I want to say that I called the police then. I didn't. I should have, and I've thought about why I didn't, and the honest answer is that I didn't know what I'd be calling about. That my neighbor lied about taking a bath? That she shipped boxes in a van? You can't arrest somebody for running an eBay business at night. I thought of the officer who'd taken my two reports that year, how patient she'd been, and how her patience had a bottom to it. I thought about how it would sound. The man the whole neighborhood had just heard accused of peeping calls the cops on the woman who accused him. I could hear the laugh from the back of the clubhouse.
So instead I did the reasonable thing, which was to write a letter.
I wrote it to the board, which meant to Norm and Kayleigh as well as to Debra. I said that I would not be removing my cameras, that I'd be happy to have any neutral party inspect them, and that I had footage showing that at the time Mrs. Pelletier had described being in her bath, she was outside her house. I didn't say what she was doing. I didn't mention the van. I said I hoped we could resolve this without anyone having to escalate it, and I signed my name, and I dropped it in the HOA drop box at the clubhouse the next morning, Wednesday, on my way to a job in Kuna.
I keep thinking about that letter. I think about it the way you think about a step you took on a trail right before you noticed the rattlesnake. Because what I'd actually written, if you were Debra Pelletier and you opened that envelope in your kitchen on Wednesday afternoon, was: I've seen it. And I'm keeping it.
Maisie texted me that night. Somebody at the pool had told somebody who told a girl she knew from volleyball, who told her, that her dad was a creep who filmed the old lady next door in the shower. It wasn't even the right room. Maisie wrote, "its fine. i told her she was an idiot." And then, a minute later: "dad is it fine." And then, a minute after that, before I'd even had time to answer: "i still have the screenshot. and the settings export. i saved it when we set it up. it has the tilt angle in it."
I wrote back that it was fine. I wrote that she was a genius and that I loved her and that nobody was going to touch the cameras. I was wrong about one of those things.
Thursday, July 24, I was in Kuna staking out the footprint of a pole barn for a man who raised alpacas. It was ninety-eight degrees by two in the afternoon. I was sitting in the cab of my truck with the air conditioning on, eating a gas station burrito and drinking a Gatorade the color of antifreeze, when my phone buzzed with a motion alert from the patio dome. It buzzed all the time, for deer, for magpies, for the wind moving the shade cloth over the pergola. I almost didn't look.
The dome was mounted so it looked out over the backyard toward the canal, but the left edge of its frame caught the back corner of the garage, where the low roof steps down. And on that low roof, in the left edge of the frame, there was a man. Big, sunburned, in a sleeveless shirt and a pair of cargo shorts, kneeling at the edge of my garage roof and reaching down under the north eave with a pry bar. I watched his arm work. I watched him lean, and pull, and come up with my side-yard camera in his hand, trailing three inches of cut cable like a tail. He held it up and looked at it. Then he turned around and gave a thumbs-up to someone I couldn't see, someone on the ground in the side yard, someone standing, I'd guess, about where the Pelletiers' hose reel was.
I knew him, a little. Everybody in Tamarack Ridge knew Skeet Fisk. He did gutters and sprinkler blowouts and Christmas lights, and the HOA used him for odd jobs around the clubhouse. His business card said FISK HANDYMAN — NO JOB TOO SMALL, and he had given me one at a block party and told me that if I ever needed something done that I was "too busy to do or too smart to do," he was my guy.