Among the Imposters

Fifteen

The very next day Luke raced out to his garden even more eagerly than ever. It was too soon to tell anything about the potatoes, but if the beans still looked good, he could probably be sure that they would live and grow and produce. And would the raspberries have any more buds today?

Luke reached his clearing and stopped short.

His garden was destroyed.

The raspberry branches were broken off at odd angles; the bean plants were trampled, smashed flat in the mud. There hadn’t been any potato shoots to be ruined, of course, but the garden was so messed up, Luke couldn’t even tell where he’d planted them.

“No,” Luke wailed. “It can’t be.”

He wanted to believe that he’d accidentally walked into the wrong clearing. But that was crazy. There was the maple tree with the jagged cut in its trunk on one side of the clearing, the oak with the sagging limb on the other side, the rotting trunk in the middle — this was his garden. Or — it had been.

Who wrecked it?

His first thought was animals. Back home, back when his family still raised hogs, there had been a couple of times when the hogs had escaped and found their way to the garden. They’d rooted around like crazy, and Mother had been furious over the damage.

But there weren’t any hogs in the woods. Luke hadn’t seen anything bigger than a squirrel. And for all his shooings and worrying, he knew squirrels couldn’t have done this kind of damage.

And squirrels didn’t wear shoes.

Luke winced. He’d been too distraught to notice before:

Instead of animal tracks, the garden was covered with imprints of the same kind of shoes Luke was wearing. Smooth-soled Baron shoes had stomped on his raspberries, trampled his beans, kicked at his potato hills. They had walked all over his garden.

For a crazy instant, Luke wondered if he himself was to blame. Had he been careless leaving the garden yesterday? Could he have stepped on his own plants by mistake? That was ridiculous. He’d never do such a thing.

What if he’d sleepwalked, and come out here in the night without even knowing it?

That was even more preposterous. He would have been caught.

And he didn’t wear shoes to bed.

Anyhow, he could tell by stepping next to the other footprints: Some of the imprints were made by shoes that were bigger than Luke’s. Some of the imprints were made by shoes that were smaller.

Lots of people had been in Luke’s garden. Lots of people had been there destroying it.

Luke sank to the ground by the tree trunk. He buried his face in his hands.

‘This was all I had,” he moaned. Once again he was pretending to talk to someone who wasn’t there. But it wasn’t Mother or Dad, Jen or Mr. Talbot he appealed to now. It was Matthew and Mark, his older brothers. He had to apologize to them. He had to explain why he, Luke Garner, a twelve-year-old boy, was crying.