In the silence, the rocker squeaked, and a dog barked, off in the distance.
We didn’t hear him coming across the carpet of pine needles. Jack opened the door and let it slam behind him. “Hi, Ma, sorry I’m so late. I got a chance to work another couple of hours, so I thought I’d better. Hi, Cici.”
“Hi,” I said, going dry-mouthed once more.
He was wearing worn jeans again—not cutoffs this time—and a dark green T-shirt with a smear of grease across the front of it. Nothing fancy. But I thought he was the best-looking boy I ever saw.
“Is there anything left to eat?” he asked. “I had a bag of peanuts about six, but they’re long gone.”
“You can heat up some of the beef and noodles I had,” Lina told him. “And there’s about half a blueberry pie left. Last year’s berries.”
He went on past us into the kitchen, and my fingers curled alongside my thighs. I was clearly back to eight years old again, darn it.
A moment later, he called from the adjoining room, “Hey, Cici, you want a piece of Ma’s pie?”
“Sure, if she’s not saving it for tomorrow,” I said, glancing at her.
Lina laughed. “I never figured on saving anything for the next day. Not with two teenage boys in the house. They always got hungry about two A.M. and cleaned out the fridge.”
I followed Jack into the kitchen and sat down across from him at the table while he put a plate of noodles in the microwave and brought the pie to place between us. He cut it in two gigantic slices, serving half of it to me.
“Want it warm, with ice cream?” he asked.
I remembered all the times he’d comforted me with cookies or a hunk of cake or hot homemade bread. It was for skinned knees, stubbed toes, or having been scolded at home for some minor transgression. Habit, I supposed. The little girl is down, so feed her.
It was good pie, purple juice oozing onto the plate, ice cream melting over flaky crust that disintegrated at the touch of a fork.
“How’s Molly?” he asked, hazel eyes finally meeting mine.
“Not good, I guess. We don’t know much.”
“Bummer,” Jack affirmed.
Behind him, the light slanted into his bedroom. I could see the bulletin board.
“I’m surprised at the stuff you keep,” I observed inanely.
He glanced over his shoulder. “The headline about Brody’s conviction? It stays until he gets out of prison. Or the Christmas card? That stays until the newer one comes, next winter. Or do you mean the picture of Ma and Brody and me? Last one we had taken as a family, during the trial?”
“I’m really sorry,” I murmured. “I thought this was going to be such a super summer, and now it’s all spoiled. Brody and Zoe, and you and Lina, and now Molly. And I thought I was old enough to join the big kids, but they all acted as if I were still Freddy’s age.”
He forked in the last of the pie and wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. “I thought I was part of the group, once, too,” he told me. “Now they look right through me, if they happen to meet me face-to-face. Come on, brat, I’ll walk you home.”
Brat. He’d often called me that in the old days, but it wasn’t what you called someone who was almost fifteen, I thought. It wasn’t what you called a potential girlfriend.
I carried my plate to the sink and rinsed it.
“Okay, let’s go,” I agreed.
How could I make Jack, at least, treat me as if I were one of the big kids?
chapter seven
I didn’t see Jack again for a week.
As if that weren’t bad enough, after Molly had been in the hospital for six days, Mom and Aunt Mavis decided that Ginny and I were old enough to visit her. Freddy and all the other kids were declared to be too young.
“I’d rather be too young, too,” Ginny said glumly.
I knew what she meant, but Mom had been pretty definite when I made reluctant noises.
“She doesn’t even know who’s there, does she? So what’s the point, Mom?”
“The point is that it’s the decent thing to do. Nobody knows if she’s aware of her visitors or not, but how awful if she thought nobody cared enough to come.”
“You and Aunt Mavis and Aunt Pat and the Judge have been there,” I protested halfheartedly.
“But it might mean a lot to her if you were there, too. She was very good to you when you were smaller, Cici.”
“I know. She was great,” I admitted. “It’s just so hard to do, to see somebody when they’re that sick.”
“Lots of things are hard to do,” Mom said. “That’s not an excuse not to do them.”
“But she might be dying! What if she dies while we’re there?” I asked, almost panicky.
“We all die sometime, Cici. My father did, years ago, and now my mother’s probably close to it. It’s part of life, the end part of it. It’s something we all have to face, including our own death sooner or later.”
“Will—” I hesitated. “Will she be all full of . . . tubes and stuff?”
“She signed a Living Will saying she didn’t want to be kept on life supports. But they’re giving her oxygen, so she can breathe more easily. And an IV is kept running, so she doesn’t get dehydrated. Even a person who isn’t fully conscious can feel discomfort if their mouth is too dry, for instance. Change your clothes, Cici. A new pair of jeans and a decent shirt will be all right.”
It was every bit as bad as I expected.
I don’t think I would have even recognized my grandmother. This old lady looked like nobody I’d ever known, so shrunken and pale, and bruised where the IV was hooked up or needles had been inserted.
The Judge had scarcely left her side. He looked exhausted, but managed a smile for Ginger and me. “Thank you for coming, girls,” he said.
I wished we hadn’t had to come. Ginger and I only stayed in the room for about five minutes, then waited in a lounge where a woman was sobbing into a handkerchief and a man sat with his head in his hands.
“I don’t want to remember her like this,” I said, and Ginny shuddered.
“Me neither, but I probably will,” she declared, walking to look out the window so she wouldn’t have to watch the grieving couple behind her.
The others didn’t stay long, and we didn’t take the Judge home that day, either. Nobody talked on the way back to the lake. Every little while, Mom wiped her eyes.
When we got home, there were a bunch of kids swimming off our dock and raft, but I didn’t feel like joining them. I walked down past the Powells’ dock, hoping I’d spot Jack, but he must have still been working, and Lina’s car wasn’t in the yard, so I couldn’t even talk to her.
The lake wasn’t much fun if you didn’t have anybody to talk to. Ginny had disappeared, and I suspected she and Randy were somewhere together, having a better time than I was.
Mom called Dad that evening, then reported that he was still too busy to get away. She joined Aunt Mavis on the porch, where they talked in low voices. They stopped when any of us kids got anywhere near them.
I met Ginny in the bathroom when we were washing for supper. She gave me a funny look I couldn’t interpret.
“I overheard Aunt Vivian talking to Uncle Dan. Your family’s having trouble, too?”
“Not that I know of,” I said, drying my hands. And then, more sharply, “What do you mean, too?”
“Your mom looked like she’d been crying.”
“Talking about Molly, I guess. What do you mean, too?”
“I overheard a little of what my mother and yours were talking about.” Ginny’s mouth turned down almost the way a sad person does in a cartoon. “It sounded like maybe my folks are discussing separating.”
I stared at her, stunned. “You mean . . . divorcing?”
“Maybe. But not living together for a while, anyway. I know they’ve been arguing some lately. You know how everybody shuts up when you enter a room, though? So you’re never quite sure what it’s about?”
Come to think of it
, I had noticed that. Between Mom and her sisters, ever since we’d arrived at the lake.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong between my folks,” I said slowly. “No, there couldn’t be. Not the way they hugged and kissed each other good-bye. I’m sorry, Ginny. What’s going to happen, do you know?”
“I don’t know yet. I think Mom talked to the Judge about it, but I don’t know if he’s going to talk to Dad, or offer to let us stay here, or what.”
“You mean, like go to school in Timbers?”
“I hope not. I want to go home, Cici! Go back to school with my friends! I don’t know any of the kids in Timbers, and most of the people here at the lake will leave when school starts. Randy will, I know.”
“I wouldn’t want to go to school here, either,” I told her. “I don’t think most of the people in Timbers were very nice to Lina and Jack after what happened with Brody, even though he may not be guilty of anything.”
“A jury said he was,” Ginny reminded me.
“Juries have been known to be wrong,” I countered. “Cripes, what a lousy summer this is turning into.”
I said the same thing later to Mom.
She hugged me. “It hasn’t been the greatest, has it, honey? Well, do the best you can, Cici. Swim, relax in the sun, and enjoy the other kids.”
How? I wondered sourly after she’d left me there in the dim interior hallway. Ginny was tied up with whatever Randy wanted to do, Jack wasn’t coming around at all, and nobody else acted as if I were alive.
I went out on the veranda overlooking the drive, where it was cool and quiet. Ilona was there with a book in her lap, rocking in the hanging swing.
She looked up. “You going back to see Grandma Molly today?”
“Not unless somebody makes me. I’ll have nightmares now, remembering how little and old and helpless she looks.” I leaned against one of the posts supporting the roof.
For a few seconds Ilona closed her eyes. “I have nightmares about things, too.”
“About Brody?” I guessed, and then bit my tongue. Should I have mentioned him, or not?
Her blue eyes met mine. “Sometimes Brody,” she admitted. “I think about what he did, and wonder how I could ever have thought we’d get married some day.”
“You think he did it, then? Lina and Jack are convinced he didn’t.”
She brushed a few pine needles off the lap of her shorts. “They’re his family. I suppose you have to believe family.”
“You were almost family.”
She gave a delicate shudder. “Thank God I wasn’t yet. Imagine being married to someone who’d strangle a girl to death.”
“But what if he didn’t do it?” I demanded, suddenly annoyed with her for accepting Brody’s guilt. “He never confessed. Did you ever know him to lie?”
“It’s different, when you’re talking about murder. Of course he denied doing it. They found his footprints—”
“On the beach, for crying out loud! Everybody walks on the beach and leaves footprints! That didn’t prove anything!”
“He was carrying her scarf. He had it in his pocket.”
I hadn’t heard about that, and it gave me a jolt. “He could have found it and picked it up.”
“That’s what he said, that it was on the beach, and he didn’t know whose it was.” Ilona swallowed. “When they described it, I knew whose it was. Zoe was the only one who wore those wild, bright-colored silk scarves.”
“Guys don’t always notice stuff like that. If Mom doesn’t wear a dress for six months, Dad thinks it’s brand-new when she puts it on again. Why would Brody murder her, then carry around something that would tie him to her? That doesn’t make sense.”
Ilona flipped back her silvery hair. “He noticed what Zoe wore. Everybody did. She was usually halfway hanging out of it, whatever it was. Brody had remarked on how short her shorts were, how low her blouses were open, that kind of thing.”
For some reason I felt I had to argue against everything she said. “Because those things were revealing. What would she have revealed with or without a scarf?”
She stared at me, becoming somewhat stony. “You weren’t here last summer. You didn’t see how she behaved.”
“I saw how she behaved the summer before. Showing off all the time. Flirting with everybody.”
“Flirting is right.” There was a bitter edge to her words. “She threw herself at anything in pants, from the time she was about twelve. Including Brody.”
“But he didn’t flirt back, did he? If he wanted to drop you and get into something with her, he was free to do it, wasn’t he? He didn’t want to, Ilona. He thought Zoe was a pest.”
“She was a pest all right. She fooled her folks with that smile and her lies, but she never fooled me. She was a deceitful, nasty girl.” A spasm of what looked surprisingly like hatred twisted her face for a few seconds, and I was taken aback. I’d never seen her anything but pleasant and placid. “There were times when I could have throttled her myself.”
It took me a minute to find my tongue again. If she was that bad, maybe she had affected someone else that way, over something more serious than flirting. “Did you ever ask Brody, face-to-face, if he did it?”
Color flooded her face, then receded. “I’ve never talked to him since it happened. My mother and the Judge and the newspapers told me all I needed to know.”
“But you were supposed to be in love with him!” I protested, sure I would never have behaved this way if it had been Jack who was accused. “It must have hurt him very much, that you refused to go see him.”
“It hurt me very much that he did it,” Ilona said, and made a point of returning to her book.
After a brief silence, I pushed myself away from the post and went down the steps, thinking deeply.
Obviously the authorities had bothered to look no further than Brody for a suspect, but wasn’t it possible that Zoe had in some way walked on someone else’s toes? Just about any male at the lake might have had a reason for getting rid of her. In fact, if it hadn’t been that I didn’t think Ilona had the strength to strangle anybody, she might have disposed of Zoe.
It was about that time that the idea came to me.
Maybe I could find out who else had reason to want Zoe to shut up and had taken the ultimate step to see that it happened.
chapter eight
How did real detectives go about solving a murder?
First they determined that a crime had been committed. Then they figured out who the victim was, the method, and the motive, and lastly the opportunity. When all this stuff had been sorted out, they knew who was guilty.
The victim had been Zoe Cyrek, known from the start. The method apparently had been obvious, too; she’d been strangled.
The investigators had decided that the motive, in Brody’s case, had been that he’d made advances, that she’d fought him off, and he’d killed her.
The more I thought about it, the crazier it seemed. From what I remembered about Zoe, it was unlikely she’d have rejected Brody or anyone else. And Brody had been going with Ilona, making plans for a future with her, for ages. He’d never shown the slightest interest in Zoe.
He’d been walking on the beach around the time they thought she’d been killed, which did give him the opportunity. But how many other people had had the opportunity? How many others might have had a motive?
Jack thought the cops had given up too soon, on motive, opportunity, and the suspect. They’d never looked beyond Brody for anything.
Could I discover anything new if I looked, almost a year later?
It would mean so much to Lina and Jack, not to mention Brody, if I did. I wasn’t sure about my cousin Ilona. How much had she loved Brody if she hadn’t even talked to him after it happened? How did he feel about her now, after she’d let him down completely?
Maybe Jack would help me, if I turned up anything, and talk to me the way he used to. No, I amended after thinking about Jack for a few moments, not the way he us
ed to. Maybe he would treat me the way I was now, two years older. Almost fifteen.
I didn’t know if anybody would want to talk about Zoe, but when I tried, I found it was amazingly easy to get them started.
It only took a little while. I had to be subtle about it. I couldn’t just waltz up to each person and ask what he—or she—thought about the murdered girl, or where they’d been when she was killed. And I knew that the person who killed her wouldn’t admit to a motive, so I’d have to dig until something turned up.
I planned it all out, like a campaign, and visited each family in turn. Not too obviously, just to say hello because I hadn’t seen them in two years. And they all wanted to know about Molly. That part didn’t take long, since her condition remained unchanged.
Sometimes I had to hang around and talk about other things. They offered me banana bread and rhubarb pie and oatmeal cookies. I sat in porch swings and on kitchen chairs and on the edges of docks. Nobody seemed suspicious of my interest, as far as I could tell.
Since by now everybody knew I’d only just heard about the murder and Brody’s prison sentence, it was only natural that I’d want to talk about it, learn the details.
Ed Kraski worked on his car, and I held a flashlight for him as I listened to his observations on carburetors and the comparative costs of used ones versus new ones. He didn’t have much to say about Zoe or the murder.
I kept working my way around the lake, always keeping an eye open for Jack.
He hadn’t made any attempt to see me since the day we went over to the cove, so one morning I swiped more rolls from the kitchen before Mrs. Graden got there—plenty for two, this time—and managed to catch my quarry on the dock. It was so early in the morning that the mist floated just above the water, the sun not yet burning through.