The first object landed beside my tomato plants at six seventeen on a Thursday morning.
It was a blue ribbon tied around a brass hook.
I knew the time because the sound interrupted the coffee maker, and I checked the kitchen clock before walking outside.
At first, I thought some bird had dropped an ornament from a nearby porch.
Then I found a little white tag attached to the ribbon.
The tag bore a number, 214, written in careful black ink.
My neighbor, Bernice Vale, stood on her porch across the fence with a watering can in one hand.
She was sixty-eight, straight-backed, and famous on our street for criticizing the height of other people’s grass.
She looked at the ribbon and immediately looked away.
I held it up.
“Did this come from your yard?” I asked.
“People leave all kinds of rubbish around,” Bernice answered.
She poured water into an empty flowerpot and went inside.
My name is Tess Morgan, and I had lived in the small yellow house on Alder Street for eleven years.
I worked nights dispatching deliveries for a grocery cooperative, which meant I usually noticed the things other people did while everyone else slept.
I was also raising my fourteen-year-old niece, June, while my sister recovered from a serious accident in another state.
June used the backyard as her quiet place to draw, read, and escape the crowded hallways of her middle school.
That made the second object considerably less amusing.
Three days later, a square of painted wood crashed through the climbing beans and struck June’s folding chair.
She was sitting in the chair when it happened.
I ran outside at the sound of her scream.
June stood against the fence with her sketchbook pressed to her chest.
The painted square lay on the ground with a splintered edge.
A bright red flower covered its front, and a strip of green felt clung to the back.
“It came from over there,” June said.
She pointed toward Bernice’s property.
Bernice’s upstairs window was open, although the morning air was cold.
I knocked on her front door until she appeared behind the glass.
“Something nearly hit my niece,” I told her.
Bernice examined the painted square in my hand.
Her jaw tightened as though she recognized it.
“Then you ought to keep her indoors,” she said.
“You don’t get to throw things into my yard and tell me where my niece can sit.”
“I haven’t thrown anything.”
She closed the door so sharply that the brass knocker rattled.
June wanted me to call the police.
I promised to document anything else before deciding how to proceed.
I put the ribbon and wooden square inside a clean cardboard box in the kitchen.
The next morning, the box gained a cracked clay cup painted with yellow stars.
The morning after that, it gained three numbered paper tickets and a length of purple string.
Every object had been thrown from the direction of Bernice’s house.
Every object looked as though it belonged to some peculiar celebration that had been taken apart in a hurry.
Nothing seemed valuable, and nothing explained why an old woman would risk hurting a child to get rid of it.
On the sixth morning, June found a little clay bird with one broken wing.
A name was scratched beneath its base.
It read Mabel Ortiz.
June traced the letters with her finger.
“That’s Mrs. Ortiz from the art center,” she said.
“She taught us to make bowls in sixth grade.”
I remembered a warm woman with red glasses who wore aprons patterned with lemons.
She had retired from teaching after a stroke made one side of her body slower than the other.
I called the neighborhood art center and asked whether Mabel had recently donated any pottery.
The receptionist told me that Mabel had moved to a residential care community in early spring.
She also told me that Mabel’s work was being exhibited that Saturday at a charity auction called the Lantern Gala.
I looked again at the broken clay bird.
Then I looked out the window toward Bernice’s quiet house.
The woman was standing beside her trash cans, watching my back gate.
