roses appeared more sickly than when they were unpacked as sticks and roots from the nursery.
A letter to Darren Grover, placed (stampless) in his mailbox: “Will you please remove that thicket of trees at the edge of my lot. It is shading out my rose garden.”
Grover had a row of dogwoods, taken from the wild, which he had planted along their lot line. They were now handsome small trees: graceful drooping branches, large white flowers in the spring, bright red berries in the winter. True, their branches overhung Mrs Perth’s property. Grover ignored her letter.
Not long after, workmen came and pruned away every branch that violated his neighbor’s airspace. It was, after all, the law.
Next season, the roses did equally poorly In a mass execution, Mrs Perth had them all uprooted and flung into the rubbish heap to be carted away.
She then began work on a dahlia bed. Grover was past explaining to her about shade and drainage, and the dahlias died horribly. Somehow it weighed upon his conscience.
The flowering cherries were too crowded to do well, and they soon shaded out her peonies. Mrs Perth had the lot cut down and uprooted, replacing them with a bed of iris and a great mass of forsythia. The forsythia struggled gamely to please her, but after a few seasons they were ripped up and replaced by flowering quince. The surviving iris gave place to day lilies. The dahlia bed became a tulip bed, which became a row of clematis vines along the newly erected rail fence, which became a rose garden once again.
The shorn evergreens had died that first year.
And so the years passed.
Darren Grover no longer enjoyed sitting out in his side garden, face to face with the glowering lump as she prowled about her grounds wreaking slaughter. He began to think of her as the Wicked Witch of Hargrove Terrace—a malevolent creature constantly setting out innocent vegetation, then summarily executing it. Of course, weeds were her special prey, and she roamed her grounds daily, peering nearsightedly for anything that might be a weed, pulling it up and placing it in her basket. Leaves were also a target. No leaf fell into her yard that Mrs Perth did not hear and find and remove.
It would have been a brilliant garden, if the old witch had any clue as to how to garden. Instead she flung plant after plant into the soil, only to cast it forth once it failed to meet her expectations. Grover thought of a bad general hurling his troops against impossible odds, then executing the survivors for cowardice.
All of this leads into the matter of the deaf dog.
The acquisition of the deaf dog came about not long after the murder of the maple.
The tree that Grover prized above all others on his grounds was a large and aged maple, probably well settled in at about the time the American colonials were sniping at British redcoats from behind fencerows here. It was gnarled, sprawling and ungainly, and it had the most wondrous red and gold autumn foliage of any maple in Pine Hill. Of course, Clara Perth hated it. Hated it for the shade it cast upon her garden. Hated it for the leaves it shed across her well-picked yard. Hated it because it was wild and unfettered.
There had been many notes in the mailbox and surly conversations, all to the point that Grover should do something about that half-dead tree. Grover ignored her dire warnings of lawsuit, should the tree topple on to her house, as he ignored the witch in all other matters—having by now forsaken his quiet interludes in his side garden.
When a large branch blew down in a storm and crushed a birdfeeder and a despairing magnolia in her yard, Grover agreed in the out-of-court settlement to pay damages and have the tree removed. The tree fought gallantly for two days, but it had never faced chainsaws before. Mrs Perth watched its dismemberment from a lawn chair.
A stranger in his own yard, Darren Grover sought refuge in his daily walks through the forest. It had been close to a year now since he had encountered the hanged student, and Grover usually avoided that particular wooded glade. On this day his steps were aimless and automatic, and the westering sun found him wandering along his once-familiar path.
As he crossed the glade, Grover paused to study an unfamiliar plant—unusual, in that he could readily recognize most of the local flora. The short-stemmed plant had ovate leaves