Free Loonies by Gregory Bastianelli

apple in it.
    “Here, on the house,” he said with a grin.
    “Thanks,” Brian said and left the office, waving to the clerk on his way out the door and still thinking he had seen the man somewhere.
    On the sidewalk he bit into the fruit. It was soft. He fumbled the Garden Club flier out of his back pocket. A map on the interior showed the locations of the homes in the tour. The closest was just around the corner, on the street behind the library. He could walk to it. He headed up Main Street, tossing the disappointing fruit in a garbage can chained to a lamppost.
    A paved walkway between the library and the elementary school on Main Street led to the homes on Cricket Lane. When Brian got there, a few women were milling about in the front yard gardens of a small Cape-style home. A white picket fence enclosed the front yard. Several rose bushes grew along the fence, sporting red flowers.
    Once inside the front yard, he removed the camera from his bag and started taking pictures of the spectators admiring the bushes lining the picket fence and the front of the house. He approached a couple of the women, introducing himself, and asked what they thought of the tour. He scribbled their comments and then asked if they minded him taking their photograph looking at the flowers. They were thrilled, of course, and he snapped a couple of pictures.
    He thanked them, turned to look for other shots, and came face to face with Mrs. Picklesmeir.
    The large woman startled him.
    “Hello,” he said, with a big smile.
    “Mr. Keays,” she said. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I weren’t seeing it with my own eyes.”
    Brian faked a laugh. “I told you I would be here.”
    “And how many homes have you visited?”
    He hesitated, almost afraid to answer. Boy, he thought, Steem and Wickwire should enlist her for their side.
    “This is the first.”
    “Humph.” Her eyes bore into him, and sweat seeped down the back of his neck. He could not hold her gaze and looked away.
    “Very beautiful,” was the only thing he could think of saying while looking as some unknown flower. “What is that?”
    “Delphinium.” She offered no more.
    “I like it.” He turned to face her but she had already walked off and was now chatting with the two elderly women he had just photographed.
    A wooden bench stood beside a stone bird bath, and Brian sat to jot some notes in his pad. He was wondering how to describe some of the plants when he heard whistling and looked up, spotting someone on the roof of the house across the street. It was the chimney sweep he had spied across from his house the other day. The man, grimy and black, was pushing a wire brush attached to a long handle into the mouth of the chimney. The man wore the same outfit—black coat with tails, dark shirt, and top hat. Brian wondered how comfortable it could be wearing a costume like that on a roof on a hot summer day. It might have made for a good publicity gimmick, but didn’t seem very practical.
    “Brian?”
    He looked up, drawn out of his daze, to see his wife.
    “What are you doing here?” he asked.
    She looked disappointed in him. “I told you before you left this morning that I was going to take in the garden tour. Remember?”
    “Oh, sure.” He didn’t. “Having a good time?”
    She sat down on the bench beside him. “Yes, very much so.” She was smiling. “It’s given me so many wonderful ideas for our own yard. I can’t wait to get started.”
    “Great,” he said, and he really meant it. It would give her something to do and take her mind off the awful thing she had found in their home and the ongoing story that was unfolding because of it.
    “I hope you’ll be able to help me with it.”
    He feigned enthusiasm but really didn’t offer any kind of answer, just nodded politely.
    “I was also thinking,” she said, “that I’d like us to go to church Sunday.”
    “Church?” And he knew from her expression that he had used an inappropriate tone. They