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look pretty healthy, but maybe you should take a look at them. I confess I’d hate to lose my purple beech, but if it’s infecting the whole street, I’d certainly sacrifice it, although it would break my heart.”
    “Glad to be of service,” said Mortimer Moon.
    Donald Swallow lived on Laurel Street, right around the corner from the professors Hall. Therefore everybody at No. 40 Walden Street heard the scream of Mr. Moon’s chain saw and the smashing fall of one mighty limb after another as Donald Swallow’s magnificent tree was lopped and chopped and brought to the ground.
    Donald stood watching the massacre with tears running down his face. His gigantic beech tree had been the wonder of the neighborhood. With itsbroad spreading universe of purple leaves, it had been a piece of midnight in the middle of the day.
    “Aha, I told you so,” said Mortimer Moon, holding up a leaf. “Thrips! See there? All those specks?
    Donald bent to look. “I don’t see them,” he whimpered. “But I’ll take your word for it, Mr. Moon.”

21
THE MATCHBOOK
    T HE OTHER TREE , the new fast-growing tree on Walden Street, was like a city under siege. The houses on either side were fortresses with windows like loopholes in enemy battlements.
    But there was a crack in one of the ramparts, because a secret agent had begun to burrow inside the walls.
    Mr. Moon’s second cousin, three times removed, had been told to beware of the vicious boy next door, but Emerald was beginning to doubt. After watching the delinquent boy and his dangerous little sister from her window and obeying thewarnings of Mr. and Mrs. Moon, she had begun to dodge behind doors and hide in closets and listen to their whisperings.
    Slowly the world was turning upside down. Good was no longer good, and therefore what had happened to bad? What about the boy and his little sister? What about the other kids who were now swarming in and out of the house next door?
    Who, after all, had told her to beware? Her stepmother and stepfather, the same two people who had dragged her away from everything she had always known and loved. Even her cherished family pictures were gone. “Oh, Emerald,” her stepmother had said, “I knew you didn’t want those dusty old things, so I threw them away.”
    Only one thing was left of Emerald’s old life, a folder of matches printed with her father’s name:
    O’HIGGINS LUMBER
QUALITY BUILDING MATERIALS
    She carried it in her pocket and looked at it sometimes, remembering the bundles of cedar shinglesin the warehouse and her father striding between the stacks of sweet-smelling boards.
    Instead of a father she now had a stepfather, instead of a mother, a stepmother. But surely most of the stepfathers and stepmothers in the world were kind to their stepchildren? Why were hers so different? They seemed to have come from the fiercest of the fierce old folktales, like the one about the wicked queen who sent a woodcutter into the forest to kill her stepdaughter and bring back her heart.
    Her own heart, thought Emerald, was not worth the trouble because it was broken already.

    “You’ll have to deal with it somehow, Mortimer.”

“You mean like before?”

“Whatever.”

22
THE FLOWERING TREE
    F RIEDA WAS GOING crazy. Her list of tree-watchers wasn’t working.
    “I can’t possibly do Tuesdays,” said Rachel. “I have these really important ballet lessons.”
    “Monday’s out for me,” said Cissie. “That’s when I baby-sit my kid brother.”
    “Me too,” said Sidney. “Saturday nights I have to keep my bratty little sister from crawling under the sink and eating rat poison.”
    But after the brutal felling of Mr. Swallow’s purple beech—after its dark cloudy head no longer rose above the rooftops on Laurel Street—the listalmost made itself. The nine Knights of the Fellowship vowed to keep watch on their own precious tree night and day.
    “We’ve got to get going on the tree house right away,” said Eddy. “It’s