from everything that reminded us of Daddy, maybe we could stop feeling sad.
To keep myself from thinking about my father, I turned away from the window and opened the door of the pet carrier. 'Come on out,' I told Oscar.
For a minute Oscar looked at me as if he thought I was playing a trick on him. Then he crept forward and stared at his new surroundings. Ignoring my caress, he slid out from under my hand and ran around the empty room, meowing continuously and staying close to the walls, his belly almost dragging along the floor. Finding nothing to hide under, he darted back into his carrier and crouched at the back.
Mom opened my door a crack and looked at the cat. 'Poor old Oscar,' she said. 'Just leave him in there and come help, Ash. He needs time to get used to moving.'
***
Mom and I made at least six trips up the steps to get our things into the apartment. To make it worse, Max barked every time we went up and down the stairs. When we were finally finished, it was late in the afternoon and we were hot and tired and Mom still had to take the rental truck back to Baltimore.
'Why don't you just stay here and rest. Ash?' Mom suggested. 'I'll pick up a pizza on the way home, and we can eat it on the porch.'
After Mom left, I sat down on the top step. A gentle breeze stirred the bushes in the garden, and I breathed in the sweet fragrance of honeysuckle and roses.
Sitting there, staring at the jungle at the end of the lawn, I wondered why Miss Cooper had let her garden grow wild. The rest of her yard was so neat and tidy. Even bush had been trimmed into a cone or a ball and surrounded by a circle of pine mulch. The flower bed was edged with white stones, and the flowers themselves were laid out in patterns according to size and color.
But the garden was a wilderness, and the more I looked at it, the more inviting it seemed. Lush and green, the bushes swayed in the breeze, promising cool shade and privacy. It was a place to be alone, a place of secrets, a forest for me to explore and make my own.
But not now. I was too hot and tired to move. Lazily I told myself I'd save the garden for tomorrow when I felt more energetic. Yawning, I closed my eyes and stretched. But when I looked at the garden again, I saw a flash of white in the weeds. Was it a cat?
Remembering Miss Cooper's attitude toward Oscar, I forgot my fatigue and ran down the steps. If a cat had ventured into the yard, I'd rescue it before the old woman saw it and called the pound.
As I dashed across the grass, I had the strongest feeling that someone was watching me; I could almost feel eyes boring into the back of my neck. Afraid Miss Cooper had spotted the cat, I glanced over my shoulder. The shades at her windows were drawn and there was no sign of her or Max, but next door I glimpsed a flash of red in the leaves of a tall tree.
Stopping for a moment, I stared hard, sure it wasn't a bird, but I couldn't see a face or even a leg or an arm, just a bit of red that didn't belong there.
'Nosy, aren't you?' I muttered.
A mockingbird answered, and a cat meowed from somewhere in the garden. Reminded of my purpose, I turned my back on the spy, ducked my head to avoid the thorny arm of a rosebush, and pushed my way through the weeds into the cool, green shade of the garden.
Chapter 2
Kristi
ALL AROUND ME roses ran riot, sending long prickly shoots in every direction, fighting with honeysuckle for growing space. Waist-high thistles and Queen Anne's lace almost choked out the daisies and black-eyed Susans.
Hoping I wasn't stepping in poison ivy, I made my way down a narrow path to the dried-up goldfish pond at the center of the garden. In its middle was a statue of a cherub. His arms were draped with ivy and a wreath of honeysuckle circled his head. At his feet were foot-high weeds. His worn features and weather-streaked face reminded me of statues in pictures of Pompeii that I'd seen in a book.
As the stillness of the garden settled around me, I looked for the cat. Calling softly, I thought I heard something rustling in the weeds.
'Kitty, kitty,' I whispered, almost sure I saw a pair of green eyes peering out at me. 'Kitty, kitty, kitty,' I called again. Dropping to my knees, I peered under a rosebush and stretched out my hand.
For a moment, a cool, pink nose brushed against my finger tips. Then it was gone and the garden was empty, silent except for a cloud of gnats circling my head.
'Where did you go?' I tried to crawl into the bushes after the cat, but thorns caught in my hair and thistles pricked my bare arms. Backing out, I sat on the edge of the empty pond. The cherub looked sadly down at me, and a mockingbird hopped from one branch of a dogwood tree to another just over my head.
Where I sat, I was completely surrounded by a dense wall of bushes, trees, and weeds bound together with honeysuckle. Just as I'd thought, the garden was a secret place, somewhere to go when I needed to be alone. No one could see me here - not the spy in the red shirt, not Miss Cooper, not her dog. Not even Mom.
As still as the cherub behind me, I watched the leaves sway in the breeze. Sunlight and shadow mottled the ground, and the weeds whispered to themselves, lulling me like distant voices of children at play. Closing my eyes, I pretended I was in a magical place, safe from pain and sadness and death. In this garden, Daddy was alive again. I could almost hear his voice, smell his pipe and the after-shave lotion he used, feel his hand on my shoulder.
Slowly I opened my eyes like Sleeping Beauty in an enchanted bower, but all I saw were weeds and bushes. Daddy wasn't there. Except for the mockingbird, I was alone. Blinking hard to keep from crying, I got to my feet and tried calling the cat once more.
I thought I heard a faint meow from somewhere deep in the bushes, but the cat wouldn't come to me.
I waited for a few minutes, hoping the cat would change his mind, but when I saw no sign of him, I made my way through the weeds and bushes to the lawn. Mom would be back soon, I thought, and I didn't want to worry her by not being where she'd left me.
As I passed the tree between Miss Cooper's house and the house next door, I saw a girl in a red polo shirt standing in a gap in the hedge. She was younger than I was - seven or eight, I guessed. Her hair was short and shaggy and streaked with yellow from the summer sun, and her skin was golden tan. Her bare feet and legs were dirty and scratched, and she was covered with mosquito bites.
'Are you going to live in Miss Cooper's house?' the girl wanted to know. When I nodded, she said, 'My name's Kristi Smith. What's yours?'
'Ashley Cummings,' I told her.
She smiled then, a grin that showed the gap between her two front teeth, and started firing questions at me. In a few seconds, she'd learned I was almost eleven; I used to live near Baltimore; I liked reading, drawing, and bike riding; I didn't have a dog but I did have a cat. Finally she got to the question I'd been dreading.
'Where's your dad?' she wanted to know.
'He died last November,' I said. 'He had cancer.' I turned away then, hoping she wouldn't ask me anything else. It was still hard to talk about my father.
Kristi was silent for a while. The only sound was a bird singing in the garden. Finally she cleared her throat and said, 'My grandfather died a couple of weeks ago.'
I looked at her and she looked at me. It was a long look and it said we understood something about each other. Then Kristi leaned toward me. 'How do you like Miss Cooper?'
'Not much,' I said. 'She hates me already. And my cat too.'
'Miss Cooper hates
'Do you?'
'Sometimes.' Kristi grinned again. 'When I was little I thought she was a witch.'
'She looks like one.' I thought of Miss Cooper's wild white hair floating around her face, her sharp nose and little chin, her red-rimmed eyes netted with wrinkles.
'I feel sorry for you, living upstairs from her,' Kristi went on. 'It used to be her house, all of it. She was born
