Hook
When her estranged father dies, Marguerite inherits nothing but his allotment plot — Plot 47 — and a committee rulebook with one clause underlined in three colours of ink: 'The occupant of 47 must dig the north bed by hand, alone, every March, without fail.'
Escalation
- She skips the digging the first year to spite him; in April the whole allotment site sends her a get-well card for an illness she doesn't have, and the site secretary quietly reassigns her water rights.
- Digging the bed herself the next March, she hits a layer of pale gravel that isn't gravel, and realises every plot on the north row has the same underlined clause — and every one of those plot-holders has been coming, alone, in March, for forty years.
- The committee invites her to the AGM, where she learns the site was built in 1953 on the grounds of a demolished institution, and the 'crop rotation map' pinned to the shed wall is really a map of who is buried where — the digging keeps the soil turned so nothing ever surfaces intact.
- When a developer buys the freehold and sends surveyors with ground-penetrating radar, the eight north-row gardeners have three weeks to move what their parents spent a lifetime keeping still.
✦ Twist
The clause wasn't her father hiding a crime from her — it was him enrolling her, from beyond the grave, as the one honest person on the row: the plot he chose for her sits over the only body that shouldn't be there, and he trusted her to be the one who'd finally dig it up and tell.
💡 The engine is a chore-as-inheritance: an obligation so mundane no one questions it becomes the mechanism for burying — and eventually exhuming — a communal secret.