Chapter 1: The Woman on the Ladder
The first blow cracked the plastic housing around my porch camera, and I heard it from the upstairs bathroom.
The second blow shook the wooden bracket above my garage door.
By the time I reached the kitchen, my neighbor was balanced near the top of a silver extension ladder with a hammer in her right hand.
Her name was Vivian Rourke, and until that Saturday morning, I had never seen her do anything more physical than point at other people’s lawns.
She was sixty-three, wore pressed white tennis clothes even when she was not playing tennis, and chaired the architectural committee of our neighborhood association.
Now her hair was loose around her face, and her left shoe had slipped halfway off a ladder rung.
I pushed open the side door and shouted her name.
Vivian swung again without looking at me.
The camera broke free, struck the driveway, and scattered fragments over the concrete.
She climbed down too quickly, nearly losing her balance on the last two steps.
I moved toward her, but she pointed the hammer at the ground between us.
“You had no right to put that camera there,” she said.
“You just destroyed my property,” I answered.
“That camera was watching my house.”
I looked over my shoulder at the empty driveway that separated our homes.
My camera had been aimed at my garage, the front gate, and the narrow walkway where packages kept disappearing.
A little of Vivian’s side fence appeared at the extreme edge of the frame, but her windows did not.
“It was watching my driveway,” I said.
“I know what it saw.”
The certainty in her voice caught my attention more than the hammer.
“What did it see, Vivian?”
She opened her mouth, then looked toward her own garage.
A curtain moved in the upstairs window.
Vivian lowered the hammer and pulled a folded paper from her pocket.
“Take it down permanently, or you’ll hear from our attorney.”
“You already took it down.”
She dropped the paper at my feet and walked away with the ladder scraping against her shoulder.
I picked up the notice after she crossed the property line.
It was not on association letterhead, and there was no attorney’s name anywhere on it.
It was a printout of a neighborhood policy that had expired four years earlier.
I might have been angry enough to call the police immediately if the camera had been the only thing she damaged.
Instead, I noticed a narrow scratch on my garage door beneath the mounting bracket.
Someone had carved three letters into the paint during the night.
They were small, crooked, and almost invisible unless the light hit them sideways.
The letters were E, L, and I.
My younger brother’s name was Eli.
He had been missing for eleven years.
