I tromp up over the hill, knowing goddamn well that no one can hear me yelling over the squeal of chainsaws. I yell myself hoarse anyway. Char, with Daktari in tow, suddenly dips out of sight. Moments later, the saws stop and the boys wielding them disappear too, but even from this distance I can see plumes of panic rising. Twisted ribbons, like bruised banana peels, tinged with a sickening orange sherbert colour. An urgent anxiety fills the air. By the time I get to the source of all the fuss and silence, I understand. Char has scurried up into the high branches of a matriarchal maple — a mere spitting distance from where more tall trees on the other side of the property line are expected to fall — to stand on the platform of rickety old boards and road signs that served as my teenage treehouse escape. With Baby Daktari clinging at her hip.

“Bruce the Spruce warned me! Murderers!” Char shrieks, in full banshee mode. She has one arm wrapped tight around the baby, while the other arm takes mad, sweeping accusatory aim at the trio of thoroughly confused, scared shitless guys on the ground. One of them pulls out his phone.

“I’m going to call the boss,” he stammers.

“No, man, the police. Before something bad happens,” the guy beside him whispers.

“Don’t bother with the cops.” I try to sound smooth and sure, and not at all like an out of breath muumuu-Mama with serious doubts about the mental stability of the howling tree chick. “But you should definitely give Sarah Spenser a ringy dingy. She’s going to want to see what happens next.”

When Sarah rolls up in her gleaming white SUV and emerges from behind the tinted windows in an equally gleaming white pantsuit, Char and Daktari are already making themselves very much at home in the treehouse. And the boys from Alberta who were supposed to be cutting down the adjacent trees are sitting around a small fire, having a beer with Willy while Peggy cooks up a pan of baloney and home fries over the open flame.

Sarah marches toward the fire. The poor buddies she hired to cut the trees stash their beer at their feet and try to look like maybe they’re hostages. Slightly drunk, relaxed, well-fed hostages who avoid eye contact, but nod and murmur “ma’am” as she sweeps past them.

“What is the meaning of this?” Sarah Spenser looks and sounds much less powerful with the mud nudging up over the edges of her high heels, mosquitoes entangling themselves in her fragrant hair, and a teensy trace of frothy spittle gathering at one corner of her pouty pink mouth. Then there’s her aura. A thick yellow swamp of sulk, threaded with strands of corroded orange pride and toothless red fury.

Peggy sniffs over her shoulder, beyond the smell of baloney and potatoes. “Anybody else smell that?” she yells. “Smells like defeat.” Which, according to Peggy, literally smells like feet. Sweaty feet.