Front Yard Read Online Free Page B

Even a proven gardening thug like Phyllis Sproot might have to behave herself this time.”
    Dr. Sproot looked up briefly as they approached, her eyes turned into big black caverns by the capacious sunglasses, a deep scowl painted on what there was of her face that they could see, then resumed viciously attacking her soil.
    â€œWhy couldn’t someone have been murdered in her yard?” Nan said as they drove off toward home. “Step on it, George, before she comes over and kills us or something.”
    The drive home continued in its dawdling manner, with occasional short detours to view the beginnings of gardens the Fremonts had only just discovered last year, when they were scoping out the competition for the contest. Not surprisingly, signs of this year’s activity were much harder to spot. Livia’s fair-weather gardeners had obviously been thwarted by the drawn-out winter and the lack of any high-stakes gardening competition to match last year’s.
    â€œDown to the hardcore this year, I guess,” said Nan. “Livia’s true-blue gardeners, the ones in it for the long haul. Speaking of which, we’d better get crackin’ ourselves. We don’t want a couple of girls showing us up, do we?”
    George didn’t respond. He was stewing about someone getting murdered in their yard, however long ago that might have been.
    The Fremonts were intermittent Christians belonging to the Please-Redeem-Me Lutheran Church, an offshoot of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that allowed a little pagan-flavored nature worship to enter into its doctrine. While that was plenty good enough for Nan, George occasionally entertained extreme spiritual notions more in line with his druidical antecedents. For instance, he thought it was quite possible that malevolent spirits of the unsettled dead rattled around and created mischief in the places where they had died.
    Nan, though she had become an accomplished plant whisperer and had petitioned the synod to add an epicurean element to the tenets of their faith, had no doubt that the dead went to abide blissfully with Our Lord and Savior unless they were real creeps. In that case they just turned into the fossil fuels of tomorrow, and were quite incapable of oozing up through the earth.
    George turned on the radio. The exuberant babblings of Milo Weavermill and Bernie “Bad Dog” Simpson, the voices of the St. Anthony Muskies, salved his nagging anxieties. So did the fact that the Muskies were hammering the Pelicans, 12–2, and Johnny “Smokestack” Gaines had already jacked two out of the park.
    â€œTurn that down, please,” Nan said.
    From a block away, they couldn’t see daughter Mary and Shirelle, their gardening intern, who were supposed to be hard at work prepping the soil in their front yard for the new gardens that Shirelle had purportedly been designing for them over the winter and spring. No sign of any turned-up soil, the rototiller, or burlap-encased shrubs or bushes. In fact, there was no sign of any activity at all.
    But there was something else that caught Nan’s attention, something new, big, and artificial sticking out of the yard.
    â€œLook, George, they put it back!” Nan beamed.
    On the rounded corner of their lot, at the little grassy spot where their unshaded bluegrass, rye, and fescue tended to cook brown by late July, the Burdick’s sign had reappeared. Made of wooden planks and posts sunk deep into the turf, it measured six feet wide by four feet tall. Most important was what the sign said in dark letters branded boldly, yet tastefully, into the knotty pine boards:
    CONGRATS, G. AND N. FREMONT, 1ST PLACE PRIZE, BURDICK’S BEST YARD CONTEST. The G. AND N. FREMONT part was on a little raised panel, detachable, so that when the next contest came around in four years it could be replaced by a similar panel with the new winners’ names on it. George cringed, then made a manly