shovel with a clatter. She made a wild dash for the street.
"Two more?" Ava Downey sounded doubtful. She rattled the ice in her glass and her husband Beau took it for the signal it was and went to refresh her gin and tonic. "Darlin', you sure you're not sufferin' from somethin'?"
"I know what I saw," Willow told her neighbor. "I let Leslie know and now I'm telling you. I killed one, but I saw two more. And I swear to God, they knew what I was doing."
"Intelligent rats, then?" Ava Downey asked. "My Lord, what a perplexin' situation." She pronounced it perplexing in her southern drawl, Miss North Carolina come to live among the mortals.
"It's a neighborhood problem," Willow said. "Rats carry disease. They breed like... well, they breed..."
"Like rats," Beau Downey said. He gave his wife her drink and joined the ladies in Ava Downey's well-appointed living room. Ava was an interior decorator by avocation if not by career, and everything she touched was instantly transformed into a suitable vignette for Architectural Digest.
"Very amusin', darlin'," Ava said to her husband, without smiling. "My oh my. Married all these years and I had no idea you have such a quick wit."
Willow said, "They're going to infest the neighborhood. I've tried to talk to Anfisa about it, but she's not answering the phone. Or she's not at home. Except there're lights on, so I think she's home and... Look. We need to do something. There're children to consider."
Willow hadn't thought of the children till earlier that afternoon, after Scott had risen from his daily five hours. She'd been in the backyard in her vegetable garden, picking the last of the autumn squash. She'd reached for one and in doing so had dug her fingers into a pile of animal droppings. She'd recoiled from the sensation and pulled the squash out hastily from the tangle of its vine. The vegetable, she saw, had been scarred with tooth marks.
The droppings and tooth marks had told the tale. There weren't just rats in the yard next door. There were rats on the move. Every yard was vulnerable.
Children played in those yards. Families held their summer barbecues there. Teenagers sunned themselves there in the summer and men smoked cigars on warm spring nights. These yards weren't meant to be shared with rodents. Rodents were dangerous to everyone's health.
"The problem's not rats," Beau Downey said. "The problem's the woman, Willow. She probably thinks having rats is normal. Hell, she's from Russia. What d'you want?"
What Willow wanted was peace of mind. She wanted to know that her children were safe, that she could let Blythe-or-Cooper crawl on the lawn without having to worry that a rat - or rats' droppings - would be out there.
"Call an exterminator," Scott told her.
"Burn a cross on her lawn," Beau Downey advised.
She phoned Home Safety Exterminators, and in short order a professional came to call. He verified the evidence in Willow's vegetable plot, and for good measure, he paid a call on the Gilberts on the other side of 1420 and did much the same there. This, at least, got Leslie off the sofa. She dragged a set of kitchen steps to the fence and peered over at 1420's backyard.
Aside from a path to the chicken coop, ivy grew everywhere, even up the trunks of the fast-growing trees.
"This," Home Safety Exterminator pronounced, "is a real problem, lady. The ivy's got to go. But the rats have to go first."
"Let's do it," Willow said.
But there was a problem as things turned out. Home Safety Exterminators could trap rats on the McKennas' property. They could trap rats in the Gilberts' yard. They could walk down the street and see to the Downeys' and even cross over and deal with the Harts'. But they couldn't enter a yard without permission, without contracts being signed and agreements reached. And that couldn't happen unless and until someone made contact with Anfisa Telyegin.
The only way to manage this was to waylay the woman when she left one night to teach one of her classes at the local college. Willow appointed herself neighborhood liaison, and she took up watch at her kitchen window, feeding her family take-out Chinese and pizzas for several days so as not to miss the moment when the Russian woman set off for the bus stop at the end of Napier Lane. When that finally happened, Willow grabbed her parka and dashed out after her.
She caught up to her in front of the Downeys'