I knew it was foolish, but I couldn’t help feeling creepy going into the cabin where Zoe had died.
My cousins felt it, too.
Arnie stopped on the threshold, looking around as if expecting a mad killer to leap out of the shadows.
It was actually pretty ordinary, a small two-bedroom cabin furnished with castoffs from the Wades’ house in Milwaukee. A sagging couch, a worn easy chair, some scarred tables.
The Wades were an older couple who had come here summers for years until about three years ago. Then Mrs. Wade had fractured her hip, and though we’d heard she was fine now, they had never come back.
I suspected that after what had happened here last year, they never would. They’d sell it to someone who hadn’t known Zoe or Brody, who wouldn’t feel as if the cabin were filled with ghosts.
“Spooky, isn’t it?” Errol asked.
The spookiness was all in our imaginations, and I said so. If we hadn’t known Zoe had died here, we wouldn’t have thought there was anything unusual about it at all.
“No blood stains anywhere,” Arnie commented, stepping inside so Errol and I could follow him into the small living room.
“Why would there be?” I scoffed. “She wasn’t stabbed, she was strangled.”
A spider had spun a huge web in one of the windows and it sat there, dark and puffy, waiting for a victim. A fly, following us through the open doorway, unwisely headed toward the motionless creature in the center of the silken strands, and a moment later it was trapped. It struggled as we watched, then grew more feeble, until finally the fat spider bound it fast, to eat later.
Was that how Zoe felt? I wondered. Had she come here looking for adventure and romance, only to be surprised from behind, the life choked out of her the way it had been squeezed out of the fly?
All of a sudden I didn’t want to be here. I hadn’t liked Zoe particularly, and neither had anyone else, but she’d been a person, a bright and bubbly girl not much older than I was, and she’d been savagely strangled.
It must have taken a lot of anger to make someone kill her that way.
Anger, or fear.
The thought came to me as I turned to leave.
Fear? Had someone had something to fear from Zoe?
Maybe Zoe had known something about one of the people at the lake, something she’d taunted them with, something they didn’t want known.
It would have to have been pretty serious if they’d taken such a terrible risk to silence her.
“Hey,” Errol said behind me, “you’re not leaving already, are you? We didn’t even look around yet.
“There’s nothing to see,” I told him. “How come the place is wide open? Didn’t they lock it up after they’d done their investigating?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Arnie said. “But kids have broken in. Curious, you know. The lock’s broken.”
He hadn’t inspected the lock when we arrived. I wondered if he was one of the kids who had broken in, curious. I didn’t care enough to ask.
“Leave things the way they are,” I advised, and headed for the beach to walk home along the shore. It felt better out in the open, rather than imagining someone skulking behind one of the trees in the woods.
Brody had walked this way that fatal night. Sooner or later practically everybody who lived out here walked around the edge of the lake, thinking their own thoughts. At least they used to, before Zoe was killed. Even at night nobody would have been afraid. The community at Crystal Lake was a family, it would have been like walking around your own house in the dark.
That feeling of security was gone now. For me, and probably for everyone else as well.
The Judge’s cottage was much the same as I’d left it. The soap operas were still on on the kitchen TV, but something smelled good. Homemade soup, maybe.
Mrs. Graden looked around when I passed the kitchen door. “Mr. Kraski picked up the mail,” she said. “It’s there on the little table. Maybe you could put it in on the Judge’s desk. He’ll want to see it when he gets home.”
Judging by the size of the stack, it had been accumulating for a while. The housekeeper had separated it into two piles: first-class letters, and everything else.
I picked up the stacks and carried them into the study. It looked like ordinary stuff, mostly bills. Well, at least the Judge didn’t have to worry about having enough money to pay for them, the way we occasionally did at our house.
When I put the stacks on the desk, two of the envelopes fell onto the floor. I picked them up, noticing that one of them was from the hospital. Grandma Molly had just died that morning; they hadn’t wasted any time getting their bill out.
The other letter was addressed to the Judge in a big, sprawling hand, written with a broad stub in black ink. There was no return address, but it was postmarked in Greenway. That was a town north of Timbers. Another bill, probably.
I dropped it on top of the rest of the stuff, and wandered outside onto the veranda facing the drive. I wanted Mom to come home, even though I knew everybody would be depressed and there’d be a discussion about things that had to be done over the next few days. I hoped Dad showed up soon to make things easier.
Old Sunny, the dog Molly and the Judge had had for years, wandered out from under the porch, trailed by half a dozen puppies. I sat on the steps and rubbed Sunny’s ears and let the pups nibble on my shoestrings and lick at my hand.
There was something comforting about the dogs. Sunny leaned into me, and I knew she’d be missing Molly; the dog used to sleep at Molly’s feet when she was rocking or knitting or reading.
“I’m going to miss her, too,” I whispered to the gentle old dog, and I sat there for a long time with the sun on my face, eventually drying my tears.
* * *
Dad got there about the time we were sitting down to a dinner nobody wanted. The Judge had come home with Mom and her sisters, all of them looking tired and sad. Mom hugged me, and then Freddy and Dad, and cried just a little bit while he hugged me back.
Ginny looked at her mom and made a defiant statement. “My dad’s coming, too, for the funeral. I called him myself. He is still my father.”
“Yes, of course he is,” Aunt Mavis said quietly. “It’s all right, Ginny, you were right to call him. He was fond of Grandma Molly, too.”
They had been to the funeral parlor in Timbers already, and the funeral was set for the following Monday morning. There would be private viewing before that.
Ginny, beside me at the table, jabbed me with a finger. “Private viewing? Does that mean we all have to go and look at her? In a coffin?”
On the other side of me, Mom heard. “There will be friends from the church and in town who will want to pay their last respects. You girls needn’t go if you don’t want to.”
“But we’ll have to go to the funeral itself,” I offered reluctantly, knowing she would say yes to that.
“When Dad’s Aunt Clara died, she didn’t even have a funeral,” Ginny muttered. “She didn’t want any services. It was a lot easier for everybody.”
“Some families have only a memorial service,” Mom told us. “Some have a funeral. It’s whatever each family feels they need. In this case, it’s the Judge’s decision to make. He wants a nice funeral service.”
“Nice,” Ginny echoed. “Boy, talk about a contradiction in terms!”
I agreed with her, but I knew my opinion didn’t count for anything.
Ginny and I escaped as soon as we could. They were talking about flowers and music and who was going to ride to the cemetery in the limousine and what clothes to deliver to the mortuary.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I suggested, thinking we’d flop on my bed and talk about something else.
But Ginny looked guilty. “I can’t, Cici. Randy’s coming over to get me, we’re going into town. I asked Mom if it would be disrespectful to go with him to this ball game we’d planned on. The local softball league, you know. She said okay.”
So there I was again, on my own. I couldn’t stand listening to the grown-ups, and Errol and Arnie disappeared as soon as they’d finished their pie. Even Sunny had gone back under the porch with her puppies. I could hear them squealing there and didn’t bother to call them out.
I wished Jack would come over after work but knew he probably wouldn’t. His father’s funeral had been a long time ago, when Jack was a little kid, but I knew he remembered it.
Zoe had had a funeral, too, no doubt. I didn’t want to think about that one. A natural death was horrible enough, but it was too easy to imagine how the Cyreks had struggled to deal with their daughter’s murder.
In desperation, I decided to work on my list of names, motives, and alibis. I hadn’t gotten very far, but I didn’t have anything else to do.
I’d left the paper on the Judge’s desk.
It wasn’t there.
He must have come in, some time before we ate, and looked at the mail, because he’d thrown some stuff in the wastebasket; there was still a pile of letters left, though. He hadn’t spent a lot of time at his desk.
Even so, he might have thrown out my paper, or Mrs. Graden had cleaned in there. I pawed through the wastebasket, and sure enough there it was, on the very bottom. It was slightly crumpled, so I smoothed it out and took it with me. I needed to borrow a pencil again, and in the same container with the one I chose was a compass.
Impulsively, I took that, too. I remembered the seventy-three miles Zoe had put on Fergus’s car, and Mom had a map of Michigan in the glove compartment. I decided to find out just where she could have driven in that many miles.
It was still daylight. I got out the map and spread it on the hood of the car, then figured out where we were, on the shores of Crystal Lake. I set the point of the compass there, and made a circle with a radius of the thirty-six miles that would have been possible for Zoe to reach and allow enough miles to return Fergus’s car.
The line made by the pencil in the compass encircled Timbers and two other small towns. Lacey was just outside the circle, Greenway was just inside it.
Greenway. That was the postmark on the letter the Judge got, and I was sure I’d been there a couple of times. A little place, not much bigger than Timbers.
Had Zoe gone to either Greenway or Lacey? Why? Especially late at night. It would have to be to see a person, wouldn’t it? Who? For what purpose?
The logical answer to the last question was that she was meeting some guy. But how could I determine who? I didn’t know a soul in either town. I wondered if Jack did. His school probably played ball games against the kids in those places; he might know if Zoe had been interested in some hunk in a neighboring village.
“What on earth are you doing?”
I jumped and turned to see Ilona looking over my shoulder.
“Oh, just . . . figuring something out.” I folded the compass and stuck it in my pocket, refolding the map as well. My heart was beating as if I’d been caught at something I shouldn’t have been doing. “You weren’t looking for me, were you?”
“Yes, and Ginny. Mother wants to know if we’d all like to go to the mortuary for the viewing this evening.”
I shuddered. “No thanks. And Ginny’s gone to town with Randy’s family.”
“Your folks are going,” Ilona pressed. “To be supportive for the Judge.”
“Well, I’m not, unless somebody insists,” I told her firmly.
She regarded me critically. “I’d have thought you were grown-up enough by now, Cici, to do the right thing.”
Something inside me flared up, uncontrollable. “Sure. Like you were grown-up enough to go see Brody when he was in trouble.”
She flushed deep pink and then went so white it sort of scared me, as if she might pass out. “That was different.”
“Was it? If I’d been going with a guy, planning to marry him someday, I’d consider it my responsibility to at least give him a chance to explain.”
“There’s no explaining away murder,” Ilona said faintly.
“Maybe not, but there are some of us who don’t think Brody did it. He’d probably have told you that if you’d given him a chance. He must have waited and wondered why you didn’t come. You didn’t even send him a note, did you?”
Ilona was recovering. “You’re talking about things you don’t know anything about, Cici. And it’s none of your business, anyway.”
“And it’s none of your business when, or if, I go to see Grandma Molly in a casket. She’s dead, but Brody’s still alive, and he’s hurting. So are Lina and Jack. And they aren’t the only ones who think Brody’s innocent.”
She stared at me for long seconds, her blue eyes blazing so fiercely I thought she might slap me. Then she turned and stalked into the house.
I took the compass back to the Judge’s den and then hesitated, looking at the stacks of mail. Hadn’t I left the envelope with no return address right on top of the nearest pile? The one that had come from Greenway?
It wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere in the stack.
I glanced over my shoulder toward the hallway, but I didn’t see or hear anyone. On impulse, I dumped out the stuff in the wastebasket and sorted through it, but there was no envelope addressed in that distinctive handwriting.
Had the Judge already picked it up and disposed of it? Without looking at the rest of his mail?
And if so, what had he done with it?
Knowing I shouldn’t, yet compelled by the pressure inside me, I opened the wide drawer to see if he’d put it in there. He hadn’t. So where the heck was it?
I had no reason to think that particular envelope was important or significant. Yet it bothered me that someone had taken pains to remove it from the desk.
From a distance I heard Ilona’s voice, and then my dad’s.
I decided the best thing for me to do, before the others tried to scoop me up for their trip to the mortuary, was to disappear.
If Jack wasn’t home yet, I’d talk to his mother.
Anything to get away from Ilona’s ideas about responsibility, and anyone else’s views on visiting the funeral home.