“Did you hear Zoe calling Fida in the middle of the night?” Dora came from her bedroom, yawning and stretching, pulling her robe tight around her body.
“Uh-huh.”
“Seemed like it was about three or four. What was the dog doing out at that hour?”
“I don’t know. Had to pee, I suppose.” Jenny set the table for breakfast while her mother brought eggs from the refrigerator and pointedly held on to the carton.
“How about a poached egg?” Mom asked.
Jenny gave a slight laugh. “Guess you didn’t like how I scrambled them last night.”
“A little dry, dear.”
“I swear I’ll go to the market today, soon as I can.”
“That would be nice.” Dora smiled. “You’ve got the list. Maybe add some bagels. I’ve been longing for a good bagel.”
“You won’t get one in Bear Falls.”
“Oh, I know. But even a pack of frozen would do. Just something different for a change.”
Jenny toasted the hard bread while her mother put a pan on the stove to poach the eggs.
“You think she found her?” Dora asked as she set the table with bright-yellow dishes.
“You mean Fida?”
Dora nodded.
“No idea.”
“I’ll call and ask,” Dora said. “Zoe is such a fun person—all that fairy tale business of hers. She really is a dear. I feel so lucky to have her as a neighbor. After all, she’s a lot like me, loves books of all kinds. Though she won’t read Priscilla’s town history. I suppose I can’t fault her. Priscilla still tries to corner her, holding out the book as if it was a French postcard or something.”
Dora innocently kept cracking eggs on the side of the pan to drop them in the boiling water. “I just thought it would be nice for her to be up on what the people of Bear Falls have done in the past.” Dora sighed. “Guess you can lead a horse to water, you know, Jenny? But you can’t make her read.”
Dora went to the wall phone when the table was set to her satisfaction. She dialed, then talked a while. After she hung up, she turned worried eyes to her daughter.
“Fida’s gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?” Jenny stuck the butter back in the refrigerator.
“Said she didn’t know. Oh dear, Jenny. She sounds awful. Said she’s been surrounded by awful smells all night. I think she’s afraid something’s happened to the poor dog. She has that handicap, you know.”
“Zoe?” Jenny shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like a handicap to me. Just a little shorter than the rest of us.”
“Not Zoe. I meant Fida. Got that one blind eye.”
“You think I should go over and see if there’s anything I can do?”
Dora’s face relaxed. “That would be nice. She helped us almost all day yesterday. It seems the least we can do.”
We turned out to be Jenny, alone, making her way through the pines into Zoe’s backyard after breakfast and into a garden like none Jenny had visited before and wasn’t sure she ever would again.
She knocked at the back door, then turned to look at Zoe’s garden.
It was huge, stretching from beds at the back of the house to rows of dying tulips and daffodils. Flowering vines grew thick on Zoe’s side of a tall fence hiding Adam Cane’s yard from view. There were long beds of near-blooming peonies in all colors running down the center of the yard, running toward what Jenny imagined was the back of the yard, up a slight hill and out of sight. Jenny couldn’t see all of the garden because of tall rhododendrons in bud. The rhodos curved into lilac bushes in full blooms of deep purple, white, pink, and pale blue stretching around, and almost completely hiding, a yellow shed. Through all the color and all the green, a flagstone walk meandered from bed to bed.
Jenny knocked again and waited, turning back to look hard at what she recalled Zoe calling fairy houses standing in every flowerbed.
Some, she could make out, were made of wood, painted with flowers. Some were made of tiny stones. A few of tiny bricks. The houses stood between dying tulips or were hidden behind budding roses. In one bed there was a two-foot-tall castle, complete with turret. In another daffodils bobbed around a miniature opening to a cave. There were other houses hidden under tall plants and what looked like tiny statues throughout the gardens.
Jenny pulled away from the astonishing sight to knock again—hard this time.
Zoe’s pretty face, when the door opened, was almost unrecognizable—her skin mottled, eyes nearly swollen shut. Her hair was uncombed and stood up like a fright wig.
“She didn’t come back?”
Zoe shook her head. “I looked most of the night. I put her out about three thirty because she had to pee, but when I called her back in, she didn’t come.”
Zoe wore a pair of mismatched pajamas with tin soldiers printed on the top and Humpty Dumptys patterned on the bottoms. She looked like an ad for a mixed-up cartoon.
“Get dressed and we’ll go looking,” Jenny said. “I’m sure she’s somewhere nearby. With one eye—well, I can only imagine the poor thing trying to find her way home last night.”
“I’ll bet anything he did something to her.” Zoe gave a quick nod of her head and a sniff of her nose toward Adam Cane’s yard.
Jenny thought a minute. What would Lisa the Good say in this predicament? Something soothing.
“I don’t think he’d ever really . . .”
Zoe narrowed her eyes. “Don’t treat me like a child. We both know what the man’s capable of doing. You saw what he did to something your mother loved.”
“Why don’t we go ask him?”
“He’d never tell the truth.”
“What about going to the police?”
“How would that get me Fida back? Adam would lie, and you could see the chief doesn’t like me much. Not about to set his pants on fire looking for my dog.”
Jenny was out of ideas with nothing more to offer. “Get dressed.” She couldn’t help the impatience in her voice. “We’ll keep looking until we find her.”
“You want to come in?” Zoe pushed the door wider but with little enthusiasm.
“No. I’ll walk around your yard.”
Zoe didn’t perk up. “Suit yourself,” she said, closed the door, then opened it again to call after Jenny. “It’s a fairy garden. They might be sleeping. Don’t bother ’em.”
With a roll of her eyes, Jenny walked down the steps to take a tour.
Between two pumpkin-shaped houses, she found a tutued fairy standing on one toe. Jenny smiled and fought the urge to yell “Boo” at the tour jeté-ing statue.
From inside a building with a waterwheel on one side, a fairy with pointed ears peeped out.
Jenny laughed as she made her way past the beds—as creative as any garden she’d ever visited.
A worried fairy face peeked out one small, four-paned window. At the castle, a tiny Rapunzel sat in the tower, her long, blonde hair hanging out a narrow window. One house after another, fairies old and young watched her. What fun! In this garden she could be a carefree little girl again, the way she and Lisa once pretended that they would grow up to be princesses and live in faraway castles and marry doting princes and have nothing but beautiful children.
She worked her way past the rhodos, searching out the scent of lilacs over by the yellow shed.
At first she mistook the pile of rags, lying on the stone walk between the lilac bushes and the shed, as part of a construction site—a new fairy bed in progress. Or clothes for a scarecrow Zoe was putting together. She smiled as she got closer, wondering what would come next in this enchanted garden, then was struck by an awful thought—that the discarded bundle could be Fida, dead and wrapped in an old quilt and dropped there for Zoe to find.
She stopped, took another step, and almost tripped on pieces of ceramic scattered over the walk. She bent to see what she could see. Much too large a bundle to be a little dog.
Blue. And red plaid. And colorless sandals on a pair of dirty feet sticking out from beneath the ragged bundle. A blackthorn stick lay near the shed.
She pulled the rags away and stared down into the face of a dead man.
“Mr. Cane!” Jenny yelled at the sprawled figure. “Mr. Cane!”
She bent over the man, shaking him until she saw the pool of blood beneath his head. She fell to her knees and caught her breath. Not only a pool of blood, but a deep gash in the long, gray hair wrapped by a blue headband. She waved a hand at the gathering flies and then laid a hand on his chest, feeling for movement, for breath going in and out.
Nothing.
She felt for a pulse at his wrist.
Again nothing. She called his name then held her breath, hoping for the slightest sound.
Adam Cane was dead. A broken fairy house lay in pieces beside his head. In the first minutes of her confusion, she told herself he’d had an accident. It appeared that he’d fallen over the fairy house, or maybe he’d tripped on his cane and fell.
She looked beyond the body to where a pointed hoe lay tangled among the branches of a broken lilac bush. Without understanding why, Jenny got up to move the hoe as if that lethal point, so close to his head, could do more damage.
She touched the wooden handle, meaning to push the hoe off to one side. It seemed important to make things better. Caught in the broken bush, the hoe didn’t move when she pushed it. She pulled at the handle and then, when it caught, she pulled again. She put both hands on the metal end itself and pulled.
When it wouldn’t budge, snagged too deeply in broken branches, she decided to leave it where it was and go for help. As she got up, she noticed that she’d left behind a shiny handprint on the stone where she’d been leaning.
She turned her hand up to check it. Her palm and fingers were stained red. No cuts. Nothing hurt. She looked at her other hand. More dark red stains.
Horror struck her hard when she glanced at the pointed head of the hoe. A single drop of viscous liquid dripped. The drop fell slowly to the dark stone beneath. On the stone, a puddle of coagulating blood spread out to blackened edges.