So that is the woman I'm talking about. I'm telling you all this up front because I want you to know I understood what her life was. I want you to know I didn't hate her. Even at the worst of it, I didn't hate her. I was mostly confused, and then I was angry, and then I was something I don't have a good word for, something like the feeling you get when you set a corner pin and then realize the whole survey is off by four feet because somebody before you started from the wrong monument.
As president, Debra was what you'd expect, and what you'd expect is a little worse than it sounds. She walked the neighborhood every morning at nine and every afternoon at two with a canvas tote bag and a clipboard. She called them inspections. Mostly they were walks, but walks with consequences. If your lawn went brown in August she'd leave a courtesy notice, a half sheet of yellow paper tucked in your screen door, and the second one came on pink paper with a fine attached. She'd fined the Ochoas two doors down for a kiddie pool. She'd fined Folasade Eze across the cul-de-sac for a wind chime, which Folasade, a retired ICU nurse from Lagos by way of Houston, appealed to the full board and won, in a meeting that people still talked about. Debra fined me once, in 2020, for leaving my trash cans at the curb until Friday morning, and I paid it and moved on. I measure lines for a living. I understand that people care about where they are.
But the walks were the thing I noticed most, looking back. Debra on porches. Debra on the Ochoas' porch, bending down to read a delivery tag. Debra on the Szendreys' porch at the corner, moving a box out of the sun "so the rain wouldn't get it" in the middle of a dry July. Debra at my own door, twice that first summer with the cameras, standing there with her tote bag like she'd forgotten what she came for. Everybody in Tamarack Ridge had seen Debra Pelletier on their porch at one time or another. It was so normal that nobody saw it at all.
The cameras went in in April, and for the first couple of months nothing happened, which is what you want from cameras. I'd check the footage now and then. Deer from the canal. A raccoon on the trash cans at three in the morning, standing up on its hind legs to try the lid, then giving up with what looked like real disappointment. The UPS guy, the FedEx guy, the Amazon van, the same three or four faces every week. Debra on her walks, going past my porch. Maisie, on her weeks, came downstairs some evenings and scrolled the doorbell clips like they were a TV show, narrating. "That's the guy with the dog that hates us. That's Mrs. Eze going to Pilates. That's Debra. That's Debra. That's Debra again." She said it like a joke, and it was a joke, and neither of us thought about it any harder than that.
The first thing that should have made me think harder came in the mail in late June.
It was a letter from a bank in Utah I had never heard of, welcoming me to my new store credit account with a big-box electronics chain. My credit limit was four thousand dollars. My card would arrive separately, it said, if it hadn't already. I stood in my kitchen holding it and felt the floor go a little soft, the way it does when you realize somebody has been in your house. I hadn't applied for anything. I'd never had a store card in my life. I called the number on the back of my real credit card, and then I called the number on the letter, and a woman in a call center somewhere very far away confirmed that, yes, the account had been opened online in May, using my name, my address and my Social Security number, and that it currently carried a balance of three thousand eight hundred and sixty-one dollars.
"What was purchased?" I asked.
She couldn't tell me that. She could tell me that it was a fraud case now, and she gave me a case number, and she told me to freeze my credit with the three bureaus and file a report with the FTC and with my local police, which I did, all of it, over the next two days. The Nampa police officer who took that report was the same one who'd taken the rover report in March. She remembered me. She said, "You're having a year, huh," and I said I was, and she said that identity fraud was mostly out-of-state rings buying data that had been breached somewhere, and that the best I could hope for was that the bank would eat it, which it eventually did.
"Where did they ship the stuff?" I asked her.