Charles detached the piece of rusty metal from the roots. “It’s a belt buckle. Kind of a weird thing to find here.”
Their eyes met and Jill knew they were both thinking the same thing.
The tooth with the braces. A belt buckle. Things that might be found in a grave, not a garden.
Charles put the buckle next to the thermos and went backto work. A half hour later, after they’d both finished weeding their areas and had started on a new area, Charles made a discovery of his own.
“Hey,” he hissed, shooting an anxious glance at the house. “I found something.”
Jill tried to ignore the prickly sensation on the back of her neck. Mrs. Smith was watching them; she was sure of it. But from which window?
Charles scuttled over to Jill and opened his hand. A coin sat in the middle of his palm. “I rubbed off most of the dirt. It’s from 1870!”
Jill picked up the silver-colored coin and stared at the woman’s profile and the date. Its reverse side showed three straight lines that looked like the columns on a Greek temple.
“Do you think it’s worth anything?” she asked Charles.
“Maybe. But what if she finds out we took it?”
Jill pinched the coin between her thumb and index finger and slipped it inside her sock. “We need to show everything we find to Una.”
Charles opened his mouth to argue when a shadow fell across the path. They both pivoted to find a tall, dark-haired woman in a sky-blue halter dress standing over them.
“Good morning, children. I’ve been watching you work with such diligence. You must have built up quite an appetite by now and Mrs. Pulaski brought me these lovely cookies.” She held out the silver plate piled with cookies. “As tempting as they look, I’ve never taken to sugary foods. Would you care for one?”
Unable to meet the woman’s dark, bottomless eyes, Jill studied the hands holding the platter.
Milky-white skin stretched over bony fingers. Her long, pointy nails were the yellow of old paper. They were the hands of a fairy-tale witch disguised as a princess.
Jill lowered her eyes to the ground and said, “No, thank you.”
“What about you, young man?”
Charles lurched to his feet. “No, I c-can’t. I’m s-sorry. Ihave to go home now.”
Jill’s chest tightened. Charles was going to leave her alone with this terrifying creature?
She turned to him, wordlessly begging him to stay, but he scurried away in that quick, awkward gait that made him look like a rodent being chased by a feral cat.
Jill had to swallow twice before finding her voice again. “I need to go, too.”
“I owe you remuneration. How many hours did you work?”
Jill grabbed the trash bags and her tools. She still didn’t meet the woman’s eyes. “Two.”
“I’ll put an envelope in your mailbox. After the carrier comes, of course. Perhaps he would like these confections. He looks like a man who indulges in sweets all too often.”
Jill mumbled a goodbye and hurried off. The trash bags made it impossible to run, but she could feel the slithery caress of the woman’s gaze on her back.
She cursed Charles for abandoning her. He was supposed to be her ally. He was supposed to help her figure out a way to defend themselves against something neither of them understood. But he was too much of a wimp. She could only rely on Una.
As soon as she was safely inside her house, Jill turned on the kitchen sink and drank deeply from the tap. Then she washed her hands, her arms, and her face, scrubbing hard to get rid of all traces of dirt from Mrs. Smith’s garden.
But no amount of soap could erase the snake-tongue feeling of looking into that creature’s soulless black eyes. Mrs. Smith had assessed her in the same way her mother inspected a piece of meat at the butcher counter.
“She’s gotta be a monster,” Charles had said.
He’d been talking about the stone woman, but Mrs. Smith had the same eyes. Arrogant, angry, and old. Too old to belong with such a smooth, sculpted face.
