'Well, it did the trick,' I said, handing back the bottle. 'At least for now. Oh, please let this be a temporary aberration! First Steven's Neanderthal brother and now this. I just can't deal with Scotty on top of everything else. If one more oaf comes near me ...' I said, shaking my head and leading the way to the stairs.
'Define oaf,' Michael said, moving away slightly.
'The way I feel at the moment ... any member of the male sex.'
'No exceptions?' he asked, plaintively. 'Dad. He's totally bonkers, but he's not an oaf.'
'Agreed,' Michael said.
'Rob ... I think.'
'You think? Your own brother and you're not sure?'
'His taste in women is highly questionable,' I said.
'No argument there. Anyone else?'
'Michael, if you're fishing for compliments, I'll grant you provisional exemption from oafhood on the grounds that you helped rescue me from Scotty, and have refrained from asking what I could possibly have done to encourage him to leap out of the closet at me like that.'
'Like you said before, somehow I don't think Scotty needs much encouragement.'
'The wrong men never do.'
'What about the right ones?'
'I'll let you know if I ever meet one,' I said.
'Speaking of which, have you ever considered--' Michael began, and then was drowned out by a frightful commotion in the yard. Scotty, still unclad, suddenly burst through the azalea patch and streaked across our yard, closely pursued by all three of the Labradors from next door.
'That's odd,' I said, 'the Labs usually like Scotty.' Spike popped out of the azalea patch, barking fiercely, and disappeared in the direction Scotty and the Labs had taken.
'Oh, God,' Michael said. 'It must be Mom's dog repellent. Though why a dog repellent should make dogs chase him I have no idea. I suppose I should go see if he needs help.' I wasn't sure whether he meant Scotty or Spike, but I didn't feel much like helping either of them, so after watching Michael lope off in the general direction of the furor, I went to bed. After making a note in my indispensable notebook to borrow the so-called dog repellent from Michael before the next time Barry showed up.
Tired as I was, I had a hard time tuning out the barking noises, steadily increasing in volume and variety, that seemed to come first from one end of the neighborhood and then the other.
Saturday, July 9
Having gone to bed before midnight, I was up by eight and feeling virtuous about it. I joined Mother for breakfast on the porch, and felt suitably rewarded when Dad dropped by with fresh blueberries and Michael with fresh bagels.
'We certainly had a lively time around here last night,' Mother remarked over her second cup of tea. Michael and I both started. I had thought Mother safely out of the way during Scotty's unconventional visit, the ensuing mad dash around the neighborhood, and the countywide canine convocation that had reportedly dragged the sheriff and the normally underworked dogcatcher out of their beds at 3:00 A.m. Michael had a suspiciously innocent look on his face.
'Could you hear the party all the way down at Pam's?' I asked.
'Oh, no, dear,' Mother said. 'But I think some of Samantha's friends must have gotten just a little too exuberant.'
'Most of them were totally sloshed, if that's what you mean,' I said. 'But that's nothing new.'
'Yes, but it really is too bad about the side yard,' Mother said.
'What about the side yard?' I said. Had Scotty and the pack returned to our yard after I dropped off?
'So very thoughtless,' she continued. 'And not at all what one would expect from well-brought-up young people.'
'What, Mother?' I asked, beginning to suspect it would be easier to get an answer from the side yard.
'Someone has torn up some of your father's nice flowers. You know, dear,' she said, turning to Dad, 'those nice purple spiky ones.'
'Purple spiky flowers?' Dad and I said in unison, looking at each other with dawning horror.
'Oh, no!' I gasped, and Dad exclaimed 'Oh, my God!' as we simultaneously jumped up and ran out to the side yard. Mother and Michael followed, more slowly.
'I'm sorry, dear,' Mother said, looking puzzled. 'I had no idea you'd be that upset about it.'
'They were fine when I watered them yesterday afternoon,' Dad said.
'A lot of the damage is trampling,' I said, as Dad and I crouched over the flower bed.
'Yes, but I don't think all the plants are here,' Dad said. 'I think some of them are missing. What do you think?'
'I think a lot of them are missing,' I said. 'Whoever did this did a lot of trampling to cover it up--or maybe someone else came along and trampled it afterwards--but there are definitely a lot of plants missing, too.'
'Does it really make that much of a difference whether the vandals dragged them off or not?' Michael asked. 'They look pretty well ruined to me; you couldn't replant them or anything in that condition, could you? And are they really that valuable?'
'It's not that they're valuable,' Dad said. 'They're poisonous.'
'Why does that not surprise me, in your garden?' Michael said, with a sigh. 'What are they, anyway?'
'Foxglove,' I said. 'Which means that if it wasn't just vandalism--'
'Which I don't believe for a minute,' Dad fumed, shaking a fist full of limp foxglove stalks.
'Then someone--'
'Someone who's up to no good--' Dad put in.
'Has just laid in a large enough supply of digitalis to knock off an elephant.'
'Several elephants,' Dad added. 'This is very serious.'
'Digitalis!' Michael exclaimed.
'Is it dangerous, dear?' Mother asked.
'Meg and her friends might very well have died if that salsa had contained digitalis,' Dad said.
'It felt as if we were going to anyway,' I said.
'I do hate to criticize, dear,' Mother began. 'But we wouldn't have this little problem if you wouldn't insist on growing all these dangerous plants.' She looked over her shoulder with a faint shudder, as if half expecting to find a giant Venus flytrap sneaking up on her.
'I'd better call the sheriff,' Dad said, trotting off with Mother trailing behind him, gracefully wringing her hands.
'You know,' Michael said, as we watched them leave, 'your mother's right. Your dad's garden is rather a dangerous thing to have around.'
'Nonsense,' I said, automatically parroting the Langslow party line. 'I'm sure more people die in car accidents every year than from eating poisonous plants.' But I must admit that I said it with less conviction than usual. Somewhere, probably very nearby, someone could be concocting a deadly potion out of Dad's plants. I had no idea how one would actually do this, but that didn't ward off the vivid visions of a determined poisoner bent over a black kettle on his--or her--stove, distilling digitalis from Dad's beautiful little purple flowers. Probably highly inaccurate, but I couldn't shake the picture.
'Let's go and find out what you would do with foxglove to make it into a poison,' I said, starting for the door.
'You're not serious.'
'Deadly serious. The more we know about how the poison is made, the better we can watch for signs that anyone we know is up to no good.'
Dad gave us a highly technical lesson on the chemistry of digitalis. He was partial to the idea of our plant
