“Please stop calling this a county project.”
Grant stood up so quickly that his chair scraped the floor.
“You need to leave our home.”
“Gladly.”
As I approached the door, Finch leaned close enough that only I could hear him.
“You could take the offer and retire somewhere quieter.”
“I already have a quiet place,” I said.
“Or I did before your company took an interest in it.”
Hannah arrived in the middle of a thunderstorm and dropped her overnight bag beside the refrigerator.
She wore the same worried expression Elise used whenever I had driven too long in bad weather.
“You went to their meeting alone?” she asked.
“There were forty people there.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
We made dinner together because arguments were easier when vegetables needed chopping.
I told her about Finch and the offer to replace the pool liner.
She asked whether I had recorded the conversation.
“No,” I admitted.
“Then write down the exact words now.”
I fetched my notebook while she washed the tomatoes.
For the next hour we assembled a timeline on the dining table.
The easement offer came first.
Then the real estate inquiry.
Then the gate damage, the pool trespass, the suspicious compound and the anonymous photographs.
Hannah drew a line from each event to the next, but she left the cause column blank.
“We’re going to separate what happened from what we think it means,” she said.
Elise would have loved that sentence.
Hannah had worked as an insurance claims investigator before becoming a school counselor, and she knew that a believable theory was not proof.
She asked about the footprint in the kitchen.
I had photographed it, but the mark was already gone.
“Was anything missing?” she asked.
I hesitated.
There was one thing I had not told anyone.
The old brass key to the shed beside the stone wall had disappeared from a hook near the kitchen door.
I had assumed I misplaced it during spring cleaning.
Now I could not remember when I last saw it.
Hannah walked to the back window and looked at the shed.
“What’s in there?”
“Garden tools, old pool furniture, Elise’s boxes.”
“Anything a developer might want?”
“Nothing I can think of.”
She held my gaze.
“Then we should stop assuming this is only about the pool.”
We checked the shed the next morning with Officer Larkin present.
The padlock was scratched, and its clasp had been forced at some point, but it still closed.
