Voodoo Shack E-Book

Terri Martin

• Herausgeber: Modern History Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 196

Beschreibung

Join Iris and the Voodoo Shack gang as they investigate a mysterious death and an unsolved crime!
When 11-year-old Iris Weston discovers a ramshackle hunting cabin deep in Hazard Swamp, she and her friends decide it's perfect for a secret clubhouse. The gang dubs it the Voodoo Shack and meets there to swap stories and play card games. Ol' Man Hazard, the former owner, died under mysterious circumstances, and the kids speculate whether it was an accident, suicide or maybe even murder! The gang believes that cash from an unsolved crime may have been stashed within feet of the cabin. Even as things go badly awry, feisty Iris learns how to use her wit and independence to put things right, discovering what family really means in this adventurous and often humorous coming-of-age story set in rural Michigan in 1962.
"Set in the early 1960s, Martin's novel traces a girl's journey toward understanding the true meaning of love, family and friendship. Iris is an appealing character whose relationships with friends and family are realistically portrayed as she struggles to find her place."
--School Library Journal
"Martin has drawn on her childhood memories to create an engaging, feisty heroine, lively supporting characters and an easy-to-visualize early 1960s rural Michigan setting. And, although Iris doesn't solve all her mysteries, she finds the answers to the most important ones in this fast-paced story."
--ALA Booklist
"Readers fond of lightweight mysteries solved by spunky heroines will take to this fiction debut, though a heavy ballast of tragedy and near-tragedy keeps it low to the ground. Some of the dialogue and set pieces show a promising authorial gift for comedy. (Fiction. 10-12)"
--Kirkus Reviews
This book was originally released as A Family Trait

Leseprobe

Copyright ©2023 by Terri Martin. All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-61599-720-6 paperback

ISBN 978-1-61599-721-3 hardcover

ISBN 978-1-61599-722-0 eBook

Modern History Press          www.ModernHistoryPress.com

5145 Pontiac Trail                 [email protected]

Ann Arbor, MI 48105          Tollfree 888-761-6268

Distributed by Ingram (USA/CAN/AU)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Martin, Terri, author.

Title: Voodoo shack : a Michigan mystery / Terri Martin.

Other titles: Family trait

Description: Ann Arbor : Modern History Press, 2023. | Formerly published as A Family Trait, 1999, Holiday House New York, N.Y. | Audience: Age 12. | Audience: Grades 4-6. | Summary: “Living with her mother and grandparents on their Michigan farm, eleven-year-old Iris tries to find out about her father, who died before she was born, and to solve a local murder mystery involving a friend of her grandmother”-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023002398 (print) | LCCN 2023002399 (ebook) | ISBN 9781615997213 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781615997206 (paperback) | ISBN 9781615997220 (epub)

Subjects: CYAC: Farm life--Michigan--Fiction. | Grandparents--Fiction. | Michigan--Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories. | LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Novels.

Classification: LCC PZ7.M36423 Vo 2023 (print) | LCC PZ7.M36423 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002398

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002399

Dedicated to rural Michiganders

Above and below the bridge

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

About the Author

Also by the Author

Children’s

•The Home Wind (age 9+)

Adult

Short Stories-humor

•Church Lady Chronicles: Devilish Encounters

•High on the Vine: Featuring Yooper Entrepreneurs Tami & Evi Maki

Full Length Novel

•Moose Willow Mystery

- 1 -

I spent near five minutes running my finger up and down the page in my American College Dictionary, looking for the word that Alice Pruitt had spat out at me like a bad peanut. I found the word on the same page as a lot of other words starting with “ill”: illegal, ill-fated, ill-gotten, illicit. When I sounded out the word, illegitimate, there was no question that it was the same word that Alice had used.

I had told Alice that I would eat worms and die before I’d tell her where the Voodoo Shack was hidden deep in Hazard Swamp. That was our club pact. We had all sworn to eat worms and die if we broke any of the club rules. Luckily, the only rule so far was to keep the whereabouts of the Voodoo Shack secret, and none of us was just dying to tell Alice Pruitt how to find it.

When I had recited this pact, Alice put her hands on her hips and stuck her nose in the air so high she liked to give herself a nosebleed.

“Who wants to join your ol’ club anyway?” she had said in a voice that reminded me of chalk taking a bad turn on the blackboard. “Besides, I’m thinking of forming a club of my own, and it won’t include…your kind.”

What did she mean, my kind?

“The membership of my club will be restricted to those who can trace their lineage back several generations. Mother is helping me with a list. It certainly won’t include any kids from trashy families, or—”

“Who are you calling trashy!” I yelled, giving Alice a small shove.

“And it won’t help to resort to violence, Iris Weston—I guess that name will just have to do, since you don’t have a father. Well, that’s not exactly true. Everyone has a father, it’s just that those who will be in my club will know who theirs is.”

“That so?” I snorted.

“Yes, Iris, that’s so. Mother says that you’re illegitimate and should therefore be disqualified from my membership roster.”

I knew it was a name-calling word—illegitimate. Alice was not about to call me something nice, and just the sound of it had a bad ring to it. Course, she was just ticked off because I wouldn’t tell her where the Voodoo Shack was. But I didn’t like the notion that Alice Pruitt’s mother was discussing my—what was that word?—lineage.

“And you’re a sissy-pants,” I had zinged back at her. I couldn’t think up any great comebacks.

I hadn’t given Alice’s hissy fit much thought until I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to do my homework. Usually I had better things to do than hunt up words in the dictionary, but I happened to have it right with me to help decipher Silas Marner, the book my sixth-grade class had been assigned to read. Besides, I figured I might be able to store up the word for use at a later time.

The definition said it meant not legitimate. Well, that’s like saying unhappy is “not happy.” But it went on to say some other pretty harsh things. Unlawful. I knew what that meant. Crossing the street against the traffic light is unlawful. I admit to it, but I always look both ways. Illegal. More of the same against-the-law-type stuff. Maybe Alice Pruitt saw me jaywalking. My finger came to an abrupt halt at the next part of the definition. Born out of wedlock; an illegitimate child. I strongly suspected that this is what Alice meant, or at least what her mother meant, when she’d told Alice this word.

But what did it mean, born out of wedlock? What was a wedlock? Maybe I wasn’t born in a hospital. Maybe they forgot to lock something. I turned the pages of the dictionary to the W section. Wedlock: state of marriage; matrimony. Born out of—Momma and my father not married? I slammed the dictionary closed with such a bang that my pencil jumped right off the kitchen table onto the floor and rolled under the refrigerator.

It was a big fat lie. Alice Pruitt’s mother was spreading lies, like everybody says she does. I wish Deputy Skinner could arrest folks for telling lies.

I was sure my momma was married to my father. I never knew him, my father. Whenever I asked questions about him, Momma’s lower lip would start to tremble and Gran would give me a harsh look, like I was asking something bad. Gramps had told me that my father was killed in the Korean War, where Momma had met him when she was over there as a nurse.

“What was that racket?”

I near jumped out of my skin. Gran has a way of just appearing out of nowhere and scaring the daylights out of folks.

“I asked you a question, Young Lady.”

I bought a little time by going over to the refrigerator and crawling around to fetch my pencil that had settled next to the drip pan. I could see Gran out of the corner of my eye, her foot tapping. She was holding a newspaper and wearing her reading glasses. She reached up and pushed a strand of loose hair back into her bun. If that hair knew what was good for it, it would stay put.

“Humpf,” she said as she squinted at the front page of the newspaper. “Now that fool President wants put a man on the moon! First they send John Glenn into orbit—how they ever got him back is a miracle—and now a man on the moon? Pure foolishness.”

I slid back into my chair and wiped the lint off my pencil before I commenced to chew on it. Gran looked over the top of her newspaper. “For the last time, Iris, what was that commotion I heard?”

“Commotion?” I said. “I’m just sitting here doing my homework. I dropped my pencil is all.”

She walked up to me and got close enough so’s I could smell the lemon Pledge on her. I knew she wasn’t buying it, doing my homework, since the sheet of paper in front of me was blank, except for a doodle in the corner. I was supposed to be working on my book report for Silas Marner. I hadn’t really read the book and had been planning to skim it and crank out the assigned four pages just as soon as I finished looking up illegitimate.

“Sounded like a gunshot, way you’re slamming things around here. You know your momma worked the late shift at the hospital. She’s got to get her rest. How’s she supposed to do that with you throwing books around?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I had learned not to argue with Gran, from the day Momma and I came to live with her and Gramps on the farm. That had been when I was just seven years old. Momma had pulled me right out of my second-grade class one day. She was a nurse in the emergency room of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, where folks came in all shot up and stabbed or sick from drugs or liquor. Momma said it was worse than the war sometimes. She finally got just plain fed up, said the city was no place to raise a child. I remember her sitting at the table, scribbling on a pad of paper, then wadding up the pages and throwing them away. I found out she was trying to write to Gran and Gramps but was having an awful time getting the words down. I guess Momma and Gran had had harsh words when I was just a baby, and things had been bad ever since. I had smoothed out one of the crumpled sheets and read it. Momma was asking Gran and Gramps if they could patch things up and for us to go live with them on their farm.

It was driving me crazy, watching Momma try again and again to write that letter, then throw it away. So, when I was writing my thank-you note for my birthday money—Gran and Gramps always sent me a real nice card with money tucked inside—I put it down plain and simple. Momma thought that we should go live with them, and that was that. About a week later, Momma yanked me out of school, already had the station wagon packed, and off we headed for Scottsburg, Michigan. I remember her hands shook so bad I was afraid she couldn’t hang onto the steering wheel. “We’re going home, baby,” she said, her voice all quivery.

So that’s how I came to find myself sitting at the kitchen table with Gran looking over me like a prison warden. I figured I’d keep my mouth shut for the time being about this illegitimate business, just like I didn’t ask anything about the pictures that I had taken a peek at in Momma’s nursing books. My favorite section was Human Reproduction. There was some interesting stuff there. I was trying to work up the nerve to sneak the book out and take it to the clubhouse for review at one of the meetings.

“Don’t sass me,” said Gran as she moved over to the kitchen counter and pulled open a cupboard.

You couldn’t win with Gran. Even a shoulder shrug was considered sass.

“I’ll fix you a can of Franco-American spaghetti for lunch, then I want to see some words written on that school paper,” she said as she began twisting the can opener with her crooked fingers.

“Want me to open that for you, Gran?”

“No, child, I’m not a cripple. I guess I can open a can of spaghetti.”

“Why don’t you get an electric can opener?”

“Why don’t you start writing about that book. You read it, didn’t you?”

I began to work on the eraser with my teeth. I tried to think of an answer that wouldn’t be a lie and wouldn’t incriminate me. I finally mumbled some nonsense into my pencil eraser. Even though I didn’t really say anything, Gran somehow knew the answer to her own question.

“Do you want to be held back in the sixth grade?” Gran asked me. She asked me that a lot. I wasn’t expected to answer, since it was really more of a threat than a question. The whole trick with Gran was to know when you were expected to speak and when you were expected to be quiet like you were mulling over ways to wash away your sins. I hoped I wouldn’t be flunked out of the sixth grade just because I hadn’t read Silas Marner. I had tried to read it, I really had, I just couldn’t make it through the first chapter. I had no trouble with my Nancy Drew mysteries. Silas Marner was different.

I buried my nose in the book for a moment, trying to look interested.

In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was all unwonted, or even intermittent and occasional merely, like the visits of the pedlar or the knife-grinder. No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?

That phrase caught me like a fly in a spiderweb: and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother? I supposed the question applied to girls as well as men. Course everybody knew my momma and Gran and Gramps. But what about my father? Everybody got all tight-lipped when I asked questions about him, then they’d send me to my room to do my homework or outside to clean the chicken coop. I learned real quick to avoid the subject, though there was a spot inside me that ached when I thought about it.

I heard Gran stirring my spaghetti. She poured a glass of milk and plunked it down next to me. She bent over, looking at the book, smoothing back my tangled hair.

“Humpf,” she said, then went back to dish up my lunch.

Like I said, you had to learn how to read my gran. Pushing my hair back like that and the “humpf” were signs of softening. I suppose the “humpf” was her opinion of the book, or maybe she noticed that I had forgotten to brush my hair. Since I was afraid to ask about my father, I decided to investigate the situation by the indirect route.

“Gran, what’s ‘illegitimate’ mean?”

I could tell that hit her like a bolt out of the blue. She almost dropped my plate of spaghetti in front of me. That strand of hair popped out of her bun like a coil spring. I became very interested in my spaghetti and tried to see how much I could twist around my fork.

“Iris Mae Weston, where in tarnation did you hear that word?”

There was only one thing worse than being called Young Lady by Gran, and that was being called by my full Christian name of Iris Mae Weston. Gran seemed to enjoy using my name more than I enjoyed hearing it, though even she admitted it didn’t fit me too well. She allowed that it was her idea, the name Iris, after her sister who died when she was a baby. Momma says she hopes I’ll grow into the name. She says right now I’m at the bulb stage, before the green starts to show. After the green comes the bloom. Momma says she reckons the bloom will come in a few years, maybe in about the eighth or ninth grade. I was thinking, while I felt Gran’s eyes burning into me, that I wished I was a bulb so’s I would be buried deep in the dirt.

When the name Iris is put with my middle name, Mae—which everybody always spells wrong—and my last name, Weston, I know I might be chewing on a bitter old piece of Ivory soap.

“I’m waiting,” said Gran, that foot doing its tap dance again.

If I told her that Alice Pruitt had repeated the word to me, then I would be blowing soap bubbles for sure. I don’t know why the mouth gets all the blame. Seems to me the eyes, ears, and brain play a part in picking up words and sinful acts they shouldn’t be seeing, hearing, or remembering. I guess folks can’t figure out a way to wash away an evil until it gets to the mouth.

Nope, I couldn’t tell her that Alice Pruitt had name-called me that word, much as I would have liked to. But if I told Gran that I’d read it in a dictionary, then the word found its way into my mouth in an acceptable manner. Gran couldn’t accuse me of wrongdoing any more than if I had stumbled across the part about begotten sons and daughters in the Bible, as opposed to, say, a nursing medical book. And it wasn’t a lie.

“Dictionary,” I said, tapping my pencil on the tattered cover of the book.

Gran sniffed, like she smelled something overripe. “Well, then, Miss, I guess you know what it means if you looked it up.”

Miss was another one of my names. My degree of sin had been downgraded from Iris Mae Weston to Miss, which meant, though on thin ice, I was okay if I walked carefully.

I sucked in a spaghetti noodle through my lips. I felt some sauce dribble down my chin.

“I’ve seen pigs at the trough with more table manners,” said Gran, tossing me a napkin. I wiped my chin and hunched over my plate. There was no end to my disgraceful behavior. It was a sure thing that Gran despised bad table manners more than the taint of a bad word. I could feel the thin ice crack under my feet.

I rose from the table and carried my dishes to the sink and turned on the faucet. I could feel Gran’s eyes on me. She was suspicious probably because I never voluntarily did dishes.

After I carefully wiped my plate, silverware, and glass and put them away in the cupboard, I picked up Silas Marner.

“I’m going to finish reading my book,” I announced.

It wasn’t really an untruth. I was going to finish it—eventually.

She squinted at me through her rimless glasses. I felt my face burn like I’d been out in the wind all day.

“I want that book at least half read by suppertime tomorrow, Young Lady,” Gran said.

I had backslid from Miss to Young Lady, in spite of doing the dishes. It wasn’t really fair, doing homework on Saturday. But there was no use in complaining. Gran would tell me it was my fault, since I’d had the whole six-week marking period to do the assignment. The report due date now loomed just around the corner at the end of Easter vacation.

“Yes ‘um,” I muttered.

I trudged up the steps to my room, feeling the weight of the book pull at my elbow socket. I went into my room and banged shut the door. I set Silas down on my bed. My Timex said 12:15. Gran would nap until at least 2:00. She always took a nap after lunch.

I regularly used candlewax on the window frame, so it slid open without a sound. I squirmed over the sill and onto the porch roof. Next I shinnied down the big oak tree that hugged the side of the porch. Using the hemlocks for cover, I slipped out of the yard onto the path that led to the Voodoo Shack.

- 2 -

It had been a wet spring. The weather couldn’t decide between rain or snow and the ground kept trying to thaw, but all that water had no place to go. Black ooze crept over the sides of my sneakers as I squished my way along the path that wound through Hazard Swamp. The swamp had lots of trees that seemed to be sprouting from little dirt islands. The trees were what made it a swamp instead of a marsh. They blocked most of the light, making the swamp dark and gloomy, even on a sunny day. I shivered, partly because it was kind of creepy and also because I hadn’t dared to get my coat off the peg by the back door, since Gran’s bedroom was right off the kitchen. I was wearing my heavy wool sweater, but the chill seeped through.

The Voodoo Shack, which stood on a high spot at the edge of Hazard Swamp, was the secret meeting place Alice Pruitt was dying to know about. Greenie Skinner—Deputy Skinner is his pa—was the first I’d asked to join after I discovered the Voodoo Shack in the Hazard Woods about a month ago. I had slipped out of the house because Gran was looking for me to help with some early spring cleaning even though there were still patches of snow on the ground. I had walked a deer trail into Hazard Swamp and saw a little log cabin tucked away in the woods neat as can be. It was padlocked up tight, but I found the key hanging from a nail on a rickety old woodshed next to the cabin, right next to the sign that said KeepOut!

Even though Greenie Skinner was a boy, he was my best friend. Come to think of it, most of my friends were boys. The first thing that I liked about him was his name, Greenie. His real name was Lamonte Green Skinner. Either way, his name was nearly as bad as Iris, and at first we thought maybe only kids with bad-sounding names could become members. Later, Greenie and I had to loosen up the requirements, or have a mighty small membership.

The other good thing about Greenie was that his dad was a deputy sheriff for Harley County, Michigan. It never hurts to be on the good side of the law. The sheriff’s office was in Harley City, a few miles from Scottsburg. Our farm was about two miles north of Scottsburg, which is where I’d gone to school since Momma and I moved in with Gran and Gramps four years ago. Folks say the town is so small, you can string a clothesline between the town-limit signs. Harley City was where Momma worked at the hospital as a floor nurse and where we went when we needed to do serious shopping, such as for school clothes or a new toaster.

Anyway, pretty soon Greenie and I let in Cecilia Campbell, because she bribed us with chocolate cupcakes. Tobey “the Tobster” Koklemeyer got straight A’s on his report card and was president of the student council. We figured he was a smart investment. Randy Whip was allowed into the club because he told a good ghost story. He was telling an especially good tale one day about voodoo spells, one thing led to another, and we came up with the Voodoo Shack as a name for the clubhouse. Randy did a great Elvis impersonation, too, though I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about with Elvis Presley. The five of us could sit comfortably around the rickety old table in the Voodoo Shack, so we decided to close the membership.