Jill tied off her second garbage bag and dragged it to the curb. She had no idea how long they’d been working. And even though she was hot and thirsty, she had no desire to go home. The brick path had curved to the right at first but was now curving back to the left. She wanted to follow the wave of bricks to the center—to the heart of the ruined garden.
She and J.J. didn’t talk much. Occasionally, he’d pause to show her a bit of detritus caught in a nest of the vines or speared by a thorn. There was a bleached comic strip, a torn Thurman Munson baseball card, and a scrap of pink ribbon.
“It’d be cool if we found some money. Or old jewelry.” He slowly ripped the baseball card until Munson’s head separated from his body. “I should bring my metal detector up here.”
Jill shot a wary glance at Mrs. Smith’s house. There was no window on the ground floor, but there were two on the floor above. Mrs. Smith could be looking down at them right now. Watching.
“Better not,” she whispered.
She’d almost filled another bag with moss and weeds when her trowel revealed a line of bricks moving in another direction. It seemed she’d finally reached an intersection. The path continued meandering to the east but also split off, heading north and south as well. There was a round stone in the middle of the place where the paths crossed.
Jill wondered if she’d uncovered a rose compass, but then she saw grooves carved into the center stone. Strange symbols ran around its perimeter.
“J.J.!” she hissed. “You have to see this!”
Her brother was dragging a massive hairball of vines toward the garden door. He was red-faced and sweaty. His arms were mottled with dirt and small lacerations. Glowering at her, he warned, “This better be good.”
Jill knew that voice. Her brother was angry. He wanted to hit or kick or swat at something.
She didn’t want that something to be her.
“Look. It’s a face.”
J.J. lumbered over and put his hands on his hips, fully prepared to disparage his sister. But the sneer forming on his lips evaporated when he looked down at the image. “What the hell?”
Jill pointed to the path leading from the door to the side of the face, then to the start of another path jutting out from higher on the face. “I think it’s a sun. The paths are, like, the sun’s rays.”
Grabbing her trowel, J.J. scraped along the edge of thestone until a series of diamond shapes began to emerge. They looked like snake scales.
“Maybe it’s Medusa,” Jill said.
“Jesus Christ. You’reobsessedwith her. Just because you did that book report at the end of the year doesn’t mean everyone is into Greek myth. I mean, duh. Don’t be such a dolt. No normal person would have a Medusa head in their garden.”
Mrs. Smith isn’t normal.
“Use your brain for two seconds,” J.J. sneered. “The bricks have anchors. The face has scales. The house is on the water. It’s a fucking mermaid.”
He walked back to the mass of vines and dragged them out of the garden.
As Jill scraped more dirt and moss from the circular stone, scales continued to emerge around the edges.
She pulled a tapestry of small stubborn roots away from the bowed lips and wide, flat nose. The eyes were narrow ovals under a heavy brow. The woman wasn’t pretty like the mermaids Jill had seen in books. Her unsmiling mouth and lowered brow made her look angry.
Determined to prove J.J. wrong, Jill started probing the ground for more bricks. If more wavy paths grew out of the stone head, this woman had to be Medusa.
Jill worked as if in a fever dream, sliding her trowel under thatches of moss, tugging grass, and yanking out dandelions. She filled another garbage bag. Then another.
The drone of wasps became more persistent. More gnats gathered. The hostile buzz of a horsefly sounded in Jill’s ears. She idly swatted the insect away.
Suddenly, a shadow moved though the grass a few feet in front of her right hand. It shot forward quickly, the grass blades shivering in its wake.
The thing could be a field mouse or a chipmunk, Jill told herself. But it hadn’t scurried like a rodent. It had slithered. Like a snake.
Jill froze.
She hadn’t seen a snake since last summer, when she and her father were working in the vegetable garden. A little green snake, no bigger than the ruler in Jill’s pencil case, had poked its head out from under the leaves of a cucumber vine.
“Careful,” her dad had said. “We don’t want to hurt him. He’s good for the garden because he eats bugs.”
