The Doll in 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 everybody? Kristi said. "She calls the police if my brother turns his stereo on after ten. She thinks I'm a nosy brat, and she's always complaining to my mother about me. She says I spy on her."

"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 there, my mom says, but when she got older she was so poor she had to make the upstairs into an apartment. Nobody lives in it for long, though."

"Why? Because Miss Cooper's so grouchy?"

Kristi put a piece of grass in her mouth and chewed on it. "That's part of the reason," she said after a while.

I watched her for a few seconds, waiting for her to go on. "What's the other reason?" I asked.

"I don't know if I should tell you." As Kristi spoke, she glanced at the garden, then looked away. The shadows were getting longer now, and the tangled underbrush looked dark and mysterious. "You might get scared and want to move away."

I leaned toward Kristi, my face inches from hers. "I won't be scared."

"Well, it's the garden," she said slowly. "Some people think it's haunted."

"A haunted garden?" I sat back on my heels and tossed my hair. "How can a garden be haunted?"

Kristi frowned and her lower Up crept out. I could tell she was annoyed at not being taken seriously. "You wait," she muttered. "When you see the cat and hear the crying, you won't laugh."

I stared at her. "What cat?"

"A white one. He meows and meows and then he disappears into the garden. You hear him mostly at night. And only in the summer."

Before I could tell Kristi I'd just seen a white cat, a teenaged boy stepped out on the porch next door. "Hey, Kristi," he called. "Get over here. It's dinnertime."

"That's my brother Brian, the creep," Kristi said. "I have to go. I'll see you tomorrow. Okay?"

She ran through the gap in the hedge, but paused once to call back, "If you hear anybody crying tonight, just remember I told you so." Then she was up her steps and gone, letting the screen door bang shut behind her.