"I'd like to withdraw my complaint," Karen said, in a very small voice.
"Ma'am," said Mulcahy, not unkindly, "that's not really how it works anymore."
Karen's phone buzzed in her lap. She turned it over, looked at it, and I saw the name on the screen before she declined the call: MEGAN. It buzzed again almost immediately. BRENT.
She stood up. Her knees seemed uncertain. She looked around my living room — at the binders, at Dale's salmon, at Priya, at me — the way you'd look around a room you had walked into by mistake, in a house you thought was empty.
"You don't understand," she said to me. "I've given this neighborhood everything. Six years. Nobody else would do it. Nobody else would even run. I kept this place nice. I kept the values up. Do you know what houses on Thrasher sold for before I — "
"Lorraine Bickel," I said. "Ninety years old. She's in a facility in Marion. She lived on Meadowlark for twenty-four years. Her house sold for a hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars on the courthouse steps to your son-in-law. Is that the value you kept up?"
Karen looked at me. Then she walked out of my house, and down my front walk, and past the Feeneys, whose blinds were all the way up now, and the Ochs, who were standing on their porch in their slippers, not pretending anymore, and down Larkspur Lane toward her big Colonial with its cedar deck and its upstairs window.
She didn't run. But she didn't walk the way she usually walked, either, at eleven miles an hour, looking at everyone's lawn.
Reyes closed her notebook. "For what it's worth, Ms. Haskett," she said at the door, "my grandmother does the same thing with her lilacs. Writes the dates in a calendar. Has since 1971."
"Tell her to sign up," I said. "They need more lilacs."
* * *