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The untrimmed hedgerow had overwhelmed the verge in front of Ivy Cottage, so I parked the Range Rover on the manicured grass on Willis Sr.’s side of the road. Bree and I piled out of the Rover and crossed the lane, scarcely bothering to look for oncoming cars. Traffic was not an issue in Finch.
While a few of my neighbors locked their doors against intruders, Hector Huggins had locked his tall, wooden gate. When I’d dropped by to check on him, I’d had to ring the intercom he’d installed on one of the gateposts to summon him, and even when he’d answered it, he’d never opened the gate far enough for me to see past it.
The gate was still locked when Bree and I reached it, but I addressed the intercom with a greater sense of anticipation than I ever had before. After years of frustration, I was confident that I would be admitted at last to the land beyond the hedgerow.
“Jack?” I said. “It’s Lori Shepherd and Bree Pym. May we come in?”
“No worries.” Jack’s voice crackled through the speaker and a click signaled the lock’s release.
Smiling broadly, I opened the gate, strode boldly into the front garden, and came to a stumbling halt. Bree moved forward cautiously to stand beside me.
“I think we’ve found Sleeping Beauty’s cottage,” she murmured. “And her garage.”
I knew exactly what she meant. Ivy Cottage wasn’t a ruin. It was a pretty place, two stories tall, with a pair of bay windows on the ground floor and a pair of dormer windows protruding from its wavy slate roof. Tall chimneys bracketed the roof, faded green-and-white checked curtains hung in the windows, and a shallow porch sheltered a front door made of weathered oak. Ivy Cottage would have been worthy of a picture postcard had it not been left to languish in the most unkempt front garden I’d ever seen.
Nature had run riot in Mr. Huggins’s realm. The shed that served as a garage seemed to be drowning in a congested mass of shrubs, vines, weeds, and flowers. Slender brick paths leading from the gate and the garage to the front door were barely discernible beneath the overgrowth, and a thick mat of ivy had colonized the cottage’s stone walls. The ivy had been pruned around the windows and the porch, presumably to allow for light and access, but it had otherwise been allowed to do exactly as it pleased.
Jack had chosen to park his rental car in the weed-infested gravel driveway instead of in the decrepit-looking garage. Smoke rising from both chimneys suggested that he’d heeded my advice to warm himself before a roaring fire. I suspected he’d needed the warmth rather desperately after he’d fought his way barelegged through the sodden jungle to enter his home away from home.
“We should have worn waders,” Bree commented, as we walked in single file along a brick path obscured by dripping greenery. “And brought a machete.”
“Not everyone’s a gardener,” I allowed.
“Anyone can use a machete,” said Bree.
“G’day, ladies!” Jack called to us from the doorstep. “Come in, come in!”
I was happy to accept his invitation and happier still when he closed the door behind us. My jeans were soaked through from the tops of my rain boots to the bottom of my rain jacket and Bree’s were similarly saturated, but the cottage was deliciously warm and dry. It was, in those as in many other respects, the exact opposite of the front garden.
I’m not the best housekeeper in the world, nor am I the worst. I’d like to think that, on an average day, the tidiness level in my home rests somewhere between Untouched by Human Hands and This Property is Condemned. Mr. Huggins had evidently favored the sterile end of the bell curve. The rectangular room in which we stood had been created by removing the wall between the front and back parlors. It was simply furnished, excruciatingly clean, and absolutely devoid of clutter.
Jack’s brown rain jacket hung from a row of hooks mounted on the wall beside the door. Below the hooks lay a utilitarian rubber mat, presumably a resting place for damp or dirty footwear. A sagging armchair upholstered in a drab brown fabric sat before the hearth and its twin faced a large, multipaned picture window overlooking the back garden, which was, if anything, even more of a wilderness than the front.
A pole lamp and a small table sat beside each armchair, a small bookcase with glass doors rested against one wall, and a sisal rug covered most of the parquet floor. There were no pictures on the plastered walls, however, no framed family snaps on the bookcase, no knickknacks on the windowsills, nothing that might reflect the personality of the man who’d lived there.
Except that the room was probably a perfect reflection of Hector Huggins’s personality, I told myself sadly. A blank room for a blank man.