The letter had an attachment: a single color printout, stapled, labeled EXHIBIT A — PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION OF VIOLATION, 41 LARKSPUR LN, OBSERVED 07/02/2025.
The photograph had been taken from the street, from a little ways down Larkspur, looking up at the front of Ruth's house at an angle. It showed a lawn the color of a paper bag, dead and matted. The shrubs along the foundation looked shaggy and dull. The trim around the front windows was peeling, a few curls of white paint hanging off the fascia. In the lower margin, someone had typed in red: DEAD/DORMANT TURF — OVERGROWN SHRUBS — DETERIORATED EXTERIOR TRIM.
I looked at it for a long time. Something about it bothered me in a way I couldn't name at first, the way a misspelled word bothers you on a page before you find it.
Then I found it.
At the far right edge of the frame, at the bend of the street, you could see the little triangle of common ground. And on the triangle you could see the buckeye.
It was bare.
Not thinning, not drought-stressed, not scorched at the edges the way a buckeye goes in a dry August. Bare. Gray branches, every twig tipped with the big, varnished, reddish-brown terminal buds that the Ohio buckeye sets in autumn and holds all winter, and which, if you touch them, are sticky as flypaper. And beyond it, at the edge of the frame, the pin oak on the corner of Thrasher — my WH-2 — was holding a crown of brown, crinkled, dead leaves. Pin oaks do that. They're marcescent: they keep their dead leaves through the winter and only drop them when the new growth pushes them off in spring. On a pin oak in July, there is not a single brown leaf. There's a dense, glossy green.
I got up without saying anything and went to my laptop.
I had walked the loop on the morning of Wednesday, July 2 — I'd swapped from Tuesday because of a dentist appointment, and noted it in the ledger. I pulled up the WH-1 photograph from 7:06 that morning. The buckeye, from my tag on the triangle, bearing 215 degrees, looking southwest — directly back toward the curve of Larkspur and, at the left edge of the frame, the front corner of Ruth Pruitt's yellow house.
In my picture, the buckeye was a full, dark-green dome, so thick with leaves you couldn't see the trunk. Behind it, Ruth's front lawn was green — not golf-course green, she didn't water it, but green, with clover in it. Her boxwoods were neatly clipped into low rounds. Her son had flown in over Memorial Day and pressure-washed and repainted the trim; I'd watched him do it, standing on a ladder in a Carolina Panthers cap while Ruth held the bottom of the ladder and told him to be careful. In my picture, the trim was bright white.
"Ruth," I said. "Come here."