"Tell your daughter I'm sorry," she said through her fingers. "About the school. The things they said. I heard about it. Tell her I'm sorry." And then she said, "He asked about you today. My sister took me. He asked where the Surveyor was. He wanted to know if you ever got that garage door fixed right."
Then she went back in her side door and closed it, and I stood in my side yard in the stained amber of her pole light with an empty trash can in each hand, and I didn't know how I felt, and I still don't.
It's October now. The honey locusts along Killdeer Way have gone yellow and they drop their little leaves on everything like confetti after a party nobody enjoyed. Debra's case hasn't gone to trial. Detective Solberg tells me, when I call, which I've stopped doing as often, that there's talk of a federal case swallowing the state one, and talk of Debra cooperating, of giving them what she knows about Ridgeline Fulfillment Partners and the man in the ball cap who drove the white van, who has not been identified and whose van has not been seen on Towhee Court or anywhere else since the night of July 18. Solberg says the people at the top of these things are almost never in this country. She says the people at the bottom almost always are. She says it with no particular emotion, the way I'd tell a man his fence is on his neighbor's land.
Debra is still next door. Her bond conditions say she can't contact any of the named victims, and I'm a named victim now, so we don't talk. I see her twice a day. At nine o'clock, she goes out to her mailbox and back, and nowhere else. No clipboard. No tote bag. And at a quarter to four, her garage door goes up, and her car backs out, and she drives to Caldwell, and at a quarter after seven she comes home. Her sister comes up some weekends. In September, a real estate agent came and walked around the outside of the house with a measuring wheel and a camera, and then didn't put up a sign, and I don't know what that means either.
The prosecutor's office sent me a form in the mail last week. A victim impact statement. Two pages, lined, and a cover letter explaining that I could submit it to the court before sentencing, if there was a sentencing, and that the judge would read it. It's on my desk in the basement, next to the recorder, which blinks its little blue light all night, and writes over itself every forty days, and remembers nothing it isn't told to keep. I've started the statement four times. Once I wrote about the clubhouse, and the small ugly laugh from the back of the room. Once I wrote about Maisie, who still has a folder on her phone called EVIDENCE. Once I wrote about twenty-six people and a bank in Utah and a two-thousand-dollar computer nobody could throw away. And once, late, I wrote three lines about a man in a sunroom in Caldwell who knows his wife for twenty minutes a day, and who asked where the Surveyor was, and I sat looking at those three lines until the recorder's screen went dark, and I didn't tear them up, and I didn't send them.
Last Saturday, because I couldn't stand the not-knowing anymore, I did the one thing I know how to do. I pulled the plat for Tamarack Ridge from the county, and I set up my new rover, the one the insurance and a lot of my own money bought, and I resurveyed the line between Lot 14 and Lot 15. Just for me. Nobody asked. It took me an hour. The original pins were still there, under the gravel on my side and the river rock on hers, a little bent from twelve years of lawnmowers and trash cans but exactly where the plat said they'd be. The line ran straight down the middle of the side yard, thirteen feet wide, between my gate and her hose reel, under my camera and under her window. It was where it had always been. It was where Debra always knew it was. She'd stood on it three times that summer, exactly on it, never an inch to either side.
I tapped a new survey nail into the gravel on my end, with a little pink ribbon, the way I would on a job. Then I stood there for a while, looking at it. From her side, I heard her garage door start up. Quarter to four. I didn't turn around. I listened to her car back out, and pause at the end of the driveway the way it always does, and go.
The ribbon is still there. I haven't decided yet whether to pull it up.