Patty shook her head. “Nah. There was nothing there. We had to have him put to sleep. He had cancer. The vet said maybe that’s what made him so crazy.”
Vi shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What does that have to do with us? With this situation?”
Patty gave her a long look. “We’re Oscar,” she said.
“No!” Vi said, a little too loud. Miss Ev looked over, then went back to ordering Old Mac around. He now had the tractor positioned correctly and was about to dump the rocks. “We’re not digging at nothing,” Vi whispered. “And you know it.”
“Everything all right over there?” Miss Ev called to them.
“Just fine,” Patty called back. “Vi’s just being a perfectionist. She isn’t happy with the way I’ve got the back of the bed shaped.”
“It looks good from here,” Miss Ev said. “The whole garden is coming along fabulously!”
Vi nodded. The truth was, she was actually disappointed with how well things were going and how quickly the garden was coming together; she was running out of time. Once the garden was done, she wouldn’t be able to keep talking with Patty or walking into Miss Ev’s office or the Inn without question.
She stood up straight, leaned against her shovel, and looked around.
It was thirty feet from one side to the other, a perfect circle. They’d laid it out by putting a stake in the ground and tying a fifteen-foot string to it, then marking the circumference all the way around. Old Mac and the patients had torn up the sod, marked the areas for the beds and paths with sticks and string. There was a fountain in the center with three cement birds that sprayed water out of their open mouths (Miss Ev had picked it out herself from a catalog at the garden center). Gran thought the fountain was a little tacky, but what mattered, she said, was that Miss Ev and the patients all seemed to love it. When Old Mac first plugged it in and those birds started spitting, everyone cheered and hooted and hollered like they were watching fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Little by little, after putting in the fountain, they’d been adding in beds and lining them with stone.
Vi had enjoyed getting to know some of the patients. Other than the strays Gran brought home from time to time, she’d never interacted with any of them at the Inn before. The thing that surprised her the most was how normal they all seemed. Like Jess, for instance, who’d quickly become one of Vi’s favorites. Jess had two kids and a husband who came to visit her twice a week. She talked about her life back at home: her friends, how she was active with the PTA, how she coached her daughter’s softball team. She wore cheerful, bright-colored blouses that she’d sewn herself. Vi couldn’t understand what she was even doing at the Inn—she seemed so… normal. Vi had asked Gran about Jess, and Gran had shaken her head, said, “You know I can’t talk about our patients, Violet.”
“But she seems fine. Like there’s nothing wrong with her at all.”
Gran nodded. “Some people’s problems are better hidden than others,” she’d said. “In fact, sometimes, the better hidden, the deeper they go, the more difficult they are to fix.”
Vi thought about that a lot as she worked on the garden with Jess and the other patients for a few hours each afternoon during activity time at the Inn—the time when patients got to choose between working in the vegetable garden, pottery studio, or kitchen. Sometimes there were other special activities, like badminton. One time Miss Ev had even taught patients how to make macramé wall hangings. And now, there was the bird garden.
Each night at dinner, Vi gave a progress report on the garden. Iris kept asking to come help work on it, but Gran had said no again and again.
“You’ve come such a long way,” Gran said to Iris. “I don’t want you to push yourself.”
So Iris and Eric had been staying home and painting rocks for it: rocks with ladybugs, butterflies, and birds. They also painted a big sign that Old Mac was going to hang from a post with chains: MISS EVELYN’S BIRD GARDEN. They painted a rainbow with lots of birds flying over it in the background.
But Eric’s heart wasn’t really in the rock painting or sign painting. He was thinking about the Ghoul. He was determined to find it. It was all he talked about. He wanted—no, he seemed to need—to find the Ghoul, just so they’d believe him.
The next night was the full moon, and he had come up with a plan to trap it.
He had this idea that they could lure the Ghoul out and surround it in the clearing by the stream. They’d have a salt circle all set up with just one part missing. Once the Ghoul landed in the circle, they’d lay down the rest of the salt, and it would be trapped. They could try to talk to it, learn what it was and what it wanted. If it gave them any trouble, they’d do the Spell of Banishment.
For Vi, the Ghoul was the least of her worries these days. Figuring out where Iris had come from and what was going on at the Inn was at the forefront of her mind.
Now Miss Ev was arguing with Old Mac about the size of the rocks he’d been gathering—“symmetrical,” she kept repeating, and Vi was pretty sure Mac had no idea what that meant. He was adjusting his scarecrow hat, looking down at the rock in Miss Ev’s hand—her “ideal size and shape” of rock. “Think about a bowling ball. Not a big one, but one of the little ones they use for candlepin bowling.”
He looked at her blankly. “Most rocks ain’t round like that, Evelyn,” he said.
“That’s absolutely true,” Jess said.
“He’s got a point,” said Tom as he scratched at his bare arms.
“It doesn’t need to be perfectly round,” Miss Ev said, shaking her head like the whole thing was hopeless. “Just rounded. And more or less the same size. It looks funny when you’ve got a huge boulder next to a little baseball-sized rock, don’t you agree? That’s what I’m saying about symmetry.”
Old Mac licked his lips, adjusted his straw hat.
Vi looked at Patty. “Any other updates?” she whispered.
Patty sighed. “Well,” she said.
“What?”
Patty had her eye on Old Mac and Miss Ev as she leaned close to Vi and said in a low voice, “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but someone came to the Inn yesterday. She showed up and started asking a lot of questions. Got your grandmother and my uncle all stirred up. Did your grandmother happen to say anything to you about it?”
“No.” Vi shook her head. Though Gran had been in a lousy mood when she came home from the Inn last night—she’d gulped down two martinis before she even started making tuna casserole for dinner. “Who was she? A family member?”
Gran said sometimes that family members were harder to deal with than the patients.
“I think she was a reporter. Or journalist of some kind.”
“A reporter?”
“Yeah.” Patty nodded. “She made kind of a scene in the front room, and Dr. Hildreth and my uncle whisked her away to the meeting room.”
“But what did she want? What was she saying?”
“I don’t know. But I do know it got Dr. Hildreth and Uncle Thad all upset. After she left, the two of them went down into the basement for hours.”
“I need to get down there,” Vi said. “Tonight. I’ll get down there tonight.”
“How?”
“I’ll take my grandmother’s keys.” Vi thought of the key ring in Gran’s purse—the purse that never left Gran’s side.
“You’re going to steal her keys and come over and get into the basement without her knowing?” Patty chuffed out a laugh like this was the most ridiculous plan she’d ever heard, and Vi sank a little, knowing she was right. “How exactly are you planning to pull this off?”
“I’ll create a distraction. Something to keep her busy.” Vi bit her lip, thinking. “How late are you working?”
Patty sighed. “I’m doing a double ’cause Nancy called out. I’ll be here till eleven.”
“Will you help me?”