"I sent you what's relevant," Darlene said.
"I'd like all of it."
There was a pause, a tiny one, the length of a hiccup in a recording.
"I'll have to see how to do that," Darlene said. "The app is very confusing."
* * *
They didn't arrest me. I want to be clear about that, because by lunchtime the Larkspur Commons Facebook group had decided that I'd been arrested, released on bail, and possibly deported, though nobody could agree on where to. What happened was this. Officer Kowalczyk took the black bag, the leaf sample, my envelope, and a lot of notes. She told me she was forwarding the matter to the detective division. She told me not to destroy any plants, which I said was no problem, since I'd been planning to harvest them anyway and would now be glad to wait. She gave me a case number on a card. And then, as she was leaving, she stopped at the end of my driveway, where Darlene was still standing with her arms crossed and Duchess lying on the concrete looking bored, and said something to her I couldn't hear.
Whatever it was, Darlene didn't like it. Her mouth went flat. But she didn't say anything back. She just turned and walked up the hill to her house with Duchess bouncing behind her, and at the top of her front walk, between the famous blue hydrangeas, she turned around once and looked down at me.
Forty minutes later she posted on the Facebook group.
Police were at the Pruitt property this morning following a report I made. I can't say more due to the ongoing investigation. I know some of you doubted me. I just did what any responsible neighbor would do. Stay safe, Larkspur.
It got two hundred and six reactions in an hour. Marisol came over at ten with coffee and found me sitting at my kitchen table, still in the apron. I'd turned off the burner under the stockpot. The fiber in it had gone cold and grey and congealed into a mass, and I was staring at it as if it might tell me something.
"You're calling Bev again," she said, and put the phone in my hand.
* * *