CHAPTER THREE: THE WRONG ACCIDENT

The following morning, Mara visited the neighborhood association office.
The office occupied a narrow storefront between a laundromat and a bakery.
A volunteer named Dev Patel was sorting recycling notices behind the counter.
He recognized Mara before she introduced herself.
“I saw the video,” he said.
“Then you saw the edited version.”
Dev set down his papers.
“I also saw June here on Thursday.”
Mara waited.
“She wanted us to cancel a children’s swimming event at your house.”
“There isn’t a swimming event at my house.”
“That’s what I told her.”
Dev opened a calendar and pointed to a different address.
The neighborhood’s annual safety demonstration was scheduled at the public recreation center, three streets away.
Mara frowned.
“Why would June think it was happening at my pool?”
Dev looked uncomfortable.


“She didn’t think that.”
He explained that June had argued for twenty minutes about an accident that had occurred the previous summer.
A maintenance worker named Elliot Brand had fallen from a portable stage during the recreation center’s reopening ceremony.
The fall had injured his back and ended his contract.
The city had described it as a personal misstep.
June had insisted that the stage was defective.
“What does that have to do with my pool?” Mara asked.
Dev shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
Outside, Mara found another white card beneath her windshield wiper.
This one contained an address for a storage company and a time.
FOUR O’CLOCK.
She photographed the card and called Lena.
“Someone wants me to follow a trail,” Mara said.
“Then don’t go alone,” Lena replied.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE STORAGE COMPANY

Lena arrived twenty minutes before four.
They drove together to a storage facility near the interstate.
The receptionist refused to discuss other customers, but she handed Mara an envelope that had been left in her name.
Inside was a photograph of a folding aluminum platform with one leg bent inward.
A second photograph showed a yellow equipment tag attached to the same platform.
The tag read RECREATION CENTER DEMONSTRATION UNIT.
There was no letter.
There was only a handwritten number on the back of the second photograph.
Mara called it from the parking lot.
A man answered on the fourth ring.
“Elliot Brand,” he said.
Mara identified herself.
He went silent.
“I didn’t leave those photographs,” Elliot finally said.
“Someone did.”
“Then somebody has decided to make my life difficult again.”
Mara described the cord, June’s fall, and Owen’s recording.
Elliot interrupted when she mentioned the rubber sleeve.
“Was it black with a green seam?”
“Yes.”
“That isn’t a household electrical cable.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a portable pressure-sensor lead.”
Mara glanced at Lena.
“What would someone use that for?”
“Measuring movement on temporary flooring,” Elliot said.
“Or pretending to.”
He gave them the address of a diner and asked them to arrive before the evening rush.