Twisted Summer by Willo Davis Roberts

Author:Willo Davis Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

chapter ten

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.

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