the garden plot thickens

They had impounded her purse! Patent leather must take a nice print. Meredith, rather viciously, it must be admitted, clipped the dead stalks of last year’s peonies. They had taken the wheelbarrow, too. The brand new wheelbarrow! Which could prove to be a very unfortunate thing. No wheelbarrow, the very epicenter of a gardener’s existence in the spring, and no way to buy another wheelbarrow—because her credit cards were in her wallet in her purse! Which they had impounded!

       “I am confounded,” she said to Joseph. He had pulled up in the driveway while she was mounding the weeds in a bushel basket—not her wheelbarrow. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t go in my own flower beds. I can’t buy anything. You think I’m in cahoots with a taxi driver to kill some man I barely knew. One would think that after all these years of public service I would be entitled to a little respect.”