So I left him.
I hurried out of the garden, and in the Hedges the sirens were louder still. I feared that meant that they were coming this way. Had something happened? Had someone gotten hurt? One of the volunteers or—oh no, one of thevisitors?
I dropped my gloves on a mosseaten bench in the Hedges and followed the gazes of the statues to the exit. I didn’t have time to worry about that rude man in the garden.
He’d find his own way out, anyway.
4
iktsuarpok
Wykofski met me at the exit arch to the Hedges, his bushy brown eyebrows bunched together in vexation. “Those weewoos aren’t cominghere, you think?” he asked worriedly, stuffing his pack of sunflower seeds into his overalls’ breast pocket. “I didn’t call ’em.”
“I didn’t, either,” I said. We stood there, giving it a thought, and then I jumped at the realization—“Juliette?”
We exchanged a panicked look and rushed around the side of the manor.
To our relief, Juliette was in the kitchen garden with her laptop, sitting at one of the wrought iron tables under a pergola of English ivy. It was impossible to miss her. Glossy blond bob and bright purple pencil skirt. She was a petite woman with an emotional support clipboard she kept at her side at all times, and after a month I was convinced that she was the only thing keeping Lilymoor running these days. She gave us a strange look as we burst into the vegetable garden, then took out one of her AirPods.
Her eyebrows jumped high.
“Oh,” she gasped, pushing herself to her feet. “Is that—that isn’t—”
“You didn’t call them?”
She shook her head and quickly hurried over to us, abandoning her laptop and carrot sticks, her ever-present clipboard clutched to her middle. “That sounds a bit like a fire truck, doesn’t it.” She squinted out into the distance toward the main road. “Maybe it’s going to the goat farm,” she added doubtfully.
Wykofski gave a slow, serious nod. “Goats would do arson.”
Juliette and I gave him the same exhausted look. She opened her mouth, probably to ask what the hell, when red and white lights began to shimmer between the trees, brighter now in the dusk.
A moment later, a fire truck roared up the curving drive from the main road. The driver laid on the horn to the beat of . . .
“Don’t Stop Me Now”?
Well, that was unserious.
Almost immediately, Juliette’s tense shoulders sagged. She put her head in her hands. “Oh my god.Eula. . .”
“What?” I asked, baffled.
The fire truck crested the final hill. This close, I could finally make out the woman sitting atop the vehicle. Her arms were out, fingers splayed; she shouted happily as the fire truck circled the roundabout in front of the house and came to a slow stop. By then, the three of us had migrated there, too. At least by the look of the parking lot, there was no one left at the estate.
Strange—I guess that man had made a break for it soon after I’d left him.
The driver flicked off the sirens, and the tailpipe gave abelch of black exhaust. I wrinkled my nose as Juliette fanned the smoke away with her clipboard.
The woman atop the fire truck waved her hands in the air and cried, “She has risen!”
Wykofski threw up his fists in a hooting holler. “Yeaaah!Euls! That was badass!”
Annoyed, Juliette slapped him on the arm with her clipboard, then regained her professionalism and said, “What are you doing home this evening, Eula?” She watched helplessly as two burly firefighters went up to retrieve the elderly woman and gently carry her onto solid ground. “Aren’t you supposed to be in outpatient therapy for another month?”
When Eula was firmly on the ground, a third firefighter dismounted from the back seat of the cab and flicked out a walker, placing it in front of her. She said, wagging her finger at Juliette, “They underestimated me! They always do.”
Wykofski agreed, “Nothin’ can keep a good woman down.”
But Juliette narrowed her eyes. “You got bored.”
