Chapter 4 iktsuarpok
iktsuarpok
Wykofski met me at the exit arch to the Hedges, his bushy brown eyebrows bunched together in vexation. “Those weewoos aren’t coming here, 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 a belch 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.”
The old woman rolled her eyes. “Of course I got bored! And so, I bullied my way out. Thank you, sweetie,” she added to the firefighter with her walker, who also delicately handed over her expensive turquoise purse.
She patted him gently on his bicep. “Tell your mother that I appreciate her help in my escape. But she still owes me that chicken salad recipe!”
“I’ll tell her, Mrs. Beck,” the firefighter replied kindly.
Another one, a woman with short hair and shoulders strong enough to pull me over her like a sack of potatoes, said as she handed Juliette a folder, “A physical therapist will come here three times a week at ten a.m., and here’s the prescriptions for her meds, and instructions.”
But Juliette could only glare at the old woman. “Eula!”
“Don’t give me that, Jules. You know I couldn’t stay away,” the old woman said, then turned her attention to me.
There were a lot of things about Odette, Maine, that I didn’t understand. The obsession with lobster, for one. The family-owned grocery store hours, for another. The pricing on the menu at the only bar in town. The lack of available men within a fifty-mile radius on any dating app.
And Eula Beck, the owner of Lilymoor House and Gardens.
Harriett and I had seen her once from afar ten years ago when we visited.
It was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment between the arches of the Central Garden.
A proud-standing woman in a zipped-up fleece jacket, even in summer, in jeans and worn work boots, with hot pink gloves and a matching bucket hat.
She was walking with a shovel, a goose waddling along behind her.
“Was that her?” Harrie had whispered to me, catching my arm to stop me, because she had seen her, too. When I nodded, she got excited. “Let’s go meet her!”
“No,” I said, grabbing her to keep her from running over to the woman.
“Why not?”
“It’s too weird,” I whispered, “and besides, what would I say? ‘Hi, I love your gardens and want to work here someday’?”
Harrie gave me a blank look. Then she said, “Yes, actually.”
“No,” I decided, turning in the opposite direction Eula Beck went.
“You’ll regret it, Soph,” she warned.
And maybe I had, but I’d never told her that.
Ten years later, I wound up here anyway. If I were like Harrie, I’d call it fate or kismet, but it was simply that my career field was small, and my position at the NYBG allowed me these kinds of opportunities. It was just coincidence.
Twenty-two-year-old me wouldn’t have believed that I now call Eula Beck at the end of every week to update her on the progress and my plans.
Though while she oversaw my transfer, the paperwork was done by her private lawyer, and Juliette had welcomed me to the estate itself, and Wykofski had shown me the ropes.
Eula was this distant overseer—
Until now.
While her cloud-white hair was windswept from the drive up, and her clothes still in moderate disarray, she looked more put together than I did on a good day.
With pearls around her neck, she wore a dainty little pink sweater and white trousers.
For an old white lady who had fractured her hip a month ago, she seemed rather well, if you didn’t look at the IV bruises on her hands or catch the slightest wince whenever she shifted the wrong way.
But then she set her piercing caramel eyes on me.
They were kind but hard, and I suddenly had the terrible fear that she could see right through me.
And I was afraid she didn’t like what she saw.
“And you,” she said with a smile, “must be the magical Sophie Drear.”