"The detective said you gave him the backup without having to be asked twice," I said.
Rick looked up the hill at the empty deck and the bare post where the camera had been.
"I put that camera up," he said. "I figured whatever it saw, I was responsible for. Seemed only fair it should see her too."
The people who bought the house were the Okonkwos: Adaeze, who works for the Bureau of Land Management, her husband, Chidi, their six-year-old twins, and a rescue greyhound named Professor. In their first week, the twins came down to my fence and asked what I was going to plant. When I told them, one asked whether it would grow taller than their dad. I said, "Much," and they cheered.
Before I planted, I knocked on their door and asked if I could stand on their deck for a minute. I stood at the railing where Darlene used to stand with her wine and her binoculars and worked out exactly where my kenaf would block the mountains. Then, with three days of shovel work and a fourteen-year-old complaining cheerfully the whole time, I moved the beds. Now there were two blocks, one on each side of the yard, with a gap in the middle. From the deck, the Owyhees would sit in that gap all summer like a picture in a frame.
"You didn't have to do that," Adaeze said.
"I know," I said. "That's sort of the point."
* * *
The kenaf came in twelve feet tall that summer, and the twins named every stalk. In October, Lucía, Gus, and I cut it down and stripped the bark. On the third Saturday of the month, a year almost to the day after the Safety Walk, I held a papermaking workshop for the neighborhood.
Marisol put it in the association newsletter, which was now an actual printed newsletter on my kenaf paper. Thirty-four people came. We ran out of felts by eleven and started couching onto old bath towels, and nobody minded. The twins got pulp in their hair. Pam Oyelaran made six sheets for her grandfather. Hal Brennan pressed a sprig of arborvitae into his. Lyle Brandt came on his day off with his wife, who lettered everyone's names on their dry sheets in copperplate while Lyle told anyone who would listen about the cattle in Nampa.
Halfway through the afternoon, a woman in jeans and a fleece came up the driveway. It took me a full minute to recognise Officer Kowalczyk without the uniform.
"I'm off duty," she said. "My sergeant's wife gets your newsletter. I wanted to see how it's done. For the record."