“Oh my God!” Willow leapt onto the metal food box without a thought of Ava Downey, Beau, the poker game, or the neighborhood seeing her. Rats were terrifying-she couldn't have said why- and she looked around for something to drive the creature off.
But he took himself into the ivy without her encouragement. And as the last of his gray bulk disappeared, Willow McKenna didn't hesitate to do so herself. She leapt from the food box and ran all the way home.
“It
Leslie Gilbert took her gaze away from the television. She'd muted the sound upon Willow's arrival but hadn't completely torn herself away from the confrontation going on there.
“I know a rat when I see one,” Willow said.
Leslie reached for a Dorito and munched thoughtfully. “Did you let her know?”
“I phoned her right away. But she didn't answer and she doesn't have a machine.”
“You could leave her a note.”
Willow shivered. “I don't even want to go into the yard again.”
“It's all that ivy,” Leslie pointed out. “Bad thing to have ivy like that.”
“Maybe she doesn't know they like ivy. I mean, in Russia, it'd be too cold for rats, wouldn't it?”
Leslie took another Dorito. “Rats're like cockroaches, Will,” she said. “It's never too anything for them.” She fastened her eyes to the television screen. “Least we know why she has that box for her groceries. Rats bite through anything. But they don't bite through steel.”
There seemed nothing for it but to write a note to Anfisa Telyegin. Willow did this promptly but felt that she couldn't deliver such news to the reclusive woman without also proffering a solution to the problem. So she added the words, “I'm doing something to help out,” and she bought a trap, baited it with peanut butter, and bore it with her to 1420.
The next morning at breakfast, she told her husband what she had done, and he nodded thoughtfully over his newspaper. She said, “I put our phone number in the note, and I thought she'd call, but she hasn't. I hope she doesn't think I think it's a reflection on her that there's a rat on her property. Obviously, I didn't mean to insult her.”
“Hmm,” Scott said and rattled his paper.
Jasmine said, “Rats?
And Max said, “Yucky yucky yuck.”
Having started something with the deposit of the trap on
Anfisa Telyegin's front porch, Willow felt duty bound to finish it. So she returned to 1420 when Scott was asleep and the children had gone off to school.
She walked up the path with far more trepidation than she'd felt on her first visit. Every rustle in the ivy was the movement of the rat, and surely the
Her fears came to nothing, though. When she mounted the porch, she saw that her effort at trapping the critter had been successful. The trap held the rat's broken body. Willow shuddered when she saw it, and hardly registered the fact that the rodent looked somewhat surprised to find his neck broken right when he was helping himself to breakfast.
She wanted Scott there to help her, then. But realizing that he needed his sleep, she'd come prepared. She'd carried with her a shovel and a garbage bag in the hope that her first venture in vermin extermination would have been successful.
She knocked on the door to let Anfisa Telyegin know what she was doing, but as before there was no answer. As she turned to face her task with the rat, though, she saw the venetian blinds move a fraction. She called out, “Miss Telyegin? I've put a trap down for the rat. I've got him. You don't need to worry about it,” and she felt a bit put out that her neighbor didn't open the front door and thank her.
She steeled herself to the job before her-she'd never liked coming across dead animals, and this occasion was no different from finding roadkill adhering to the treads of her tires-and she scooped the rat up with the shovel. She was just about to deposit the stiffened body into the garbage sack, when a susurration of the ivy leaves distracted her, followed by a skittering that she recognized at once.
She whirled. Two rats were on the edge of the porch, eyes glittering, tails swishing against the wood.
Willow McKenna dropped the shovel with a clatter. She made a wild dash for the street.
“Two more?” Ava Downey sounded doubtful. She rattled the ice in her glass and her husband Beau took it for the signal it was and went to refresh her gin and tonic. “Darlin', you sure you're not sufferin' from somethin'?”
“I know what I saw,” Willow told her neighbor. “I let Leslie know and now I'm telling you. I killed one, but I saw two more. And I swear to God, they
“Intelligent rats, then?” Ava Downey asked. “My Lord, what a perplexin' situation.” She pronounced it
“It's a neighborhood problem,” Willow said. “Rats carry disease. They breed like… well, they breed…”
“Like rats,” Beau Downey said. He gave his wife her drink and joined the ladies in Ava Downey's well-appointed living room. Ava was an interior decorator by avocation if not by career, and everything she touched was instantly transformed into a suitable vignette for
“Very amusin', darlin',” Ava said to her husband, without smiling. “My oh my. Married all these years and I had no idea you have such a quick wit.”
Willow said, “They're going to infest the neighborhood. I've tried to talk to Anfisa about it, but she's not answering the phone. Or she's not at home. Except there're lights on, so I think she's home and… Look. We need to do something. There're children to consider.”
Willow hadn't thought of the children till earlier that afternoon, after Scott had risen from his daily five hours. She'd been in the backyard in her vegetable garden, picking the last of the autumn squash. She'd reached for one and in doing so had dug her fingers into a pile of animal droppings. She'd recoiled from the sensation and pulled the squash out hastily from the tangle of its vine. The vegetable, she saw, had been scarred with tooth marks.
The droppings and tooth marks had told the tale. There weren't just rats in the yard next door. There were rats on the move. Every yard was vulnerable.
Children played in those yards. Families held their summer barbecues there. Teenagers sunned themselves there in the summer and men smoked cigars on warm spring nights. These yards weren't meant to be shared with rodents. Rodents were dangerous to everyone's health.
“The problem's not rats,” Beau Downey said. “The problem's the woman, Willow. She probably thinks having rats is normal. Hell, she's from Russia. What d'you want?”
What Willow wanted was peace of mind. She wanted to know that her children were safe, that she could let Blythe-or-Cooper crawl on the lawn without having to worry that a rat-or rats' droppings-would be out there.
“Call an exterminator,” Scott told her.
“Burn a cross on her lawn,” Beau Downey advised.
She phoned Home Safety Exterminators, and in short order a professional came to call. He verified the evidence in Willow's vegetable plot, and for good measure, he paid a call on the Gilberts on the other side of 1420 and did much the same there. This, at least, got Leslie off the sofa. She dragged a set of kitchen steps to the fence and peered over at 1420's backyard.
Aside from a path to the chicken coop, ivy grew everywhere, even up the trunks of the fast-growing trees.
“This,” Home Safety Exterminator pronounced, “is a real problem, lady. The ivy's got to go. But the rats have to go first.”
“Let's do it,” Willow said.
But there was a problem as things turned out. Home Safety Exterminators could trap rats on the McKennas' property. They could trap rats in the Gilberts' yard. They could walk down the street and see to the Downeys' and even cross over and deal with the Harts'. But they couldn't enter a yard without permission, without contracts being signed and agreements reached. And that couldn't happen unless and until someone made contact with Anfisa Telyegin.
The only way to manage this was to waylay the woman when she left one night to teach one of her classes at
