RehnWriter

A week after we’d officially moved into our new house, an older, lanky man appeared at our front door.

“Who is it?” my husband Joe called out from the living room, busy setting up furniture.

“An old man, probably a neighbor,” I answered.

With that, I went and opened the door.

“Hello there, nice to meet you! I’m Karen,” I greeted him.

I reached out my hand, but the man completely ignored it. For a few awkward seconds, he just stood there, staring at me, before he opened his mouth.

“Are you looking for a gardener?”

Okay, this is weird, I thought. Sure, we had a huge front yard and garden, but why did he turn up like this?

“Not really, thank you. Are you living nearby?”

“Yes, nearby. You sure you don’t need a gardener? I’d be happy to help you with that garden of yours.”

“I don’t think we need any help. We’re just settling in right now, and we can’t afford to-“

“You don’t have to pay me. I’d be happy to do it for free.”

“What?” I blurted out.

What the hell was up with this guy?

“Well, that garden looks like it needs some work, so-“

“Look, mister, I appreciate the offer. I really do, but I have to decline, all right?”

For a moment, his face grew hard, and I was sure he’d explode at me, but then he simply nodded and left.

“Well, have a nice day, too,” I muttered under my breath.

Once I’d closed the door, I joined Joe in the living room.

“So? Was it a neighbor?”

“Honestly? I’ve got no idea. That guy was pretty weird.”

I told Joe about the encounter, but he only laughed.

“Who knows, maybe he’s one of those people who can’t stand to look at an overgrown yard?”

In the end, we both shrugged it off, and when our daughter Sarah entered the room, I didn’t think about it anymore.

“Mommy, can you help me put up the pictures in my room?”

“Of course, honey,” I answered with a bright smile, and followed her upstairs.

The next day, I found Joe at the window, looking outside. He was cursing to himself.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. What the hell’s that guy doing?”

When I looked outside, I recognized the old man from the day before.

“That’s him! That’s the guy who was here yesterday.”

“Okay, I’ll go talk to him.”

With that, Joe made his way outside and approached the man. I quickly followed behind him.

“Excuse me?” Joe called out, his voice firm, but the man didn’t react.

Instead, he was busy cutting the hedge at the side of our garden.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

This time the old man turned to us, shears still in hand.

“Taking care of the hedge,” he stated matter-of-factly. “It really needed some trimming. See those branches here? They are-“

“Look, my wife told you yesterday we don’t need a gardener, okay? You can’t just come here and… do it on your own.”

The old man just smiled at him.

“Oh, you don’t have to pay me.”

“That’s not the point, all right?” Joe started, and I could hear him getting angrier. “Leave. Now. And if you show up again, I’m calling the cops.”

For a moment, his eyes wandered from Jo to me and back to Joe before he picked up his tools and walked off.

“Mommy, who was that?” Sarah called out from the front door.

“Oh, just someone living nearby,” I answered.

She nodded and accepted it in the way only little kids can.

“You think I should call the cops after all?”

I considered it, but then I shook my head.

“No, he’s pretty weird, but seems harmless. Only if he shows up again.”

As the days passed, we finally finished furnishing the house. At this point, I decided it was time to take care of the garden. The old man had been right. It really was unkempt, and I didn’t want him to show up again. I decided to start with some rose bushes. They’d always been a favorite of mine, and Sarah absolutely loved them. We had a lot of fun that afternoon planting them while Joe was at work.

When I went out again the next day, Sarah suddenly walked up to me.

“Mommy, the plants moved!” she called out in excitement.

I smiled at her and asked her what she meant. Instead of answering, she pointed at where we’d planted the rose bushes. My heart skipped a beat. They were empty, and nothing but soft soil was left. The rose bushes themselves had been replanted a couple of meters away. I told myself it must’ve been Joe, but he was at work. He didn’t have time for something like that. Then something in my mind clicked. Don’t tell me…

When Joe was home, I told him what I thought had happened. He was visibly upset, more so than I was.

“That’s it. We’ve got to do something about this,” he cursed.

He called the cops, and once they arrived, we told them about the whole thing. They were confused and weren’t sure if we were joking. We assured them, though, that a random man had been working in our garden. They took the story down, but told us there wasn’t much they could do. In the end, they told us to give them a call should the man show up again. As they drove off, I could imagine them having a good laugh at this weird story. Hell, even I thought the entire thing was ridiculous.

I couldn’t sleep that night. We hadn’t seen the man, so the only time he could’ve done it was when we were asleep. Again and again, I got up, walking over to the window, scanning the front yard and the garden, but I saw nothing.  It must’ve been past three in the morning when I finally dozed off.

When Joe woke me, I knew the man had been here again.

“He trimmed half the damned hedge,” he said as he led me to the window. “There you see it?”

He was right. The hedge on the left side of the garden was nicely trimmed. Even the twigs and branches he’d cut off were gone.

“This is just so strange,” I said, and couldn’t help but laugh. “What the hell’s wrong with that man?”

Joe didn’t say a thing. Instead, he went downstairs to make himself a cup of coffee, muttering to himself.

For the next couple of days, I kept an almost constant watch of the garden, but I never saw the man. It was as if he was waiting for us to fall asleep, only to sneak into our garden and… take care of it. By that point, he’d trimmed the hedges, mowed the grass, and had even planted a lilac in the center of the garden.

“You got to admit, it looks much better now,” I mumbled one morning, still half-asleep.

“That’s not the point,” Joe protested. “We can’t have someone sneaking into our garden in the middle of the night. What if he’s…? I don’t know a freaking weirdo or something?”

Eventually, Joe and I decided to both stay up. He was right. We really had to do something about this. It was about four in the morning when Joe rocked me awake.

“There he is!”

I saw him right away. He’d brought an assortment of gardening tools, a potted plant, and even fertilizer. For a moment, I watched, almost in a trance, as he dug a hole for the plant he’d brought. At this point, Joe had enough, and stormed out of the house. I ran after him, calling the police on my mobile phone.

“You… what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Joe yelled at the man.

“Taking care of the garden. You really didn’t-“

“All right, buddy, what the hell are you talking about? Why the hell are you in our garden at four in the freaking morning?” Joe laid into him, while I told the officers our address.

“I’m just turning the garden into what it used to be. The way she’d wanted me to.”

“What are you… she?”

“Maria, my little angel Maria,” he said in a low voice, smiling faintly, as his eyes wandered the garden.

“Who’s Maria?” I cut in.

The old man sighed before he put down his gardening tools.

“We used to live here, the Williams family. That was my wife and me, and our two daughters Lizzy and Maria. Maria, she was… sick, and couldn’t go out often, but whenever she did, she was always in the garden. That girl, she loved flowers more than anything,” he said, his voice somber. “She always said she wanted the garden to always stay like this, but…”

His voice trailed off, and we found him staring at nothing.

“But, what?” I asked.

“She passed away. After that… things weren’t he the same anymore. My wife couldn’t handle it. Our family broke apart, and she moved away, taking Lizzy with her. But I couldn’t… I had to stay, if only for Maria.”

I was puzzled when I heard this, but before I could interject anything, the old man went on.

“Eventually, I couldn’t pay the rent anymore, and was evicted. For the past fifteen years, I tried… I tried so many times. Whenever people moved into the house, I tried to talk to them, tried to restore the garden, but they always chased me away.”

He laughed a little after he’d said that.

“Now that I’m old, though, there isn’t much left for me. I just… really want to see my little girl happy again, wherever she is,” he ended.

By that point, the police had arrived. The two officers looked up when they saw us with the old man.

“So that’s the ominous gardener?” one of them asked.

Joe nodded.

“Sir, what are you doing here?”

“No, officer, I’m sorry, but it’s all right. We actually settled the issue just now,” I interjected.

The officers eyed me suspiciously, and Joe was equally surprised.

“What do you mean, miss?” one officer asked, not bothering to hide his annoyance.

“It was all just a misunderstanding. Mr. Williams here is our new gardener. I’m sorry, but I guess we got it all mixed up.”

The two of them were still confused, but eventually gave Joe and me a long lecture about wasting valuable police resources before they drove off.

“All right Mr. Williams, how about you come back tomorrow afternoon, and we have a talk about everything?” I finally asked.

The old man nodded, and after gathering his goods, left. Joe was still staring at me, and he protested, of course, but after having heard the old man’s story, I couldn’t just chase him away like all those other people had done.

The talk with Mr. Williams went nice. Sure, he was quite weird, but he didn’t seem unfriendly at all. Most importantly, he seemed to have a decent idea about what to do with our garden. In the end, I decided to give him a chance.

At first, I mostly watched him as he planted the flowers and bushes I’d bought for the garden. In time, though, I warmed up to him. Many afternoons, while Joe was at work, Sarah and I hung out with him and helped him with his work. Our little girl grew especially fond of the wacky old man. It wasn’t long before she absolutely adored him, and the old man, in turn, seemed to enjoy having her around.

On certain days, while I was reading a book on the front porch, I’d see the two of them joke around with one another. On another day, he’d be kneeling beside her, showing her how to plant the bulbs in that gentle, soothing voice of his.

Yet there were a few moments that made me slightly uneasy. Whenever he talked to her, he always stood closer to her, almost too close, his hand resting on her shoulder or her head. Occasionally, I’d catch him staring at her for a tad bit too long. Sometimes, he’d even take her hand, leading her around the garden, as he explained the meaning of the flowers to her. Eventually, the old man seemed to notice my unease, and walked up to me, giving me this reserved smile, clearly embarrassed about it.

“She’s just like my little Maria, so sometimes, I feel like back then, when she was still around…”

“Oh god, Mr. Williams, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean-“

The old man smiled and just shook his head.

“No Karen, it’s all right. It’s just… hard, you know?”

I guess that was when I truly bonded with the old man. While he was weird, he seemed one of the sweetest people I’d ever met, the perfect babysitter for Sarah. That’s why I left her with him last Saturday. Joe was busy working on one of his many work related projects. When I was about to prepare dinner, I noticed we’d run out of a few things.

“Sarah, do you want to come with me to the grocery store?”

“Nuh-uh. I want to stay with Mr. Williams and the flowers!” she answered, pouty.

The old man and I both had a good laugh about it.

“You sure you can handle this little devil all by yourself?” I asked, turning to the old man.

“Of course. I could use a few helping hands with all this work anyway,” he said with a big grin on his face.

At the grocery store, I ran into one of our neighbors, an old woman named Linda.

“Karen,” she greeted me. “I must say, you’ve really outdone yourself with that garden of yours!”

“Oh, thank you, but it wasn’t me. It was our new gardener.”

“Either way, it’s beautiful. I’m sure little Lizzy would’ve been happy to see it like that.”

“Wait, what do you mean?”

“Oh, Karen, it’s such a sad story. Back in the day, a family lived in that house, and one of the girls died right there in that garden.”

“I know about the story, but her name was Maria, wasn’t it?”

“Maria? No. Maria was always sick, but Lizzy was the one who broke her neck when she fell off that tree.”

What the hell was she talking about? This made no sense. Mr. Williams had told us he did it all for his daughter Maria, and that she’d been the one who died. I even remember how he told me all about that unfortunate fall because of one of her dizzy spells.

“But Mr. Williams said it was Maria who’d died there.”

“That’s impossible, dear,” the old lady said in a confused voice. “Mr. Williams died three years ago?”

“But… He’s right there, at our house! He’s our gardener!”

The old lady’s face turned as white as a sheet.

“No. Karen. That’s impossible! Old Mr. Williams died at the retirement home. I was at the funeral and…”

I didn’t listen anymore, I couldn’t. If Mr. Williams was dead, then who was that man in our garden? Why this entire story? Why pretend to be him? Then I thought about Sarah. The way he’d talked to her, the way he’d played and joked with her, and the way he used to lead her around the garden. How he’d always watched her. Oh god, I thought he’d seen his daughter in her, but, but…

I rushed from the story without any of the groceries and dialed Joe’s number. Come on, come on, please answer the phone, Joe! Finally, after a dozen rings, he answered.

“Joe! Where are you? Where’s Sarah?” I screamed into the phone.

“She must be out in the garden with Mr. Williams? Why, what’s-?”

“Go and get her!”

“Karen, what’s-?”

“Just do it, Joe! Go and get her!”

I heard him walk through the house and finally open the front door. Oh please let her bet here, please.

“Sarah? Sarah, where are you?”

“Joe, what’s going on?”

“I can’t see her. Sarah!”

“Joe, where’s Mr. Williams?”

I heard him shuffle around, calling out for the old man, then again for our daughter. With every second, his voice grew more and more agitated.

“I can’t find them, Karen. Where-?”

That’s when I hung up and called the police. I was in hysterics at this point, screaming into the phone and having to repeat myself multiple times before they understood what was going on. When they finally did, they were as alarmed as me and sent out multiple patrols to search the area.

Thankfully, it didn’t take long for them to find Sarah and Mr. Williams, or whoever the man was. They’d been holding hands, and he’d already led her halfway down the street, just a few hundred meters away from an abandoned warehouse. Only a block, I thought, when I heard this, only a block and I might have lost her forever.

When the police took him in, they found out who the man really was. His name was Tom Edwards. He was a registered sex offender from half a state away. The man had arrived in our town about a month ago. He’d stayed at a cheap, rundown motel nearby. It was by sheer chances he saw us move in and also noticed Sarah. When he learned about the history of the house, he hatched a plan. Knowing we’d just moved in, and wouldn’t be aware of the story, he decided to pretend to be old Mr. Williams. That day, when I went grocery shopping, he finally got his chance.

At the warehouse, the police found a dirty mattress hidden in a small room at the back, but also a variety of twisted items, he’d… prepared. Rubber gloves, anesthesia, rope, and other things I wish they’d never told me about.

Even now, days later, I can’t stop thinking about that horrible afternoon. And I can’t help but wonder about one thing: what would have happened to our little girl if he hadn’t mixed up the names?