Cribbage, Installment One

There was a quiet place in the neighbor's yard where Annette went to be alone. It was far from the houses, behind an old rotting garden shed and a stand of birch. In the summer the roses covered the old arched trellis with a carpet of red, pink, and white. Sitting on the old wooden bench, she could feel miles away from everything, and the smell from the flowers was like a heavy blanket she could wrap around herself. When the foliage was at its thickest in the season, she could hear her neighbors in the yard, having a meal, doing their gardening, or playing cricket. But neither she nor they could see through the trees and bushes, and the neighbors never came back there.
Still Annette liked it best in the winter after a snowfall. The foliage was gone and the bench was visible, but only from one angle. And it was so quiet that Annette could imagine she was the only person in the world. Just two hundred feet from her own backdoor, she could pretend she was in a different part of the world. It was a place no one ever visited but her. Parents, neighbors, her older brother, they never came here. Annette wondered if they even remembered it was there.
Eventually, Annette lay her claim on the place with a small wooden box of her most treasured items. Included therein were her pink shoelaces, the marble she found in her room when her family first moved into their house, the key to her brother's spider-man safebox, which of course he had no idea she possessed, and a picture of her and Jess. It was a picture from the last day they had seen each other, the day Annette had moved to Dalton Hills. The box was kept on the bench in plain sight. Written on the top was "Private Keep Out." And for almost three years, it had never been disturbed by anyone but Annette, until one Saturday afternoon when Annette found someone had placed a deck of cards in it.