Maisie heard about it that Sunday and went quiet in the way she does when she's building something in her head. The next weekend she showed up with a printed spreadsheet. Four cameras. A doorbell camera for the front porch. A bullet camera on the front corner of the garage covering the driveway and the street. A second bullet camera on the north side of the garage, up under the eave, pointed down the side yard at the gate and the trash cans, because that was the path somebody would take to get to the backyard and the shop. And a small dome under the pergola on the back patio, looking out over the yard toward the canal. She'd picked a system that recorded to a little box in the house instead of to somebody's cloud, because, she said, "Dad, you do not want your driveway living on a server in Virginia." The box would go in my basement office, under the desk. It would keep about forty days of footage before it started writing over itself. The patio dome had its own cell backup so I could check it from my phone if the internet went down, which in Tamarack Ridge happened every time it rained hard.
We installed them on a Saturday in April. I did the ladders and she did the settings. I remember her standing in the side yard with her phone held up, looking at the feed from the north camera, telling me to tilt it down. "Down more," she said. "You're getting the Pelletiers' house. Nobody wants to look at a stucco wall." So I tilted it down until the top of the frame cut off just above the top of my side gate and the bottom showed my gravel path and the green lids of the trash cans. Maisie made me do it twice, because the first time I overshot. She saved a screenshot of the final framing in a folder on her phone called CAMERA STUFF, because that's who she is. I didn't think about that screenshot again for four months.
The Pelletiers' house was the one to my north, Lot 15. Mine was Lot 14. Between us was a side yard about thirteen feet wide, my half of it gravel and a gate and the trash cans, their half of it a strip of river rock and a single air conditioning unit and a hose reel. Their house was a two-story, a little bigger than mine, beige stucco with brown trim, the color scheme approved by the Tamarack Ridge Homeowners Association Architectural Review Committee, of which Debra Pelletier was the chair. She was also, for the past seven years, the president of the board.
I should tell you about Debra, and I should tell you fairly, because she was not a cartoon, and it would be easier for me if she were.
When I moved in, in the fall of 2019, the first knock on my door was hers. She had a foil pan of enchiladas and a three-ring binder. The enchiladas were good. The binder was the CC&Rs, the covenants, conditions and restrictions of Tamarack Ridge, all forty-one pages, with the parts she thought I'd be most likely to violate marked with yellow sticky tabs. Trash cans not visible from the street except on collection day. Basketball hoops removed from driveways by dusk. No commercial vehicles parked overnight, which she told me, with a smile that was meant to be generous, she was willing to interpret as not including my work truck, "as long as you keep it clean." She asked if I had children. I said I had a daughter, every other week. She said, "Oh, honey," in a way that let me know she had already heard about the divorce from someone, and then she said that her husband, Vern, had taught shop at Nampa High for thirty-one years and if I ever needed a tool I should come knock, because Vern had every tool God ever made and a few God hadn't thought of.
Vern was a good guy. Big hands, white mustache, a laugh you could hear from inside my house. The first summer, he came over without being asked and helped me rehang a garage door that the previous owners had backed into. He showed Maisie, who was eleven then, how to use a coping saw, and she made a wooden fox that still sits on the windowsill in her room at my place. He called me "the surveyor" like it was my rank. "Morning, Surveyor." "Surveyor, you got a minute?"
By the second summer, he was calling me Surveyor because he couldn't remember my name.
It came on fast, the way it sometimes does. Debra told me later it had started before I moved in, little things she'd explained away, and then he had a stroke in the spring of 2021, a small one, and after that the little things weren't little. He'd walk out to get the mail and come back forty minutes later from the wrong direction. He'd stand in my driveway and ask me where his truck was, and his truck was in his own garage. One night in January he knocked on my door at one in the morning in his slippers and asked if I'd seen his wife, and I walked him home through the snow and Debra opened the door in a bathrobe with her face completely white, and she said, "Thank you," and then she said, "Don't tell anyone, please," and I didn't.
He went into a memory care facility in Caldwell called Sunhaven in the fall of 2022. Debra drove out to see him every day, at four o'clock, I knew because I could hear her garage door. She came back at seven. In between, I figured, she sat with a man who did not always know who she was.