The Inspector’s Garden

Detective Inspector Merriweather preferred his mornings quiet, though lately even the stillness seemed to carry echoes of the past—ghosts of cases he couldn’t quite leave behind.. The garden behind his narrow brick house was a place of ritual stillness. A fig tree stood in the center—mostly leaves, rarely fruit. But that year, one lone fig ripened, soft and bruised, sagging with sweetness no one would taste.

Merriweather stared at it, hands in his coat pockets. It felt like a riddle. And riddles had followed him his entire career—some solved neatly, others destined to remain unsatisfied. He had long ago accepted that some questions stayed open like half-finished books.

Then the phone rang, slicing through the calm. He didn’t rush to answer. The shrill sound seemed almost accusatory in the silence. Finally, he lifted the receiver.

“It’s about the woman,” said the voice. Flat, precise. “Margaret Bloom.”

Merriweather didn’t speak immediately. He recognized the voice. An intermediary. Always careful, always faceless.

“She has something," the voice continued, and Merriweather felt a flicker of unease tighten in his chest—half dread, half a grim curiosity he’d never been able to silence.,” the voice continued. “A jar. Special Reserve fig jam. Retrieve it. Do not open it. Bring it to us.”

“And the woman?” Merriweather asked. His voice carried a faint edge, though he knew it made no difference.

“She’s irrelevant. Do what you must.”

The line clicked dead.

He stood for a long moment, receiver in hand. He’d been tasked with odd objects before—items that seemed trivial but carried shadows far larger than their size. A chipped teacup once held the key to an entire embezzlement ring. A misplaced ledger had sparked a cover-up that still haunted Bleaker’s Hollow. But this—this felt different. Someone was already moving one step ahead of him. He could feel it, like the faint tremor before a storm.

---

Margaret Bloom.

He remembered her well—quiet, unassuming. A retired librarian who once organized Westover’s mystery book fair with meticulous care. Harmless. Punctual. Ordinary.

And yet she’d fled.

An accidental theft, or so it appeared. A third jar of jam slipped among her groceries. No alarms. No confrontation. Just a polite letter from the store, and then—disappearance. Why run? Fear of embarrassment? Of exposure? Or had she felt something else, the same invisible weight he’d felt countless times before—being watched by forces you couldn’t name?

He’d read the brief surveillance reports. She’d begun noticing odd things before she left. A cardigan misplaced. Tomatoes in her kitchen rearranged. A metallic taste in her tea. Harmless details to most. But to someone like Margaret, someone whose life was neat and precise, these small fractures in her reality had been enough. She might not have known why she felt it—but dread had followed her like a shadow until she packed a suitcase.

Merriweather couldn’t blame her. He’d felt it too.

---

The inn smelled of salt and aged wood. A Thursday afternoon, still and deceptively mundane. The kind of place that made you feel time had folded in on itself.

He arrived in his beige suit, blending into the backdrop. His badge, when shown, resembled a librarian’s card more than authority—a quiet trick he’d perfected for encounters like this. Margaret opened the door herself. She had aged in the weeks since she’d left, fine worry lines deepening like cracks in porcelain. Still, her posture remained calm, polite.

“Detective Inspector Merriweather,” he introduced, voice smooth but careful.

Her hands trembled just faintly, though her gaze was steady. “Inspector,” she said softly, “please, come in.”

The small sitting room was lined with lace doilies and postcards. A kettle whistled softly in the background. She poured tea without asking, as though politeness might shield her from what she feared he’d bring.

“I’m hoping you can help me find someone,” he began lightly, almost conversational. “A woman of your age, traveling alone. No formal charges, you understand. Only a community eager to see the matter resolved. We simply want to ensure she’s alright. People worry.”

Margaret offered a faint smile, but her fingers tightened around the teacup. “I’m sure she’s quite well. Sometimes… people need a change of scenery. To clear the air.”

He tilted his head, studying her. “And yet change often follows a cause. Even the smallest nudge can send someone off course. A misplaced item. A letter.”

She didn’t respond. The tea between them cooled. The faint sound of the sea pressed against the window.

He let the silence stretch. “Did you ever feel,” he said at last, “that something was in your home when you were not? A presence just behind the edges of ordinary life?”

Her eyes flickered, barely perceptible. “I… may have felt watched. But surely that’s foolishness at my age.”

He scanned the room—her suitcase in the corner, still half-packed. On the counter, a jar glimmered in the dim light. But something was wrong. The lid bore no cipher. The subtle weight of secrets was gone. Someone had already replaced it.

Someone like Isadora.

He knew the signs immediately. The faintest trace of perfume lingered in the air—iris and smoke. The curtains had been drawn at a slightly different angle, and the window latch bore the delicate scratch of a tool he’d seen used before. She’d been there. Always one step ahead.

As he left the inn, the sea wind curled around the garden gate. Memories tugged at him, unbidden. Five years ago, in Bleaker’s Hollow, the gallery fire had burned bright and ruthless, devouring canvases, ledgers, names. He’d been called to retrieve a ledger from the ashes—one that documented acquisitions never meant for public eyes. But it had vanished. And back then, too, Isadora had been there first.

The fig jam wasn’t innocent. Its label carried a cipher, a key to the same network that burned the gallery, destroyed evidence, and left Harold and Miriam with nothing but silent grief. Margaret was collateral—an ordinary woman unknowingly brushing against the edges of something vast and dangerous. She fled from the only thing she could name: dread.

For a brief moment, Merriweather felt doubt—sharp and unexpected. Was he any different from the organization that sent him? Did his quiet interventions truly protect people like Margaret, or simply maintain their blissful ignorance while the real games played on above their heads?

From his pocket, he withdrew a slip of paper. Isadora’s handwriting, slanted and deliberate: *They would be back.* It was both a warning and a taunt. He could almost hear her voice when he read it—soft, melodic, edged with irony. They had history, though it was a history filled with more unanswered questions than truths. Once, years ago, they’d worked the same side. Until she’d chosen a different path. Or perhaps she’d seen more clearly than he ever could.

He stayed still for a moment, listening to the echo of his own footsteps in the narrow street. Why did he keep doing this? Why follow the breadcrumbs of riddles left by a nameless bureaucracy he no longer trusted? Perhaps because he still remembered the night he failed to protect someone who mattered—a name long erased, lost to the same shadows he now tried, futilely, to outpace.

His gaze fell to the inn’s tiny patch of greenery. A fig tree there too—out of place, holding one bloom, catching the last light. A silent witness. A reminder of the things that rot quietly, hidden beneath leaves.

The threads were converging: Harold’s silence, Miriam’s regret, Ivy’s framing, Emilia’s awakening. And always Isadora, one step ahead. Was she guarding a truth—or ensuring it stayed buried? He could never tell.

A figure appeared beyond the gate, her silhouette unmistakable even in the fading light. Isadora. She paused, glancing back at him, and gave the faintest smile—cryptic, knowing, carrying both familiarity and challenge. Then she vanished into the winding street, leaving only the soft trace of her scent and the weight of unanswered questions.

Merriweather turned back once, to the garden. Still. Watchful. From the ivy slipped a fox, eyes glinting with quiet cunning, as if mocking him. It moved swiftly into the dark, a reminder that the game wasn’t over. The fox had appeared before, years ago in Bleaker’s Hollow—a symbol, a warning, or perhaps just coincidence. He no longer believed in coincidence.

Some riddles, he thought, were never meant to be solved. And yet he would follow them, again and again, because not knowing was worse than the cost of the truth.

---

He walked away from the inn, feeling the weight of the garden’s silence still pressing at his back. Somewhere in the distance, a bell tolled the hour. Time moved on, indifferent. But the fig trees watched, and so did he.