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nearby. With one eye—well, I can only imagine the poor thing trying to find her way home last night.”
    “I’ll bet anything he did something to her.” Zoe gave a quick nod of her head and a sniff of her nose toward Adam Cane’s yard.
    Jenny thought a minute. What would Lisa the Good say in this predicament? Something soothing .
    “I don’t think he’d ever really . . .”
    Zoe narrowed her eyes. “Don’t treat me like a child. We both know what the man’s capable of doing. You saw what he did to something your mother loved.”
    “Why don’t we go ask him?”
    “He’d never tell the truth.”
    “What about going to the police?”
    “How would that get me Fida back? Adam would lie, and you could see the chief doesn’t like me much. Not about to set his pants on fire looking for my dog.”
    Jenny was out of ideas with nothing more to offer. “Get dressed.” She couldn’t help the impatience in her voice. “We’ll keep looking until we find her.”
    “You want to come in?” Zoe pushed the door wider but with little enthusiasm.
    “No. I’ll walk around your yard.”
    Zoe didn’t perk up. “Suit yourself,” she said, closed the door, then opened it again to call after Jenny. “It’s a fairy garden. They might be sleeping. Don’t bother ’em.”
    With a roll of her eyes, Jenny walked down the steps to take a tour.
    Between two pumpkin-shaped houses, she found a tutued fairy standing on one toe. Jenny smiled and fought the urge to yell “Boo” at the tour jeté-ing statue.
    From inside a building with a waterwheel on one side, a fairy with pointed ears peeped out.
    Jenny laughed as she made her way past the beds—as creative as any garden she’d ever visited.
    A worried fairy face peeked out one small, four-paned window. At the castle, a tiny Rapunzel sat in the tower, her long, blonde hair hanging out a narrow window. One house after another, fairies old and young watched her. What fun! In this garden she could be a carefree little girl again, the way she and Lisa once pretended that they would grow up to be princesses and live in faraway castles and marry doting princes and have nothing but beautiful children.
    She worked her way past the rhodos, searching out the scent of lilacs over by the yellow shed.
    At first she mistook the pile of rags, lying on the stone walk between the lilac bushes and the shed, as part of a construction site—a new fairy bed in progress. Or clothes for a scarecrow Zoe was putting together. She smiled as she got closer, wonderingwhat would come next in this enchanted garden, then was struck by an awful thought—that the discarded bundle could be Fida, dead and wrapped in an old quilt and dropped there for Zoe to find.
    She stopped, took another step, and almost tripped on pieces of ceramic scattered over the walk. She bent to see what she could see. Much too large a bundle to be a little dog.
    Blue. And red plaid. And colorless sandals on a pair of dirty feet sticking out from beneath the ragged bundle. A blackthorn stick lay near the shed.
    She pulled the rags away and stared down into the face of a dead man.
    “Mr. Cane!” Jenny yelled at the sprawled figure. “Mr. Cane!”
    She bent over the man, shaking him until she saw the pool of blood beneath his head. She fell to her knees and caught her breath. Not only a pool of blood, but a deep gash in the long, gray hair wrapped by a blue headband. She waved a hand at the gathering flies and then laid a hand on his chest, feeling for movement, for breath going in and out.
    Nothing.
    She felt for a pulse at his wrist.
    Again nothing. She called his name then held her breath, hoping for the slightest sound.
    Adam Cane was dead. A broken fairy house lay in pieces beside his head. In the first minutes of her confusion, she told herself he’d had an accident. It appeared that he’d fallen over the fairy house, or maybe he’d tripped on his cane and fell.
    She looked beyond the body to where a pointed hoe lay