"No."
"Ninety-six hundred a month," Solberg said. "Memory care. She was about four hundred short every month and she was making up the difference out of savings, and the savings were almost gone. We found a letter from the facility in her kitchen. Overdue notice. Polite. Two of them."
I asked her how it had started. Solberg said it had started the way it always starts, with a job posting. Remote Receiving Coordinator. Work from home, flexible hours, perfect for retirees and stay-at-home parents. You receive packages for overseas clients who can't get US shipping, you inspect them, you relabel them, you send them on. Debra had answered it in the winter of 2023. For the first few months, everything came addressed to her, under her own name, and then to made-up names at her own address, and she must have known, Solberg said, she must have known by then. The detective's voice didn't change when she said that. It was just a fact on a page.
"And then in the spring," she said, "they asked her for something else."
The ring had Social Security numbers. Rings like that always do; they buy them by the thousand from breaches, the way you'd buy screws. What they don't have is the rest of it. They don't know which of those thousand people actually still live at the address on the file, or when they leave for work, or whether they have a dog, or whether a box on their porch will sit there unnoticed until two in the afternoon. A store account opened in your name and shipped to your own real address sails through the fraud checks. Somebody just has to be there to pick it up before you get home.
"Your HOA keeps pool registration forms," Solberg said. "Every member of the household, full name, date of birth, a phone number. Signed waiver. They're in a filing cabinet in the clubhouse office, and the only person with a key to that cabinet is the president." She turned her coffee mug on my kitchen table, a quarter turn. "She typed up a list. She sent it to them. Forty-one names in this subdivision. They matched thirty-three of them to numbers they already had. Twenty-six accounts opened that we know about so far. Yours was the third."
I thought about the morning walks. Nine o'clock and two o'clock, every day, a clipboard and a canvas tote. Courtesy notices on yellow paper. Debra on porches, bending down to read a delivery tag. Debra moving a box out of the sun. It was the cleanest cover I've ever heard of. She had spent seven years teaching all of us that it was normal, even right, for her to be on our porches. We'd built it for her ourselves, one fine at a time.
"So when I put up the cameras," I said.