* * *
The Garden
The next point on the map was eight or nine miles south, through forest. Jackaby conceded that as long as we touched on each essential point along the journey, it would be acceptable to use the party crackers in between. He slid out a glossy, blue-papered tube and we gave the ends a tug.
The world at the other end of the disorienting crackle was still green countryside, but this time there were signs of habitation. An old wooden fence lay just ahead of us, and a soft, dirt path led toward its gate and away. I could see no houses or barns nearby, but within the fence the earth had been tilled, and leafy stems were sprouting in careful rows.
“I assume we’re here for the garden,” I said, and began toward it.
“Wait,” Jackaby clasped my shoulder so quickly my feet nearly slid out from under me on the soft earth.
“What is it?”
“The vegetables,” Jackaby said, with intensity. His eyes narrowed. “Don’t eat them.”
“I think I can manage to control myself.”
We drew nearer and examined the garden from over the weathered beams of the fence. The crops looked exceedingly healthy, all the plants at least two or three times larger than average. A trellis of simple timbers had been erected to support tomato vines, the fruits of which were as large as a man’s head and brilliant red. Not far off, deep-purple eggplants grew with such heft that if I jabbed a few stocks into them, they could pass for bagpipes. Beyond were cucumbers you could fit a saddle over and pumpkins you could hollow out and sleep in.
“What do you see?” I whispered.
“Danger. Desperation.” He peered at the produce with uncertainty. “And . . . vegetation.”
“Perhaps we should just move on to the next—,” I began.
“No.” He cut me off. “Every step is recorded for a purpose. Tell me, what do you see?”
I tried to look beyond the obvious. The plants were the glaring spectacle, so I pushed them to the back of my mind and saw . . . dirt. The soil was freshly watered and looked soft and—
“Footprints.” I traced them to the gate. “Several different sizes, too.”
Jackaby looked where I indicated. “It appears a great many people have entered this garden,” he said.
“Yes,” I scanned up and down the soft earth. “But no sign of any of them leaving again.”
I stepped hesitantly up to the gate. A rough hand had carved into the post: TURN BAC—a small pen knife still jabbed into the wood after the unfinished caution. The letters looked old and had long since worn to the same color as the wood around them. A hearty green bean vine had wound its way up the post and clung to the knife’s handle.
“Right. That’s not unsettling in the least,” I said. Jackaby plucked a set of colored lenses from his coat and gazed at the plants through each disc in turn, humphing and hmming unhappily as he did. “So, where did they go?”
I looked out over the garden while he worked, tracing a line of footprints down a nearby aisle. The indentations led between rows of carrots and potatoes and then stopped, suddenly and entirely. In a mound of dirt, one hefty potato had been mostly unearthed, its scarf and cap sliding back to the ground. My mind lurched back. Scarf and cap? I looked again up the aisles. They were there, the tips of a worn pair of boots amid the rhubarb, a patched vest wrapped around a butternut squash, and broken spectacles at the base of a cabbage.
I whirled around as Jackaby leapt to his feet. “They didn’t go anywhere . . . ,” he began.
“The people are the vegetables!” I exclaimed.
“These vegetables are people!” Jackaby pronounced at the same time. We stared at each other. Jackaby scowled. “I’ve just used a seventeenth-century Scottish scrying stone to detect and confirm undeniable evidence of involuntary vegetative transfiguration. How did you . . . ?”
“I found a hat.”
“Your mind is both fascinating and infuriating, Miss Rook.”
“So what now?” I said. “If we go in we become ingredients for a salad. Why are we here?”
“We’re on a quest designed by a notorious thief,” said Jackaby. “So what would the Bold Deceiver do differently than those poor souls did?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“This.” Jackaby stepped over the threshold, took a few long, confident steps, and plucked what must have been a five-pound turnip from the soil. He examined it closely and smiled in satisfaction.
“What are you doing?”
He looked around, then down at himself. He patted his chest experimentally, nodded, and then dropped the purloined root into his satchel.
“What were you thinking?” I burst as he sauntered back to my side of the fence.
“Miss Rook, what would entice you to steal from a garden as ominous and clearly unnatural as this one?”
“Nothing! That was insane!”
“Precisely. Those who did must have been absolutely desperate, deprived. In short, they were starving.”
“So?”
“So, if you were driven to theft out of dire hunger, what’s the first thing you would do with one of those ill-gotten greens?”
My stomach growled involuntarily at the thought.
“Right again. You would eat. But a man driven by the thrill of the theft itself would not. Those poor, decent folk took only what they needed, but the Bold Deceiver didn’t leave his map for their sort. He left it for someone like him.”
“The Bold Deceiver wanted us to steal a human vegetable?”
“Not human, but yes. He wanted us to steal one of the forbidden fruits, so to speak. Steal it, but not eat it. Brilliantly biblical. The sly snake is playing God and the Devil in one.”
I eyed the garden uneasily. “Perhaps it’s best that we move on?”