“Hi, Cici.” He greeted me as if we’d seen each other yesterday, not as if he’d missed me even slightly. “Unhook that rope, will you, and toss it down to me?”
He had MacBean’s V-bottom rowboat drawn up to the dock and had dropped some stuff into it, preparing to take off.
“Going fishing?”
“Yeah. Ma said she’d like some fresh bass tonight.”
“Can I go along?”
He looked at me quizzically. “Remember the rules?”
“No standing up,” I recited. “No rocking the boat. No asking to go ashore to go to the bathroom. No whining about the sun being too hot or the mosquitoes biting. No talking unless you talk first.”
He grinned. “You got it. Okay, get in.”
Jack was the only person I could think of that I could be with and be quiet and not feel uncomfortable about the silence. He’d trained me well when I was a little kid.
Within five minutes the shoreline had vanished in the fog, leaving us in a strange yet familiar half-world. Within half an hour, though, the fog was drifting away, opening up the lake to the sun.
Wordlessly, I passed him the bag of rolls, and he helped himself, neither of us speaking. I was content to drift as the morning grew warmer, and Jack flipped bass after bass into the bucket he’d brought.
Finally, he inspected the catch and declared, “That ought to be enough for the two of us and to freeze a batch. You want a few?”
“No. Mrs. Graden’s fixing chicken tonight. Besides, I’d have to have enough for so many people it would take all day to get them.”
He reached over and grabbed my wrist, turning it so he could see my watch. “Want to swim before we go home? I’ve got about an hour before I have to head in.”
This time I took it for granted that we’d swim in our clothes and let them dry in place. I knew some of the older kids had gone skinny-dipping in mixed company a few times in the old days, but I didn’t consider myself quite that grown-up. Or maybe, as my folks would have considered it, that juvenile.
We headed for the cove, and at least for a little while I was glad we’d come back to the lake this summer. The only thing that would have made it better would have been for Jack to say something personal. Something to show he’d noticed I was growing up, not still a little girl he’d accepted as a fishing partner.
I was sorry when it was time to start back across the lake. We tied up at the dock, and Fergus came out to see how many fish we had. He grunted when Jack thanked him for the use of the boat. “Anytime,” he said.
After Jack had gone, I lingered to talk to Fergus.
He was pretty old, close to seventy, I guess. He had iron-gray hair clipped short in an old-fashioned, military-looking cut. He’d added a slight paunch since I remembered him, but he stood up straight, and below the rolled-up sleeves of his plaid shirt, his arms had plenty of muscles.
I swallowed. Only someone muscular could have strangled a healthy, athletic sixteen-year-old girl.
“Missed seeing you last summer,” Fergus said, squinting at me against the sun. “But I supposed you’d have turned wild like the rest of them, getting into trouble.”
“Not if my folks were around,” I told him. “I don’t think anybody in our clan is allowed to be wild. What did all these wild kids do?”
He gave me a quick, suspicious look. “You mean nobody told you about the Cyrek girl getting herself killed?”
“We didn’t know about it until we got here.” It was interesting to put it that way—getting herself killed. “But that was just Zoe. That didn’t involve the other kids.”
I thought he’d say it involved Brody, but he didn’t. He scratched the side of his neck, looking across the lake. “Any idea when the Judge’ll be home?” he asked. “I miss my fishing partner.”
“He’s still at the hospital with Grandma Molly. It sure is different here this year,” I said tentatively. “Some new people have moved in, some of the old ones have left, and everybody’s older.”
Fergus swiped a hand over his gray hair. “You can say that again. I’m reminded every time I get out of bed.”
“I saw you talking to Mr. Cyrek the other day.” Now I was going on dangerous ground, and my mouth felt dry. “How are they doing? Have they . . . gotten over Zoe yet?”
He gave me a direct look, pursing his lips. “Nobody really gets over losing one of their kids. Especially that way.”
“I suppose. They sort of thought the world revolved around Zoe, didn’t they?”
He made another one of those grunting sounds. “Spoiled her rotten, you mean. Never could quite see her the way she was.”
Was this something? I wondered, feeling a flutter of excitement. “I didn’t know her all that well. She was older than I was. She was pretty, though.”
“Pretty.” His tone was dry. “Yes, she was that. But as my ma used to say, pretty is as pretty does. Some people with too much good looks don’t bother to develop personality, like kindness and consideration for other people, nor character. There’s Ellen, waving us in. Come on up and say hello to her. She was baking something when I left.”
I had always liked Ellen MacBean. She baked a lot, and with no kids at home to eat the goodies, Fergus got most of them. No doubt that accounted for the belly.
I went up to the cottage with him, and Ellen hugged me and insisted I have some of her homemade doughnuts. “I just took a carrot cake out of the oven, so it’s too hot to frost yet, but the doughnuts were only made yesterday. I remember the time when you were four,” she said, waving me into a chair, “and I’d lined up five dozen doughnuts to cool on the table. Molly and I were visiting, not paying attention to you, and you managed to get a bite out of each of the ones in the front row before we caught you. I was planning to donate them to the bake sale at church, but Fergus and I had to keep the ones you’d chewed on.”
She laughed, poured me a glass of milk without asking. “You were always one of my favorites, Cici. Welcome back.”
Gradually I brought the conversation around to Zoe again. Ellen, the best natured of neighbors, made a small face. “That child was never trustworthy, even when she was small. You took bites out of doughnuts, and once you spilled lemonade on my couch and we didn’t know it until Fergus sat in the wet spot, but you never stole anything.”
“Did Zoe steal?” I asked. That wouldn’t be a motive for strangling her, though. The victim would either tell her folks or call the police.
“More than once,” Ellen said soberly. “She got into my purse and helped herself to my change a few times, and she was big enough to know better. I hate to say it, but that last summer she got so . . . sly, I’d have to call it. I didn’t want her in my house anymore.”
This was the kind of thing I wanted to know about, though I suspected that the guilty party might not be so candid about how he or she felt. I fixed my eyes on Ellen’s hands as she carried a cup of coffee to the table and sat down across from me. I’d assumed that Zoe had been strangled by a man, but was there any proof of that? Surely no woman would have had the strength to do it. Would she?
Unless, the idea suddenly hit me, Zoe had been approached from behind. Could a woman have grabbed those necklaces and twisted them until Zoe died? Maybe.
But not Ellen. Ellen was a friend of my mother, and of Grandma Molly. I’d known her practically all my life.
I’d known all the old-timers at the lake just as long. Including Brody.
I cleared my throat. “It’s hard to believe Brody could have killed her. Do you believe he did it?”
Ellen’s face was troubled. “A jury said so.”
Fergus reached for a second doughnut, leaving a trail of powdered sugar down the front of his plaid shirt. “Juries have been known to be wrong,” he said flatly.
“Then you don’t think he was guilty?” I asked hopefully. I wanted there to be someone as doubtful as I was.
“Well, I wouldn’t have been surprised at anybody who wanted to throttle that girl, on the spur of
the moment. I felt the urge myself a couple of times,” Fergus admitted. “But Brody was the steady, calm type, I always thought. I can’t picture him suddenly losing it and choking a girl who’d been bugging him—and every other male—as far back as he could remember. All he had to do was walk away from her, same as everybody else always did.”
Something in the way he spoke convinced me he had been one of those males Zoe had bugged, though he was old enough to be her grandfather, at least. But a couple of people had commented that Zoe threw herself at anyone in pants, including old Fergus.
“What did she do to you?” I asked impulsively, and then felt my face get warm. That was pretty blunt, and Mom would have considered it rude.
“Stole my car once, for one thing,” Fergus said. “She called it ‘borrowing,’ but in my day a girl didn’t take someone else’s car late at night to go to town to meet some guy her parents didn’t want her to see. She didn’t dare take theirs, and probably hoped I was sound asleep or deaf and wouldn’t notice. Drove seventy-three miles. Didn’t even give me credit for noticing either the added mileage or the missing gas.”
“She didn’t offer to pay for the gas, either,” Ellen murmured, twisting the cup between her hands. “It wasn’t that kind of thing that bothered me so much, though at the time I was as annoyed as Fergus was. I guess I’m old-fashioned enough to want girls to be young ladies. Oh, I’ve gotten used to the bikinis and the messy hair and the language. Well, most of the language. But it bothers me to see a young girl carrying on the way Zoe did with the old men, young men, perfect strangers . . . other people’s husbands . . .”
I spoke without thinking.
“Fergus?” I asked, and then bit my tongue in embarrassment.
To my amazement, Ellen and Fergus looked at each other and laughed.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I didn’t mean to sound like—”
I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t make it worse, so I shut up.
Fergus was still grinning. “It’s not that Ellen doesn’t think I’m man enough to be flirted with,” he said. “I’m not dead yet. I still notice an attractive woman. But that girl was looking for trouble, even with people who’d made it clear that they weren’t interested, and I wasn’t too surprised when she found it.” By now his amusement had faded.
“There were times when I’d liked to have swatted her behind,” Ellen said, “but I was shocked at what happened to her. She was bold, forward, but naive, I think. Maybe not even very bright. But I never thought she’d get herself killed.”
There was the phrase again. Get herself killed. They thought Zoe had been asking for what happened to her.
We got on to another subject then, and I ate another doughnut, but I remembered it later on, when I was lying awake in the dark, listening to voices elsewhere in the house, and hearing someone laugh.
Zoe had done something to cause her own death. Something worse than showing too much skin on the beach, or leaning over so someone could see down her shirt. Worse than “borrowing” a neighbor’s car or pilfering a purse.
Just before I fell asleep, I wondered where Zoe had gone when she put seventy-three miles on Fergus’s car.
chapter nine
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?”
“I guess,” I said.
“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.