has never thought much of cutoffs) and her hair (which Helen finds a bit dykey).
“Oh, hello,” she says to the girl. “No, no. Everything’s fine. Just… swearing at the flowers.”
“Oh,” says the girl. “I don’t believe we met, ma’am. I moved down the street, I’m Mona.” She aggressively sticks out her hand.
“Helen.” She shakes off one dirty gardener’s glove and shakes the girl’s hand.
“Doing some yard work today?” Mona asks.
“Yes,” says Helen, who wishes the girl would go away.
But she doesn’t. She looks around at the front beds and says, “Well, you can’t have much to do. These look gorgeous enough already.”
Helen smiles thinly. The girl obviously does not know what she’s talking about, and cannot see the numerous damages. “Well, it’s not for these,” says Helen. “The backyard’s a bit of a mess.”
“I see. Sorry to ask, but would you mind if I ask you a question, ma’am? Us being kind of neighbors and all.”
“I suppose not.”
“Have you lived in this house long?” Mona asks.
“Oh, God,” says Helen, laughing wearily. “Too long.”
“Would you have happened to have lived here when a Laura Alvarez lived at the house I’m in now?” She points down the street as if Helen can’t tell where she lives by the absurd red thing parked outside. “That one?”
Helen thinks. “No,” she says finally. “I’m afraid I can’t recall. I doubt it, though.”
“She would have worked up at the lab on the mountain. Coburn.”
Helen frowns at her mistrustfully and glances around. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“You don’t? Wasn’t the town built around it?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” she says again. “Coburn was gone long ago.”
“Do you know how long?”
Helen, growing impatient, shakes her head. “No. I don’t.”
“Oh,” Mona says. She looks at the spade in Helen’s hand, then up at the gate to the backyard, which is hanging open. Helen cannot help herself: she slowly moves to block the girl’s view.
“Well,” says the girl, “thanks anyways. If you think of anything, I’d really appreciate it.” She waves and walks back down the street, hands in her pockets.
“Ta ta,” says Helen. She watches the girl go, happy that the conversation ended there. There are a few subjects you never discuss, and Coburn is one of them, even though its logo—the hydrogen atom encased in light—discreetly adorns nearly every municipal structure in Wink, if you know where to look. Often you will see it tucked away in the corner of a building’s foundation, or engraved on the very, very bottom of a light post; but then you must forget you ever saw it, which of course is no issue in Wink, where knowing how to forget what you’ve seen is like knowing how to blink. And there are much, much harder things to forget than a little logo.
Helen hauls the yard tools around back. She was not lying to the girl: the backyard is in a bit of a mess. But it’s not the lilies, which need to be thinned, nor is it the morning glory, which is taking over; it’s the enormous sunken hole right in the center of the backyard, nearly five feet across. It’s a very curiously shaped hole, really: it has a large roundish section in the middle, and four rather odd protrusions stick out of its edges, with three bendy ones on one side of the circle and a large square one sticking out of the opposite side. It would be difficult for anyone to imagine what could ever make such a bizarre shape. It could be a sinkhole, one might think, but the rest of the ground is very firm. And it could have been done by flooding or standing water, but these possibilities are ruled out, for those forces take time and this hole appeared overnight.
Helen throws down her tools and begins hastily filling in the hole. Her husband Darrel, who, as always, is mostly worthless, comes out to watch, but does not offer any help.
“It’s huge,” he says softly after a while.
Helen nods sourly as she works at the hole.
“It came right into the yard,” he says.
“Isn’t that obvious?” says Helen.
“They’re not supposed to come in here,” he says. “They stay out in the woods. And we stay away from the woods. Those are the rules.”
“Do you think,” asks Helen between spadefuls, “that I am an idiot? Do you really think I don’t know that?”
“Which one do you think it was?” he asks. “We can report him, if we like. We should report it anyway. If there’s anyone