmother couldn’t have strangled a kitten, let alone a healthy, athletic sixteen-year-old girl. I wrote no after Molly’s name.
I slapped down my pen in frustration. If the only motives I could think of were jealousy or an angry male, either a harassed or a rejected one, I was getting nowhere. It just wasn’t a strong enough reason to kill somebody. All anyone would have had to do was walk away and ignore her.
The phone rang alongside of me.
I jumped, then waited for Mrs. Graden to answer it.
In the kitchen, I heard the TV. She was watching a morning soap opera.
When the phone rang again, I picked it up, hoping it wasn’t more bad news. I hadn’t even said anything yet when a man’s voice spoke in my ear.
“I think you forgot something, Judge. I won’t wait.”
Was there a threat in his tone? I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry, the Judge isn’t here. May I take a message?”
That startled him. After a few seconds, he said, “When’ll he be home?”
“I don’t know for sure. His . . . his wife died this morning. I guess he’ll be home later today. Can I tell him who called?”
He muttered a curse and hung up.
I stared at the phone. What was that all about?
“Cici! Cici!”
Ginny’s little sister, Misty, came running through the house, screaming at the top of her lungs.
I got up and went to the doorway just in time to have her crash into me. “What’s the matter?”
“Freddy got stung by a whole bunch of bees!”
Oh, crum, I thought. I hoped this wouldn’t mean a trip to the Emergency Room. There were several cars around here, but I didn’t know if any of the keys were around, and Ilona was the only one who could drive legally.
As it turned out, there were only two stings, though the girls had poked a nest with a stick and stirred up the entire hive, so Freddy was lucky. After we got that situation under control, and I’d explained to them in detail how stupid they had been, Freddy stopped crying except for an occasional sniffle, and I persuaded them that cool lake water might make it feel better, so they went back outside.
I was debating whether or not it would be worth my life to invade the kitchen to get something to make up for the breakfast I hadn’t eaten, when I heard my cousins Arnie and Errol tromping up the steps to the house.
They looked just alike—blond hair and gray eyes, on the skinny side—except that Errol wore horn-rimmed glasses.
“Hi, Cici. Is anybody fixing anything for lunch yet?” Arnie wanted to know.
“It’s only ten-thirty,” I told him. “But we got up so early this morning that I’m getting hungry, too. Maybe if all three of us go in at once, she’ll let us have something to eat.”
“I hope Mrs. Graden made cinnamon rolls again,” Errol said.
She hadn’t, but she’d stocked up on big bran muffins with raisins in them, and she even let us sit at the kitchen table and put butter on them and drink orange juice.
Errol wiped his mouth on his sleeve and pushed back his chair when we’d finished. “You want to come with us, Cici, over to that cabin where Zoe was murdered?”
A chill ran quick fingers down my spine. “What for?” I asked.
“Aren’t you curious about it?” Arnie asked, taking another muffin to eat on the way. “I mean, we never saw a place where anybody was murdered before. We might find something interesting.”
“Like what?” I wondered aloud. “It happened almost a year ago, and the police were all over it. I doubt if they left any clues or anything.”
Errol’s eyes were magnified through his lenses. “You believe Brody did it? We like Brody. I caught a baby rabbit once, and he made us put it back where it was, said it would die if we tried to keep it. And remember when Arnie sprained his ankle jumping into old Fergus’s boat, and Brody carried him home? We don’t think he’d kill anybody. Anyway, we’re going to look around. You want to come with us? When it happened, the Judge told us to stay away from there, but that was a long time ago, and they’re all finished investigating.”
They didn’t usually include me in their activities, and generally I wasn’t interested in what they did. But it might be a good idea to go, and I didn’t have much else to do.
“Okay, sure,” I agreed. “Let’s go.”
We set out through the woods, our feet almost silent on the pine needles, and I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the murderer. Also silent, slipping between the trees, maybe following Zoe. Hating her, possibly.
But why? Why had he hated her enough to kill her?