Front Yard Read online

  Books by Norman Draper

  Backyard

  Front Yard

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  Front Yard

  Norman Draper

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 - New Frontier

  2 - What Lies Beneath

  3 - Detours and Delays

  4 - A Spring Prelude

  5 - Treasure Quest

  6 - Tall Tales

  7 - Stunted Growth

  8 - Transformation

  9 - Reunion and Reparation

  10 - The True Nature of Things

  11 - Seeds of Envy

  12 - Noxious Weed

  13 - Paradise Reborn

  14 - The Tree

  15 - Settling In

  16 - Fremont Fest

  17 - Tree Disposal Done Cheap

  18 - The Scammer’s Guide to Tree Removal

  19 - Giving the Gift of Stump

  20 - Roots

  21 - Drive-by

  22 - A Gardening Hiatus

  23 - Lies and Moles

  24 - Status Report

  25 - The Black Art of Gardening

  26 - Fairy Tales

  27 - Archaeology

  28 - Plague

  29 - Counter-Plague

  30 - Livia Unearthed

  31 - The Story of Livia

  32 - Battle Royal

  33 - A Spring Well-Sprung

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  For the aunts and uncle I never met:

  Norma Ann Draper, 1925–1934

  Margaret Eva Zimmerman, 1918–1935

  Lt. j.g. Norman Claflin Draper, 1921–1944

  1

  New Frontier

  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 ca
lm 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!”

  2

  What Lies Beneath

  “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.