Everyone's T-shirts are wet. It has rained every night for a week. Trumpet Vine (Campsis radicans) decorates all the fences along the way with its orange trumpet flowers. There was a trumpet vine in the corner of the stone garage and the fence of my childhood home. My mother said that if a black cloud came up from the direction over the garage then we would have rain. The fence separated our yard from that of the Archers, an older couple who were the only people in town to employ a liveried butler. Mrs. Archer was deathly afraid of our gray Persian cat, Madame Overpuss. One day, Madame Overpuss lay dead on our side of the fence next to a dinner of meat laced with ground glass.
That was when we, my brother and sister and I, began to crawl out our second floor window onto the flat roof and spy on the Archer's butler. We could see him carefully washing Mr. Archer's many used whiskey glasses at the sink beyond the lighted window.
We told each other fantasies of how the butler had murdered Mrs. Archer, usually by serving her a pork chop laced with ground glass.
That was long ago now.
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