Mom slept late again. I think the lady beetles took a lot more out of her than they had out of me. We can’t all be trained entomologists, I suppose. (Well, actually we could be, and in a perfect world we would be, which might provide just about enough manpower to finish The Project and maybe make some inroads on beetle taxonomy.)
I made coffee, then sat down with The Project, only to find that the next section was all scale insects. Trying to ID scale insects down to the species level is one of those jobs that makes entomologists old before their time. Is that a quinquelocular pore or just a cerarius? Who can say? (Never mind the beetles. We’re putting humanity to work on the damn scale insects.)
Not feeling up to scale insect identification on my current level of caffeine, I stepped out into the garden instead. Still no insects, though I did see a tiger swallowtail pass overhead at treetop height. Butterfly ID is easy. The scale insects could learn from them. I checked for the lady beetles that I had released from the invasion, but they were long gone.
The roses smelled like … well, like roses. It was still early enough in the day that they hadn’t filled the garden with musk. I remembered the way that the house used to smell, how Gran Mae would cut armloads of tightly furled rosebuds, nipping the thorns off with her little pink pliers, and put them in vases, where they would open up over the course of days.
A thought occurred to me. I was trying to bring up positive memories of Gran Mae, right? In case Mom was in mourning? Why not cut some rosebuds and put them in vases for her? I could get one from each bush, make a nice arrangement of pinks and reds and whites.
I went back inside and found a pair of vases in the cabinet over the sink where random glassware goes to die. Was I supposed to add something to the water? I couldn’t remember. There were shears in the shed, at least, and the pink pliers for removing thorns. The shears had a patina of rust and didn’t want to open, but the pliers looked just like they had when I was ten years old.
I wasn’t sure how much stem you left on a cut rose, so I erred on the side of length and ended up stabbing myself with a thorn. I jerked my hand back, sucking on my fingertip. How had Gran Mae done this every day?
Let the roses taste you.
I believed that Brad believed what he had seen, but it occurred to me that maybe the adults had been right after all. Maybe he hadn’t seen what he thought he had. Maybe I’d grabbed for a stem and Gran Mae really had tried to stop me. I was thirty-two now and couldn’t touch these plants without stabbing myself. God only knows what I would have been like as a small child. Gran Mae had been an awful person, but in retrospect, the fact that I hadn’t come into the house dripping blood every day might prove that she’d been looking out for me. Or maybe just that she didn’t want to deal with a little kid screaming and bleeding everywhere, take your pick.
Five more roses entailed five more blood offerings to the rosebushes. I’m not sure why, but being stabbed with a rose thorn hurts more than it has any right to, given the relatively small size of the stabby bit. Maybe it was like caterpillars. The hairy ones often have what are called “urticating hairs,” which aren’t actually venomous, but have little barbs that work their way into your skin so they’re far more painful than just getting poked with a comparably sized needle.
Maybe I’d just do one bud vase.
Still, I was determined to get a rosebud from every bush, dammit. I was a tool-using mammal. (A tool-using mammal who should have been wearing gloves.) I was not going to be outsmarted by shrubbery.
I ended up with thirteen buds, one for each of the thirteen rosebushes. My left hand looked like I had tried to wrestle a feral cat. I snapped a couple of thorns off with the pliers, acquired a fourteenth wound, told myself that it was silly to worry about thorns for a plant that was going directly into a vase, and came inside feeling vaguely martyred about the whole thing.
Roses went in vase. I tried to arrange them attractively and immediately realized why Gran Mae had taken off the thorns. Fifteen. The results looked exactly like someone had cut some roses and then jammed them into a vase with no idea what they were doing. I decided that awkwardly charming was the best I could aspire to and went to bandage up my hand.
I looked up rose thorns on the internet to see if they had some kind of extra barb, and discovered that there was something called “rose picker’s disease” caused by a fungus growing on rose thorns, which manifested in small bumps under the skin, which then spread and became ulcers. Jesus Christ. I have got to stop looking up medical things on the internet.
There was a knock on the front door and Phil cautiously poked his head through. “I’m here to check for ladybugs.”
“Go on up,” I said absently. “Did you know that there’s a fungus spread by stabbing yourself on rose thorns?”
“Rose picker’s disease,” he said. “Yeah?”
“Does everyone know about this but me?”
“Probably only the gardeners. Why?”
“I tried to pick some roses.” I held up my battle-scarred hand. He winced.
“Yeah, you probably want gloves for that. Heavy-duty ones, not the little wimpy gardening gloves they sell you at the hardware store.”
“That’s okay. I am retiring from the field of botany.” I got another cup of coffee and settled down to work on The Project. Phil came downstairs after a few minutes and said he had to go get a ladder to check the outside wall.
“I won’t panic if I hear thumping.”
“No, but if you hear a scream and a thud, I’d appreciate it if you called 911.”
“Heh.” I dumped all the scale insect photos into one directory called “Scale insect spp.” for some other poor bastard to go through and went on to the next bit, only to discover that some asshole had dumped all the termites into a single directory for some other poor bastard to go through, and that poor bastard was me. Soldier termites have distinctive head shapes, but the workers—and they’re mostly workers—all look alike. You tell the difference by doing measurements of the relative length of their antennal segments. After the first dozen or so, you start to wonder why you didn’t become a medical test subject instead. The pay is similar and it’s much less painful.
I was just wondering how soon I could be injected with questionable drugs when Mom came down the stairs, made the groggy pre-coffee wave, and went into the kitchen. I heard the clatter of mugs and then she let out a gasp and glass shattered.
“Shit! Mom!” I jumped to my feet, dropping my laptop to the couch. “Are you okay?”
She did not look okay. She was standing in the remains of the coffeepot, surrounded by spilled coffee and shattered glass, staring straight ahead. Her skin had gone so white that I was afraid she was going to faint.
“Mom! Oh god, don’t move…” I ran for the dustpan. “Mom, talk to me!”
“It’s … I’m fine … I just…”
I returned and began frantically sweeping broken glass from around her feet. Thank god the coffee had started to get cold. There were a few drops of blood starting on her legs where splinters of glass had caught her. “Oh jeez, Mom.”
She swallowed. “The roses,” she said. “They startled me. I wasn’t expecting to see them. You … ah … you picked them, right, Sam?”
“Yes.” Oh, great job, you wanted to start a positive conversation about Gran Mae and now she’s got glass in her feet. A+ work. For your next trick, maybe you can just shove her down the stairs and be done with it. “I’m sorry! I remembered that Gran Mae always had roses in vases and I thought … I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have done it without asking.”
“No. No, it’s fine. It’s very sweet.” Color seemed to be returning to Mom’s face. “Gran Mae … Gran Mae would have loved them, I’m sure.”
Say something positive. It was hard enough to think of positive things about my grandmother when I wasn’t surrounded by broken glass. “Well, she always grew such beautiful roses.”
“Yes. Yes, she did.” Mom looked down at her legs and grimaced. “Oh, this’ll be fun. I can’t believe I was so clumsy.”
“It’s my fault.”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” said Mom firmly. She lifted one foot clear of the glass. “No harm done.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Five minutes with the tweezers, it’ll be fine.” She patted my shoulder and went upstairs. I made another pass with the broom, wondering if the glass fragments could carry rose picker’s disease and feeling like history’s biggest fool.
When I brought the dustpan full of glass outside to the trash, there were two black vultures sitting on the neighbor’s roof, watching me until I went back inside.
Mom had to go into town to mail some packages for a client. I waited until she left, then dumped the rest of the worker termites back into the directory for the next, next poor bastard and went to talk to Gail.
I had no idea how I was going to start the conversation, I admit. “Excuse me, but has my mother been losing her mind lately?” did not seem like the best opener. Still, I could hopefully fumble through something.
When I arrived at the garden at the end of the lane, though, the thought of my mother briefly went out of my head. So did everything else.
There were insects here. Gail’s garden was tucked into a clearing in the pine trees and it glowed with flowers. All kinds, not Gran Mae’s monotony of roses. I couldn’t tell you what most of them were, I’m no botanist, but they were swarming with hoverflies and solitary wasps and big hefty carpenter bees and at least two varieties of bumblebee—probably American and black-and-gold, although I’d need to get closer, Bombus wasn’t my specialty—and little iridescent sweat bees and skipper butterflies and all the other things that should have been in Mom’s backyard and weren’t.
“Hey there,” called Gail. I blinked and pulled myself out of my reverie. She was dressed much more casually today, in jeans and a T-shirt that read I CAME HERE TO PULL WEEDS AND CHEW GUM AND I’M ALL OUT OF GUM.
“You have insects!” I blurted.
“I sure hope so,” she said cheerfully, as if this was a normal replacement for “Hello” or “How are you?” “I planted the flowers for them. It’d be a shame if they didn’t enjoy them.”
“Sorry,” I said, trying to focus. A dragonfly cruised by overhead. (Eastern pondhawk, female.) “I—ah—there’s none in Mom’s backyard. It’s been bugging me.”
“It’d bug me too,” said Gail. She ambled toward me. Something followed her, and for a second I thought she had a cat or a very small dog, but it moved all wrong and then the shape resolved into a small vulture.
It didn’t move at all like I had expected. You see little birds hopping around on the ground, and you don’t think of them walking. This one walked, in a kind of bouncing gallop. Its wings were folded up and the longest feathers stuck out behind it, at least on one side, and it rocked from side to side as it galloped along. I’d never seen any animal that moved like that. It was unsettling and hilarious all at once.
“This is Hermes,” said Gail. “He’s friendly, but please don’t try to pet him.”
I eyed his hooked beak with respect. “He looks like he could take a finger off.”
“Well, yes, but he’d be mortified afterward. Vultures use their beaks to interact with everything, and it makes people nervous if they aren’t used to it. Then they jerk away and get hurt, and Hermes gets confused.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Hermes,” I said to him.
“Well, go on,” said Gail, in the voice you’d use with a toddler. Hermes bounced up to me and made a careful circuit of my legs. I’d rolled up my jeans into cuffs—it’s very hard to get pants that are both wide enough and short enough when you’re my size—and he cautiously reached out and took the edge of the cuff in his beak. He nibbled it, very carefully, then Gail called him back and he bounced over to her. She tossed him something and he devoured it with one gulp.
“I take it he’s not ever gonna be released,” I said, eyeing his distinct lack of wing on one side.
“Nope. He’s in training to be an ambassador bird. He’s a sweet little guy, and people have a lot of hang-ups about vultures, so we’re hoping he’ll make friends.”
“I promise I am very pro-vulture.”
She grinned at me. “Glad to hear it. They’re revered in many cultures, as I’m sure you know.”
“Sure. Egypt went nuts for them.”
“Yep. Powerful psychopomps. Like crows in The Crow.”
I probably looked blank, because she sighed. “It was a movie … which probably came out right around the time you were born. Don’t mind me, my bones are just crumbling to dust, that’s all.”
“Sorry?”
“Not your fault.” She shook her head. “Anyway, vultures are supposed to escort the dead to the afterlife.”
Hermes bounced back and forth, looking more like he would ask the dead to play fetch.
We chatted about vultures for a few minutes before I shook my head, realizing that I’d gotten distracted. “I’m sorry to drop in on you like this,” I said, remembering why I had come. “I had a question for you, but if this is an inconvenient time…”
“Nah. Come on up to the house and I’ll get Hermes settled.” She led me to a screened-in porch. Hermes bounced up onto a stool and she gave him another chunk of something meaty. “Dead mouse,” she said at my glance. “Hang tight and I’ll get you something.”
“Dead mice aren’t really my thing…”
She cackled. “Have a seat, if you can find a spot that doesn’t have vulture poop on it,” she said and went inside.
This was not the most encouraging statement I’d ever heard, but I located a wicker chair that did not appear to have vulture poop on it, though the back bore the marks of grasping talons. I sat. I looked at Hermes, then at my phone. I had a smidgeon of signal, so I took a photo of Hermes and sent it to my coworkers with a text saying, “Made a new friend.”
Gail came back, bearing lemonade and cookies. “Oh my,” I said. “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble.”
“Bah. I’m an old lady and easily amused.” She set the drinks down and handed me one. On his stool, Hermes sagged down into a pancake, which wasn’t a position I associated with vultures.
Gail regarded me with eyes as sharp as her bird’s. “Let me guess. It’s about your mom.”
“Are you a mind reader?”
“No, just a witch.” She snorted at my look. “Nah, relax. You get the same expression Edith does when she’s upset about something but trying not to bother anyone else. What’s the problem?”
Now that I came to actually talk about it, I couldn’t seem to form the words. I took a swallow of lemonade. “I’m worried about her,” I said. “She’s acting odd. I don’t know how well you know her…”
“Well enough.”
“She’s changed a lot of things in the house,” I said carefully. “Wildly different. And she seems scared of something. I’m afraid that something’s wrong. I just don’t know if it’s something … ah … external, or if it’s all in her head. I was wondering if you’d noticed any changes.”
Gail continued to study me. Her eyes looked much older than the rest of her, but that didn’t dull their gleam. Some knives stay sharp no matter how old they are.
“Have you ever read any Agatha Christie?” she asked abruptly.
“Uh…” I was startled by the sudden change of topic. “I think I read Murder on the Orient Express.”
“Any Miss Marple?”
“I don’t think so.”
Gail shook her head. “That’s a shame. Far superior to Poirot, in my opinion. Miss Marple is always saying that one sees so much evil in a small village. That’s how she solves all the murders. They all remind her of things she saw in her village.”
I raised my eyebrows. Hermes flipped his wing and continued to imitate a pancake. “You think there’s evil here on Lammergeier Lane? In a subdivision?” It seemed so absurd to say it out loud that I had to make a joke. “If we had an HOA, I could maybe understand it.”
She didn’t smile. “Anywhere there’s people, there’s a possibility of evil, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose in theory?” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. I could feel a headache coming on. I’d just wanted to ask if Mom had seemed odd, but I was getting more than I bargained for, none of which was particularly helpful. “But who do you think is evil here? Not Mom.” That last didn’t come out like a question. If Gail accused my mother of being evil, it didn’t matter how cute her pet vulture was, I was going to call her a lot worse than an old witch.
“Oh lord, no!” Gail shook her head so hard that gray hair fell into her face. “Not Edith. If your mother was the worst humanity had to offer, we’d be living in a state of grace.”
I relaxed. “Well, I agree. That’s why I came to see if she’s been acting odd, you see.”
“Mmm. Miss Marple was also a gardener, you know.”
My headache was definitely getting worse. “Mom isn’t,” I said.
“And yet there’s a garden at her house, isn’t there?”
“Well, yes, but…”
“Some things run in families,” said Gail. “And other things skip generations. It’s odd, isn’t it?”
I was completely lost. Families? I suppose insomuch as Mom had inherited the garden from Gran Mae, but it’s not like that was genetic. I had a brief flash of Great-Grandad Rasputin. Had he puttered around in a garden? Somehow it was hard to imagine. If he did, it would be one of those big Gothic numbers with poisonous plants twining up wrought iron fences, not pink hybrid tea roses.
Gail picked up a Tupperware container and began loading it up with chocolate chip cookies from the plate in front of us. “These are for your mother. And you, of course. I promise that Hermes didn’t stick his beak in the batter.”
“Uh…” Before I quite knew what was happening, she was very politely showing me the door. “But…”
Gail leaned against the doorframe, looking at me with an oddly sympathetic expression. “I know you’re an archaeologist and it’s in your nature to go digging around in the past. But it’s best to let some things lie.”
“But I’m worried about my mother,” I said helplessly. “I can’t just let that lie. What if she’s got dementia?”
“Edith seems very sharp to me,” said Gail. “Always has. Maybe she’s acting completely rationally based on her experience.”
I gaped at her. She smiled brightly. “Enjoy those cookies, dear. And tell your mother that if she needs anything, she knows where to find me.”