Front Yard

by Norman Draper

Genres: Family Life; Humor & Satire; Satire

Synopsis

Livia is a quiet Midwestern suburb known for its green-thumbed residents and their impeccable yards--but this summer, they'll be digging up a lot more than weeds. . . George and Nan Fremont are renowned among their neighbors for their meticulously manicured backyard. Now that the weather's warming up, it's time for them to give their neglected front yard a much-needed makeover. Luckily, their daughter Mary and their gardening intern Shirelle are around to help. But a bevy of meddlers stonewall their latest project before they can even dig in. Shirelle's college advisor, Dr. Brockheimer, is a little too enamored with the Fremonts' gardening prowess. Livia's resident historian, Miss Price, seems to be hiding something about the history of their property. And their nosy neighbor, Jim Graybill, is forever scanning their lawn for buried treasures with his beloved metal detector--but could he actually be onto something for once? Trouble is in full bloom in Livia, but with a trowel in one hand and a glass of merlot in the other, George and Nan count on everything coming up roses.

Release date: October 1, 2015

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

At first, it was all about the front yard.

That was the part of their corner lot that was so obviously scenic. Spreading out westward from the house, it stayed level for about twenty yards before sloping down thirty feet to Sumac Street.

Beyond Sumac the land dipped more gradually to the thin screen of cottonwoods that bordered Bluegill Pond, the third-biggest lake in suburban Livia. The gap in the terrain created by Bluegill Pond opened up the sky. Winter nights would treat them to panoramic displays of stars, meteor showers, and northern lights. On summer days, columns of clouds would billow up in plain view forty miles away.

George and Nan Fremont, on purchasing the hilltop rambler at the corner of Sumac and Payne Avenue, immediately set to work to take advantage of this wonderful setting. They’d make their front yard the showpiece of their new home, and use it to take advantage of Nan’s developing skills as a gardener.

They hired a landscaping contractor to build a stone wall that curved upward, following the cement steps rising from the driveway to the stoop, on which were situated a table made of a laminated slice of tree trunk and three plastic chairs.

Their first plantings were the sweet-scented dwarf Korean lilacs, which they placed next to the huge silver maple that shaded the front entrance to the house; a mistake, they soon discovered, since dwarf Korean lilacs are sun worshippers. Somehow, they had managed to bloom adequately.

Then came the pachysandra and purple-flowering ajuga at the base of the stone wall. The rotten wooden railing on the lake side of the steps came down, to be replaced by an elegant, curving, gray-painted iron one.

Nan dreamed of much more: a cedar deck, carpets of ground covers, and swaths of annuals and perennials that would turn their slope into a quilt of bright colors and rich earth tones. But she soon discovered that all this would have to wait; three small children demanded too much of her attention. They’d also require an unobstructed playground of hardy grass that could be trod on and trampled to their hearts’ delight. Once they were older, Nan would be able to give her new hobby the attention it deserved. For the time being, she had to make do with some petunias and impatiens, and a ring of irises she planted around the stand of mugho pines that came with the house.

Over the years, though, the front yard’s stock nosedived.

It was all about George, who had developed a front yard phobia. That might have come from having to push a lawn mower without a self-propelled mechanism up and down that steep slope. Or maybe it was the need to continually spray a particularly stubborn patch of dandelions and cockleburs that rose halfway from the street to the top of their little hill. Another thing: The slope and sandy soil meant water drained away quickly from the grass’s shallow roots. Any week-long stretch of dry heat scratched brown patches across the lawn, even with regular sprinkling.

There was also the front yard’s history of violence.

George had once been attacked while mowing by a honking mother goose who must have figured he was going to run over one of her goslings. Her sudden waddling charge caused him to let go of the lawn mower, which trundled down the hill, barely missing a passing minivan as it crossed the street, jumped the curb, and careened down the slope and into the lake. A swift kick to her feathered midriff that left George losing his balance and sprawled on the lawn finally drove the attack goose and the maniacally squabbling goslings away.

It was in the front yard where George made the mistake of spraying a yellow jacket nest in midday. The result of that was an upper lip swollen by stings to three times its normal size and Nan taking photos of it, which she advertised to friends as “George’s Homer Simpson look.”

All this got Nan to wondering whether her gardening ambitions had been off-target. She began shifting her attention from the front to the loamier and more level back.

This new project started with George renting a chain saw to clear out the volunteer trees that had turned much of the backyard into a junkyard of mismatched vegetation. Then, he built pea-gravel-and-railroad-tie steps into the weed-choked bare patch that separated the driveway from the patio.

Nan took over from there. Her maiden garden effort was to plant lilac bushes and variegated dogwoods next to the fence that separated the Fremonts from the Grunions, their neighbors to the east. That was eight years after they bought the property.

Six years later, they’d transformed the backyard into a suburban paradise of vibrant blooms, trilling songbirds, and hovering hummingbirds that, last summer, had defied the destructive whims of Mother Nature and even some ridiculous efforts to sabotage them by the local gardening nutcases. It had won them first place in the world-famous Burdick’s Best Yard Contest, and the unprecedented $200,000 tax-free windfall that came with it.

Now, at last, it was the front yard’s turn.

“Lots of work to do here, George,” said Nan as they sat on the covered front stoop. George gazed out through the sheets of endless May rain at their blank canvas of a yard. This would be a start-from-scratch job, just as the backyard had been. A flare of pain shot through his knee. Then, another one, this time starting at the small of his back and rocketing all the way up his spinal column. It was his body’s reaction to the prospect of hard, painful labor ahead. He flinched.

“Yeow!”

Nan snorted.

“You can’t fool me, George. I know those phantom aches and pains of yours. So, buck up, because I’m gonna need you to do most of the heavy lifting here. Dig. Rake. Mix. Haul. And maybe you can sometimes give me a little input as to what we should plant and where. But, mostly, you’ll be my good old semi-reliable gardening mule.”

George cringed. This was the hyper-caffeinated-morning Nan talking here, and when she started jabbering away about projects that would put the Pyramids of Giza and Hoover Dam to shame, you just had to listen and nod politely. She’d calm down once the day moved into its afternoon stage, and wine-induced relaxation replaced all the let’s-build-the-world’s-best-garden-in-a-day stuff. What especially worried him was this stark comparison: It had taken them six years to transform the backyard. Nan wanted the front yard planted by the end of the month. George, at a loss for words to express his foreboding, looked stricken. Nan regarded him with a mixture of connubial pity and scorn.

“Oh, don’t look so miserable, George. Just think of all the new flower buddies you’ll have to talk to. And imagine the magnificence! This front yard project will make us whole. Backyard and front yard. The Fremont gardens, not just the Fremont backyard. Won’t that be wonderful? If it would only stop raining for a few days.”

“What’s wrong with resting on our laurels?” George said. “For, say, four or five years, maybe a decade, before moving on to new projects.”

“Oh, stop being Mr.-Lazy-Ass-Fussbudget,” Nan harrumphed. “You’ve got helpers this time, you know. Mary’s going to pitch in big-time, and we’ve got Shirelle as our gardening intern all summer. With two strong, motivated young women like that, you won’t be overworked. With any luck, you can spend a good amount of your shiftless days just lording it over those of us who’ll actually be working.”

Yes, that’s true, George thought; we’ve got reinforcements for this project! His mood brightened instantly. And just as instantly the clouds returned to darken it. What about the psychotic rage unleashed by the local criminal gardening element on the backyard last year? And the freak hailstorm? And all that weird, otherworldly stuff that they didn’t dare tell their pastor about? What about the deadly angel’s trumpets that would once again sprout their seductive and hallucinogenic flowers?

Are we through with all that, or is this just the beginning? George wondered, involuntarily bouncing the balls of his feet on the cement. Who or what’s going to try to deep-six us now?

It was at this point that the caffeine racing through Nan’s brain found the appropriate neurons responsible for inventing horticultural riddles and knock-knock jokes.

“George, what flower is like a cartoon character?”

George could only shrug, looking as he did like a mourner who’s wound up at the wrong funeral and decided to stick around anyway.

“A daffy-dill. Get it? Daffy Duck? Daffodil? Tee-hee-hee . . . Now, let’s get a move on, mister. We’re off to the Historical Society.”

“Waste of time, if you ask me,” George said. “I mean, why do we need to encourage Jim and his stupid delusions of buried treasures somewhere underneath us?”

“Because he’s one of our dear friends, George, as you may recall. And he happens to be recently bereaved.... Quit being so morose and contrary just because you’ve got one of the Labors of Hercules ahead of you. Besides, I’d have thought the Mr. History Buff in you would jump at the chance of getting a little glimpse back in time of the very place where you eat, tipple, and otherwise fritter away your slothful days.... Hey, here’s something that’ll perk you right up: It’s stopped raining. And look over there to the west. That patch of blue’s getting bigger by the minute. Let’s go; it’s time for us to do our annual spring inspection tour anyway.”

George and Nan pulled out of the driveway with George’s disposition improved. The notion of a front yard makeover, assisted by a mug’s worth of French roast coffee, was beginning to appeal to the semi-developed aesthete in him; especially since there were others who would be sharing the toil this time. There was also the fact that the front yard was smaller than the back. Something else to look forward to was picking up the skinny on their property’s pedigree. That was long overdue, especially after the scare they had gotten last year about there being an Indian burial ground under the backyard gardens. That had turned out to be a false alarm . . . or so they’d been told.

Besides, what if there was something to this buried treasure notion of Jim’s?

“Why is this museum we’re going to like an overly emotional woman?” George quizzed Nan as he peeled out of the driveway.

“This is a joke?” wondered Nan, pleasantly startled by George’s sudden impersonation of a getaway car driver. “If it is, it’s sexist, and I’ll have no part of it.”

“Because they’re both hysterical. Or, you know, historical. Ha-ha!”

“You mean to tell me a man was killed in our backyard?”

Nan’s knees buckled. She propped herself against the front counter and gripped its ledge hard. Having steadied herself, she pivoted away from the woman at the information counter to stare, goggle-eyed, at George.

George was doing his speak-no-evil impression by clamping his hand over his mouth and chin. He did that when he couldn’t decide whether to be astonished, scared, or completely indifferent. Nan wished he would stop; it made him look like such a dolt.

But this! It was disturbing enough that their placid and orderly little oasis at one time harbored thickets of weeds, natural grasses gone wild, and shrubs and trees growing and multiplying by nature unchained. To now be told that it was the scene of a violent death, why, it was unthinkable!

“Well, we don’t actually know that for a fact,” said the historian, a Miss Price.

Miss Price’s baleful glare had challenged them to approach her as they sauntered into the Livia Historical Society during one of the few times it was open to visitors: ten a.m. to eleven a.m. on the third Saturday of the month, alternating months, even-numbered years only. “But we are reasonably certain that two men associated with Sieur de La Salle—Messrs. Boyer and Ducharme—departed from La Salle’s main group at some point. They might have made their way to Livia and camped out in the vicinity of Bluegill Pond. The best place to camp along Bluegill Pond would have been the east side, on top of the rise on which your house now stands.”

“This guy was actually killed on our property!” George said. “Whoa!”

“Yeah,” said Nan. “Who was this ‘La’ guy?”

“La Salle, the French explorer.”

“Oh, that La Salle,” George said. “Sure. The guy who canoed the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. And that was before they had lightweight Mylar materials. Ha-ha! Of course I’ve heard of him! And who would have been the victim, Boyer or Ducharme?”

“Very possibly . . . Boyer,” said Miss Price. She peered at an old map covered with indecipherable markings, but on which the pear shape of Bluegill Lake was plainly visible. “The murderer, Ducharme, might have buried him out of guilt; they were friends and early business partners in the fur trade with the Indians, after all. Or maybe he wanted to hide the evidence. Well, let’s be fair to Ducharme; he might have killed in self-defense. Most likely, Boyer’s body was just left there to be consumed by wild animals.”

George shuddered.

“And that was a very long time ago, I take it?” said Nan. George caught the hint of a tremor in her voice.

“Of course, Mrs. Fremont. The voyageurs were active in the area from the mid-sixteen hundreds all the way until the early eighteen hundreds. La Salle flourished in the late sixteen hundreds. This would have occurred around then. I would know—I have specialized in the study of the Livia area my entire adult life.”

Nan released her hunched-up shoulders.

“Well, I’m really relieved. When you first mentioned it, I thought you were talking about something that happened not all that long ago.”

“Why, certainly not!” Miss Price gasped. “Most certainly not! This is a historical society, not the local constabulary. What, do you think French explorers and missionaries and fur traders were mucking around here after World War Two? With maybe hundred-horsepower Evinrude outboard motors on their birchbark canoes, and outfitted with breathable-fabric anoraks and bazookas to ward off the bad old suburbanites?”

Nan jerked back from the counter at this sudden outburst.

“Well, when you first told us about a murder, you didn’t say right away when it was. And it’s still a little unsettling to know someone might have been killed in your backyard, no matter when. Goodness!”

“Some believe the spirit lives on,” said Miss Price. “Perhaps you’d better be mindful of that, hmmm?”

“Actually,” said George, clearing his throat and glancing at Nan, whose pursed lips and unflinching stare he knew to be the signal to be resolute. “We wanted to know if you have records of anything else . . . uh . . . buried there.”

Miss Price gave a start.

“Some thing buried?” she said. Nan and George glanced at each other. A telepathic connection warned them to shift into evasive mode.

“Uh . . . uh . . . some old papers and things like that,” George said. Why, oh why can’t my husband be a better liar when the need arises? Nan mused to herself disconsolately.

“Buried? Now, let me think . . . Ah, yes. I’ve heard that one. Yes, indeed, I’ve heard that one. Yes. Not papers. No, siree. It’s the lost treasure of Livia. Ha-ha!”

George and Nan smiled politely as Miss Price continued.

“As the story goes, pirates from the Spanish Main used to travel fifteen hundred miles inland to bury their doubloons right here.” Miss Price stabbed her finger at the point on the map that marked the Fremonts’ three-quarter-acre lot. “There could be a dozen chests of pieces of eight buried in your yard. Those pirates would have sailed right up from the Gulf on to the Mississippi, veered on to the Muskmelon River, branched off on the Big Turkey, and found your place on the high ground. Probably ten, twelve feet down, but who knows exactly where.”

“You’re not serious!” Nan cried.

“Dead serious. You know what else is there? Jesus’s bifocals. Dropped off after the Last Supper. So is Captain Kidd’s spittoon, and the lost racing bike of the Incas. All right there in your yard waiting to be dug up.”

George frowned. Nan frowned. Miss Price coughed up a brittle laugh.

“I’m pulling your legs, Mr. and Mrs. Fremont. There’s no buried treasure of Livia. Otherwise, I’d have the complete dossier on it, and it would have been dug up a long, long time ago.” She glared at Nan and George with bulging eyes.

“Not about the murder, though,” she said, her voice quavering. “I wasn’t joking about the murder.”

Gwendolyn Price wrung her hands in furious agitation as she watched the Fremonts walk out the front door, tinkling the little bell that signaled the comings and goings of the few visitors who ever passed through the portals of the Livia Historical Society.

She couldn’t believe it—4250 Payne Avenue come back to haunt her, and after she had pretty much given up on it! How long had it been since she was forced to sell the place? How many years had she yearned and striven to get it back?

The old farmhouse had been torn down and a new house built that had nothing to do with farming. Two sets of owners came and went. As a teacher subject to continual layoffs and bouncing from school district to school district while caring for a terminally ill mother, she was powerless to do anything about it.

When her mother finally died, Miss Price went back to college for her master’s degree and eventually found a place in the history department of the St. Anthony metro’s most prestigious private school. Having never married, and with only one true passion—the history and genealogy of Livia—making demands on her time and resources, she was able to amass a large savings over the years. So, when the house, or, more important, the property, came up for sale again, she was ready. But then, she was outbid by these . . . these Fremonts! Why, they had bought the property from right under her nose!

Now who, of all people, should suddenly come waltzing in on a quiet Saturday morning!

“Astonishing!” she blurted to no one in particular since there was no one else in the big museum-styled room at the moment. She had acquired the habit of talking to herself from years of living alone.

Hold on! There were possibilities here. Miss Price’s febrile imagination began firing up, but it was moving in too many directions. She was being handed an opportunity, given a sign, but how to proceed? They had heard something. They had heard talk and hearsay, probably nothing more. But even talk and hearsay could be dangerous. They might find it, and after she had searched high and low these many years.

“Who do they think they are?” she mumbled. “They don’t know anything, do they? But, yes, they must. They know something is buried there. Or maybe just suspect. That’s why they came in. They must be up to no good.”

At first shocked and confused when the Fremonts had walked up to her counter and presented the address she knew so well, Miss Price had struggled to figure out what to do. Ultimately, she had chosen on the fly to tell them some truths and some falsehoods. Voyageurs could well have visited the site. They might have even camped there. But nobody would know who they were.

The murder was pure fabrication. Why had she made that up? To throw them a red herring. It just wouldn’t do to tell them nothing at all had happened there. That would arouse suspicion more than anything. The rest was pure buffoonery, in detail if not in general concept. She had masked the true situation further by laughing off the whole mystery as a joke.

Miss Price’s face reddened with solitary mirth. Private jokes were so much better than shared ones, she reflected. But this was no time for levity. Time to stop amusing herself and get back on-task. She gave her cheek a stinging slap.

“Yeow!” she cried. “Not so hard.”

Self-mortification was Miss Price’s way of keeping her thoughts from wandering. It could be a slap, a pinch, a jab with a just-sharpened pencil. As a teacher, she had thrown erasers and even pieces of chalk at inattentive students. Jarring acts of physical violence, she found, were excellent focusing mechanisms. That practice had stopped when several wealthy board members had threatened to pull their children out of the school and run Miss Price out of town on a rail. But Miss Price had taken that lesson and applied it to herself. She frowned at the memory and found herself beginning to dwell on it. That called for a pinch.

“Ouch!”

Miss Price retrieved a business card from her purse. She picked up the receiver of the Historical Society’s circa-1960 Princess phone and dialed the number on the card. After four rings, the voice mail kicked in. The recording startled her. It started with the booming of cannons and clatter of musketry. Then, barely audible above the din, came the sound of a muffled voice.

“Hi, Scroggit Brothers here. Antiquities Sales and Investigations. History is our strategic objective. Can’t talk now. The Rebs are coming. Looks like our regiment will be right in the thick of it. Leave your name, number, and a brief message and we’ll call you back once we’ve repulsed the attack. Or you can find our stores on the Web at www.fightyankee.com. Here they come, boys. Aim low.”

The Scroggit brothers were borderline criminals with few scruples when it came to ferreting out and scavenging historical rarities. They had, in fact, unearthed such items for her on more than one occasion. Her Indian peace pipe, for instance. And pioneer woman Violet Tagget’s diaries. Tales of their extralegal methods had failed to shock her, which was good because it was time to take off the kid gloves and claim what was rightfully hers.

“Gwendolyn Price here,” Miss Price barked into the phone after the beep. “I have a mission for you that requires discretion. This demands your immediate attention. I promise a commission based on the finding, which will be significant in both a pecuniary and historical sense. Please respond ASAP.”

“Stupid full-of-herself historian!” sputtered George as he and Nan drove back home. “How can they have somebody like that running the Historical Society and dealing with the public? You’d never know when she was telling the truth and when she was playing her little joke at your expense.”

George and Nan decided to make their way home via a slow detour down hidden, winding residential streets in tucked-away neighborhoods, rather than going straight back along the most direct route—34th Avenue West. This was their scenic tour. Now that the Livia gardening season should be in full swing, it was time to see what some of their favorite gardeners were up to. But their mood, which would ordinarily have been bright and expectant—or at least moderately curious, in George’s case—was colored by what Nan referred to as the “ugly incident” at the Historical Society.

“The nerve of her!” Nan said. “Getting us going the way she did. I should have known from the moment she started talking about pirates. Who ever heard of pirates in Livia? Or on the Big Turkey River! You can barely get a kayak down that thing. Too bad for Jim. It would have made him so happy to find something really big with his whatchamacallit.”

“Metal detector.”

“Yah, metal detector.”

“Well, we did what he asked,” George said. “We checked it out and found nada. Jim and his stupid buried-treasure story! What a bunch of baloney! No more digging up the yard to find maybe a few screws and some flattened cans, like he did last year.”

“Just hold on, dear,” Nan said. “I’ve been doing some revisionist thinking about this. It’s a big yard. I wouldn’t be surprised if he missed a few spots, front and back. We’re just starting our big front yard gardens, so what’s the harm in him rooting around before Mary and Shirelle get planting? Heck, he can still dig around a little in the backyard under where the new angel’s trumpets will be.”

George’s stomach churned at the mention of the angel’s trumpets.

“I probably won’t get around to planting them for another week or two,” Nan continued. “And, speaking of which, I’m still trying to figure out whether we should plant them at all since you get so freaked out every time you look at the ones that are there already. It’s a nice sunny spot. Maybe I’ll transplant some of those volunteer spirea there.”

“I have made my peace with the angel’s trumpets,” George huffed.

“No, you haven’t. I bet you won’t come within ten yards of them, even before they bloom. They’re really not that poisonous, you know. Could they cause some mild hallucinations? Maybe. But you’re already hallucinating in your advanced middle age anyway.”

“Could we continue on this Jim-digging-up-our-yard line of conversation, Nan-bee? You might recall that Jim said he wanted to dig up our beautiful blue hydrangea, too. Remember how hard we worked at that to make the blasted soil more alkaline? And now we’re going to, what, dig it up, plant another hydrangea, and hope that it turns out as blue as the one we’ve got now?”

“I know.”

“Those peonies and astilbe that finally started to bloom last year would get dug up, too. They were some of your best cross-cultural communicators, or whatever it is you call your little plant buddies. I guess you’ll be getting a real earful once they pop up through the soil and find out what you’re thinking about.”

“I know, George. I know. I’m willing to say now that’s all moot since there’s nothing to this buried-treasure talk. I just wanted to find something to get Jim’s mind off Alicia. He’s so sad these days with her gone and taking the dog and parakeet and his baseball card collection and all.”

George chuckled. In doing so, he elicited a brief, icy stare from Nan. As bad as he felt for Jim, he couldn’t help but admire Alicia for running off with the baseball cards, especially the Phil Croxton rookie card. Why, that card must be worth a mint!

“I feel sorry for Jim, too, but listen, will you, Nan-bee: Those won’t be dinky little pick-and-shovel jobs Jim was proposing, like last year’s. He wants to dig down six or seven feet and ten to twelve feet across. That means you bring in the heavy equipment. How long would it take those scars to heal? And how could your little flower friends ever forgive you? You’d be just another flower murderer in their minds.”

Nan blanched at the thought of having to break the news to some of her flowers that they were to be sacrificed for the sake of filthy lucre. But, hard as it might be to believe, there were other, more pressing matters to consider.

“Listen here, buddy, a few stray gold coins wouldn’t have hurt us any, especially since I’m guessing our current financial situation isn’t looking all that rosy. Eh?”

George didn’t respond. He bit his lip and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He had begun to fret that they’d been burning through their recent first-place Burdick’s Best Yard prize earnings at a clip they couldn’t keep up. Maybe he should start paying more attention to their bank accounts and mutual fund balances. Hang on—what mutual fund balances? Oh, yeah, he had cashed those out a couple of months ago.

“Did you hear me, George? Huh?”

George jerked the steering wheel violently to the right to turn onto Old DanTroop Drive. The tires squealed and the car tilted a few degrees as the left-side wheels lifted an inch or two above the road. Nan froze in rigid attention as she heard the squeal and felt the lurch, then leaned against the tilt of the car with a leering grin.

Nan was always excited and sometimes transformed when he took that right-angle intersection at forty, actually speeding up into the turn instead of slowing down. George figured it was because it gave her the sort of adrenaline thrill she didn’t often feel among the more subtle attractions of their gardens. Could it be that for those few seconds she was actually inhabited by the spirit of some dangerous woman from times gone by? Annie Oakley, for instance? Whatever it was, it would . . .