The Murder House

 It’s always something.  About a month ago, we noticed that a part of our yard was suddenly  like a swamp.  I figured it was something with the sprinklers and called our plumber.  He found a pipe in the ground that had been broken into by a root of one of the redwood trees at the back of our yard.  He replaced it and also replaced the shut off things for the sprinklers.  In no time I expected the swamp would dry up.

But it didn’t.

After two weeks it was as muddy as ever with standing water, so the plumber came back.  The only thing he figured  could be the problem was the spot where the sprinkler line went into the ground, so he shut that off.  I had stopped running all the sprinklers in the yard, hoping the swamp would go away. There were days with the temperature over 100 and even though the swamp was in a shady spot, it seemed it should dry up.

I waited a few days and checked again.  I was shocked to see that the swamp had grown larger and I could actually see water flowing.  I watched wasps landing in the water and imagined mosquitos breeding in the puddles. I heard they’d found West Nile fever in mosquitos not too far away.

The plumber came back and together we looked at the spot in the yard.  He was perplexed. There was clearly no water coming from our sprinklers to be making the swamp.  And then he asked if it could be coming from the yard behind us. It didn’t look like it.  The wet area was pretty clearly defined in our yard, or so it seemed.  When he checked the ivy that grows at the base of the redwood trees, he found mud.  Then he went over to the house to check out what was going on.

The house behind us is at the end of cul du sac.  I don’t know the owners, but I do have a relationship with their house.  A developer bought the land and knocked down the small house that had been there and built a hill and put one of the two story 5000 square foot farmhouse style dwellings on it that have become so popular lately.  Because of the hill they created in the backyard, the house loomed over the white vinyl fence they put up.  If it hadn’t been for the redwood trees and torrey pine trees we planted years ago, all the privacy of our backyard would have been lost.  Needless to say I wasn’t thrilled about it.  But I found a way to make use of it and while the house was being built I used it for the murder house in HOOKING FOR TROUBLE. When it was put up for sale, I went to the very first open house anxious to see in person the place I had imagined.  It was downright strange to see the patio off the master bedroom where I had the murder take place.

So, when the plumber came back and reported that the water was indeed coming from their yard and gave me the name and number of the owner, I had this weird feeling that I had secret knowledge of their house. It felt even weirder when he told me the problem seemed to be with the pool.  That pool had a big part in HOOKING FOR TROUBLE.  Molly and Barry had a big scene hanging out next to it.

I never let on to the neighbor that I had spent so much imagined time by that pool as I texted back and forth with her about the leak.  But I had my own personal giggle thinking about it.  And just like that the next day the leak was fixed and the swamp changed from  puddles of flowing water to wet dirt.  The wasps went looking for water somewhere else.  Hopefully any mosquito larvae dried up.  The swamp area was very green, but the rest of our yard was parched from not getting watered in weeks.

I turned the automatic timer for the sprinklers back on and life returned to normal.  And  the neighbor has no idea that she’s living in a murder house.