Debra was released the afternoon after her arrest, on bond, the charges at that point being possession of stolen property and a handful of counts under the state's identity theft statute, with more expected, and a postal inspector already asking for copies of everything because so many of those boxes had come and gone through the mail. Her sister drove up from Twin Falls to get her. I watched them pull into the driveway from my kitchen window, and I watched Debra get out of the car slowly, like her joints hurt, and stand for a long time looking at the yellow evidence tags still taped to her garage door.
That evening, around eight, when the heat was finally starting to come off the pavement, I was in my side yard putting the trash cans back after collection, and she came out of her side door and walked to the edge of the river rock and stopped. Right on the line again. Her sister must have been inside. She was wearing the gray fleece, even though it was still eighty degrees, and no makeup, and without it her face looked smaller and older and, honestly, more like the woman who'd brought me enchiladas than the one who'd stood up in the clubhouse.
"My lawyer says I'm not supposed to talk to you," she said.
"Then you probably shouldn't."
"Probably not." She looked up at the bracket under my eave, empty still; Skeet hadn't come by yet. "I never thought you were filming me. I want you to know that. I need you to know that, at least. I knew you weren't. You're not that. I knew the first week you moved in you weren't that."
"Then why did you say it?"
She was quiet for a long time. A sprinkler came on two houses down and ticked its way around. "Because it was the only thing I could think of that would work," she said. "And it almost did. Didn't it? It almost worked." It wasn't a boast. It was something closer to wonder, the way you'd talk about a car accident you'd somehow walked away from.
"Debra," I said. "Twenty-six people."