Free The Skeleton Garden by Marty Wingate

disappeared from the edge of the pit without anyone noticing. She dusted herself off and walked to the house. The cook sat at the kitchen table, staring at the pot of tea in front of her. She didn’t move when Pru entered.
    “Evelyn,” Pru said, carefully sitting down, as if a wrong move could destabilize world peace. “I’m sorry we missed our tea. We were caught up with digging and—well, did you see what we’ve found? It might be a German plane, buried out there in the garden. At least, part of a plane. The most I ever found digging in my garden in Texas was a little toy truck with the name of an oil company painted on the side.”
    Evelyn blinked at the teapot. “My ma was a Land Girl,” she said. “During the war. She was up at Home Farm.”
    A real conversation.
“I’ve heard of Land Girls,” Pru said. “The Women’s Land Army. Women all over Britain worked on farms and grew food for the country during the war.”
    “It was a shock, that’s all, seeing a German plane here in this garden. Makes all her stories about the war seem so real.”
    “I didn’t know you grew up here.”
    Evelyn inclined her head slightly and drew a handkerchief out of an apron pocket and twisted it round her fingers. “My ma came down in ’39 from Croydon, south of London. Planted onions and cabbages and mucked out the barns even though she’d never had her hands in the dirt before. It was her duty to work for the war effort, she said. I was born at the end of the war. Ma went to work at the Blackbird, and the two of us lived in the little cottage out the back.” She heaved a great sigh.
    Yes, that’s right, now Pru remembered—Dick said that Evelyn’s mother worked the bar. But Pru didn’t know of any cottage behind the pub, just an old storage shed that had seen better days. Oh dear, she thought.
    “I’d love to hear what work your mother did on the farm.” Pru put her hands around the teapot. “Oh, it’s still warm. Shall I pour?”
    Evelyn nodded to the pot. “That tea’ll be stewed.”
    “Right,” Pru said, jumping up. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
    Evelyn didn’t move, and Pru marveled at the leaps and bounds they were making in their relationship—Evelyn would never have let Pru touch the kettle before this, not when she was around, at any rate. But just as Pru readied to pour up a new pot, Orlando appeared at the door. “Mr. Snuggs is here,” he said, nodding out toward the parterre lawn.
    “Evelyn, would you like to come out and see what we find?” Pru asked.
    Evelyn stood up, picked up a wooden mallet and began pounding a piece of meat on the counter. “I’ve no time to stand around and gawk—I’ve your lunch to sort out, and dinners to prepare.”
    —
    “So, Stan, do you remember this plane crashing?” Simon was asking when Pru and Orlando returned to the pit.
    “I can’t quite set a date on it—the bombs and crashes became almost common. But I seem to recall this one, now that I stand here,” Stan said. “I remember there was no pilot—seems he parachuted out and was tracked down in the wood. After the excitement died down, old man Saxsby—that would be Vernona Wilson’s great-uncle—decided he’d bury it. We had planes crashing here, there, and everywhere those years—and bombs almost every night, at least at the beginning. It was great excitement for a boy—I was barely ten at the start of the war—near to sixteen toward the end.”
    Pru had hopped down into the pit, but paused with her spade as she felt a constriction around her heart. “Our mother was almost sixteen at the end of the war.” She felt Simon watching her, and she blinked at the thought of what a young girl had to go through with bombs and crashes and air raids.
    “And where did she live?” Stan asked.
    “Ibsley,” Pru and Simon answered as one. “That’s where I was born,” Simon said.
    “She died five—no, six years ago,” Pru said. Simon, of course, had lost her long before that.
    “I’d