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pan on the stove to poach the eggs.
    “You think she found her?” Dora asked as she set the table with bright-yellow dishes.
    “You mean Fida?”
    Dora nodded.
    “No idea.”
    “I’ll call and ask,” Dora said. “Zoe is such a fun person—all that fairy tale business of hers. She really is a dear. I feel so lucky to have her as a neighbor. After all, she’s a lot like me, loves books of all kinds. Though she won’t read Priscilla’s town history. I suppose I can’t fault her. Priscilla still tries to corner her, holding out the book as if it was a French postcard or something.”
    Dora innocently kept cracking eggs on the side of the pan to drop them in the boiling water. “I just thought it would be nice for her to be up on what the people of Bear Falls have done in the past.” Dora sighed. “Guess you can lead a horse to water, you know, Jenny? But you can’t make her read.”
    Dora went to the wall phone when the table was set to her satisfaction. She dialed, then talked a while. After she hung up, she turned worried eyes to her daughter.
    “Fida’s gone.”
    “Gone? Gone where?” Jenny stuck the butter back in the refrigerator.
    “Said she didn’t know. Oh dear, Jenny. She sounds awful. Said she’s been surrounded by awful smells all night. I think she’s afraid something’s happened to the poor dog. She has that handicap, you know.”
    “Zoe?” Jenny shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like a handicap to me. Just a little shorter than the rest of us.”
    “Not Zoe. I meant Fida. Got that one blind eye.”
    “You think I should go over and see if there’s anything I can do?”
    Dora’s face relaxed. “That would be nice. She helped us almost all day yesterday. It seems the least we can do.”
    We turned out to be Jenny , alone, making her way through the pines into Zoe’s backyard after breakfast and into a garden like none Jenny had visited before and wasn’t sure she ever would again.
    She knocked at the back door, then turned to look at Zoe’s garden.
    It was huge, stretching from beds at the back of the house to rows of dying tulips and daffodils. Flowering vines grew thick on Zoe’s side of a tall fence hiding Adam Cane’s yard from view. There were long beds of near-blooming peonies in all colors running down the center of the yard, running toward what Jenny imagined was the back of the yard, up a slight hill and out of sight. Jenny couldn’t see all of the garden because of tall rhododendrons in bud. The rhodos curved into lilac bushes in full blooms of deep purple, white, pink, and pale blue stretching around, and almost completely hiding, a yellow shed. Through all the color and all the green, a flagstone walk meandered from bed to bed.
    Jenny knocked again and waited, turning back to look hard at what she recalled Zoe calling fairy houses standing in every flowerbed.
    Some, she could make out, were made of wood, painted with flowers. Some were made of tiny stones. A few of tiny bricks. The houses stood between dying tulips or were hidden behind budding roses. In one bed there was a two-foot-tall castle, complete with turret. In another daffodils bobbed around a miniature opening to a cave. There were other houses hiddenunder tall plants and what looked like tiny statues throughout the gardens.
    Jenny pulled away from the astonishing sight to knock again—hard this time.
    Zoe’s pretty face, when the door opened, was almost unrecognizable—her skin mottled, eyes nearly swollen shut. Her hair was uncombed and stood up like a fright wig.
    “She didn’t come back?”
    Zoe shook her head. “I looked most of the night. I put her out about three thirty because she had to pee, but when I called her back in, she didn’t come.”
    Zoe wore a pair of mismatched pajamas with tin soldiers printed on the top and Humpty Dumptys patterned on the bottoms. She looked like an ad for a mixed-up cartoon.
    “Get dressed and we’ll go looking,” Jenny said. “I’m sure she’s somewhere