“Call me Owen.”
“All right, Owen.”
He looked toward the window, where trucks rolled past beneath a gray sky.
“Don’t become so determined to win against your neighbor that you forget what you’re trying to protect.”
I told him I would remember.
He was right, and I needed to hear it.
A ruined friendship with Meredith was not the real danger.
The real danger was that fear and rumor would drive a neighborhood into decisions nobody could easily reverse.
The next morning a woman named Savannah Reed knocked on my door carrying a paper grocery bag.
She had rented a house on the far side of Alder Hollow for three years and worked nights at the county hospital.
I recognized her face from neighborhood picnics, though we had never spoken longer than a few minutes.
She asked whether Hannah was home.
When my daughter joined us, Savannah pulled a stack of neighborhood flyers from the bag.
Each was a different version of Meredith’s claim about my pool.
One described an unknown substance under investigation.
Another said a dangerous chemical had been confirmed.
The newest claimed a county agency had ordered all adjoining properties inspected.
None included a case number or a signed official notice.
“These are being left at the hospital,” Savannah said.
“People are frightened.”
Hannah asked who had distributed them.
Savannah had seen a young man placing copies beneath windshield wipers, but she had not recognized him.
“Why bring them to us?” I asked.
She rubbed the handles of the grocery bag between her fingers.
“Because my grandmother lives behind the drainage ditch.”
Her grandmother, Evelyn Reed, had owned a small cottage near the creek since before Sterling closed.
She had been visited twice by people offering to purchase a narrow strip of her garden.
When she refused, somebody sent a letter suggesting that the property might be unsafe because of historic industrial activity.
The letter included a map that misplaced the creek boundary by almost thirty feet.
“Grandma asked me to look at it,” Savannah said.
“I couldn’t make sense of the drawing.”
I asked whether we could meet Evelyn.
Savannah nodded but warned me that her grandmother disliked strangers who arrived with clipboards.
“I’ll come empty-handed,” I promised.
We visited that evening, carrying a lemon cake Hannah bought on the way.
Evelyn lived in a blue cottage with white window trim and a porch lined with bird feeders.
She was eighty-four and sharp enough to notice that Hannah had cut one corner of the cake unevenly.
