The Actual Rufus

You go into Mrs. Patel's hedge for a closer look, and the hedge is already occupied.

It is occupied by Rufus. The actual Rufus — Mrs. Patel's beagle, original holder of the name, sleeping off his supper in the cool leaves — and Rufus wakes to discover two children landing on him in the dark, and Rufus has opinions.

The next forty seconds contain: the loudest baying ever recorded in Maple Hollow county; Finn exiting the hedge backward into Mrs. Patel's birdbath; you exiting the hedge forward into Mrs. Patel's prize marigolds (the regrown ones — the ones there was a whole operation about); every porch light on Elm Street coming on in sequence like dominoes; and Mrs. Patel herself arriving in curlers and a bathrobe of terrible majesty, demanding to know which child is which and whose idea everything was.

Somewhere across the street, under the humming streetlight, the new kid watches the entire catastrophe with his head tilted — and does something you have never seen him do. He laughs. Rusty, surprised, two sizes too big for him, like the first water through a thawed pipe.

“Surveillance,” Finn says later, wringing out his sock on the walk home, “requires patience, Madison. And a hedge census.” Tomorrow you'll try again — from a distance, like professionals.