Along Came Trouble
Chapter One
“Get out of my yard!” Ellen shouted.
The weasel-faced photographer ignored her, too busy snapping photos of the house next door to pay her any mind.
No surprise there. This was the fifth time in as many days that a man with a camera had violated her property lines. By now, she knew the drill.
They trespassed. She yelled. They pretended she didn’t exist. She called the police.
Ellen was thoroughly sick of it. She couldn’t carry on this way, watching from the safety of the side porch and clutching her glass of iced tea like an outraged southern belle.
It was all very well for Jamie to tell her to stay put and let the professionals deal with it. Her pop-star brother was safe at home in California, nursing his wounds. And anyway, this kind of attention was the lot he’d chosen in life. He’d decided to be a celebrity, and then he’d made the choice to get involved with Ellen’s neighbor, Carly. The consequences ought to be his to deal with.
Ellen hadn’t invited the paparazzi to descend. She’d made different choices, and they’d led her to college, law school, marriage, divorce, motherhood. They’d led her to this quiet cul-de-sac in Camelot, Ohio, surrounded by woods.
Her choices had also made her the kind of woman who couldn’t easily stand by as some skeevy guy crushed her plants and invaded Carly’s privacy for the umpteenth time since last Friday.
Enough, she thought. Enough.
But until Weasel Face crushed the life out of her favorite hosta—her mascot hosta—with his giant brown boot, she didn’t actually intend to act on the thought.
Raised in Chicago, Ellen had grown up ignorant of perennials. When she first moved to Camelot, a new wife in a strange land, she did her best to adapt to the local ways of lawn-mowing and shade-garden cultivation, but during the three years her marriage lasted, she’d killed every plant she put in the ground.
It was only after her divorce that things started to grow. In the winter after she kicked Richard out for being a philandering dickhead, their son had sprouted from a pea-sized nothing to a solid presence inside her womb, breathing and alive. That spring, the first furled shoots of the hosta poked through the mulch, proving that Ellen was not incompetent, as Richard had so often implied. She and the baby were, in fact, perfectly capable of surviving, even thriving, without anyone’s help.
Two more springs had come and gone, and the hosta kept returning, bigger every year. It became her horticultural buddy. Triumph in plant form.
So Ellen took it personally when Weasel Face stepped on it. Possibly a bit too personally. Swept up in a delicious tide of righteousness, she crossed the lawn and upended her glass of iced tea over the back of his head.
It felt good. It felt great, actually—the coiled-spring snap of temper, the clean confidence that came with striking a blow for justice. For the few seconds it lasted, she basked in it. It was such an improvement over standing around.
One more confirmation that powerlessness was for suckers.
But then it was over, and she wondered why she’d wasted the tea, because Weasel Face didn’t so much as flinch. Seemingly unbothered by the dunking, the ice cubes, or the sludgy sugar on the back of his neck, he aimed his camera at Carly’s house and held down the shutter release, capturing photo after photo as an SUV rolled to a stop in the neighboring driveway.
“Get out of my yard,” Ellen insisted, shoving the man’s shoulder for emphasis. His only response was to reach up, adjust his lens, and carry on.
Now what? Assault-by-beverage was unfamiliar territory for her. Usually, she stuck with verbal attack. Always, the people she engaged in battle acknowledged her presence on the field. How infuriating to be ignored by the enemy.
“The police are on their way.”
This was a lie, but so what? The man had already been kicked off her property once this week. He didn’t deserve scrupulous honesty. He didn’t even deserve the tea.
“I’ll leave when they make me,” he said.
“I’m going to press charges this time.”
The photographer squinted into his viewfinder. “Go ahead. I’ll have these pictures sold before the cops get here.”
“I’m not kidding,” she threatened. “I’ll use every single sneaky lawyer trick I can think of to drag out the process. You’ll rot in that jail cell for days before I’m done with you.”
And now she sounded like a street-corner nut job. Not the kind of behavior she approve
d of, but what was she supposed to do? It was already too late to give up. If she stopped pushing, he would win. Unacceptable.
A tall man stepped out of the SUV. One of her cedar trees partially blocked the view, but she caught a glimpse of mirrored sunglasses and broad shoulders.