Twisted Summer

  As soon as this was over, I’d get Ginny all to myself and get every detail out of her, I thought. Even cherry pie with ice cream didn’t tempt me; the more I watched Ilona, the more sure I was that she had even less appetite than I did.

  Was she thinking about Brody? But that . . . that mess, whatever it had involved, had happened last summer, a year ago. Naturally it would have shocked and depressed her, if it was true that the boy she’d been planning to marry eventually had murdered a neighbor girl, but was she still brooding after all this time? Going away to school ought to have been exciting, yet she wasn’t looking forward to college. I was sure of that.

  I almost exhaled in relief when the Judge finally folded his napkin beside his plate and pushed back his chair. Now, I thought, looking at Ginny.

  “What time is the weenie roast?” my cousin Arnie asked. “Is it just for the kids, or are the grown-ups going, too?”

  “Not this grown-up,” the Judge said. “I’m too old for sitting in the sand and having to keep moving when the wind shifts to keep the sparks from landing on my clothes.”

  “I’ll pass, too,” Mom said. “I’ve had a long day, and I don’t need another meal before morning.”

  One by one they dropped out, which of course suited all the kids just fine. “Will Jack be there, do you think?” I asked Ginny during the movement out of the dining room.

  She made a doubtful face. “Probably not. I don’t think he’s done anything with the gang since . . . you know.”

  “No, I don’t know,” I told her fiercely. “But you’re going to tell me. Right now.”

  “Okay. They won’t start the fire until almost dark, so we’ve got plenty of time. Come on up to my room.”

  We could hear voices on the veranda beneath the open window as we sprawled on Ginny’s bed. Someone was strumming a guitar down by the water, and at the other end of the lake an outboard motor roared to life.

  Up here at the top of the house, it was quiet. I felt more nervous than I could ever remember. “Okay, when did this happen?” I demanded, watching Ginny’s face.

  “August, last year. We missed you guys, but we were doing all the usual stuff. You know, swimming and canoeing and—”

  “Skip that part,” I said. I knew there were twenty or so families that came to Crystal Lake every summer. A few of them, like the Shuriks and MacBeans, had winterized their cottages and lived here all year round. The rest came on weekends in good weather and then moved out from the nearest town of Timbers or from cities like Pontiac, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee after school was out. We’d always been like one big family; it was rare for anyone to sell out, or any new people to move in. Fergus MacBean was retired and reveled in the fact that he and Ellen didn’t have to pack up and go back to the city in September like the rest of us. I didn’t need to hear about any of that.

  “You said Brody murdered Zoe.”

  I’d known Zoe, of course, although she was older and as one of the big kids had never paid any attention to me. She was as striking in her own way as Ilona. If Ilona was ice, Zoe was fire.

  Inky black hair, challenging brown eyes, a slim figure almost always flamboyantly eye-catching in scarlet or purple or deep turquoise. She’d reminded me of a gypsy, as I imagined them, with golden bangles on her arms and long dangling earrings and several necklaces worn at the same time. She laughed a lot, and shot sidelong glances at anything in pants.

  Once I heard Aunt Pat say to my mom, laughing ruefully, “She can’t seem to turn it off, even with someone as old as Fergus!”

  And Mom had replied, “I’m afraid that girl will get into trouble one day if they don’t tame her down.”

  If Zoe had any girlfriends, I didn’t remember them, though a lot of us had been envious of her. I certainly had been, though I knew my folks would have locked me in a closet if I’d dressed and acted the way she did.

  The males were all her friends, of one degree or another.

  Even Brody?

  “It was terrible,” Ginny said now. “But I don’t know why it’s knocked your socks off this way. Neither Zoe nor Brody was a particular friend of yours, were they?”

  “They were almost like family, though,” I said with a dry mouth. “Like everybody else at the lake.”

  “And he’s Jack’s brother,” she added. “That’s it, isn’t it? Jack, not Brody. But you haven’t seen him for two years.”

  I remembered him, though. I remembered the way he’d slowly and patiently worked a fishhook out of my finger while I tried not to cry. He’d taught me how to swim better than a dog paddle and made the Atterbom boys stop teasing me by throwing my sandal back and forth between them, even though they were all bigger than he was. He’d made them ashamed for picking on a little girl, and somehow done it without humiliating me.

  “He was always nice to me,” I told Ginny. “He never tormented me with worms and snakes and spiders down my neck.”

  She regarded me soberly. “He laughed when I stepped in a pile of dog poo, remember?”

  “Well, you can’t expect anybody to be perfect,” I said, feeling that even with Ginny I’d better try to inject some humor into what seemed like a catastrophe. I hadn’t seen Ginny for two years, either, and I wasn’t sure how much she’d changed. I didn’t want her to start making embarrassing remarks about Jack in front of other people. “Why did Brody do it?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. He wouldn’t admit anything. Most people think it had something to do with sex. Like, she wouldn’t give in to him or something.”

  “From what I remember of her, it seems more likely she would have,” I said.

  Ginny rolled onto her back and put her hands behind her head. “There were people who said that too, actually. Nobody really knows.”

  “You said Brody wouldn’t admit anything. Did he admit killing her?”

  I remembered Brody well, too, though mostly I’d paid attention to him because he was Jack’s big brother. Tall, dark, brawny in a way Jack wasn’t, not yet anyway. Brody had worked out with weights, and as far as I remembered, nobody had ever picked on him because he had too many muscles. He was quiet, though not particularly shy, and practically everybody liked him. Especially Ilona.

  “No,” my cousin said now. “He never admitted anything. Said he’d been out walking the path around the lake that night, but claimed he never saw Zoe. Never heard anything.”

  “Then why did they think he killed her? How, Ginny? How did he kill her?”

  “She was strangled, with her necklaces. Remember how she always wore three or four of them at a time? Gold chains and all those colored beads?”

  Brody was strong enough to strangle anybody, I supposed. It made me feel peculiar to think about it happening. “But if he said he didn’t do it, how did anybody know?”

  “Her brothers found her at the Wade cabin, at the end of the lake, late that night. The Wades had never come up that summer and no one had used their cabin. She’d told her folks she was meeting Brody and he was giving her a ride into town, to the movies, but she never came home. They found signs Brody had been there. He dropped his wallet, even. Like he panicked and didn’t realize he’d lost it, you know. And his footprints on the shore, just a few yards away, pretty much cinched it.”

  I considered that, picturing the terrible scene with an awful sick feeling. “How did they know the footprints were Brody’s? There are always footprints. Everybody walks around the lake, sooner or later.”

  “He had a new pair of Reeboks, very distinctive pattern on the soles. Chet and Nathan recognized it; they’d seen it in the sand out by our dock earlier in the day.”

  I let all that sink in. Murdered. A girl I had known, though not very well. By my cousin Ilona’s boyfriend. It didn’t seem possible. Murder was something that happened in the cities, to strangers, not to people who were almost like relatives. Not at a place like Crystal Lake, where we’d never locked our doors and never had anything stolen except for maybe apples or cookies.

  “Why didn’
t anybody tell us?” I asked finally. “It must have caused a sensation, but nobody told us.”

  “I guess we each thought that someone else would tell you. There was a trial, and Brody was convicted and sentenced to the state prison. Lina was so mad at the Judge because he said there was nothing he could do about it that she quit working for him. She felt he could have used his influence to help, but he said the evidence was plain. He did offer to get a lawyer instead of letting them appoint a public defender, but Brody and Lina turned him down. Said if he didn’t believe them, to forget it.”

  “Lina thought he was innocent, too?”

  “Well, sure. She’s Brody’s mother. Wouldn’t your mom believe you if you told her you didn’t kill somebody?”

  “I never did kill anybody,” I said sharply.

  “I know that. But you lied to her the time we almost burned down the old Mills’ barn, remember? We all lied. They’d have killed us if they’d known we tried smoking there and Hal accidentally dropped a cigarette and set the hay on fire. We all said we hadn’t been there, and the grown-ups finally decided it must have been tramps. Our folks believed us, and that was when the Judge and the others decided to put a gate across the road in from the village so strangers couldn’t get in.”

  “But it was a nuisance locking and unlocking it, so by the next summer they just left it open,” I recalled. “But that was different, that they believed us. We all told the same lie, six of us.”

  “So Brody was only one, but his mom believed him. Parents do that, Cici. They want to think their kids are okay, so they believe lies.”

  I didn’t want to believe this story about Brody, and I was sorry she’d reminded me about the fire in the Mills’ barn; I still felt guilty about that, even though we’d managed to put it out without doing any serious damage.

  “I still can’t believe that nobody told us about any of this,” I said.

  Ginny made a face. “Everybody was too busy to write. I know Molly and the Judge try to keep in touch, but at the time so much was going on that this business with Zoe and Brody got lost in the shuffle, I guess. By the time he was convicted, which was in late winter, Grandma Molly’d had her stroke, and the Judge was spending all his time at the hospital and then had to take care of her when she came home, so he didn’t get around to writing to you, or calling. He had lost Lina as housekeeper, and it was months before he hired Mrs. Graden. He still talks as if he’s behind on things. It’s a good thing he’s semiretired now, or it would be even worse.”

  I swallowed, finally beginning to accept her story. “How did Ilona take it? You were all still here when it happened, weren’t you?”

  Ginny went quiet and very serious. “Ilona was devastated, I think. I wasn’t there when they told her, but Errol said she went white as a sheet and nearly passed out, and then she locked herself in her room for days. He could hear her crying and hear Aunt Pat begging her to eat something. She’s still thinner than she used to be, didn’t you notice?”

  I had. I could hardly imagine what it would be like, to learn that someone you cared about could be a murderer.

  It was growing darker in the room. Whoever had the guitar had come up onto the veranda, and they were starting to sing, old songs like “My Darling Nellie Gray” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Old Dan Tucker.”

  Ginny slid off the bed. “We better get dressed for the wiener roast. It’s going to be on the beach by the Powells’ place. Jeans, maybe, in case it gets chilly.”

  My heart stirred a little. The Powells lived the closest to the Shuriks. Was there a chance that I’d run into Jack? He hadn’t killed anybody, and it wasn’t fair that he should have to suffer for what his brother had done.

  I hadn’t wanted to go to the wiener roast after I’d heard all about Zoe, but now I got up, too, and headed for my room and a change of clothes.

  Outside, they were singing an oldie from Sunday School when I wasn’t even in regular school yet. “Jesus Loves Me.” I had a flickering remembrance of the Judge holding my hand when he left me in a class of four-year-olds. I had been wearing a pink and white organdy dress with a ruffled underskirt that made it stand out all around me and black patent leather Mary Janes with white socks. “I’ll be back to get you before church,” he’d said, and smiled. I trusted him, so I didn’t cry at being alone with strangers.

  Why on earth did I still remember that, after all these years?

  I opened the door to my room and rummaged through my suitcase for the jeans.

  I wondered if Jack still had any friends at all, and my eyes stung with unshed tears.

  chapter three

  “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.