Tribute

fireflies that flashed over the fertile fields, the velvet lawns, Cilla imagined. The voices from the weekend guests who wandered over the lawns, the porches and patios as bright as the music. Stars as luminous as the ones that gleamed overhead like little jewels scattered away from that spotlight moon.
    Dark pockets of shadows, streaming colored lights from lanterns.
    Yes, it would’ve been like that. Janet’s world had been one of brilliant light and utter dark. Always.
    Cilla hoped she dove into that pond unapologetically naked, drunk and foolish and happy. And utterly unaware her crowded, desperate, glorious life would end barely a decade later.
    Before turning away from the pond, Cilla listed it in her thick notebook. It would need to be cleaned, tested and ecologically balanced. She made another note to read up on pond management and maintenance before she attempted to do so, or hired an expert.
    Then the gardens. Or what was left of them, she thought as she crossed through the high, lumpy grass. Weeds, literal blankets of vines, overgrown shrubs with branches poking through the blankets like brown bones, marred what had once been simply stupendous. Another metaphor, she supposed, for the bright and beautiful choked off and buried in the grasping.
    She’d need help with this part, she decided. Considerable help. However much she wanted to put her back into this project, get her hands into it, she couldn’t possibly clear and hack, slash and burn, and redesign on her own.
    The budget would have to include a landscaping crew. She noted down the need to study old photographs of the gardens, to buy some books on landscaping to educate herself, and to contact local landscapers for bids.
    Standing, she scanned the ruined lawns, the sagging fences, the sad old barn that stood soot gray and scarred from weather. There had been chickens once—or so she’d been told—a couple of pretty horses, tidy fields of crops, a small, thriving grove of fruit trees. She wanted to believe—maybe needed to believe—she could bring all that back. That by the next spring, and all the springs after, she could stand here and look at all the budding, the blooming, the business of what had been her grandmother’s.
    Of what was now hers.
    She saw how it was, and how it once had been through her own Arctic-blue eyes shaded by the bill of a Rock the House ball cap. Her hair, more honey than gold dust, threaded through the back of the cap in a long, messy tail. She wore a thick hooded sweatshirt over strong shoulders and a long torso, faded jeans over long legs, and boots she’d bought years before for a hiking trip through the Blue Ridge Mountains. The same mountains that rolled up against the sky now.
    Years ago, she thought. The last time she’d come east, come here. And when, she supposed, the seeds for what she would do now had been planted.
    Didn’t that make the last four—or was it five—years of neglect at least partially her doing? She could’ve pushed sooner, could have demanded . She could have done something.
    “Doing it now,” she reminded herself. She wouldn’t regret the delay any more than she would regret the manipulation and bitter arguments she’d used to force her mother to sign over the property.
    “Yours now, Cilla,” she told herself. “Don’t screw it up.”
    She turned, braced herself, then made her way through the high grass and brambles to the old farmhouse where Janet Hardy had hosted sparkling parties, or had escaped to between roles. And where, in 1973, on another steamy summer night, she took her own life.
    So claimed the legend.
    THERE WERE GHOSTS. Sensing them was nearly as exhausting as evaluating the ramshackle three stories, facing the grime, the dust, the disheartening disrepair. Ghosts, Cilla supposed, had kept the vandalism and squatting to a minimum. Legends, she thought, had their uses.
    She’d had the electricity turned back on, and had brought plenty of lightbulbs along with what she hoped would be enough cleaning supplies to get her started. She’d applied for her permits and researched local contractors.
    Now, it was time to start something.
    Lining up her priorities, she tackled the first of the four bathrooms that hadn’t seen a scrub brush in the last six years.
    And she suspected the last tenants hadn’t bothered overmuch with such niceties during their stint.
    “Could be more disgusting,” she muttered as she scraped and scrubbed. “Could be snakes and rats. And