“Strange?” he asked. “Well, Ms. Dennis was complaining that something was eating her plants and flowers. A couple of dead mice, a squirrel or two—pretty torn up. That’s about it.” The gardener shrugged. His tone suggested that none of this was unusual.
“It was probably our dog,” I said brusquely. “That thing on the deck. He has a cruel, prankish streak in him.”
The gardener didn’t know what to say after that. Just a pause in which he smiled but the smile faded when he saw I wasn’t joking.
“Well, dogs don’t usually eat the kind of flowers Ms. Dennis has.”
We were now on the periphery of the yard.
“You don’t know this dog,” I said. “You have no idea what he’s capable of.”
“Is that . . . right?” I heard the gardener murmur.
“I found something strange last night in the field.”
We stepped over a low concrete divider and were now standing where the headstone had been and someone had dug a hole (my most hopeful scenario). I pointed at the wide, black, wet patch I’d slipped in, and which now led from where the headstone had stood and stretched toward our yard, where it abruptly ended at the divider. The gardener laid down the leaf blower and, taking his cap off, wiped the sweat from his forehead. The black trail was glistening in the midmorning sun—there was a white veneer of crust overlaying it but the trail wasn’t entirely dry yet.
“What is it?” he asked, and I caught an expression usually associated with dead things.
“Well, that’s what I want to know.”
“It looks like, um, mud.”
“That’s not mud. It’s slime.”
“It’s what?”
“Slime. That’s slime.” I realized I had now said that word three times.
The gardener grimaced slightly. Kneeling down, he murmured a few noncommittal suggestions that I couldn’t hear. I looked back at the pool man, who was dumping the crow into a white plastic bucket. A warm wind was rippling the water in the pool, and high white clouds moved swiftly across the sky, blocking the sun and darkening the spot where we were standing. This field is a graveyard, I suddenly told myself. The ground beneath us was jammed with dead bodies, and one of them had escaped. That’s what caused the trail. That’s what dragged itself toward our house. The sound of kids playing somewhere in the neighborhood—their cries of surprise and disappointment associated with something living—momentarily comforted me, and the Xanax had increased my blood flow to the point that I could inhale and exhale without my chest aching.
“I slipped in that last night,” I finally said, and then added, before I could stop myself, “What made it?”
“What made it?” he asked. “Well, it is a slime trail of some kind.” The gardener paused. “I’d say a snail, a slug, or a whole hell of a lotta them made it but damn . . . this is really too big for a . . . slug.” He paused again. “Plus we haven’t had any snail problems here.”
I stood there, staring down at the gardener. “Too big for a slug, huh?” I sighed. “Well, that really sums it up nicely. This is encouraging.”
The gardener stood up, still staring at the trail, perplexed. “And it smells funny—”
“Can you just get rid of it?” I asked, cutting him off.
“This is really weird . . .” he muttered, but so are you his expression told me. “Maybe it’s that dog you’ve got such a problem with.” He shrugged lamely, aiming for levity.
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” I said. “He’s capable of anything. He’s got quite the attitude.”
We both turned and looked at Victor innocently lying on his side, oblivious. He slowly raised his head and, after a beat, yawned at us. It looked as if he were going to yawn a second time, but instead his head lolled forward and rested itself lazily on the deck, his tongue flopping out of his mouth.
“He’s, um . . . bipolar,” I told the gardener.
“Yeah, he looks like a problem . . . I guess,” the gardener murmured.
I didn’t say anything.
“I’ll hose it down and . . . we’ll just hope it doesn’t come back.”
(But it will, I heard the woods whispering.)
That was the extent of the conversation. It wasn’t going to proceed anywhere else so I left the gardener and as I started walking back across the yard I could hear voices from the side of the house that faced the Allens’. I moved toward them.
When I came around the corner, Jayne was standing with our contractor, Omar (there had been lengthy discussions recently about adding a skylight in the foyer), and they both had the same stance: hands on hips, faces tilted upward toward the second floor. Jayne noticed me and actually smiled, which I took as an invitation to smile back and join them. Walking over I also looked up. Surrounding the large windows of the master bedroom, and above the French doors that framed the media room situated below it, were huge patches where the lily white paint was peeling off the side of the house, revealing a pink stucco underneath. Omar was holding an iced coffee from Starbucks, Persols pushed up on his forehead, totally confused. At first glance it looked as if the house was peeling randomly, as if someone had blindly scraped at the wall in a rushed and curving motion (could that have been what Robby heard in the middle of the night?), but the longer you stared at the swirling patches they began to seem patterned and deliberate, as if there was a message hidden in them, some code being spelled out. The wall was telling us (me) something. I know this wall, I thought to myself. I had seen it before. The wall was a page waiting to be read. At our feet were flakes of paint so finely ground that they resembled piles of flour.