“What happened to my roses?”
A few neighbors shrugged. The man with the polite beagle took a half step back. The smell was not unbearable. It was not something you wanted in your nose while you discussed petunias. Brenda moved along the beds and saw the color spreading. The purple water had soaked nearly every corner of the design. The roses themselves were still healthy. That mattered. Arthur had chosen the dye because it mattered. He had not come to kill her flowers. He had come to make the theft visible. The yard looked as if someone had emptied gallons of grape juice across the soil. Leaves rinsed violet. Mulch stained. The cream trellis freckled where an arc had reached it.
She stood in the middle of it, can in hand, and did the calculation he had been waiting for. The color had not fallen from the sky. It had come through the sprinklers. The sprinklers were fed by the green hose. The hose ran to the fence.
She marched to his door and knocked hard. He had seen her coming. When he opened it, she pointed at the boards.
“Did you do something to my garden water?”
He raised an eyebrow. “My garden water?”
She paused. In that pause she heard herself. The phrase was too specific, too possessive. Not the water. Not a smell. The water she had already decided belonged to the roses.
He folded his arms. He did not raise his voice. “Brenda. Why would my water affect your garden?”
She hesitated. On the sidewalk, the audience had begun to gather in the polite way Cedar Ridge gathered, which is to say without admitting it was an audience. The beagle man had not moved on. A woman with a stroller had become suddenly interested in the strap of her bag.
“Well, because—because.”