I, Richard

Good Fences Aren't Always Enough

Twice each year a neighborhood in the attractive old town of East Wingate managed to achieve perfection. Whenever this happened-or perhaps as an indication that it had happened-the Wingate Courier celebrated the fact with a significant spread of appropriately laudatory column inches dead in the center of its small-town pages, photos included. Citizens of East Wingate who wanted to better their social standing, their quality of life, or their circle of friends then tended to flock to that neighborhood eagerly, with the hope of picking up a piece of real estate there.

Napier Lane was just the sort of place that could at any moment and in the right circumstances be named A Perfect Place to Live. It was very high on potential if not quite there in every respect. It had atmosphere provided by enormous lots, houses over a century old, oaks, maples and sycamores even older, sidewalks cracked with time and character, picket fences, and brick paths that wound through front yards lapping against the sort of friendly porches where neighbors gather on summer nights. If every house had not yet been restored by some young couple with a lot of energy and inclined to nostalgia, there was in Napier Lane's curves and dips an open promise that renovation would come to them all, given enough time.

On the rare occasion that a house on Napier Lane came up for sale, the entire neighborhood held its breath to see who the buyer would be. If it was someone with money, the purchased house might join the ranks of those painted, glistening sisters who were raising the standard of living one domicile at a time. And if it was someone with easy access to that money and a profligate nature to boot, chances were that the renovation of the property in question might even occur quickly. For it had been the case that a family now and then had bought a house on Napier Lane with restoration and renovation in mind, only to discover upon embarking on the job how tedious and costly it actually was. So more than once, someone began the Augean project that's known as Restoring a Historic Property, but within six months admitted defeat and raised the for sale sign of surrender without getting even within shouting distance of completion.

Such was the situation at 1420. Its prior inhabitants had managed to get its exterior painted and its front and back yards cleared of the weeds and debris that tend to collect upon a property when its owners aren't hypervigilant, but that was the extent of it. The old house sat like Miss Havisham fifty years after the wedding that didn't happen: dressed to the nines externally but a ruin inside and languishing in a barren landscape of disappointed dreams. Literally everyone within sight of 1420 was anxious to have someone take on the house and set it to rights.

Except Willow McKenna, that is. Willow, who lived next door, just wanted good neighbors. At thirty-four and trying to get pregnant with her third of what would ultimately be-some years hence-seven children, Willow hoped merely for a family who shared her values. These were simple enough: a man and a woman committed to their marriage who were loving parents to an assortment of moderately well behaved children. Race, color, creed, national origin, political affiliation, automotive inclination, taste in interior decoration… none of that mattered. She was just hopeful that whoever bought 1420 would be a positive addition to what was, in her case, a blessed life. A solid family represented that, one in which the dad went out to a white collar if not distinguished job, the mom remained at home and saw to the needs of her children, and the children themselves were imaginative but obedient, with evident respect for their elders, happy, and carrying no infectious diseases. The number of children didn't matter. The more the better, as far as Willow was concerned.

Having grown up with no relations of her own but always clinging to the futile hope that one set of foster parents or another would actually want to adopt her, Willow had long made family her priority. When she'd married Scott McKenna, whom she'd known since her sophomore year in high school, Willow had set about making for herself what fate and a mother who'd abandoned her in a grocery store had long denied her. Jasmine came first. Max followed two years later. If all went according to plan, Cooper or Blythe would arrive next. And her own life, which had lately felt dark, cold, and cavernous with Max's entry into kindergarten, would once more stretch and fill and bustle, relieving the nagging press of anxiety that she'd been experiencing for the last three months.

“You could go to work, Will,” her husband Scott had counseled. “Part-time, I mean. If you'd like, that is. No need financially and you'd want to be here when the kids get home from school anyway.”

But a job wasn't what Willow wanted. She wanted the void filled in a way only another baby could fill it.

That was where her inclinations lay: toward family and babies and not toward neighborhoods that might or might not be designated Perfect Places to Live. So when the sold sign appeared over the realtor's name on 1420, what she wondered was not when the new neighbors might logically be expected to make the necessary improvements to their environment-a front yard edged by a new picket fence would be a good place to start, thought the Gilberts who lived on the other side of 1420-but rather how big the family was and would the mom want to exchange any recipes.

Everyone, it turned out, was disappointed. For not only did no instant transformation take place in 1420 Napier Lane, but no family moved a plethora of belongings into the old Victorian house at all. Make no mistake: A plethora of items were delivered. But as for the mom, the dad, the teeming happy shouting children that were meant to accompany those items… They did not materialize. In their place came one lone woman, one lone and-it must be said-rather odd woman.

She was called Anfisa Telyegin, and she was the sort of woman about whom rumors spring up instantly.

First, there was her general appearance, which can largely be described by the single word gray. Gray as to hair, gray as to complexion, gray as to teeth and eyes and lips, gray as to personality as well. She was much like chimney smoke in the dark- definitely present but indecipherable as to its source. Creepy, the youngsters on Napier Lane called her. And it wasn't a leap of too much imagination to expand from that to the less pleasant witch.

Her behavior didn't help matters. She returned neighborly hel-los with the barest courtesy. She never answered her doorbell to children selling Girl Scout cookies, candy, magazines, or wrapping paper. She wasn't interested in joining the Thursday morning mothers' coffee that rotated among the houses of the stay-at-home moms. And-this was perhaps her biggest sin-she showed no inclination to join in a single one of the activities that Napier Lane was certain would help it top the short list of spots designated in East Wingate as models of perfection. So invitations to progressive dinners were ignored. The Fourth of July barbecue might not have occurred at all. Christmas caroling did not see her participate. And as for using part of her yard for the Easter egg hunt… The idea was unthinkable.

Indeed, six months into her acquisition of 1420 Napier Lane, all anyone knew of Anfisa Telyegin was what they heard and what they saw. What they heard was that she taught Russian language and Russian literature at night at the local community college. What they saw was a woman with arthritic hands, a serious and regrettable case of dowager's hump, no interest in fashion, a tendency to talk to herself, and a great passion for her yard.

At least, that was how it seemed at first because no sooner had Anfisa Telyegin removed the for sale sign from the dusty plot that was her front yard but she was out there murmuring to herself as she planted English ivy which she proceeded to fertilize, water, and baby into a growth spurt unparalleled in the history of the lane.

It seemed to people that Anfisa Telyegin's English ivy grew overnight, crawling along the packed earth and sending out tendrils in every direction. Within a month, the shiny leaves were flourishing like mongrel dogs saved from the pound. In five months more, the entire front yard was a veritable lake of greenery.

People thought at this point that she would tackle the picket fence, which sagged like knee-highs on an eighty-year-old. Or perhaps the chimneys, of which there were six and all of them guano streaked and infested with birds. Or even the windows, where the same drunken venetian blinds had covered the glass- without being dusted or changed-for the last fifty years. But instead, she repaired to the backyard, where she planted more ivy, put in a hedge between her property and her neighbors' yards, and built a very large chicken coop into which and out of which she disappeared and emerged at precise intervals morning and night with a basket on her arm. It was filled with corn on the access route. It was empty-or so it seemed to anyone who caught a glimpse of the woman-on the egress.

“What's the old bag doing with all the eggs?” asked Billy Hart who lived across the street and drank far too much beer.

“I haven't seen any eggs,” Leslie Gilbert replied, but she wouldn't have, naturally, because she rarely moved from her sofa to the window during the daytime when the television talk shows were claiming her attention. And she couldn't be expected to see Anfisa Telyegin at night. Not in the dark and between the trees that the woman had planted along the property line just beyond the hedge, trees that like the ivy seemed to grow with preternatural speed.

Soon, the children of Napier Lane were reacting to the solitary woman's strange habits the way children will. The younger ones crossed over to the other side of the street whenever passing 1420. The older ones dared each other to enter the yard and slap hands against the warped screen door that had lost its screen the previous Hallowe'en.

Things might have gotten out of hand at this point had not Anfisa Telyegin herself taken the bull by the horns: She went to the Napier Lane Veterans' Day Chili Cook-off. While it's true that she didn't take any chili with her, it's also true that she did not show up empty-handed. And no matter that Jasmine McKenna found a long gray hair embedded in the lime Jell-O salad with bananas that was Anfisa's contribution to the event. It was the thought that counted-at least to her mother if not to the rest of the neighbors-and that proffered Jell-O encouraged Willow to look with a compassionate eye upon the strange elderly woman from that moment forward.

“I'm going to take her a batch of my drop-dead brownies,” Willow told her husband Scott one morning not long after the Veterans' Day Chili Cook-off (won by Ava Downey, by the way, for the third consecutive and maddening year). “I think she just doesn't know what to make of us all. She's a foreigner, after all,” which is what the neighbors had learned from the woman herself at the cook-off: born in Russia when it was still part of the USSR, a childhood in Moscow, an adulthood far in the north somewhere till the Soviet Union fell apart and she herself made her way to America.

Scott McKenna said, “Hmm,” without really registering what his wife was telling him. He'd just returned from the graveyard shift at TriOptics Incorporated where, as a support technician for TriOptics' complicated software package, he was forced to spend hours on the phone with Europeans, Asians, Australians, and New Zealanders who phoned the helpline nightly-or for them, daily-wanting an immediate solution for whatever mindless havoc they'd just wreaked upon their operating system.

“Scott, are you listening to me?” Willow asked, feeling the way she always felt when his response lacked the appropriate degree of commitment to their conversation: cut off and floating in outer space. “You know I hate it when you don't listen to me.” Her voice was sharper than she intended and her daughter Jasmine-at the present moment stirring her Cheerios to reduce them to the level of sogginess that she preferred-said, “Ouch, Mom. Chill.”

“Where'd she get that?” Scott McKenna looked up from his study of the financial pages of the daily newspaper while five-year-old Max-always his sister's echo if not her shadow-said, “Yeah, Mom. Chill,” and stuck his fingers into the yolk of his fried egg.

“From Sierra Gilbert, probably,” Willow said.

“Hmph,” Jasmine countered with a toss of her head. “Sierra Gilbert got it from me.”

“Whoever got it from who,” Scott said, snapping his paper meaningfully, “I don't want to hear it said to your mother again, okay?”

“It only means-”

“Jasmine.”

“Poop.” She stuck out her tongue. She'd cut her bangs again, Willow saw, and she sighed. She felt defeated by her strong-willed daughter on the fast path to adolescence, and she hoped that little Blythe or Cooper-with whom she was finally and blessedly pregnant-might be more the sort of child she'd had in mind to bring into the world.

It was clear to Willow that she wasn't going to receive Scott's acknowledgment of-much less his benediction on-her plan for the drop-dead brownies unless and until she made it clear why she thought a neighborly gesture was called for at this point. She waited to do so until the kids were off to school, safely escorted to the bus stop at the end of the street and attended there-despite Jasmine's protests-until the yellow doors closed upon them. Then she returned to the house and found her husband preparing for the daily five hours of sleep he allotted himself prior to sitting down to work on the six consulting accounts that so far described what went for McKenna Computing Designs. Nine more accounts and he would be able to leave TriOptics and maybe then their lives would be a little more normal. No more regimented sex in the hours between the kids' going to bed and Scott's leaving for work. No more long nights alone listening to the creaking floorboards and trying to convince herself it was only the house settling.

Scott was in the bedroom, casting his clothes off. He left everything where it fell and fell himself onto the mattress, where he turned on his side and pulled the blankets over his shoulder. He was twenty-seven seconds away from snoring, when Willow spoke.

“I've been thinking, hon.”

No response.

“Scott?”

“Hmmm?”

“I've been thinking about Miss Telyegin.” Or Mrs. Telyegin, Willow supposed. She'd not yet learned if the woman next door was married, single, divorced, or widowed. Single seemed most likely to Willow for some reason that she couldn't quite explain. Maybe it had to do with the woman's habits, which were becoming more apparent-and patently stranger-as the days and weeks passed. Most notable were the hours she kept, which were almost entirely nocturnal. But beyond that, there was the oddity of things like the venetian blinds on 1420 being always closed against the light; of Miss Telyegin wearing rubber boots rain or shine whenever she did emerge from her house; of the fact that she not only never entertained visitors, but she never went anywhere besides to work and home again precisely at the same time each day.

“When does she buy her groceries?” Ava Downey asked.

“She has them delivered,” Willow replied.

“I've seen the truck,” Leslie Gilbert confirmed.

“So she never goes out in the daytime at all?”

“Never before dusk,” Willow said.

Thus was vampire added to witch, but only the children took that sobriquet seriously. Nonetheless, the other neighbors began to shy away from Anfisa Telyegin, which prompted Willow's additional sympathy and made Anfisa Telyegin's effort at the Veterans' Day Chili Cook-off even more worthy of admiration and reciprocation.

“Scott,” she said to her drowsy husband, “are you listening to me?”

“Can we talk later, Will?”

“This'll only take a minute. I've been thinking about Anfisa.”

He sighed and flipped onto his back, putting his arms behind his head and exposing what Willow least liked to see when she looked upon her spouse: armpits as hairy as Abraham's beard.

“Okay,” he said without a display of anything resembling marital patience. “What about Anfisa?”

Willow sat on the edge of the bed. She placed her hand on Scott's chest to feel his heart. Despite his present impatience, he had one. A very big one. She'd seen it first at the high school sock hop where he'd claimed her for a partner, rescuing her from life among the wallflowers, and she depended now upon its ability to open wide and embrace her idea.

“It's been tough with your parents so far away,” Willow said. “Don't you agree?”

Scott's eyes narrowed with the suspicion of a man who'd suffered comparisons to his older brother from childhood and who'd only too happily moved his family to a different state to put an end to them. “What d'you mean, tough?”

“Five hundred miles,” Willow said. “That's a long way.”

Not long enough, Scott thought, to still the echoes of “Your brother the cardiologist” which followed him everywhere.

“I know you want the distance,” Willow continued, “but the children could benefit from their grandparents, Scott.”

“Not from these grandparents,” Scott informed her.

Which was what she expected her husband to say. So it was no difficult feat to segue from there into her idea. It seemed to her, she told Scott, that Anfisa Telyegin had extended a hand of friendship to the neighborhood at the Chili Cook-off and she wanted to reciprocate. Indeed, wouldn't it be lovely to get to know the woman on the chance that she might become a foster grandparent to their children? She-Willow-had no parents whose wisdom and life experience she could offer to Jasmine, Max, and little Blythe-or-Cooper. And with Scott's family so far away…

“Family doesn't have to be defined as blood relations,”

Willow pointed out. “Leslie's like an aunt to the children. Anfisa could be like a grandmother. And anyway, I hate to see her alone the way she is. With the holidays coming… I don't know. It seems so sad.”

Scott's expression changed to show the relief he felt at not having Willow suggest they move back to be near his loathsome parents. She sympathized with-if she didn't understand-his unwillingness to expose himself to any more comparisons to his vastly more successful sibling. And that empathy of hers, which he'd always seen as her finest quality, was something he accepted as not being limited to an application only to himself. She cared about people, his wife Willow. It was one of the reasons he loved her. He said, “I don't think she wants to mix in with us, Will.”

“She came to the cook-off. I think she wants to try.”

Scott smiled, reached up and caressed his wife's cheek. “Always rescuing strays.”

“Only with your blessing.”

He yawned. “Okay. But don't expect much. She's a dark horse, I think.”

“She just needs some friendship extended to her.”

And Willow set about doing exactly that the very same day. She made a double batch of drop-dead brownies and arranged a dozen artfully on a green plate of Depression glass. She covered them carefully in Saran Wrap and fixed this in place with a jaunty plaid ribbon. As carefully as if she were bearing myrrh, she carried her offering next door to 1420.

It was a cold day. It didn't snow in this part of the country and while autumns were generally long and colorful, they could also be icy and gray. That was the case when Willow left the house.

Frost still lay on her neat front lawn, on the pristine fence, on the crimson leaves of the liquidambar at the edge of the sidewalk, and a bank of fog was rolling determinedly down the street like a fat man looking for a meal.

Willow stepped watchfully along the brick path that led from her front door to the gate, and she held the drop-dead brownies against her chest as if exposure to the air might somehow harm them. She shivered and wondered what winter would be like if this was what a day in autumn could do.

She had to set her plate of brownies on the sidewalk for a moment when she reached the front of Anfisa's house. The old picket gate was off one hinge and instead of pushing it open, one needed to lift it, swing it, and set it down again. And even then, it wasn't an easy maneuver with the ivy now thickly overgrowing the front yard path.

Indeed, as Willow approached the house, she noticed what she hadn't before. The ivy that flourished under Anfisa's care had begun to twine itself up the front steps and was crawling along the wide front porch and twisting up the rails. If Anfisa didn't trim it soon, the house would disappear beneath it.

On the porch, where Willow hadn't stood since the last inhabitants of 1420 had given up the effort at DIY and moved to a brand-new-and flavorless-development just outside of town, Willow saw that Anfisa had made another alteration to the home in addition to what she'd done with the yard. Sitting next to the front door was a large metal chest with grocery delivery stenciled in neat white letters across its lid.

Odd, Willow thought. It was one thing to have your groceries delivered… Wouldn't she like to have that service if she could ever bear the thought of someone other than herself selecting her family's food. But it was quite another thing to leave it outside where it could spoil if you weren't careful.

Nonetheless, Anfisa Telyegin had lived to the ripe old age of… whatever it was. She must, Willow decided, know what she was doing.

She rang the front bell. She had no doubt that Anfisa was at home and would be home for many hours still. It was daylight, after all.

But no one answered. Yet Willow had the distinct impression that there was someone quite nearby, listening just behind the door. So she called out, “Miss Telyegin? It's Willow McKenna. It was such a nice thing to see you at the Chili Cook-off the other night. I've brought you some brownies. They're my specialty. Miss Telyegin? It's Willow McKenna. From next door? 1418 Napier Lane? To your left?”

Again, nothing. Willow looked to the windows but saw that they were, as always, covered by their venetian blinds. She decided that the front bell had not worked, and she knocked instead on the green front door. She called out, “Miss Telyegin?” once more before she began to feel silly. She realized that she was making something of a fool of herself in front of the whole neighborhood.

“There was our Willow bangin' away on that woman's front door like an orphan of the storm,” Ava Downey would say over her gin and tonic that afternoon. And her husband Beau, who was always at home from the real estate office in time to mix the Beefeaters and vermouth for his wife just the way she liked it, would pass along that information to his pals at the weekly poker game, from which those men would carry it home to their wives till everyone knew without a doubt how needy Willow McKenna was to forge connections in her little world.

She felt embarrassment creep up on her like the secret police. She decided to leave her offering and phone Anfisa Telyegin about it. So she lifted the lid of the grocery box and set the drop-dead brownies inside.

She was lowering the heavy lid when she heard a rustling in the ivy behind her. She didn't think much about it till a skittering sounded against the worn wood of the old front porch. She turned then, and gave out a shriek that she smothered with her hand. A large rat with glittering eyes and scaly tail was observing her. The rodent was not three feet away, at the edge of the porch and about to dive into the protection of the ivy.

“Oh my God!” Willow leapt onto the metal food box without a thought of Ava Downey, Beau, the poker game, or the neighborhood seeing her. Rats were terrifying-she couldn't have said why- and she looked around for something to drive the creature off.

But he took himself into the ivy without her encouragement. And as the last of his gray bulk disappeared, Willow McKenna didn't hesitate to do so herself. She leapt from the food box and ran all the way home.

“It was a rat,” Willow insisted.

Leslie Gilbert took her gaze away from the television. She'd muted the sound upon Willow's arrival but hadn't completely torn herself away from the confrontation going on there. My Father Had Sex With My Boyfriend was printed on the bottom of the screen, announcing the day's topic among the combatants.

“I know a rat when I see one,” Willow said.

Leslie reached for a Dorito and munched thoughtfully. “Did you let her know?”

“I phoned her right away. But she didn't answer and she doesn't have a machine.”

“You could leave her a note.”

Willow shivered. “I don't even want to go into the yard again.”

“It's all that ivy,” Leslie pointed out. “Bad thing to have ivy like that.”

“Maybe she doesn't know they like ivy. I mean, in Russia, it'd be too cold for rats, wouldn't it?”

Leslie took another Dorito. “Rats're like cockroaches, Will,” she said. “It's never too anything for them.” She fastened her eyes to the television screen. “Least we know why she has that box for her groceries. Rats bite through anything. But they don't bite through steel.”

There seemed nothing for it but to write a note to Anfisa Telyegin. Willow did this promptly but felt that she couldn't deliver such news to the reclusive woman without also proffering a solution to the problem. So she added the words, “I'm doing something to help out,” and she bought a trap, baited it with peanut butter, and bore it with her to 1420.

The next morning at breakfast, she told her husband what she had done, and he nodded thoughtfully over his newspaper. She said, “I put our phone number in the note, and I thought she'd call, but she hasn't. I hope she doesn't think I think it's a reflection on her that there's a rat on her property. Obviously, I didn't mean to insult her.”

“Hmm,” Scott said and rattled his paper.

Jasmine said, “Rats? Rats? Yucky yuck, Mom.”

And Max said, “Yucky yucky yuck.”

Having started something with the deposit of the trap on

Anfisa Telyegin's front porch, Willow felt duty bound to finish it. So she returned to 1420 when Scott was asleep and the children had gone off to school.

She walked up the path with far more trepidation than she'd felt on her first visit. Every rustle in the ivy was the movement of the rat, and surely the scritching sound she could hear was the rodent creeping up behind her, ready to pounce on her ankles.

Her fears came to nothing, though. When she mounted the porch, she saw that her effort at trapping the critter had been successful. The trap held the rat's broken body. Willow shuddered when she saw it, and hardly registered the fact that the rodent looked somewhat surprised to find his neck broken right when he was helping himself to breakfast.

She wanted Scott there to help her, then. But realizing that he needed his sleep, she'd come prepared. She'd carried with her a shovel and a garbage bag in the hope that her first venture in vermin extermination would have been successful.

She knocked on the door to let Anfisa Telyegin know what she was doing, but as before there was no answer. As she turned to face her task with the rat, though, she saw the venetian blinds move a fraction. She called out, “Miss Telyegin? I've put a trap down for the rat. I've got him. You don't need to worry about it,” and she felt a bit put out that her neighbor didn't open the front door and thank her.

She steeled herself to the job before her-she'd never liked coming across dead animals, and this occasion was no different from finding roadkill adhering to the treads of her tires-and she scooped the rat up with the shovel. She was just about to deposit the stiffened body into the garbage sack, when a susurration of the ivy leaves distracted her, followed by a skittering that she recognized at once.

She whirled. Two rats were on the edge of the porch, eyes glittering, tails swishing against the wood.

Willow McKenna dropped the shovel with a clatter. She made a wild dash for the street.

“Two more?” Ava Downey sounded doubtful. She rattled the ice in her glass and her husband Beau took it for the signal it was and went to refresh her gin and tonic. “Darlin', you sure you're not sufferin' from somethin'?”

“I know what I saw,” Willow told her neighbor. “I let Leslie know and now I'm telling you. I killed one, but I saw two more. And I swear to God, they knew what I was doing.”

“Intelligent rats, then?” Ava Downey asked. “My Lord, what a perplexin' situation.” She pronounced it perplexing in her southern drawl, Miss North Carolina come to live among the mortals.

“It's a neighborhood problem,” Willow said. “Rats carry disease. They breed like… well, they breed…”

“Like rats,” Beau Downey said. He gave his wife her drink and joined the ladies in Ava Downey's well-appointed living room. Ava was an interior decorator by avocation if not by career, and everything she touched was instantly transformed into a suitable vignette for Architectural Digest.

“Very amusin', darlin',” Ava said to her husband, without smiling. “My oh my. Married all these years and I had no idea you have such a quick wit.”

Willow said, “They're going to infest the neighborhood. I've tried to talk to Anfisa about it, but she's not answering the phone. Or she's not at home. Except there're lights on, so I think she's home and… Look. We need to do something. There're children to consider.”

Willow hadn't thought of the children till earlier that afternoon, after Scott had risen from his daily five hours. She'd been in the backyard in her vegetable garden, picking the last of the autumn squash. She'd reached for one and in doing so had dug her fingers into a pile of animal droppings. She'd recoiled from the sensation and pulled the squash out hastily from the tangle of its vine. The vegetable, she saw, had been scarred with tooth marks.

The droppings and tooth marks had told the tale. There weren't just rats in the yard next door. There were rats on the move. Every yard was vulnerable.

Children played in those yards. Families held their summer barbecues there. Teenagers sunned themselves there in the summer and men smoked cigars on warm spring nights. These yards weren't meant to be shared with rodents. Rodents were dangerous to everyone's health.

“The problem's not rats,” Beau Downey said. “The problem's the woman, Willow. She probably thinks having rats is normal. Hell, she's from Russia. What d'you want?”

What Willow wanted was peace of mind. She wanted to know that her children were safe, that she could let Blythe-or-Cooper crawl on the lawn without having to worry that a rat-or rats' droppings-would be out there.

“Call an exterminator,” Scott told her.

“Burn a cross on her lawn,” Beau Downey advised.

She phoned Home Safety Exterminators, and in short order a professional came to call. He verified the evidence in Willow's vegetable plot, and for good measure, he paid a call on the Gilberts on the other side of 1420 and did much the same there. This, at least, got Leslie off the sofa. She dragged a set of kitchen steps to the fence and peered over at 1420's backyard.

Aside from a path to the chicken coop, ivy grew everywhere, even up the trunks of the fast-growing trees.

“This,” Home Safety Exterminator pronounced, “is a real problem, lady. The ivy's got to go. But the rats have to go first.”

“Let's do it,” Willow said.

But there was a problem as things turned out. Home Safety Exterminators could trap rats on the McKennas' property. They could trap rats in the Gilberts' yard. They could walk down the street and see to the Downeys' and even cross over and deal with the Harts'. But they couldn't enter a yard without permission, without contracts being signed and agreements reached. And that couldn't happen unless and until someone made contact with Anfisa Telyegin.

The only way to manage this was to waylay the woman when she left one night to teach one of her classes at the local college. Willow appointed herself neighborhood liaison, and she took up watch at her kitchen window, feeding her family take-out Chinese and pizzas for several days so as not to miss the moment when the Russian woman set off for the bus stop at the end of Napier Lane. When that finally happened, Willow grabbed her parka and dashed out after her.

She caught up to her in front of the Downeys' house which, as always, was already ablaze with Christmas lights despite the fact that Thanksgiving had not yet arrived. In the glow from the Santa and reindeer on the roof, Willow explained the situation.

Anfisa's back was to the light, so Willow couldn't see her reaction. Indeed, she couldn't see the Russian woman's face at all, so shrouded was she in a head scarf and a wide-brimmed hat. It seemed reasonable enough to Willow to assume that a passing along of information would be all that the unpleasant situation required. But she was surprised.

“There are no rats in the yard,” Anfisa Telyegin said with considerable dignity, all things considered. “I fear you are mistaken, Mrs. McKenna.”

“Oh no,” Willow contradicted her. “I'm not, Miss Telyegin. Truly, I'm not. Not only did I see one when I brought you those brownies… Did you get them, by the way? They're my specialty… But when I set a trap, I actually caught it. And then I saw two more. And then when I found the droppings in my yard and called the exterminator and he looked around…”

“Well, there you have it,” Anfisa said. “The problem is with your yard, not mine.”

“But-”

“I must be on my way.”

And so she walked off, with nothing settled between them.

When Willow shared this information with Scott, he decided a neighborhood war council was called for, which was another term for a poker night at which poker wasn't played and to which wives were invited. Willow found herself overwrought at the idea of what might happen once the neighborhood became involved in the problem. She didn't like trouble. But by the same token, she wanted her children to be safe from vermin. She spent most of the meeting anxiously chewing on her nails.

Every position taken on the situation was a turn of the prism that is human nature. Scott wanted to go the legal route in keeping with his by-the-book personality. Start with the health department, bring in the police if that didn't work, turn to lawyers subsequently. But Owen Gilbert didn't like this idea at all. He didn't like Anfisa Telyegin for reasons having more to do with her refusal to let him do her income taxes than with the rodents that were invading his property, and he wanted to call the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. and have them deal with her. Surely she was involved in something. Everything from tax dodging to espionage was possible. Mention of the I.R.S. brought the I.N.S. into Beau Downey's mind, which was more than enough to enflame him. He was of the persuasion that immigrants are the ruination of America and since the legal system and the government clearly weren't about to do a damn thing to keep the borders closed to the invading hordes, Beau said they should at least do something to close their neighborhood to them.

“Let's let this gal know she ain't welcome here,” he said, to which suggestion his wife Ava rolled her eyes. She never made a secret of the fact that she considered Beau good for mixing her drinks, servicing her sexual needs, and not much more.

“How d'you suggest we do that, darlin'?” Ava asked. “Paint a swastika on her front door?”

“Hell, we need a family in there anyway,” Billy Hart said, chugging his beer. It was his seventh and his wife had been counting them, as had Willow, who wondered why Rose didn't stop him from making a fool of himself every time he went out in public instead of just sitting there with an agonized expression on her face. “We need a couple our own age, people with kids, maybe even a teenage daughter… one with decent tits.” He grinned and gave Willow a look she didn't like. Her own breasts-normally the size of teacups-were swelling with her pregnancy and he fixed his eyes to them and winked at her.

With so many opinions being expressed, is there any doubt that nothing was settled? The only thing that occurred was passions being enflamed. And Willow felt responsible for having en-flamed them.

Perhaps, she thought, there was another way to deal with the situation. But wrack her brains though she did for the next several days, she could come up with no approach to the problem.

It was when a letter went misdelivered to her house that Willow came up with what seemed a likely plan of action. For stuck within a collection of catalogues and bills was a manila envelope forwarded to Anfisa Telyegin from an address in Port Ter-ryton, a small village on the Weldy River some ninety-five miles north of Napier Lane. Perhaps, Willow thought, someone in Anfisa's former neighborhood could help her present neighbors learn how best to approach her.

So on a crisp morning when the children were in school and Scott was tucked away for his well-earned five hours, Willow got out her state atlas and plotted a route that would take her to Port Terryton before noon. Leslie Gilbert went, too, despite having to miss her daily intake of dysfunction on the television set.

Both of the ladies had heard of Port Terryton. It was a picturesque village some three hundred years old, set amidst an old-growth deciduous forest that flourished right to the banks of the Weldy River. Money lived in Port Terryton. Old money, new money, stock market money, dot com money, inherited money. Mansions built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries served as display pieces for inordinate wealth.

There were inferior areas in the village as well, streets of visually pleasing cottages where the day help and the lesser souls lived. Leslie and Willow found Anfisa's former residence in one of these areas: a charming and well-painted gray and white salt-box structure shaded by a copper-leafed maple with a clipped front lawn and flowerbeds planted with a riot of pansies.

“So what're we trying to find out, exactly?” Leslie asked as Willow pulled to a stop by the curb. Leslie had brought along a box of glazed donuts, and she'd spent most of the drive gorging herself upon them. She licked her fingers as she asked the question, bending down to squint through the window at Anfisa's former house.

“I don't know,” Willow said. “Something that could help.”

“Owen's idea was the best,” Leslie said loyally. “Call in the Feds and hand her over.”

“There's got to be something less… well, less brutal than that. We don't want to destroy her life.”

“We're talking about a yard full of rats,” Leslie reminded her. “A yard of rats that she denies exists.”

“I know, but maybe there's a reason why she doesn't know they're there. Or why she can't face admitting they're there. We need to be able to help her confront this.”

Leslie blew out a breath and said, “Whatever, sweetie.”

They'd come to Port Terryton without much of a plan of what they'd do once they got there. But as they looked fairly harmless-one of them just beginning to show a pregnancy and the other placid enough to inspire trust-they decided to knock on a few doors. The third house they tried was the one that provided them with the insight they'd been looking for. It was, however, not an insight that Willow would have liked to unearth.

From Barbie Townsend across the street from Anfisa Telyegin's home, they received cups of tea with lemon, chocolate chip cookies, and a wealth of information. Barbie had even kept a scrapbook of the Rat Lady Affair, as the Port Terryton newspaper had come to call it.

Leslie and Willow hardly spoke on the drive home. They'd planned to have lunch in Port Terryton, but neither of them had an appetite once they were finished talking to Barbie Townsend. They were both intent upon getting back to Napier Lane and informing their husbands of what they'd learned. Husbands, after all, were intended to deal with this sort of situation. What else were they for? They were supposed to be the protectors. Wives were the nurturers. That's the way it was.

“They were everywhere,” Willow told her husband, interrupting him in the midst of a phone call to a prospective client. “Scott, the newspaper even had pictures of them.”

“Rats,” Leslie informed her Owen. She went directly to his office and barged right in, trailing her paisley shawl behind her like a security blanket. “The yard was infested. She'd planted ivy. Just like here. The health department and the police and the courts all got involved… The neighbors sued, Owen.”

“It took five years,” Willow told Scott. “My God, five years. Jasmine will be twelve in five years. Max will be ten. And we'll have Blythe-or-Cooper as well. And probably two more. Maybe three. And if we haven't solved this problem by then…” She began to cry, so afraid for her children was she becoming.

“It cost them a fortune in lawyers' fees,” Leslie Gilbert told Owen. “Because every time the court ordered her to do something, she countered with a lawsuit herself. Or she appealed. We don't have the kind of money they have in Port Terryton. What're we going to do?”

“She's sick in some way,” Willow said to Scott. “I know that, and I don't want to hurt her. But still, she's got to be made to see… Only how can we make her see if she denies there's a problem in the first place? How?”

Willow wanted to go the mental health route. While the Napier Lane menfolk gathered nightly to come up with a plan of action that would take care of the problem posthaste, Willow did some research on the Internet. What she learned opened her heart to the Russian woman who, she realized, clearly wasn't responsible in full for the infestation of her property.

“Read this,” Willow said to her husband. “It's a sickness, Scott. It's a mental disorder. It's like… You know when people have too many cats? Women, usually? Older women? You can take all their cats away but if you don't deal with the mental problem, they just go out and get more cats.”

“You're saying she collects rats?” Scott asked her. “I don't think so, Willow. If you want to take the psychological viewpoint, then let's call this what it is: denial. She can't admit that she's got rats because of what rats imply.”

The men agreed with Scott, especially Beau Downey who pointed out that, as a foreigner-or furinner, as he pronounced it-Anfisa Telyegin probably didn't know a damn thing about hygiene, personal or otherwise. God only knew what the inside of her house was like. Had any of them seen it? No? Well, then, he rested his case. They ought to just set up a little accident over at 1420. A fire, say, started by bad wiring or maybe by gas leaking at the side of the house.

Scott wouldn't hear of that and Owen Gilbert began making noises to distance himself from the whole situation. Rose Hart- who lived across the street and didn't have as much invested in the situation-pointed out that they didn't really know how many rats there were, so perhaps they were getting too excited about what was really a simple situation. “Willow only saw three: the one she trapped and two others. It could be we're getting too riled up. It could be this is a simpler problem than we think.”

“But in Port Terryton, it was an infestation,” Willow cried, wringing her hands. “And even if there're only two more, if we don't get rid of them, there'll soon be twenty. We can't ignore this. Scott? Tell them…”

Several women exchanged knowing glances. Willow McKenna had never been able to stand on her own two feet, even now.

It was Ava Downey-who would have believed it?-who offered a potential solution. “If she's in denial as you suggest, Scott darlin',” Ava said, “why don't we simply do somethin' to make her fantasy world real?”

“What would that be?” Leslie Gilbert asked. She didn't like Ava, whom she saw as being after every woman's husband, and she generally avoided speaking to her. But the circumstances were dire enough that she was willing to put her aversion aside and listen to anything that promised to solve the problem quickly. She had, after all, just that morning tried to start her car only to find that wires in the engine had been chewed up by vermin.

“Let's get rid of the creatures for her,” Ava said. “Two or three or twenty. Let's just get rid of them.”

Billy Hart gulped down what was the last of his ninth beer of the evening and pointed out that no exterminator would take on the job, even if the neighbors paid to have it done, not without Anfisa Telyegin's cooperation. Owen concurred as did Scott and Beau. Didn't Ava remember what the agent from Home Safety Exterminators had told Leslie and Willow?

“Course I remember,” Ava said. “But what I'm suggestin' is that we take on the work ourselves.”

“It's her property,” Scott said.

“She might call in the cops and have us arrested if we go set-tin' traps all around her yard, honey,” Beau Downey added.

“Then we'll have to do it when she's not home.”

“But she'll see the traps,” Willow said. “She'll see the dead rats in them. She'll know-”

“You're misunderstandin' me, darlin',” Ava purred. “I'm not suggestin' we use traps at all.”

Everyone living near 1420 knew everyone else's habits: what time Billy Hart staggered out for the morning paper, for example, or how long Beau Downey revved up the motor of his SUV before he finally blasted off for work each day. This was part of being on friendly terms with one another. So no one felt compelled to remark upon the fact that Willow McKenna could say to the minute exactly when Anfisa Telyegin went to work at the community college each evening and when she returned home.

The plan was simple: After Owen Gilbert obtained the appropriate footwear for them all-no man wanted to traipse through what might be rat-infested ivy in his loafers-they would make their move. Eight Routers-as they called themselves-would form a shoulder-to-shoulder line and move slowly through the ivy-covered front yard in heavy rubber boots. This line would drive the rats toward the house where the Terminators would be waiting for them as they emerged from the ivy on the run from the rubber boots. And the Terminators would be armed with bats, with shovels, and with anything else that would eliminate the nasty creatures. “It seems to me it's the only way,” Ava Downey pointed out. Because while no one truly wanted Anfisa Telyegin to have to find her property littered with rats killed by traps, so also did no one want to find rats in their own yard where the creatures might manage to stagger before succumbing to a crawl-off-and-die-somewhere-else poison, if that's the route the neighbors chose.

So hand-to-rodent combat appeared to be the only answer. And as Ava Downey put it in her inimitable fashion: “I don't expect you fine big strong men mind gettin' a little blood on your hands… not in a cause good as this.”

What were they to say to such a challenge to their masculinity? A few feet shuffled and someone murmured, “I don't know about this,” but Ava countered with, “I just don't see any other way to do it. Course I'm willin' to listen to any other suggestions.”

There were no others. So a date was chosen. And everyone set about preparing himself.

Three nights later, all the children gathered at the Harts' house to keep them out of the way and out of sight of what was going to happen at 1420. No one wanted their offspring to hear or see the destruction that was planned. Children are sensitive to this sort of thing, the wives informed their husbands after a morning-coffee agreement to stand as one. The less they knew about what their daddies were up to, the better for them all, the women said. No bad memories and no bad dreams.

The men among them who didn't like blood, violence, or death bolstered themselves with two thoughts. First, they considered their children's health and safety. Second, they dwelt upon the Higher Good. One or two of them reminded himself that a yard of rats wouldn't go over well with the Wingate Courier, nor would it get Napier Lane very far toward achieving Perfect Place to Live status. Others just kept telling themselves that it was only two rats they were talking about. Two rats and nearly ten times that in men…? Well, those were odds that anyone could live with.

Thirty minutes after Anfisa Telyegin left 1420 and headed for the bus stop and the ride to the community college and her Russian literature class, the men made their move in the darkness. And much was the relief of the faint-at-heart when the Routers managed to drive only four rats into the waiting line of Terminators. Beau Downey was among this latter group and he was happy to dispatch all four rats himself, yelling, “Gimme some light over here! Scare the hell out of 'em!” as he chased down one rodent after another. Indeed, later it would be said that he took a little too much pleasure in the process. He wore his blood-spattered jumpsuit with the distinction of a man who's never fought in a real battle. He talked about “nailin' the little bastards” and gave a war whoop as his bat made contact with rat number four.

Because of this, he was the one who pointed out that the backyard had to be dealt with, too. So the same process was gone through there, with the net result being five more furry corpses, five more bodies in the garbage bag.

“Nine rats, not so bad after all,” Owen Gilbert said with the relief of someone who'd made sure up front he was among the Routers and consequently forever free of the blood of the innocent.

“That don't seem right to me,” Billy Hart pointed out. “Not with the droppings all over the McKennas' yard and not with

Leslie's engine wires getting chomped. I don't think we got them all. Who's for crawling under the house? I got a smoke bomb or three we could use to scare 'em out.”

So a smoke bomb was set off and three more rats met the fate of their fellows. But a fourth got away from the best of Beau's efforts and made a dash for Anfisa's chicken coop.

Someone shouted, “Get him!” but no one was fast enough. He slithered beneath the shelter and disappeared from view.

What was odd was that the chickens didn't notice a rat in their midst. From inside the coop came not a single rustling wing or protesting squawk. It was as if the chickens had been drugged or, more ominously… eaten by rats.

Clearly, someone was going to have to see if the latter was the case. But no one leapt to the opportunity. The men advanced on the chicken coop, leery, and those with flashlights found that they could barely hold them steady upon the little structure.

“Grab that door and swing it open, Owen,” one of the men said. “Let's get that last mother and get out of here.”

Owen hesitated, unanxious to be confronted by several dozen mutilated chicken corpses. And chicken corpses certainly seemed very likely, since even with the approach of the men, no sound came from within the coop.

Beau Downey said, “Hell,” in disgust when Owen didn't move. He lurched past him and yanked open the door himself and threw a smoke bomb inside.

And that's when it happened.

Rats poured through the opening. Rats by the dozen. Rats by the hundred. Small rats. Large rats. Obviously well-fed rats. They flooded from the chicken coop like boiling oil from a battlement and began to shoot off in every direction.

The men flailed clubs and bats and shovels at them, every which way. Bones crunched. Rats squealed and screamed. Blood spurted in the air. Flashlights captured the carnage in pools of bright illumination. The men didn't speak. They merely grunted as one after another the rats were chased down. It was like a primitive battle for territory, engaged in by two primordial species only one of which was going to survive.

By the end, Anfisa Telyegin's yard was littered with the blood, bones, and bodies of the enemy. Any rats that escaped had done so to either the McKennas' or the Gilberts' yard, and they would be dealt with there by professionals. As to the land that those few remaining rats had left behind in their flight… It was like the scene of any other disaster: not a place that can be cleaned up quickly and certainly not a place that would soon be forgotten.

But the men had promised their wives that the job would be done without signs left behind, so they did their best to scrape up broken furry bodies and wash the ivy and the outside of the chicken coop free of blood. They discovered in doing this that there had never been chickens in the coop in the first place and what this implied about Anfisa Telyegin's daily delivery of corn to the coop… Indeed what this implied about Anfisa Telyegin herself…

It was Billy Hart who said, “She's nuts,” and Beau Downey who suggested, “We gotta get her out of the goddamn neighborhood.” But before either of these comments could be mooted in any way, the decrepit front gate of 1420 opened and Anfisa herself stepped into the yard.

The plan hadn't been thought out enough to allow for midterm exams that ended class earlier than usual that night. It also hadn't been thought out enough to consider what a line of eight men tramping through ivy was likely to do to that greenery. So Anfisa Telyegin took one look at the mess in her yard-sufficiently lit by the streetlight in front of her house-and she gave a horrified cry that could be heard all the way to the bus stop.

She cried out not so much because she loved her ivy and mourned the exfoliation brought about by eight pairs of boot-shod feet. Rather she cried out because she knew intuitively what that trodden-down ivy meant.

“My God!” she keened. “No! My God!”

There was no way out of her yard save through the front, so the men emerged one by one. They found Anfisa kneeling in the midst of the trampled ivy, her arms clutched across her body, swaying side to side.

“No, no!” she cried, and she began to weep. “You do not understand what you have done!”

The men were not equipped to handle this. Clubbing rats, yes. That was right up their alley. But offering comfort to a stranger whose suffering made no sense to them…? That was quite another matter. Good God, they'd done the mad woman a favor, hadn't they? Jesus. So they'd mutilated a little bit of ivy in the process. Ivy grew like weeds, especially in this yard. It would all be back to normal in a month.

“Get Willow,” Scott McKenna said as “I'll get Leslie,” Owen Gilbert muttered. And the rest of them dispersed as quickly as they could, with the furtive air of little boys who've had perhaps too much fun doing something for which they will soon be punished.

Willow and Leslie came on the run from Rose Hart's house. They found Anfisa weeping and swaying, beating her fists against her breasts.

“Can you get her inside?” Scott McKenna asked his wife.

Owen Gilbert said to Leslie, “Jeez, make her see it's just ivy, Les. It'll grow back. And it had to be done.”

Willow, for whom empathy was actually something of a curse, was herself fighting back an onslaught of emotion in the presence of the Russian woman's anguish. She hadn't expected to feel anything other than relief upon the disposal of the rats, so the guilt and the sorrow she was experiencing confused her mightily. She cleared her throat and said to Leslie, “Will you…?” and bent to take Anfisa's arm. “Miss Telyegin,” she said, “it's all right. Really. It'll be all right. Will you come inside please? May we make you some tea?”

With Leslie helping, she got the sobbing woman to her feet and as the rest of the neighborhood wives began to gather on Rose Hart's front lawn, Willow and Leslie mounted the front steps of 1420 and helped Anfisa open the door.

Scott followed. After what he'd seen in the chicken coop, he wasn't about to let his wife walk into that house without him. God only knew what they would find inside. But his imagination had fed him inaccurate images. For inside Anfisa Telyegin's house, there was not a sign of anything as much as a hair being out of place. He saw this, felt ashamed of what he'd been anticipating, and excused himself, leaving Leslie and Willow to comfort Anfisa where and how they could.

Leslie put water on to boil. Willow looked for cups and tea. And Anfisa sat at the kitchen table, shoulders shaking as she sobbed, “Forgive. Please forgive.”

“Oh, Miss Telyegin,” Willow murmured. “These things happen sometimes. There's nothing to forgive.”

“You trusted me,” Anfisa wept. “I am so sorry for what I have done. I shall sell. I shall move. I shall find-”

“There's no need for that,” Willow said. “We don't want you to move. We just want you to be safe on your property. We all want to be safe.”

“What I've done to you,” Anfisa cried. “Not once, but twice. You cannot forgive.”

It was the but twice that caused Leslie Gilbert to realize uneasily that, hard as it was to accept, the Russian woman and Willow McKenna were actually talking at cross-purposes. She said, “Hey, Will…” in a monitory tone just as Anfisa said, “My dearest little friends. All of you gone.”

Which was when Willow, feeling a chill run over her, finally climbed aboard the locomotive of comprehension.

She looked at Leslie. “Does she mean…?”

“Yeah, Will. I think she does.”

It was only when Anfisa Telyegin posted a for sale sign in front of her house on Napier Lane two weeks later that Willow McKenna managed to get the complete story from the immigrant woman. She'd gone to 1420 bearing a plate of Christmas cookies as a peace offering and unlike the previous occasion of the drop-dead brownies, this time Anfisa opened the door. She beckoned Willow inside with a nod of her head. She took her into the kitchen and made her tea. It seemed that the passage of two weeks had been sufficient to allow the older woman not only time to grieve but also time to decide to bring Willow a partial step into her world.

“Twenty years,” she said as they sat at the table. “I would not become who they wanted me to be, and I would not be silent. So they sent me away. Lubyanka first, do you know what that is? Run by KGB? Yes? A dreadful place. And from there, Siberia.”

Willow said, “Prison?” in a whisper. “You've been in prison?”

“Prison would be nice. Concentration camp, this was. Oh, I've heard your people laugh about this place Siberia. To them it is a joke: the salt mines in Siberia. I have heard this. But to be there. With no one. Year after year. To be forgotten because one's lover was the important voice, the voice that counted, while until he died one was merely a helpmate, never taken seriously by anyone till the authorities took one seriously. It was a terrible time.”

“You were…?” What did they call it? Willow tried to remember. “A dissident?”

“A voice they didn't like. Who would not be still. Who taught and wrote until they came to fetch her. And then it was Lubyanka. And then it was Siberia. And there in that cell, the little ones came. I was afraid at first. The filth. The disease. I drove them off. But still they came. They came and they watched me. And then I saw. They wanted very little and they were afraid too. So I offered them bits. Some bread. A sliver of meat when I had it. And so they stayed and I wasn't alone.”

“The rats…” Willow tried to keep the aversion from her voice. “They were your friends.”

“To this day,” she replied.

“But, Miss Telyegin,” Willow said, “you're an educated woman. You've read. You've studied. You must know rats carry diseases.”

“They were good to me.”

“Yes. I see you believe that. But that was then, when you were in prison and desperate. You don't need rats now. Let people take their place.”

Anfisa Telyegin lowered her head. “Invasion and killing,” she said. “Some things cannot be forgotten.”

“But they can be forgiven. And no one wants you to leave. We know… I know you had to leave your home once before. In Port Terryton. I know about what happened there. The police, the lawsuits, the courts… Miss Telyegin, you've got to see that if you move away and start over again and if you encourage rats to live on your property again… Don't you see that you'll just be back where you started? No one's going to let you choose rats over people.”

“I will not do that again,” Anfisa said. “But I cannot stay here. Not after what has happened.”

“Just as well, darlin',” Ava Downey said over her gin and tonic. Eight months had passed since the Night of the Rats, and Anfisa Telyegin was gone from their midst. The neighborhood had returned to normal and the new occupants of 1420-a family called Houston with an attorney husband, a pediatrician wife, a Danish au pair, and two well-scrubbed children of eight and ten who wore uniforms to their private school and carried their books to and from the car in neat satchels-were finally doing what the local inhabitants had long desired. For weeks on end, painters wielded their brushes, wallpaperers carried rolls into the house, wood finishers sanded and stained, drapers created mas-terworks for the windows… The chicken coop was carted off and burnt, the ivy was removed, the picket fence was replaced, and a lawn and flowerbeds were planted in front of the house while an English garden was designed for the back. And six months after that, Napier Lane was finally designated A Perfect Place to Live by the Wingate Courier, with 1420 the house that was chosen to symbolize the beauties of the neighborhood.

And there was no jealousy over that fact, although the Downeys were rather cool when the rest of the neighbors offered the Houstons their congratulations on having 1420 selected by the newspaper as the model of domiciliary perfection. After all, the Downeys had restored their own house first and Ava had from the beginning been so kind as to offer her expertise in inte rior design to Madeline Houston… No matter that Madeline had chosen to ignore virtually all of those suggestions, common courtesy demanded that the Houstons decline the pictorial honor presented to them, passing it along to the Downeys who were-if nothing else-mentors to everyone when it came to restoration and interior decoration. But the Houstons apparently didn't see it that way, so they posed happily at the gate of 1420 when the newspaper photographers came to call and they framed the subsequent front page of the Wingate Courier and placed it in their front hallway so everyone-including the green-eyed Downeys- could see it when they came to call.

So “Just as well, darlin',” was said with some mixed feelings by Ava Downey when Willow McKenna stopped to chat in the midst of a walk with little Cooper snoozing in his stroller. Ava was sitting in her faux wicker rocking chair on the front porch, celebrating a warm spring day with her first outdoor gin and tonic of the season. She was referring to the departure of Anfisa Telyegin from their midst, something that Willow herself hadn't quite come to terms with, despite the advent of the Houstons who-with their children, their au pair, and their commitment to home improvement-were so much more suited to Napier Lane. “C'n you imagine what we'd be goin' through right now if we hadn't taken steps to deal with the problem?” Ava asked.

“But if you'd seen her that night…” Willow couldn't remove from her mind the image of the Russian woman as she'd been on her knees, weeping in the ivy. “And then to learn about what the rats meant to her… I just feel so-”

“Extended postpartum,” Ava said. “That's what this is. What you need is a drink. Beau! Beau, honey, you in there, darlin'? Fix Willow here-”

“Oh no. I've got to get dinner. And the kids're alone. And… It's just I can't stop feeling sad about it all. It's like we drove her off, and I never thought I'd do something like that, Ava.”

Ava shrugged and rattled her ice cubes. “All for the best,” she noted.

What Leslie Gilbert said darkly was, “Sure Ava would feel that way. Southerners are used to driving people off their property. It's one of their sports.” But she said this mostly because she'd watched Ava zero in on Owen at the New Year's Eve party. She hadn't yet forgotten that they'd used their tongues when they'd kissed, although Owen was still denying that fact.

Willow said, “But she didn't need to leave. I'd forgiven her. Hadn't you?”

“Sure. But when someone's ashamed… What're they supposed to do?”

Ashamed was how Willow herself felt. Ashamed that she'd panicked, ashamed that she'd tracked down Anfisa's previous residence, and ashamed most of all that, having tracked down the truth in Port Terryton, she hadn't given the Russian woman the chance to rectify matters before the men acted. Had she done that, had she told Anfisa what she'd unearthed about her, surely Anfisa would have taken steps to make sure that what had happened in Port Terryton didn't happen in East Wingate.

“I didn't really give her a chance,” she told Scott. “I should have told her what we intended to do if she wouldn't bring in the exterminators. I think I should tell her that now: that what we did was right but how we did it was wrong. I think I'll feel better if I do that, Scott.”

Scott McKenna thought no explanations to Anfisa Telyegin were necessary. But he knew Willow. She wouldn't rest until she'd made whatever peace she felt she needed to make with their erstwhile neighbor. He personally considered it a waste of her time, but the truth was that he was so caught up in meeting the needs of-praise God-the twelve clients he had now at McKenna Computing Designs that he really didn't do more than murmur, “Whatever you think's right, Will,” when his wife at last mentioned going to see Anfisa.

“She was in prison,” Willow reminded him. “In a concentration camp. If we'd known that at the time, I'm sure we would have done things differently. Wouldn't we?”

Scott was only half listening, so he said, “Yeah. I guess.”

Which Willow took for agreement.

It wasn't difficult to trace Anfisa. Willow did it through the community college, where a sympathetic secretary in Human Resources met her for coffee and slipped across the table to her an address in Lower Waterford, one hundred and fifteen miles away.

Willow didn't take Leslie Gilbert this time. Instead she asked if she would baby-sit Cooper for a day. Since Cooper was at the stage where he slept, ate, eliminated, and spent the rest of the time cooing at the mobiles above his crib, Leslie knew that she'd not be distracted from her daily intake of talk shows, so she agreed. And since she'd been looking forward to the topic of the day on her favorite show-I Had Group Sex With My Son's Friends-she didn't ask Willow where she was going, why she was going there, or if she wanted company.

This was just as well. Willow wanted to talk to Anfisa Telyegin alone.

She found Anfisa's new house on Rosebloom Court in Lower Waterford, and when she saw it, she felt a new onslaught of guilt, comparing it to her previous homes both in Port Terryton and on Napier Lane. Those houses were both historical properties. This was not. They had been reflective of the time period during which they'd been built. This was reflective of nothing more than a tract-home designer's desire to make as much money as he could from as little creative effort as possible. It was the sort of place families had moved into in droves after World War II: with stucco walls, a concrete driveway with a crack down the middle from which weeds grew, and a tarpaper roof. Willow's spirits sank when she saw it.

She sat in her car and regretted everything, but most of all she regretted her propensity to panic. If she hadn't panicked when she saw the first rat, if she hadn't panicked when she found the droppings in her vegetable garden, if she hadn't panicked when she learned about Anfisa's trouble in Port Terryton, perhaps she wouldn't have condemned the poor woman to life in this dismal cul-de-sac with its barren one-tree lawns, its warped garage doors that dominated the house fronts, and its patchy, uneven sidewalks.

“It was her choice, darlin',” Ava Downey would have said. “And let's not forget the chicken coop, Willow. She didn't have to encourage rats to take up residence in her yard, now, did she?”

This last question resonated in Willow's mind as she sat in front of Anfisa's house. It prompted her to recognize that there was more of a difference between this house and the last house than was described by the structure itself. For unlike the house on Napier Lane, this yard had no ivy anywhere. Indeed, it had nothing in which a rat could live. All it comprised were flowerbeds neatly planted with neatly trimmed shrubs and a front lawn clipped as smooth as an ice rink.

Perhaps, Willow thought, it had taken two houses and two neighborhoods in an uproar for Anfisa Telyegin to learn that she couldn't share her property with rats and hope to go unnoticed.

Willow had to make sure that some good had come of what had happened in her neighborhood, so she got out of her car and crept quietly up to the backyard fence to have a look. A chicken coop, doghouse, or toolshed would be a very bad sign. But a glance over the fence to the patio, the lawn, and the rosebushes proved that no habitat for rodents had been provided this time around by the Russian woman.

“Sometimes people've got to learn their lessons the hard way, Willow,” Ava Downey would have said.

And it certainly looked as if Anfisa Telyegin had learned, hard way or not.

Willow felt somewhat redeemed by what she saw, but she knew that full absolution wouldn't come until she assured herself that Anfisa was doing well in her new environment. Indeed, she hoped that a conversation with her former neighbor would evolve into an expression of gratitude from Anfisa to the Napier Lane residents who'd managed-however dramatically-to bring her to her senses. That would be something that Willow could carry home to her husband and her friends and thus redeem herself in their eyes as well, for she, after all, had instigated everything.

Willow knocked at the door, which was sunk into a small, square entry defined by a single concrete step. She felt a twinge of concern when a window curtain on the entry flicked, and she called out, “Miss Telyegin, are you home? It's Willow McKenna,” with the hope of reassuring the woman.

Her greeting seemed to do the trick. The door cracked open three inches, revealing a shaft of Anfisa Telyegin from head to toe.

Willow smiled. “Hello. I hope you don't mind my dropping by. I was in the area and I wanted to see…” Her voice drifted off. Anfisa was looking at her with no comprehension at all. Willow said, “Willow McKenna? Your next-door neighbor on Napier Lane? D'you remember me? How are you, Miss Telyegin?”

Anfisa's lips curved suddenly at this, and she stepped away from the door, roused by the mention of Napier Lane. Willow took this movement for permission to enter, so she gave a little push to the door and went inside.

Everything seemed fine. The house was as neat as a surgeon's brain: swept, dusted, and polished. True, there was a slightly peculiar odor in the air, but Willow put that down to the fact that none of the windows were open despite the fine spring day. The place had probably been closed up all winter with the heater sealing in everything from cooking odors to cleaning scents.

“How are you?” Willow said to the older woman. “I've been thinking about you for quite a long time. Are you working in a college in this area now? You're not commuting down to East Wingate, are you?”

Anfisa smiled beatifically “I am well,” she said. “I am so well. Will you have tea?”

The relief Willow felt at being greeted so warmly was like a down comforter on an icy night. She said, “Have you forgiven me, Anfisa? Have you been able to truly forgive me?”

What Anfisa said in reply couldn't have been more of a comfort had Willow written the words herself. “I learned much on Napier Lane,” she murmured. “I do not live as I lived then.”

“Oh my gosh,” said Willow, “I am so glad.”

“Sit, sit,” Anfisa said. “In here. Please. Let me make tea.”

Willow was only too happy to draw a chair from the table and watch as Anfisa bustled contentedly around the kitchen. She chatted as she filled a kettle and pulled teacups and saucers out of a cupboard.

This was a good place for her to settle, Anfisa told Willow. It was a simpler neighborhood, she said, more suited to someone like herself with simpler needs and simpler tastes. The houses and yards were plain, like her, and people kept mostly to themselves.

“This is better for me,” Anfisa said. “It is more what I am accustomed to.”

“I'd hate to think you consider Napier Lane a mistake, though,” Willow said.

“I learned much about life in Napier Lane,” Anfisa told her, “much more than I have learned anywhere else. For that, I am grateful. To you. To everyone. I would not be as I am this moment if it were not for Napier Lane.”

And how she was at this moment was at peace, she said. Not in so many words but in her actions, in the expressions of pleasure, delight, and satisfaction that flickered across her face as she talked. She wanted to know about Willow's family: How was her husband? Her little girl and boy? And there was another small one, wasn't there? And would there be more? Surely, yes, there would be more, wouldn't there?

Willow blushed at this last question and what it implied about Anfisa's intuition. Yes, she admitted to the Russian, there would be more. In fact, she hadn't told her husband yet, but she was fairly certain that she was already pregnant with the fourth McKenna.

“I hadn't intended it to be so soon after Cooper,” Willow confessed. “But now that it's happened, I've got to say I'm thrilled. I love big families. It's what I always wanted.”

“Yes,” Anfisa smiled. “Little ones. How they make life good.”

Willow returned the smile and felt so gratified by the reception that Anfisa was giving her, by Anfisa's every exclamation of pleasure over each piece of news Willow imparted, that she leaned forward and squeezed the Russian woman's hand. She said, “I am so glad I came to see you. You seem like a different person here.”

“I am a different person,” Anfisa said. “I do not do what I did before.”

“You learned,” Willow said. “That's what life is about.”

“Life is good,” Anfisa agreed. “Life is very full.”

“Nothing could be better to hear. This is like music to my ears, Anfisa. May I call you that? May I call you Anfisa? Is that all right? I'd like to be friends.”

Anfisa clasped Willow's hand much as Willow had just clasped hers. “Friends,” she said, “yes. That would be good, Willow.”

“Perhaps you can come to East Wingate to visit us,” Willow said. “And we can come here to visit you. We have no family within five hundred miles, and we'd be thrilled to have you be… well, like a grandmother to my children, if you'd be willing. In fact, that's what I was hoping for when you first moved to Napier Lane.”

Anfisa brightened, put a hand on her chest. “Me? You thought of me as a grandmother to your little ones.” She laughed, clearly delighted at the prospect. “I will love to be that. I will love it through and through. And you-” She grasped Willow's hand once more-“you are too young to be a grandmother. So you must be the aunt.”

Willow said, “The aunt?” and she smiled, although mystified.

“Yes, yes,” Anfisa said. “The aunt to my little ones as I will be the grandmother to yours.”

“To your…”Willow swallowed. She couldn't stop herself from looking around. She forced a smile and went on, saying, “You have little ones yourself? I didn't know that, Anfisa.”

“Come.” Anfisa rose and put her hand on Willow's shoulder. “You must meet them.”

Without wanting her feet to do what they were doing, Willow followed Anfisa from the kitchen to the living room and from the living room down a narrow hall. The odor she'd first smelled when she'd entered the house was stronger here and stronger still when Anfisa opened one of the bedroom doors.

“I keep them in here,” Anfisa said to Willow over her shoulder. “The neighbors don't know and you mustn't tell. I learned so very very much from living as I did on Napier Lane.”