Three weeks after the generator incident, I received a letter from the county emergency management office.
It was not addressed to me personally, and at first I assumed it was another general notice about winter preparedness.
The envelope contained a single-page questionnaire asking residents whether they had experienced interference with privately owned emergency equipment during the outage.
I read the question twice before I understood why it bothered me.
Someone at the county knew there had been more than one incident.
Rachel stood beside the sink washing a coffee mug while I called the number printed at the bottom of the page.
A woman named Denise Calder answered and identified herself as the county’s emergency planning coordinator.
When I mentioned Patricia Whitmore, the room on the other end of the line seemed to become very quiet.
Denise asked whether I could come to the municipal building the following afternoon.
I asked whether I was in trouble.
She said I was not, but she could not discuss another resident’s complaint over the telephone.
I told Rachel what she had said after I hung up.
Rachel dried her hands on a towel and asked me whether I wanted her to come along.
I said I could handle a conversation in an office.
She looked at me for a moment and said that handling something alone was not always the same as handling it well.
I knew she was right, so we arranged for Noah to spend the afternoon with his friend Caleb.
The municipal building was an old brick schoolhouse with a modern glass entrance that never quite matched the rest of the structure.
Denise met us in a narrow conference room and placed three folders on the table.
She was in her early fifties and wore a blue cardigan with a county identification badge clipped to its pocket.
She began by explaining that the outage had exposed gaps in the county’s emergency supply plan.
Several households had reported that privately purchased generators were being demanded by people who claimed to represent a local relief network.
I felt Rachel’s hand settle against my wrist.
Denise opened the first folder and showed us a copy of a flyer bearing the words NORTH COUNTY WARMTH RESPONSE.
The flyer promised emergency equipment delivery to vulnerable households for a priority registration fee.
At the bottom was the name of Patricia Whitmore’s private service center.
I stared at the printed name and remembered how Trish had introduced herself in my garage.
She had mentioned her business before she mentioned her mother.
Denise said her office had not authorized the flyer and had never contracted with Whitmore’s company.
