Her mother scowled. “I’m sure she has better things to do with her time. Just focus on your work, and before you know it, you’ll have earned thirty dollars. If she likes what she sees, she might hire you again.”
As much as Jill wanted the money for her typewriter fund, she didn’t want to go to Mrs. Smith’s. She didn’t want to step foot onherproperty.
How could her mother make them do this after what happened at the regatta? Charles’s mom would never force him to work for their crazy neighbor. He was probably still in his pajamas, watchingStar Warsor one of the other hundreds of movies he owned.
If he wanted a typewriter, he’d get it. He wouldn’t have to do a thing. No chores. No babysitting. No yard work.
J.J. finished his breakfast and pushed away from the table. “Fine. Let’s get this crap over with.”
“Afteryou put your dishes in the dishwasher. And, Jill.” Her mother tapped her own head. “Put your hair in a ponytail so it doesn’t hang in your face.”
Jill and J.J. didn’t speak as they collected their tools and trudged up the driveway. Jill was scared. She could sense the house watching them. Did her brother feel it, too? How the window on the top floor was like an eye, gazing down at them?
The electric gate across Mrs. Smith’s driveway had been drawn back, leaving a gap just big enough for the garbage can. Jill knew the door to the garden couldn’t be on the side of the house facing the Bernsteins’ or she would’ve noticed it before. That meant it was on the side bordering the woods.
“This way,” she said, leading her brother past the front porch and over the lawn.
“There’s a door under all this shit?” J.J. dropped his tools and stared at the mass of vines covering the length of the fence.
“Let’s just cut until we see it.”
Muttering under this breath, J.J. picked up his clippers and began severing vines. It wasn’t long before he said, “Found it!”
The door was made of wood so dark that it was almost black. The metalwork was rusted. Vines had wormed furrows into its surface. The pitted handle had a serpentine shape. Above the handle was a keyhole.
“Maybe it’ll be locked. Then we can go home.”
Jill didn’t share her brother’s wish. If the door was locked, her mother would make them ask Mrs. Smith for the key.
She stepped forward, placed her gloved hands flat against the wood, and pushed. The door moved inward by an inch at most.
“The vines are in the way,” J.J. said. “Lemme try.”
He rammed the door with his shoulder until the wood groaned and the vines shuddered. The door moved a few more inches and then stuck fast.
Jill peered into the opening. She saw tall grass in the foreground and vine-covered bushes in the background. She told J.J. to keep hacking away at the vines while she attempted to slice through the clumps of grass behind the door.
It took them twenty minutes to create an opening wide enough to accommodate their bodies. After hesitating a long moment, they slipped into a wilderness that bore no resemblance to a garden.
“Holy shit,” J.J. muttered.
Spread out before them was a riot of weeds, prickly shrubs, and more vines. It seemed as impenetrable as a fairy-tale briar patch. Every bush was festooned in thorns or draped in poison ivy.
Seeing no evidence of garden beds or ornamental plants, Jill said, “Should we make a clearing around the door?”
“I guess.”
Jill yanked out handfuls of crabgrass and pigweed while J.J. attacked the winter creeper. He wasn’t allergic to poison ivy,so he volunteered to tackle those vines as well, leaving Jill free to exhume what appeared to be a brick pathway from beneath a heavy blanket of moss.
As more and more bricks emerged, Jill forgot about Mrs. Smith and the ocular windows of her house. Sweat pearled on her forehead and trickled down the back of her neck. Animbus of gnats hovered around her head. The air filled with the threatening buzz of wasps, but Jill was too absorbed in her work to notice.
When her trash bag was full, she waved her brother over. “Look at this brick.”
He wiped his face with the bottom of his Lake Tahoe T-shirt and crouched down next to her. Brushing bits of orange dirt away from the shape stamped in the center of the brick, he said, “Looks like an anchor.”
“I wonder if she ever owned a boat.”
J.J. shrugged and returned to the task of rescuing a row of bushes from the greedy vines. The bushes were barely alive. They were spindly and colorless. Their fragility reminded Jill of the prisoners of war in the movies J.J. liked.
